PREY : The Open Source Answer For Stolen Device Recovery

In this fast world there are always chances of  your laptops , smartphones ,tablets getting stealed or missing. The open source solution to this problem is the Prey. Prey is a web service that allows remote tracking and monitoring of laptops, smartphones, and other electronic devices. Prey lets you keep track of your laptop, phone and tablet whenever stolen or missing.

A software agent is installed on the client device and connects in the background to Prey’s host computer.  If requested by the host, the agent sends it information such as the device’s location and can trigger various actions. A control panel can be set up to manage multiple devices.

If you choose to create an account on Prey’s site, you can take advantage of their Control Panel for more granular control of your stolen hardware. After you sign up for the service, you will get an activation key, which you will enter in the configuration screen. You will also have to add a new device in the Control Panel

Prey takes an ingenious approach to laptop recovery once reported missing, it will send timed reports to a configured e-mail address containing information describing its whereabouts. The information collected includes:

Status of the computer

List of running programs and active connections

Detailed network and WI-FI report

Screenshot of running desktop

A picture of the thief and surrounding taken from webcam

The Prey service is owned and operated by Fork Ltd., a small software company that does business out of Hong Kong and Chile.  Prey is written primarily in Bash and runs on most versions of Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Android, and iOS.  Much of its source code is published on GitHub and can be copied under the GNU General Public License.

In order for Prey to actually work, it will have to be booted up and connected online. Therefore we cannot consider prey as a perfect solution since there are chances of your systems get formatted by thief. But it is an interesting and well-executed solution that just happens to be open source and cross-platform. This enables pretty much anyone to have at least a slight chance of recovering a stolen laptop. And even the slightest assurance is better than none.

http://preyproject.com/

Ubuntu Smartphone Introduced At CES 2013

Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux operating system, has announced a new version of Ubuntu designed specifically for smartphones. The new ubuntu smartphone demo was released at Consumer Electronics Show 2013 .Mark Shuttleworth the man behind ubuntu said that he expected to make the most progress with the Ubuntu Phone in the developing world, where smartphone sales are only just beginning to take off. .  Ubuntu, will offer as martphone version of Ubuntu that allows a handset to function as a PC when docked.

“I think carriers are looking to try us out in emerging markets,” said Shuttleworth, who noted that Ubuntu is already a household name in some of these markets due to its use on desktop and laptops PCs. “We ship on 30 percent of Chinese PCs today,” said Shuttleworth, including models from Dell, Lenovo, and HP. “If you go into a store in India, you will see Ubuntu branding,” he added. “It’s a very easy transition for us there.”Shuttleworth said he believes phone manufacturers will test the waters with Ubuntu by releasing a version of an existing Android phone with his OS installed, but under a different model name

Ubuntu Phones will be freely available  as an open-source software. Canonical coördinates development of Ubuntu and makes money by offering paid-for support to companies using it, with many companies around the world using Ubuntu to run Internet and Web server It will be built around the kernel Google created for its Android mobile software.

Developers will be able to create applications for Ubuntu phones using either HTML5 or native code. Unlike some other smartphone platforms, including Android, Ubuntu does not include a Java virtual machine, which Canonical says reduces overhead and allows the OS to deliver good performance even on low-end hardware.

Because Ubuntu for phones is based on the same core OS as Ubuntu for the desktop, however, developers will be able to use the Ubuntu Software development kit to build native applications that run across phones and desktops alike, with only minor User Interface changes for different device form factors.

The new OS will also be backed by Canonical's Ubuntu One cloud service.

The ubuntu phones are likely to be released in 2014.However this year the company plans to partner with Android smartphone makers to ship the first devices featuring “Ubuntu on Android,” a solution that lets you dock your Android phone to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse to use your phone as a full-fledged desktop computer.

The link to the ubuntu phone trailer is given below

http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/phone

Darktable: Opensource Alternative 4 Photoshop

As mentioned in the previous voyager distro review Darktable is an application used for image managing and image editing.

Darktable is an open source photography workflow application and RAW developer. A virtual lighttable  and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.we can import images from your computer as single file or a grop of images which is termed as film roll.The software also scans for external devices. Thumbnailing of this app is a bit slow. The app gives us options like lighttable darkroom and tethering.

lighttable

The left panel is for importing images, displaying Exif information, and filtering. Rating and categorizing buttons are at the top, while the right-side panel features various modules such as a metadata editor and a tag editor. A module used to export images is located at the bottom-right.

darkroom

This mode can be accessed by double-clicking on an image. The layout displays the image at center, with four panels around it; most tools appear on the right side. The left panel displays a pannable preview of the current image, an undo history stack, a color picker, and Exif information. A filmstrip with other images is displayed at the bottom, and can be sorted and filtered using lists from the upper panel. The latter also gives access to the preferences configuration. darktable's configuration allows custom keyboard shortcuts and personalized defaults.

tethering

A third mode allows tethering through gPhoto to cameras which support it like Canon (5D, EOS 30D, EOS 40D, EOS 400D, and EOS 550D), Nikon (D60, D70s, D90, D5000, and Nikon Coolpix P100), and the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ50.

