Underexposed

The Smithsonian Institution has begun adding historical photos to The Commons, Flickr's project to host publicly held images.

Felix Nadar is one subject among hundreds from the Smithsonian Institution now visible at Flickr.

(Credit: Smithsonian)

The Smithsonian added 800 photographs from its collection of 13 million images, and 1,200 more will be added in coming months, Yahoo said in a Thursday announcement.

"Our goals in participating in The Commons on Flickr are to expose new, larger, broader and younger audiences to our photographic collections and help them discover more of the Smithsonian educational resources," said Richard Kurin, the acting undersecretary for history, art, and culture, in a statement..

Flickr launched The Commons with the Library of Congress in January. It's also drawn interest from the Powerhouse Museum, which joined The Commons in April and said it's happy with the results it's seen.

Putting the photos on Flickr lets ordinary people add tags and other annotations. That can be good and bad: people can label historic buildings, but also clutter shots with inane notes such as the "daddy?" note on a photo of Albert Einstein and others.

Flickr is a prominent part of Yahoo, but changes are afoot at the site. Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, the husband-and-wife co-founders of Flickr, are leaving Yahoo.

IM2GPS compares a sample photo (top left) to geotagged Flickr photos to find other similar shots (top right) to guess where the sample was taken.

(Credit: Carnegie Mellon University)

Thousands of others have taken the trouble to geotag their photos, so why should you have to jump through a lot of technical hoops to add location data to your pictures?

That's the upshot of a technique devised by Carnegie Mellon researchers and announced Wednesday. The technique, called IM2GPS, compares a single photo to the millions already on Flickr that already have latitude and longitude coordinates.

The algorithm looks at a photo's properties, such as textures, color distribution, and line patterns, then looks for matches at Flickr.

"We're not asking the computer to tell us what is depicted in the photo but to find other photos that look like it," said Alexei A. Efros, assistant professor of computer science and robotics, in a statement.

Efros also has been involved in photo research such as the scene completion technology that can patch over unsightly elements in a photo by drawing from similar ones stored at Flickr.

The researchers found they could locate sample photos within 200 kilometers for 16 percent of their test photos, which may not sound terribly useful, but it is 30 percent better than chance would predict, the university said. And that could still be useful for tasks such as forensic crime research or for guiding other image-processing tasks--for example identifying a taxi in Japan.

It ... Read more

Chris DiBona's job--manager of Google's open-source programs--is a balancing act.

Google consumes a lot of open-source software for its own highly profitable business. But as he oversees the search powerhouse's open-source work, DiBona has to ensure that the company reciprocates. It can't be all take and no give.

Chris DiBona, Google's manager of open-source programs

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

Free and open-source software advocates can be powerful allies--but also vocal critics. For example, some have critized Google for its lack of support for the Affero GPL license, which can require those using software for a publicly available network service to share modifications they've made to an AGPL software project.

DiBona thinks Google strikes the right balance, though, by offering its own modifications back to many open-source projects, advocating the philosophy in general, and trying to nurture the next generation of open-source programmers.

DiBona has been steeped in open-source software for more than a decade. Before his job at Google, he worked for Slashdot, still an influential virtual water cooler for open-source discussion. Slashdot was part of Linux server maker VA Linux Systems, which had a spectacular initial public offering in 1999 followed not long after by a drastic cutback.

DiBona will be preaching the open-source gospel at the Google I/O conference Wednesday--"open source is too good to be true and thus must be magic," according to the agenda--but I sat down with him beforehand to hear his view of ... Read more

Releasing 8.6 million lines of source code and expecting open-source programmers to join Google in its development is a technological challenge.

But when Google does make its Android mobile phone software an open-source project later this year, it looks likely it will take a page from the Linux playbook and use a tool called Git to manage that part of the work.

Linux leader Linus Torvalds originally developed the Git source-code management software in 2005. He didn't like available open-source tools for the chore, but encountered resistance in using a proprietary tool, BitMover's BitKeeper.

Torvalds liked the distributed approach enabled by BitKeeper and Git, in which individuals could maintain their own "trees," variations of a project that branch off a main trunk. Git also can be used to track and manage software patches sent "upstream" by contributors working on code branches to the programmers responsible for maintaining various open-source projects.

Google currently uses a source-code management tool called Perforce to manage Android, but the company is moving to another code repository technology in preparation for moving Android into an open-source project, said Android leader Andy Rubin.

"We need an open-source repository. Currently we're on Perforce. That has to be moved to Git," and there's an effort now to make the transition, Rubin told me in an interview about Android.

That sounded to me like Android had settled on Git, but Rubin wasn't willing to go that far. "We have no announcements at this time," ... Read more

Canonical will announce Netbook Remix, its version of Ubuntu Linux tailored for mobile devices, in two weeks, Chief Executive Mark Shuttleworth said.

"We're announcing it in the first week of June. It's called the Netbook Remix," Shuttleworth said in an interview with the Guardian. "We're working with Intel, which produces chips custom-made for this sector."

Ubuntu has been working on a mobile version of its operating system for months. In an April interview about the release of the new Hardy Heron version of Ubuntu, Shuttleworth said the mobile version is sufficiently important that developing it is worth pushing back the company's move to profitability. The company has engineers working on-site at Intel, he added.

Ubuntu still has plenty of buzz, a remarkable feat given how many new versions of Linux have fallen by the wayside over the years. However, it's not all smooth sailing: the Ubuntu Live conference that had been scheduled for July has been canceled, though some content from the show is moving to the Open Source Convention.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Google didn't invent open-source programming or pioneer the mobile-phone software market, but when it comes to its Android project, don't accuse Google of playing follow the leader.

Although the company has long used open-source software within its internal operations, Android is Google's highest-profile attempt so far to use the collaborative programming method to change how computing is done outside the company's walls.

