Newsbytes
You can now use Amazon Prime Instant Video to stream movies and TV shows in Linux. Going to the video streaming service’s website ( www.amazon.co.uk/Prime-Instant
Video) allows you to stream videos either as part of a subscription or on a video-by-video basis. There’s some decent films on there, and Amazon has followed Netflix’s lead in producing its own TV shows, such as the critically acclaimed series Transparent and Hand of God.
The Android application has also been updated to let you download videos onto your device for 30 days, which is handy for playback without using up your mobile data allowance. Google isn’t always in our good books but it’s earned some brownie points with its transport networking crew finding and fixing a Linux kernel TCP bug that has been causing trouble for nearly 10 years.
The bug affected cubic congestion control, which is used in a range of Linux distributions and causes problems with network throughout as applications switch between sending lots of data, pausing and then sending more data. A patch is now available at
http://bit.ly/TCPBugFix. The Taurinus X200 laptop has been given the Free Software Foundation’s Respects Your Freedom certification which certifies that it has completely open and secure software and hardware. It’s free from preinstalled bloatware and doesn’t ship with DRM and security backdoors, like many other laptops do. It runs the Trisquel distro and runs on an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and a choice of 2GB, 4GB or 8GB RAM. If you fancy buying one they start at $445 and can be bought and shipped within the US only at https://shop.libiquity.com/product/taurinus-x200. For the rest of the world, the similarly FSF-certified Libreboot X200 can be bought from http://minifree.org/product/ libreboot-x200.