From the Start Your Coding dept.:
This will be the 8th year for Google Summer of Code, an innovative program dedicated to introducing students from colleges and universities around the world to open source software development. The program offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects with the help of mentoring organizations from all around the globe. Over the past seven years Google Summer of Code has had 6,000 students from over 90 countries complete the program. Our goal is to help these students pursue academic challenges over the summer break while they create and release open source code for the benefit of all.

From the Whoah dept.:
In a letter to Google???s chief executive Larry Page, Europe???s ???Data Protection Working Party??? wrote that ???we call for a pause in the interests of ensuring that there can be no misunderstanding about Google's commitments to information rights of their users and EU citizens, until we have completed our analysis???.

The committee gave no indication of how long it would like the pause to be.

A senior source at Google expressed surprise at the move, but noted that there was a month for the committee to examine its concerns. The source also said that while the committee had no legal authority to require any delay, the tone of its letter was significantly less aggressive than those Google has received in the past.

From the Release Early dept.:
Pre-releases of Precise Pangolin are *not* encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. They are, however, recommended for Ubuntu developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting, and fixing bugs.

Alpha 2 is the second in a series of milestone images that will be released throughout the Precise development cycle.

This is the first Ubuntu milestone release to include images for the armhf architecture, for the ARM CPUs using the hard-float ABI.

New packages showing up for the first time include:
* Linux Kernel 3.2.2 (3.2.0-12.21)
* Upstart 1.4
* Unity 5.0
* LibreOffice 3.5 beta 2

From the Taking it Seriously dept.:
Today we???re revealing a service we???ve developed, codenamed Bouncer, which provides automated scanning of Android Market for potentially malicious software without disrupting the user experience of Android Market or requiring developers to go through an application approval process.

The service performs a set of analyses on new applications, applications already in Android Market, and developer accounts. Here???s how it works: once an application is uploaded, the service immediately starts analyzing it for known malware, spyware and trojans. It also looks for behaviors that indicate an application might be misbehaving, and compares it against previously analyzed apps to detect possible red flags. We actually run every application on Google???s cloud infrastructure and simulate how it will run on an Android device to look for hidden, malicious behavior. We also analyze new developer accounts to help prevent malicious and repeat-offending developers from coming back.

From the Makes Sense On a Server dept.:
...Red Hat. The company has just announced that it is extending the production lifecycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 and 6 from seven to 10 years in response to enterprise customer demand and Red Hat???s hardware original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partners.

For any company, upgrading to a new version of an operating system requires detailed advance planning. Red Hat has extended the Red Hat Enterprise Linux lifecycle so customers can remain on their current version longer. With the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux lifecycle, customers will benefit from continued feature enhancements while Red Hat???s application binary interface (ABI) and application programming interface (API) compatibility for their existing application.

From the Paid For dept.:
The UK Government has published a report that calls for all publicly funded research to be made freely available. The report says: "Government will work with partners, including the publishing industry, to achieve free access to publicly-funded research as soon as possible and will set an example itself," Research councils will be required to ensure compliance with existing mandates to "deposit published articles or conference proceedings in an open access repository at or around the time of publication" and will investing ??2 million (???2.4 million) to develop a 'Gateway to Research' website that could also include non-publicly funded research.

From the ShamNow dept.:
The EU ACTA chief has resigned, saying, 'This agreement might have major consequences on citizens' lives, and still, everything is being done to prevent the European Parliament from having its say in this matter. That is why today, as I release this report for which I was in charge, I want to send a strong signal and alert the public opinion about this unacceptable situation. I will not take part in this masquerade.'

From the Hard Realities dept.:
As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression. Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. Others are similar but, for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content.

From the Army of Many dept.:
Apple???s iPad reigns supreme from whatever angle you choose to look at the tablet market (profits, apps, quality, market share, mindshare, you name it), but research firm Strategy Analytics this morning said Android did manage to capture a record 39 percent tablet OS market share in the fourth quarter of 2011.

From the Backdoor dept.:
Ireland is soon to have a law similar to SOPA passed that would give music and movie companies the power to force Irish ISPs to block access to sites suspected of having copyright infringing material on them.

