Criticisms of the Ubuntu distribution and Canonical, its corporate sponsor, are not hard to come by. Depending on who is speaking, Ubuntu and Canonical are guilty of profiting from the free software community without giving back to it, forking important projects or distributions, legitimizing the use of binary-only system components, and more. Of all of these gripes, it is the "contributing to the community" complaint which is heard most. Click below (subscribers only) for some musings from your editor on whether these criticisms are justified.

Wired covers the lifting of an injunction against three MIT students regarding their research into Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) security. The ruling comes just a tad late for the students to give their planned talk at DEFCON, but it does recognize some important legal points. "District Judge O'Toole, in vacating the restraining order this morning, essentially ruled that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act does not apply to speech and that the MBTA had failed to supply sufficient proof to merit other claims with regard to the statute, to merit a restraining order or preliminary injunction." The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) represented the students, so updates should be available soon at its website.

Gizmodo takes a look at Dell's upcoming Inspiron 910 mini notebook. "A few weeks ago we ran some rumored specs of Dell's answer to the Eee, the Dell Inspiron 910 (aka Mini Inspiron and Inspiron Mini). Now we've gotten our hands on the full (internal) 910 web documentation. Along with scoping shots from every angle, we've learned that the 910 will support SSDs up to 16GB and has what looks to be very moddable internals (large Phillips-head screws hold that SSD in place). The system will go on sale in just a few days—August 22nd our source says—but we still don't know whether or not that $299 starting price is just a myth."

Debian has updated postfix (privilege escalation) and postfix (privilege escalation).

KDE.News has announced the latest interview in the People Behind KDE series. "In the next People Behind KDE interview, we stay in the United States of America (but leave in an underwater craft!) to meet a KDE developer who could be a JuKebox in another life, someone who helps you build development versions of KDE (staying on the bleeding edge without the pain!) - tonight's star of People Behind KDE is Michael Pyne."

Fedora project leader Paul Frields has sent out another update on the problems which have been, so far, unexplained in the Fedora project infrastructure. One possible clue is a change to the Fedora Hosted SSH key. "We know the community is awaiting more detail on the past week's activities and their causes. We're preparing a timeline and details and will make them available in the near future. We appreciate the community's patience, and will continue to post updates to the fedora-announce-list as soon as possible."

Datamation talks with some Debian project leaders, past and present, about the distribution's 15th anniversary and its future. "The popularity of Ubuntu, [Ian] Murdock suggests (as well as, he might have added, the popularity of specialized Debian-derived distributions such as Knoppix and Damn Small Linux) may very well mean that Debian's role is changing. Instead of being the distribution of choice for many users, the project may be evolving into an upstream supplier for other, more user-focused distributions."

Mandriva has updated postfix (local privilege escalation) and amarok (temporary file vulnerability).

Red Hat has announced a new program providing college scholarships for Fedora and free software contributors. "The Fedora Scholarship program furthers Red Hat and the Fedora Project's commitment to helping develop and foster up and coming talent in the open source software field. Applicants will be evaluated on criteria including the quality of contributions made to Fedora and other free software projects, references provided by Fedora community members, the amount of time the applicant has been contributing to Fedora and the overall quality of the application. Recipients will receive a scholarship to be applied toward tuition for the student's college or university education."

Here's a press release from the Linux Foundation, announcing that Canonical has just joined as a member. "'Canonical is an important new member for The Linux Foundation,' said Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation. 'Matt [Zimmerman] and his team have created an exciting distribution that has taken the world by storm. They have rallied the cause of cross-industry, cross-community collaboration for years. We are extremely pleased to work even more closely with Canonical as we push Linux to the next stage of growth.'"

ZDNet talks with Linus Torvalds about kernel development. "It may not sound exciting but, quite frankly, I don't think anybody who starts out believing that they want to rewrite some big piece of the kernel should even bother. Reality isn't that simple."

The Fedora Project has sent out a relatively uninformative update about whatever problem it is working on. "The Fedora Infrastructure team continues to work on the issues we discovered earlier this week. Right now, we're getting the account system restored to service, along with some of the application servers. We're also taking advantage of the outages to upgrade a few systems at the same time."

Serdar Yegulalp has a follow-up article on his previous prognostication. "One thing I didn't talk much about in my recent feature article about the future of Linux was whether consumers will be paying for Linux apps in four years. Truth is, I don't think most of them will -- if even any at all."

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols covers two LinuxWorld panels. "While at LinuxWorld at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, I chaired the panel on what the OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) that are pre-installing Linux on their PCs are up to and I attended another panel on what the Linux desktop architects have planned. One theme that showed up at both functions is: "What does Linux need to do to compete more successfully on the desktop?" We came up with several pain points, but some of them are clearly hurting Linux more than the others. "

CentOS has updated postfix (local privilege escalation).

Gentoo has updated postfix (local privilege escalation).

Red Hat has updated postfix (local privilege escalation).

rPath has updated freetype (multiple vulnerabilities).

KDE.News covers the mobile and embedded day at Akademy. "This year Akademy held a dedicated day for mobile and embedded talks. With Trolltech being owned by Nokia, mobile is suddenly a hot topic for KDE and several variants of Qt and KDE on mobiles were in progress at Akademy."

The Fedora Project has sent out an "important infrastructure announcement" regarding an unspecified "issue" with Fedora systems. "We're still assessing the end-user impact of the situation, but as a precaution, we recommend you not download or update any additional packages on your Fedora systems." Stay tuned for more.

The list of accepted talks for the Linux Plumbers Conference has been posted. This event is off to a strong start; there are a lot of interesting, highly technical talks on the agenda.

The Java Model Railroad Interface (JMRI) project is not one to sit at the top of the Debian popularity contest results; it provides tools for model railroad enthusiasts. But the legal wrangling around JMRI has made it one of the more important projects in our community at this time. JMRI has suffered some legal setbacks, but much of that was turned around by the US Federal Circuit Court of Appeals on August 13. The result is a vindication for much of the legal reasoning behind free software licenses. Click below (subscribers only) for a discussion of why this decision is important.

MAXIMUMPC looks at the latest laptop offerings from Dell, which will use a Linux-based OS front end. "Another feature that Dell will be rolling out in the coming months is the “Latitude ON” technology, which, like the HP/Voodoo Omen’s Instant-On feature, is a Linux-based UI that loads instead of Windows. Dell execs said that they weren’t creating the OS themselves, but have partnered with a yet-to-be announced third party to create the embedded Linux solution (apparently not SplastTop). What will differentiate Latitude ON from HP’s solution is that Dell is also utilize a separate low-voltage sub-processor to power the Linux OS, which in theory will let the laptop run for multiple DAYS."