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Ubuntu Linux 10.04 LTS is a major release of the operating system Mark Shuttleworth and his company Canonical first released in 2004. In this interview with Simon Dingle Shuttleworth discusses the significance of the latest version of Ubuntu Linux, competitor operating systems, the move to cloud services, open source advocacy and how it has changed in recent years, application distribution, social networking, smartphones and other topics.

Shuttleworth is a South African philanthropist and internet entrepreneur who started the company Thawte in 1995 and went on to sell it to Verisign at the turn of the century in a US$575 million deal. He then became the second ever self-funded civilian astronaut traveling to the international space station as a member of the Soyuz TM-34/TM-33 missions. Upon his return to earth Mark formed the Shuttleworth Foundation and Canonical.

Simon Dingle recently authored a chapter on Mark Shuttleworth for the book South Africa’s Greatest Entrepreneurs. The publication will be available in September 2010.

Use the audio player above to stream the interview or click here to download the mp3 file.

Today is Facebook Suicide Day. What I suspect is a very small group of Facebook users plan to delete their accounts along with all their personal information residing on the social networking service. The reason they’re doing this is due to Facebook’s shifting privacy policies and what seems to be a personal problem with the company’s young CEO Mark Zuckerberg. I won’t be deleting anything today except a few press releases in my inbox. But that doesn’t mean I approve of Facebook’s user privacy policies either. (more…)

After threatening to pull out of the People’s Republic following hacks on its systems, internet search giant Google is likely to make good on its warning and is preparing to shutdown its operations in China according to an insider at the company who spoke to the Wall Street Journal last week.

Google Search is one of the last major international internet services accessible in China after the government in that country banned Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and several other sites in 2009, making them inaccessible to local internet users. (more…)

Twitter has become an integral part of both work and play for millions of its users. It’s insanely useful and highly addictive. So addictive, in fact, that psychologists are starting to talk about it as a legitimate problem for some, in the same way they do  World of Warcraft and other online addictions. For smart, rational people like you the chances of becoming obsessed with Twitter (or anything else) are low – but it can be a distraction and hinder productivity. Attention deficit disorder has become epidemic in the 21st century, and Twitter is yet another diversion that feeds the plague.

A colleague recently asked me how to manage Twitter so that it remained useful, but was less of a distraction. “How do I use Twitter productively” is also one of the top questions I am asked when speaking about social networking. I’ll give you the list of recommendations I usually respond with – but note that these are more aimed at personal Twitter users and do not necessarily apply to using Twitter as a business, for example; (more…)