Andy Rubin, head of Google's Android project.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

Google is hardly the first company to try using open-source software to shake up the industry. What's notable is Google's willingness to ruffle feathers in the open-source world, including those of potential allies such as Red Hat, with its approach.

Google is bucking some open-source conventions by avoiding the fashionable General Public License (GPL) to govern the software and creating the software internally before involving outsiders. At the same time, though, it's been easing gradually into the mainstream open-source fold.

"Initially their approach was almost like a proprietary product approach," said John Bruggeman, chief marketing officer of Linux seller and Android partner Wind River. "I think they have adjusted all elements of that strategy as they go. It's much more open-source friendly, more developer friendly."

And though Google's path might be somewhat different, the company has a decidedly ordinary open-source destination in mind: building a broad, cooperative community to thwart a Microsoft hegemony.

Andy Rubin, the Google engineering director leading Android, ... Read more

Firefox fans looking for a major update to the open-source Web browser probably will get a final version of it next month.

"We're looking for final ship sometime in June," said Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, in an interview Wednesday. Mozilla, which was spun out of AOL more than 10 years ago, oversees the Firefox programming project.

Mozilla leads development of the Firefox and Thunderbird projects.

(Credit: Mozilla)

One of the Firefox's strengths is the broad collection of hundreds of add-ons, but that also means things move more slowly when programmers must update their projects to be compatible with Firefox 3. And that's part of what Mozilla is watching closely as it seeks feedback from the 1.5 million people who have installed the Firefox 3 release candidate 1, which Mozilla issued a few days ago.

"We're in a phase where we're letting add-ons get a chance to update," Schroepfer said. "We like to have RCs (release candidates) out for a while to gather feedback."

More release candidates are possible, he said. With Firefox 2, there were three. "We're in better shape this time, but there's no reason to rush this," he said.

The release candidate is available for download for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. If you want to try it out, it's best to read the release notes first, in particular the known issues that could trip you up.

After Mozilla's years-long slow start, Firefox ... Read more

BURLINGAME, Calif.--Think of it as crowdsourced cartography.

In about three weeks, Yahoo plans to launch a project called Corrections in which users of the Flickr photo-sharing site can help with a thorny computing problem: providing the name of the place where a photo was taken.

Flickr's geo expert, Dan Catt, speaks at Where 2.0.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

Flickr has 68 million photos that have been "geotagged" with latitude and longitude coordinates, said Dan Catt, who works on geographic work at Flickr, in a speech at the Where 2.0 conference here. Coordinates are fine for computers, but human beings looking at a Web site generally prefer place names to numbers.

The trouble for Flickr is that it's difficult to actually retrieve a place name for a given set of coordinates, a task called reverse geocoding. One problem, for example, is that not everyone agrees where one neighborhood ends and another begins.

With the new feature, Flickr will offer its best assessment of where a photo was taken, then let users fix it, Catt said. The site will start with offering information at the neighborhood level, but if a user doesn't agree, it will gradually step back to larger-scale regions.

"If you're not happy with what we're saying, tell us, and we'll learn from that," Catt said in an interview after his talk.

The service will remember a user's settings, so a given location that's one person'... Read more

Red Hat on Tuesday released the ninth incarnation of its enthusiast version of Linux, making a move that rival Ubuntu couldn't: the inclusion of the KDE 4 user interface.

That's because Fedora and Ubuntu have different approaches to new projects such as KDE 4, which is new, significantly different from KDE 3.5, and not yet settled down.

(Credit: Red Hat)

Red Hat has two versions of Linux, the free Fedora that's designed as a proving ground that can get new projects into the hands of early adopters while helping those projects to mature, and the subscription-fee-based Red Hat Enterprise Linux that's supported for years and certified to work with assorted hardware and software.

There's only one Ubuntu, in contrast, and it's free; support can be purchased separately. Founder Mark Shuttleworth deliberately founded Ubuntu with that philosophy because he wasn't happy with the way Red Hat and Novell's Suse Linux had split their products into separate lines.

Ubuntu's Hardy Heron, though, Canonical's latest version of Linux and only its second to come with long-term support, couldn't support KDE 4 because the company needed it to be more mature. With no real support requirements and a short product lifespan, Fedora can accommodate bleeding-edge projects.

To address KDE 4 demand--roughly a third of Ubuntu users prefer it to the more widely used GNOME--Ubuntu programmers took a Fedora-like approach. They're working on a KDE 4 version of Hardy Heron, but it ... Read more

Update 4:15 p.m. May 12: The file was actually infected with a remnant part of code from the Xorer Trojan, not with the full Trojan itself, according to a follow-up Mozilla blog post. The remnant "does not infect the user's machine with the virus (and) is a remnant from a virus that most likely infected the language pack developer's machine," Mozilla said. "To minimize the potential of something similar happening in the future, Mozilla is now scanning all add-ons whenever the signatures for the antivirus software are updated."

A Vietnamese language pack infected with parts of a Trojan for the Firefox Web browser was available for download from the open-source Web browser's official add-on site for months.

Mozilla, which oversees the project, announced the problem on its security blog on Wednesday, saying people should disable the add-on pack for now.

"Everyone who downloaded the most recent Vietnamese language pack since February 18, 2008, got an infected copy," Mozilla said. "While we cannot determine the exact number of compromised downloads, there have been 16,667 total downloads of the Vietnamese language pack since November 2007, so we anticipate the impact on users to be limited."

The author of the add-on pack, who acknowledged on Thursday that his machine had been infected, isn't suspected of any intentional harm, according to the discussion of the problem. The author offered a cleaned-up version Thursday that so far appears OK.

Mozilla scans its files for viruses, Trojans, and other ... Read more