Darktable support raw files from almost every camera,Import a variety of standard, raw and high dynamic range image formats like jpg, cr2, hdr, pfm etc.The powerful export system supports Picasa webalbum, flickr upload, disk storage, 1:1 copy, email attachments and can generate a simple html-based web gallery.darktable uses both XMP sidecar files as well as its fast database for saving metadata and processing settings.

Apart from usual image ,colour and effects options it comes with many features like watermarking ,framing,split toning ,vignetting,monochrome , highpass  , lowpass ,shadows and highlights which helps in image post processing.It also have many correction modules like spot removal,lens correctio,equaliser,sharpen,denoise etc.

On the whole darktable is a very good  photography workflow application and undoubtedly the best in open source

Darktable runs on GNU/Linux / GNOME, Mac OS X / macports and Solaris 11 / GNOME.

http://www.darktable.org/

follow us on https://plus.google.com/b/117053964577838395997/117053964577838395997/posts

Voyager : A Beautiful Distro From France

Voyager 12.04 ,is a beautiful XFCE distro from France .Voyager Live is an Xubuntu-based distribution and live DVD showcasing the Xfce desktop environment. Xbuntu is a combination ubuntu and XFCE.Its features include the Avant Window Navigator or AWN (a dock-like navigation bar), Conky (a program which displays useful information on the desktop), and over 300 photographs to customise the desktop.

 Voyager 12.04 which is based on Xubuntu 12.04 and is a LTS release. Voyager brings a wide variety of customisations and beautifications to Xubuntu which makes the Xfce DE shine. It also have a  Conky Control that allows you manage different 21 different Conky configurations from a single place. The Avant Window Navigator has also been customised in a special way that makes it stand out from other Distros. Voyager come pre-installed with a wide variety of really good software and codecs which makes it the perfect Out Of The Box distro with the exception of Flash but you can easily install it as I mentioned. It also comes pack with many themes and wallpapers so you don't have to sweat in looking for different things for customising your system.

Voyager comes with many inbuilt softwares .Graphics applications include many state of the art softwares like darktable,GIMP,gthumb,mcomix etc.Default internet browser is firefox , it also have software like hotrot (twitter app), thunderbird mail,xchat etc. The multimedia softwares include cheese clemtine, formatjunkie,minitube,vlc media player. Apart from the absence of libre office it has many tools like abiword and FBnumeric etc.

Another notable advantage of voyager is the fast boot time due to its light weight. The ambience of the voyager is very similar to ubuntu. But   it had made many compromises which makes compatiable to windows users and new linux users. Since Voyager is French developed distro ,there are few language mismatches.

All over voyager is a very good distro.It can be downloaded from its website.For a size of around 1GB it is an affordable download as it come with many softwares and option to download many more softwares.

This is my review of voyager, if you have any suggestion or queries kindly write in the comment section. And please do share this article if you liked it   .

http://voyager.legtux.org/

Your Ad Here

Tails Distro : Privacy for anyone anywhere

The Amnesic Incognito Live System or Tails is a live media Linux distro designed boot into a highly secure desktop environment. The Amnesic Incognito Live System is free software released under the GNU/GPL.Tails is meant for online privacy and anonymity. Tails interacts to the internet using Tor network.Using Tor, Tails pipes all Internet traffic emanating from your computer through a constantly shifting set of relays that are operated by a network of volunteers. Consequently, it’s then difficult for anyone to monitor your activity on the web or for web hosts to pinpoint your location.Thus making all your internet activites anonymous. The system is designed to be booted as a live CD or USB and no trace is left on local storage unless explicitly told to. But using it on a virtual machine can compromise the anonymity.

Once booted, it executes from RAM, taking care not to make use of a swap partition. The desktop is Gnome 2.0 and the applications are a fairly standard selection. The web browser Iceweasel 3.5 (Debian Firefox). There are other applications to handle graphics work, audio editing, media playback, text editing, instant messaging and a email client. Extra software can be added via the Synaptic package manager which pulls directly from the Debian repositories. So far, so similar to most other live desktop distros. Security and limited footprint on the the host machine are the areas in which the distro differs from the run of the mill. The tails also have open office tools.

One of the best features of the tails distro is the option to run it in a windows XP camouflage .

                                            

Also there is an onscreen keyboard .This helps from the danger of keyloggers. Also the tails have many cryptographic tools that helps to encrypt files ,emails etc.