Irish citizens won???t have a chance to lobby their democratic representatives because there won???t be a vote on the law ??? snappily named ???S.I. No. of 2011 European Communities (Copyright and Related Rights) Regulations 2011??? ??? in the Irish Parliament. Instead the law is being enacted by ministerial order because it is being prepared in the form of a Statutory Instrument.

From the webOS dept.:
...HP says it expects the software will be fully open-sourced by September, at which point its official name will be Open webOS 1.0. The first piece of the puzzle is arriving today in the form of the second-gen Enyo framework, a free tool that lets developers write webOS apps for tablets, phones and desktop browsers.

From the Spicy dept.:
Cinnamon 1.2 is out! All APIs and the desktop itself are now fully stable! I hope you'll enjoy the many new features, the desktop effect, desktop layouts, the new configuration tool, the applets, changes, bug fixes, and improvements that went into this release.

From the KNew KNews dept.:
The KDE community has released version 4.8 of their Free and open source software bundle. The new version provides many new features, improved stability, and increased performance. Highlights for Plasma Workspaces include window manager optimizations, the redesign of power management, and integration with Activities.

From the Read Carefully dept.:
...A single SpiderMonkey runtime (that is, instance of JSRuntime) ??? and all the objects, strings and contexts associated with it ??? may only be accessed by a single thread at any given time. However, a SpiderMonkey embedding may create multiple runtimes in the same process (each of which may be accessed by a different thread).

That means it is up to the embedding to provide communication (if any) between the runtimes via JSNative or other SpiderMonkey hooks. One working example is the new implementation of web workers in Firefox which uses a runtime per worker. Niko Matsakis is experimenting with a different architecture in his new parallel JS project.

From the Their Pants Off dept.:
The never-ending war on Android has cost Apple more than $100 million, according to latest estimates. While a huge chunk of that money was spent (read wasted) in claims against HTC.

...So far, 84 claims have been filed against different Android manufacturers (HTC, Samsung etc.) for patent infringments, out of which only 10 were proved to have been infringed and only one ruling has gone in Apple???s favour.

From the Zoom dept.:
Google's efforts to improve Internet efficiency through the development of the SPDY (pronounced 'speedy') protocol got a major boost today when the chairman of the HTTP Working Group (HTTPbis), Mark Nottingham, called for it to be included in the HTTP 2.0 standard. SPDY is a protocol that's already used to a certain degree online; formal incorporation into the next-generation standard would improve its chances of being generally adopted. SPDY's goal is to reduce web page load times through the use of header compression, packet prioritization, and multiplexing

From the HUD dept.:
Ubuntu is set to replace the 30-year-old computer menu system with a ???Head-Up Display??? that allows users to simply type or speak menu commands.

Instead of hunting through drop-down menus to find application commands, Ubuntu???s Head-Up Display lets users type what they want to do into a search box. The system suggests possible commands as the user begins typing ??? entering ???Rad??? would bring up the Radial blur command in the GIMP art package, for example. HUD also uses fuzzy matching and learns from past searches to ensure the correct commands are offered to users.

From the *Postponed* dept.:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid delayed a vote on the Protect IP Act (Pipa) scheduled for Tuesday.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith then said his panel would not consider the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) until a compromise was reached.

From the Almost There dept.:
Yesterday [Wednesday] the Internet cried out in protest of SOPA-PIPA, and congress heard us loud and clear. At the beginning of Janaury 18th, there were 80 members of congress who supported the legislation, and 31 opponents. Now, just 63 support SOPA-PIPA, and opposition has surged to 122, according to ProPublica.

Unfortunately, there are still more stated supporters than opponents in the Senate. There, PIPA needs 60 supporters out of 100 for it to pass, and two-thirds majority (67 votes) to prevent President Obama from being able to veto. At this rate PIPA would pass.

From the I Wonder Why? dept.:
U.S. companies are locating more of their research and development operations overseas, and Asian countries are rapidly increasing investments in their own science and technology economies, the National Science Board (NSB) reported this week.

While the U.S. remains the global leader in science and technology R&D, that lead is narrowing, asserts NSB, the policymaking body for the National Science Foundation. In particular, 10 countries in Asia -- China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand -- are closing ranks on U.S. leadership in science and technology.