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'The Apple fanboy problem'
Let this be a lesson. After posts by John Gruber and Shawn King, this happened to Violet Blue. "The misinformation gave a significant number of people fuel to stalk me, attack me for hours at a time, malign, insult me in disgusting ways, threaten me with weapon-specific violent death (an axe), and lead social media attempts to force me to lose my job over the matter. Many referenced John Gruber, and/or his post as they did this. Plans were openly made to make media to attack me - another Angry Mac Bastards podcast." Disgusting story, and sadly enough, this isn't the first time this has happened, as Blue notes in her article. I don't like talking about these matters (you don't want to know the kind of crap that gets thrown my way at times), but I can assure you my inbox has seen its share of pure vitriol after Gruber links to an OSNews piece. It ain't pretty.

No, Mac OS X wasn't ported to ARM by an intern
It's still early days, but this has the potential to put more fuel on the Apple rumour mill fire than anything else in recent times. A BA thesis by Dutch student Tristan Schaap details how, during his internship at Apple's Platform Technologies Group, he ported Darwin to a certain ARMv5 developer board. A few blog articles later, and the headline has already turned into 'Mac OS X ported to ARM'. So, what have I been running on my iPhone and iPad all these years?
Canonical Ceases Funding of Kubuntu Development
This shouldn't come as a huge surprise. Jonathan Riddell, lead developer of the Kubuntu project and the only person paid by Canonical to work on the KDE variant of the popular distribution, has announced that after the 12.04 release, Canonical will no longer be funding him, effectively putting Kubuntu on the same level as other Ubuntu variants like Xubuntu.
Raspberry Pi To Hit Store Late February
Big news from the Raspberry Pi front today - they have a manufacturing date. "The boards will be finished on February 20. Eben and I may be going to China to make sure that the boards can be brought up properly for that date if necessary. We'll be airfreighting them to the UK immediately, so you should be able to buy them before the end of the month."
C++ AMP Open Specification Published
"As an industry trend, advancement in heterogeneous hardware has progressed at a rapid pace. This in turn has fueled developer desire to target such hardware for accelerated computation, necessitating a significant step forward in programming models to enable such practices. C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism (C++ AMP) is a new technology implemented in Visual Studio 11 that helps C++ developers use accelerators such as the GPU for parallel programming."
Google Unveils 'Solve for X'
"Google's just pulled the curtains off of its 'Solve for X' website, and it appears that Google is nearing the creation of a TED-like think tank that will focus on talks about radical technological ideas. The site describes the effort as 'a place where the curious can go to hear and discuss radical technology ideas for solving global problems'."
Poland, Czech Republic Pause ACTA Ratification Process
It would seem that freedom of speech and the open web are in better hands in Eastern Europe than they are in Western Europe. After Poland, the Czech Republic is the second country to suspend the process of ratifying ACTA. "A wave of protests against the international agreement, including hackers' attacks, has swollen in the world as well as in the Czech Republic. 'By no means would the government admit a situation where civic freedoms and free access to information would be threatened,' [Czech PM] Necas said." Anyone from either Poland or the Czech Republic care to comment on how serious we have to take their politicians? If a Dutch or an American politician said something like this, I'd be weary and mistrusting.
Microsoft Removes Start Menu, Button from Windows 8
For all intents and purposes, this is only a minor change, and were this any other operating system or graphical environment, it would never warrant an entire news item. However, we're talking Windows, the most popular desktop operating system of all time, here. After 17 years of trusty service, Microsoft has removed the Start button from the taskbar in the upcoming Consumer Preview release of Windows 8.
Cables Reveal Extent of US Copyright Pressure on Sweden
"Among the treasure troves of recently released WikiLeaks cables, we find one whose significance has bypassed Swedish media. In short: every law proposal, every ordinance, and every governmental report hostile to the net, youth, and civil liberties here in Sweden in recent years have been commissioned by the US government and industry interests." How such prestigious nations with such long and proud histories, like Sweden, The Netherlands, and so on, can succumb to pressure from a former colony is beyond me. We should know better.
EU Regulators Want Google to Halt New Privacy Policy
"A group of European regulators has written to Google calling on it to halt the introduction of its new privacy policy, saying it needs to investigate whether the proposals sufficiently protect users' personal data." I'd rather regulators are on top of this now than when it's too late and we're all plugged into the Google Hivemind Overlord.
Samsung Says EU Probe Will Find it Compliant
"Samsung, in its first acknowledgment of the European Commission's antitrust investigation of its patent licensing practices, Friday said it believed the commission would ultimately conclude the company complies with the rules. The investigation arose out of Samsung's dispute with Apple over trademarks and patents that cover smartphones and tablet computers."
Do iOS Applications Crash More Often than Android Applications?
There's an article making the rounds right now about how applications on iOS crash more often than applications on Android. I'm not going to detail the entire methodology - the article itself does so - but it does raise an interesting talking point about how both mobile operating systems handle application crashes and updates.
*Parabola GNU/Linux: Freedom Packaged*
There are different reasons people use Unix-like operating systems, including configurable, availability free of charge, powerful command line interface an many more. Some people are motivated by the moral issue: they reject non-free software. Specifically for such users Free Software Foundation developed Guidelines for Free System Distributions and created the list of absolutely free ("as in freedom") distributions. In this article we are going to look at the most recent entry on the list - Parabola GNU/Linux. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...
Google Now Scanning Android Apps for Malware
"Google has added an automated scanning process that is designed to keep malicious apps out of the Android Market , the company announced today. The new service, code-named 'Bouncer', scans apps for known malware, spyware, and Trojans, and looks for suspicious behaviors and compares them against previously analyzed apps. Every app is then run on Google's cloud infrastructure to simulate how the software would operate on an Android device, he said. Existing apps are continuously analyzed, too."
Microsoft: Windows Phone 8 To Use NT Kernel
This is the kind of news just tailor-made for OSNews. After 16 years of trusty service, the venerable Windows CE will be history as far as Microsoft's mobile operating system offering goes - the next major version of Windows Phone will use the NT kernel from Windows 8. As a heavy former Windows PocketPC Mobile CE Ultimate SP2 Edition user, this makes me sad. As a fan of the NT kernel, this makes me happy.