The supplied version of Iceweasel comes with an extension to enable end to end encryption (HTTPS) whenever possible in order to further increase security and another one to switch Tor on and off. Many of the applications that are supplied have been tweaked in this way, to improve security. Tails also wipes the contents of RAM on shutdown, and it has a little onscreen keyboard to bypass hardware key loggers. Note that it isn't loaded down with security tools, such as those for penetration testing, although such tools can be added via the package manage.

Tails can be downloaded from their official website .The latest verison tails 0.15 was released on November 28 2012.
https://tails.boum.org/

Your Ad Here

Your Ad Here

WHAT IS GNOME?

GNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs on top of a computer operating system. It is composed entirely of free and open source software .It is mainly developed by Red Hat employees. GNOME was founded with the goal of promoting software freedom  It is an international project that includes creating software development frameworks, selecting application software for the desktop, and working on the programs that manage application launching, file handling, and window and task management.

GNOME is part of the GNU Project and can be used with various Unix-like operating systems, most notably GNU/Linux and as part of OpenSolaris Desktop. GNOME was started in August 1997 by Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena as a free software project to develop a desktop environment and applications for it

A number of language bindings are available, allowing applications to be written in a variety of programming languages, such as C++ (gtkmm), Java (java-gnome), Ruby (ruby-gnome2), C# (Gtk#), Python (PyGObject), Perl (gtk2-perl), Tcl (Gnocl) and many others. The only languages currently used in applications that are part of an official GNOME desktop release are C, C++, Python, Vala and Javascript. A number of build-scripts (such as JHBuild or GARNOME) are available to help automate the process of compiling the source code.The running of GNOME is mainly based on the donations received from its users.

Until the release of GNOME 3.0, GNOME was designed around the traditional computing desktop metaphor. Users can change the appearance of their desktop through the use of themes, which usually consist of an icon set, a window manager border and GTK+ theme engine and parameters. The current default theme is Adwaita. The Human Interface Guidelines help developers to produce applications that look and behave similarly to each other, which provides a cohesive GNOME experience.

The applications that are provided with the GNOME Desktop share several characteristics. For example, the applications have a consistent look-and-feel. The applications share characteristics because the applications use the same programming libraries. An application that uses the standard GNOME programming libraries is called a GNOME-compliant application. For example, Nautilus and the gedit text editor are GNOME-compliant applications.

GNOME provides libraries in addition to the libraries provided by your operating system. The libraries enable GNOME to run your existing applications as well as GNOME-compliant applications. 

The other desktop environments similar to GNOME are KDE and XFCE

Your Ad Here

Ubuntu : The Free Operating System

UBUNTU

Ubuntu  is a computer operating system based on the Debian Linux distribution and distributed as free and open source software, using its own desktop environment. The word ubuntu means humanity towards others. Ubuntu is composed of many software packages, the vast majority of which are distributed under a free software license. The only exceptions are some proprietary hardware drivers. The main license used is the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) which, along with the GNU Lesser General Public License (GNU LGPL), explicitly declares that users are free to run, copy, distribute, study, change, develop and improve the software. On the other hand, there is also proprietary software available that can run on Ubuntu.

The Ubiquity installer allows Ubuntu to be installed to the hard disk from within the Live CD environment, without the need for restarting the computer prior to installation. Beginning with 5.04, UTF-8 became the default character encoding, which allows for support of a variety of non-Roman scripts.

As a security feature, the sudo tool is used to assign temporary privileges for performing administrative tasks, allowing the root account to remain locked, and preventing inexperienced users from inadvertently making catastrophic system changes or opening security holes.PolicyKit is also being widely implemented into the desktop to further harden the system through the principle of least privilege.

Ubuntu is composed of many software packages, the vast majority of which are distributed under a free software license. The only exceptions are some proprietary hardware drivers. The main license used is the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) which, along with the GNU Lesser General Public License (GNU LGPL), explicitly declares that users are free to run, copy, distribute, study, change, develop and improve the software. On the other hand, there is also proprietary software available that can run on Ubuntu.

The Ubiquity installer allows Ubuntu to be installed to the hard disk from within the Live CD environment, without the need for restarting the computer prior to installation. Beginning with 5.04, UTF-8 became the default character encoding, which allows for support of a variety of non-Roman scripts.

As a security feature, the sudo tool is used to assign temporary privileges for performing administrative tasks, allowing the root account to remain locked, and preventing inexperienced users from inadvertently making catastrophic system changes or opening security holes. PolicyKit is also being widely implemented into the desktop to further harden the system through the principle of least privilege.

Some of the softwares included in ubuntu are LibreOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Empathy, Transmission. A large number of other softwares can be downloaded from the ubuntu software center.

The installation of ubuntu can be done with the help of live cds .Also the Ubuntu OS can run directly from the CD.

Users can download a disk image (.iso) of the CD, which can then either be written to a physical medium (CD or DVD).

