Many people are sick of Facebook and their lack of care for privacy. Websites have been setup to make users aware of privacy policy changes, new features Facebook has added (for better or worse) and even JavaScript programs that analyze how open your Facebook profile really is.

A group of four young programmers from NYU's Courant Institute have started a Facebook-killer project to decentralize the web, called Diaspora.

They have raised almost $200,000 using KickStarter.com when there goal was a mere $10,000. They have plans to make the software distributed (very git-like, if you're a programmer), allowing users and companies to set up their own servers, all running off what I assume will be diaspora.com (except that domain has already been squatted).

The project will be licensed AGPL, hosted on GitHub and feature end-to-end encryption for communication between servers and the clients that use the software. Their plans for the first release are:

• Full-fledged communications between Seeds (Diaspora instances)
• End to end GPG
• External Service Scraping of most major services (reclaim your data)
• Version 1 of Diaspora’s API with documentation
• Public GitHub repository of all Diaspora code

Followed by:

• OpenID
• Voice-over IP
• Distributed Encrypted Backups
• Instant Messaging protocol
• UDP integration

for their future releases.

That's a lot of nerd speak for:

Diaspora knows how to securely share (using GPG) your pictures, videos, and more. When you have a Diaspora seed of your own, you own your social graph, you have access to your information however you want, whenever you want, and you have full control of your online identity.

So if you are sick of worrying about Facebook privacy and believe in open source software, why not pledge a dollar or two to their cause or simply tell your friends?

They plan to have their first release up and running by September 2010.

On April 16, Hemisphere Games announced that they were currently in the process of porting their game Osmos to Linux. They wrote another teaser on April 26th and then finally released the game for Linux on April 28th.

Since Osmos has been ported and released for Linux, the developer who spearheaded the port has started part-one of a three part series on his experience porting the game to Linux.

Like any game studio, they're worried about sales, so that is why I'm letting the Ubuntu community know of the game's availability.

Is it worth porting games to Linux? We sure hope so, but we'll have to see! We had a nice sales spike our first week, but it's trailing off fast;

Ubuntu is starting to become more friendly with proprietary software by looking to integrate partner repositories and for-purchase software in the Ubuntu Software Centre. So if you want to help games on Linux and don't mind proprietary software, take a look at Osmos, available for $10 USD.

Happy Gaming!

I personally don't use nor endorse the use of Limewire but I have *a lot* of Windows users asking me about Limewire when I install Ubuntu on their machines.

If you want Limewire and you've recently switched to Ubuntu, I suggest you take a look at FrostWire. FrostWire is a fork of LimeWire and has better integration into Ubuntu, doesn't have annoying advertisements like LimeWire and generally works out of the box after installation.

FrostWire now uses Azureus code for downloading torrents. Azureus, to me, is extremely slow and not worth using just to download torrents. So, if you are looking to download torrent content, I suggest you use Transmission, the bittorrent client that is installed in Ubuntu by default and I personally use.

Other than that, happy file sharing!