On Tuesday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation called on hackers to revolutionize how everyday people contact Congress — and it’s been absolutely floored by the response.

The digital rights advocate is building a free, public domain tool that makes it simple to contact any member of Congress from one central location. The EFF and project partner Sunlight Foundation finished the backend themselves, but they needed help from web developers to test all the different forms for each member of Congress.

IT executives laid out the challenges and opportunities created by cloud computing, open source, and other disruptive technologies during this week’s Red Hat summit in San Francisco.

These regressions are a bit frightening but we are still in the process of conducting further tests -- both bare metal and in the public clouds -- to try to figure out more closely what's going on. However, for most users I wouldn't hold off on upgrading to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS since it will ultimately be needed for the longest support within enterprise environments, for desktop users there are plenty of new features, the hardware enablement is much better on 14.04 LTS, the open-source graphics stack is much better, and there's many other non-performance advantages in using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

One of these new features added today is a way to control the volume of the Chrome OS media player with the Arrow keys. Chromebooks come with master volume keys built into the keyboard, but now this new basic feature allows you to push the up and down arrow keys to change the volume of the Chrome Media Player itself.

• Opteron X Berlin runs Fedora Linux

  Berlin is the first 28nm-based CPU and APU product from AMD for the Opteron server market and this APU is supposed to replace Opteron 3300 series based on 4 to 8 Piledriver cores. Berlin has four Steamroller cores, but its APU supports HSA and it theoretically should be able to run some parallel computing applications much faster.

• AMD Shows Off x86 APU Server Running Fedora Linux

• IBM Gearing Up for New Power8 Servers

  IBM reported its first quarter fiscal 2014 results late Wednesday, once again showing weakness in its server hardware business. Big Blue however has a plan to change its hardware business fortunes.

• IBM Throws Power8 Gauntlet At The Feet Of X86

  IBM is particularly keen on promoting Linux on Power, and Schroeter said that there are now over 800 independent software vendors whose wares are certified to run on the Power-Linux combo. Many of the hyperscale and extreme scale customers that IBM would love to sell Power-based machines to have their own variants of Linux as well as their own applications, so they can relatively easily port their code to Power should it make sense for performance reasons. This is, in fact, the bet that Big Blue is making. It may not be as bold as the bet the company made to create the System/360 mainframe 50 years ago, but the company is not walking away and remains committed to using Power machinery behind its Watson service and continuing to design processors for both Power and System z platforms into the future.

Linux server slinger Linode has doubled its RAM allocations per-server, and swapped out all its hard drives with SSDs allowing it to match upstart Digital Ocean on prices.

The new gear was announced by the company in a blog post on Thursday. It contains new Ivy Bridge E5-2680 v2 processors, greater networking bandwidth, and larger memory allocations, as well as SSDs for storage.

ownCloud, the open source platform for deploying cloud services using internal enterprise infrastructure, said it can scale just as well as traditional public cloud environments, while keeping data much more private. That's the company's conclusion based on testing results of ownCloud running on Red Hat (RHT) Storage, which are on display at this week's Red Hat Summit.

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OpenStack, an extremely popular open source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud program, has just released its latest version: Icehouse. According to the OpenStack Foundation, the ninth release of OpenStack comes "with new features reflecting a community-wide effort to bring the voice of the user into the rapidly maturing open source cloud software platform."

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Russell Pavlicek from the Xen project asks "Are Containers the Right Answer to the Wrong Question? on the Citrix Open@Citrix blog. While Russell brings up many good points, including both Mirage OS and OSv, I believe his article misses the mark about where and how Linux containers are changing the way we do IT. Its true that containers are more limited than full blown virtual machines, but the real magic is about process and management.

The operating system of a server is both essential and completely besides the point. The choice of operating system can have a major affect on the structure and management of your application, so it is absolutely necessary to consider the OS family, flavor, and version carefully when planning deployment. But the client never sees the operating system. The web application that they interact with never (or at least, shouldn't) give an indication of the operating system powering it. So, in that way, the OS doesn't matter, it simply needs to be there and it needs to work flawlessly.

