LibreOffice version 4.0
came out today, with project organizers boasting a "cleaner and leaner
code base" along with various new features and greater interoperability
with business systems and document formats.
LibreOffice was launched in 2010
to overtake OpenOffice as the preeminent open source office suite.
Google Docs may still be the biggest threat to Microsoft Office, but
LibreOffice has carved out a niche for itself, becoming the default
productivity software on many popular Linux distributions.
Cleaning up the code has been a major focus. "The resulting code base
is rather different from the original one, as several million lines of
code have been added and removed, by adding new features, solving bugs
and regressions, adopting state of the art C++ constructs, replacing
tools, getting rid of deprecated methods and obsoleted libraries, and
translating twenty-five thousand lines of comments from German to
English," the Document Foundation said in its LibreOffice 4.0
announcement.
"All of this makes the code easier to understand and more
rewarding to be involved with for the stream of new members of our
community."
Back in October, the startup tech firm Silent Circle ruffled governments’ feathers with a “surveillance-proof” smartphone app
to allow people to make secure phone calls and send texts easily. Now,
the company is pushing things even further—with a groundbreaking
encrypted data transfer app that will enable people to send files
securelyfrom a smartphone or tablet at the touch of a button.
(For now, it’s just being released for iPhones and iPads, though Android
versions should come soon.) That means photographs, videos,
spreadsheets, you name it—sent scrambled from one person to another in a
matter of seconds.
“This has never been done before,” boasts Mike Janke, Silent Circle’s
CEO. “It’s going to revolutionize the ease of privacy and security.”
The federal government wants to create super WiFi networks across the
nation, so powerful and broad in reach that consumers could use them to
make calls or surf the Internet without paying a cellphone bill every
month.
The proposal from the Federal Communications Commission has
rattled the $178 billion wireless industry, which has launched a fierce
lobbying effort to persuade policymakers to reconsider the idea,
analysts say. That has been countered by an equally intense campaign
from Google, Microsoft
and other tech giants who say a free-for-all WiFi service would spark
an explosion of innovations and devices that would benefit most
Americans, especially the poor.
To improve security and cut crashes, Firefox will block plug-ins
including Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe Reader, Apple's QuickTime and
Oracle's Java, Mozilla said.
Only the newest version of Adobe Systems' Flash Player will be run by
default, said Michael Coates, Mozilla's director of security assurance,
in a blog post yesterday.
Plug-ins extend a browser's ability to run software or handle different
media and file formats, but that extra ability opens new avenues for
attack. They've been a staple of Web development for years, but browser
makers are working hard to reproduce their abilities directly with Web
standards that don't require plug-ins.
Mozilla has been named the Most Trusted Internet Company for Privacy in 2012, according to a study performed by the Ponemon Institute. Their findings were released today in celebration of an internationally recognized holiday that we at Mozilla look forward to as much as any bank holiday: Data Privacy Day.
The study surveyed more than 100,000 consumers in the U.S., and after
all the number crunching, Mozilla ranked highest in the Internet &
Social Media industry. We also made it onto the top 20 list for all
companies.
This is certainly quite a distinction and the product of a
user-centric philosophy implemented by contributors to the Mozilla
project over the past decade. Engineers, UX designers, security,
engagement, IT and privacy folks have made thousands of small decisions
over the years that have collectively created the user trust reflected
by this survey. This recognition is not something we sought, as we don’t
view privacy as an end unto itself, but it’s greatly appreciated given
all the complexities and nuances associated with privacy and security
today.
This past weekend, the Library of Congress officially put down the
hammer on the practice of unlocking smartphones without a carrier's
permission, but now the people are standing up for their right to
violate their wireless contracts.
In case you missed it, a new rule handed down by the Librarian of
Congress (the office in charge of setting the rules to execute the
recently updated Digital Millenium Copyright Act) went into effect on
Saturday. It makes it illegal to unlock a a smartphone purchased after January 26 without permission from the carrier that locked it.
Naturally, plenty of folks on the Internet are none too happy with
the government telling them what they can do with their devices. A petition
on the White House "We the People" site asks "the Librarian of Congress
to rescind this decision, and failing that, (the administration should)
champion a bill that makes unlocking permanently legal."
