For January and February, we chose some of the staples of open source security (GnuPG and Nmap) as the tool of the month. And deservedly so; both have just celebrated their ten-year anniversary in the open source realm, a rare feat for any open source project, much less one founded on security.

RMS: « Skype software in China is built for censorship and surveillance.

Marseilles, France-based Nexvision has announced a network IP (Internet protocol) video camera design that incorporates the Texas Instruments (TI) DaVinci TMS320DM6467 processor. The Linux-based CamHD hardware/software reference design is equipped with an Altera Cyclone III FPGA (field-programmable gate array), and boasts a claimed 1080P HD resolution.

I guess most of the readers are already familiar with Ubuntu, but I'm also writing this for new users, which use Linux for the first time. I use Debian for over a year now, but I used both Ubuntu and Kubuntu in the past (especially Dapper Drake and Edgy Eft) and also 8.04 and 8.10 Beta.

A Phillipines-based video capture card vendor has soft-launched a line of Linux-based surveillance DVRs (digital video recorders). Neugent Technologies said its LX8000 SmartDetect DVRs have "built-in object detection video analytics," enabling them to watch for left, abandoned, missing, or stolen objects.

RMS: «Sweden is about to pass a surveillance law that would let the government listen to nearly all phone calls and read nearly all emails, without any court supervision. The proponents describe it with lies, of course. » -- via RMS website

The House of Representatives has passed the Restore Act, which facilitates broad surveillance of foreign terror groups while restoring the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court's oversight of communications between foreign and domestic surveillance targets.

EmbWise has ported its Linux SDIO stack to a video-oriented Texas Instruments (TI) system-on-chip (SoC) processor. SDIOWorx is now available on royalty-free terms for TI's daVinci DM6446 processor, which targets portable media players, video surveillance cameras, and digital photo frames, according to EmbWise.

Medibuntu is a project somewhat similar with debian-multimedia.org for Debian, providing packages which are not included in the official Ubuntu repositories due to legal issues. In order to make use of the packages included in Medibuntu (including the non-free video codecs w32codecs and libdvdcss2 for watching ecrypted DVDs), you will only need to follow several easy steps explained below.