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WordPress users can now rejoice as the much awaited 3.9 arrives with some really stunning improvements. Writers and bloggers will now enjoy the brand new visual editor which is fully redesigned and looks more or less like Google Docs. It’s very mature, user-friendly and elegant looking.

One of the greatest things that WordPress has done is auto point updates, which means, like Google Chrome browser, your WP install is always upto date. One of the Achilles’ heel for WP was a majority of its users never bothered to update their sites. No wonder WP sites used to get cracked so much. With automatic point updates WP has eliminated that problem, however users will have to do major upgrades on their own.

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QEMU 2.0 was supposed to be released in early April but it slipped until now. The QEMU 2.0 release has AArch64 ARM 64-bit improvements, support for the Allwinner A10-based Cubieboard, PowerPC improvements, Q35 x86 machine improvements, support for Intel MPX registers, the QEMU GUI supports SDL 2.0, GTK+ support for mouse wheel, new monitor improvements, TCG code generation improvements, and many other changes.

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Modular product design is the wave of the future, said Shardul Kazi, Toshiba America senior VP, who sees the concept being extended to tablets and other products. Google is offering developers a carrot to help make that future materialize, in the form of a $100,000 prize for Project Ara innovation. The rules for the competition will be released in May

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When I first heard about Android TV I also wondered why Google was bothering with it given how successful the Chromecast seems to have been with consumers. It seemed quite odd to me that Google would suddenly decide to take on Amazon and Apple when it already had a very popular TV product.

But I think if you take another look at this it actually makes some sense. The Android TV device will most likely sell for around the same price as the Apple TV and the Amazon Fire TV: $99. So it will be competing at a slightly higher spot in the market than the Chromecast, which sells for about $35.

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Canonical is trying to position the Ubuntu OS as integral to enterprises expanding onto cloud and scale-out computing platforms.

That ambition is reflected in the make-up of Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS, the latest release of the operating system, which will be available to download on Thursday.

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It’s sort of funny that the press release announcing the new Ubuntu Linux 14.04 LTS release seems as focused on Ubuntu OpenStack as on Linux per se. It’s studded with partner testimonials from Cisco, Mellanox, NTT Software, Brocade lauding Ubuntu OpenStack. But then again, that makes sense given that the vendor battlefield has shifted from core operating system to core cloud infrastructure, where Canonical OpenStack has gained traction with Hewlett Packard and other big cloud providers.

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For about a year now, Google has been working on an Android version of its Chrome Remote Desktop app and new reports from Engadget, PCMag and other outlets claim that it is imminent. The origins of the project go all the way back to a short post from The Chromium Team, and many people have been waiting for the ability to access a remote computer or device from Android.

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In a blog posting, Jim Wasko, Director of IBM’s Linux Technology Center, said "that a Power Systems version of KVM, PowerKVM, will be available on IBM’s next generation Power Systems servers tuned for Linux before the end of the quarter."

Porting KVM to Power has not been easy. IBM has been working hard on it since 2011. Sources say that PowerKVM will be available both from Red Hat and SUSE in their main enterprise Linux distributions, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES).

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Just days before its first Project Ara Developer Conference is scheduled to begin, Google has released the device's Module Developers Kit (MDK), a set of plans and documentation designed to get hardware hackers started building modules for the componentized, mix-and-match experimental smartphone.

Google first unveiled Project Ara in 2013 as a research project within its Motorola Mobility division. But although it's in the process of selling off most of Motorola to Lenovo, the Chocolate Factory has kept Ara in-house, where it appears to be moving full steam ahead.

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Chromebooks are also getting support for folders in launcher. What it means is that now, like Android, you can create folders and club your apps in a much organzied manner. Google has also implemented the “OK Google” search feature with the launcher and the voice search can be triggered with hotword “Ok Google”. Google has also implemented support for ‘Captive Portal’ which makes it easier for users when they try to connect to the wireless of cafes, hotels, airports, and other locations which requiers them to go to an authentication page.

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