Some of the variants of ubuntu are

•             Edubuntu, a GNOME-based subproject and add-on for Ubuntu, designed for school environments and home users.

•             Kubuntu, a desktop distribution using the KDE Plasma Workspaces desktop environment.

•             Lubuntu, a lightweight distribution using the LXDE desktop environment.

•             Mythbuntu, designed for creating a home theater PC with MythTV and uses the Xfce desktop environment.

•             Ubuntu Studio, a distribution made for professional video and audio editing, comes with higher-end free editing software.

•             Xubuntu, a distribution based on the Xfce desktop environment, designed to run more efficiently on low-specification computers

The latest release is Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal), released on 18 October 2012.

http://www.ubuntu.com/

http://www.ubuntu.com/download

Your Ad Here

BROWSE ANONYMOUSLY USING TOR NETWORK

Tor (short for The Onion Router)is a system intended to enable online anonymity. Tor client software directs internet traffic through a worldwide volunteer network of servers to conceal a user's location or usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis. Tor was originally designed, implemented, and deployed as a third-generation onion routing project of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. It was originally developed with the U.S. Navy in mind, for the primary purpose of protecting government communications. Today, it is used every day for a wide variety of purposes by normal people, the military, journalists, law enforcement officers, activists, and many others.

 "Onion Routing" refers to the layered nature of the encryption service: The original data are encrypted and re-encrypted multiple times, then sent through successive Tor relays, each one of which decrypts a "layer" of encryption before passing the data on to the next relay and, ultimately, its destination. This reduces the possibility of the original data being unscrambled or understood in transit

Tor aims to conceal its users' identities and their network activity from surveillance and traffic analysis by separating identification and routing. It is an implementation of onion routing, which encrypts and then randomly bounces communications through a network of relays run by volunteers around the globe. These onion routers employ encryption in a multi-layered manner (hence the onion metaphor) to ensure perfect forward secrecy between relays, thereby providing users with anonymity in network location. That anonymity extends to the hosting of censorship-resistant content via Tor's anonymous hidden service feature.

Groups such as Indymedia recommend Tor for safeguarding their members' online privacy and security. Activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recommend Tor as a mechanism for maintaining civil liberties online. Corporations use Tor as a safe way to conduct competitive analysis, and to protect sensitive procurement patterns from eavesdroppers. They also use it to replace traditional VPNs, which reveal the exact amount and timing of communication.

Once inside a Tor network, the traffic is sent from router to router, ultimately reaching an exit node at which point the cleartext packet is available and is forwarded on to its original destination. Viewed from the destination, the traffic appears to originate at the Tor exit node.

Tor can also provide anonymity to servers in the form of location-hidden services, which are Tor clients or relays running specially configured server software. Rather than revealing the server's IP address (and therefore its network location), hidden services are accessed through Tor-specific .onion pseudo top-level domain (TLD), or "pseudomain," making it one realm of the so-called darknet. The Tor network understands this TLD and routes data anonymously both to and from the hidden service. Due to this lack of reliance on a public address, hidden services may be hosted

The Tor client is free software and use of the Tor network is free of charge

http://www.torproject.org.in/

Your Ad Here

WHAT IS OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE ?

Open-source software is software whose source code is published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees.Open-source code can evolve through community cooperation. These communities are composed of individual programmers as well as very large companies. Many of these individuals programmers who start an open-source project usually end up as large companies with open-source programs.

Examples of open-source software products are

Application software

7-Zip – file archiver
Blender – 3D graphics editor
Eclipse – development environment comprising an IDE
GIMP – graphics editor
Inkscape – Vector graphics editor for .svg
Mozilla Firefox – web browser
Chromium – web browser
Mozilla Thunderbird – e-mail client
NASA World Wind – virtual globe, geobrowser
OpenOffice.org (and the LibreOffice fork) – office suite
OpenEMR  – Electronic Medical Records software
PrestaShop – Electronic commerce platform
ADempiere – (now Free Software forked from Compiere) an enterprise resource planning (ERP) open source software platform for business
Vue – (Visual Understanding Environment) mind mapping software project of Tufts University
WordPress – web publishing platform

Operating systems

Android – operating system derived from Linux
FreeBSD – operating system derived from Unix
Linux – family of Unix-like operating systems
OpenIndiana – a free Unix-like operating system
ReactOS – operating system built on Windows NT architecture
Haiku – free and open-source operating system compatible with BeOS
Programming languages
Perl – a general purpose programming language
PHP – scripting language suited for the web
Python – general purpose programming language
Ruby – general purpose programming language
PHDL – hardware description language used for PC Board Design

Server software

Apache – HTTP web server
Drupal – content management system
MediaWiki – wiki server software, the software that runs Wikipedia
MongoDB – document-oriented, non-relational database
Moodle – course management system or virtual learning environment
WordPress – blog software
Joomla! – content management system
TYPO3 – enterprise content management system