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Dear CIO: Linux Mint Encourages Users to Keep System Up-to-Date

Regardless of what you may have read elsewhere, the Linux Mint team takes security very seriously and wants you to keep your system up-to-date.

Linux Mint 18.0 Update Manager

Swapnil Bhartiya gets it wrong.

Let me start by pointing out that Bhartiya is not only a capable open source writer, he’s also a friend. Another also: he knows better. That’s why the article he just wrote for CIO completely confounds me. Methinks he jumped the gun and didn’t think it through before he hit the keyboard.

The article ran with the headline Linux Mint, please stop discouraging users from upgrading. In it, he jumps on Mint’s lead developer Clement Lefebvre’s warning against unnecessary upgrades to Linux Mint.

FU Yahoo!

It appears as if Yahoo has become the pet rodent of the U.S. spooks. To paraphrase: A rat by any other name…

Op-ed

If I were Verizon, I’d be going over my agreement to purchase Yahoo with a fine tooth comb, looking for a way to weasel out of the deal. If I couldn’t find one, after going through with the purchase I’d quietly shut the site down and take a loss on the whole thing. Yahoo has no value anymore, not as a portal nor as a brand.

Yahoo logoThe value it once had as the main intersection on the Internet is long gone, despite the fact that the site still commands enough traffic to make it the fifth most visited site on the web. The trouble is, that traffic isn’t arriving through the front door anymore, and visitors aren’t sticking around for more than a minute or two. People no longer visit the site to use all of the nifty features Yahoo once offered, because the majority of those features are long gone. Instead, these days Yahoo’s users come through the back door, either to use Yahoo Mail or to read a news article — usually a reprint from another site — after being directed to the URL by Google.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

Krebs Goes Down, Opera Gets a VPN & More…

Also included: Yahoo’s big hack, Garrett on Lenovo, new Audacious and GNOME, and Ubuntu get’s ready for Yakkety Yak.

FOSS Week in Review

I spent time this week terminating a Yahoo account I’ve had since way back in the last century. For years, the My Yahoo page was my “home” page whenever I fired-up the old dial-up to go online, but over time the portal (remember portals?) became less and less relevant and I found my visits to Yahoo becoming less and less frequent. By the time I closed the account, prompted by news of a massive hack involving 500 million accounts going back to 2014, I hadn’t visited my Yahoo page in well over a year. RIP Yahoo. It was nice knowing you.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

Christine Hall: FOSS Force’s Grandmama Frump

All we can say is watch this interview with Christine Hall and you’ll know what we have to put up with on a daily basis — equipment that’s not quite up to par and a boss who’s a refugee from The Addams Family.

The FOSS Force Video Interview

Yes, that Christine Hall. The one whose byline you often see on this very site. Recorded under lousy lighting with a 10-year-old (or older) webcam that was probably lousy new, this video is about information, not cinematography. So meet Christine Hall. Listen to what she says about looking for contributing writers. Does she mean you? It’s possible. If you have a story idea, please send it to her. We could see [YOUR NAME] in lights right here on FOSS Force!

Robin "Roblimo" Miller

Robin “Roblimo” Miller is a freelance writer and former editor-in-chief at Open Source Technology Group, the company that owned SourceForge, freshmeat, Linux.com, NewsForge, ThinkGeek and Slashdot, and until recently served as a video editor at Slashdot. Now he’s mostly retired, but still works part-time as an editorial consultant for Grid Dynamics, and (obviously) writes for FOSS Force.

IBM’s Linux Birthday, Oliver Stone’s ‘Snowden’ PSA & More…

Also included: FCC requires TP-Link to allow users to install open source firmware on routers, five new distro releases, new releases of LibreOffice and KDE Plasma, and Microsoft releases Skype 1.3 Alpha for Linux.

FOSS Week in Review

Maybe because we’re in the last 30 days or so of real summer — as opposed to calendar summer — or perhaps because most ‘Mericans are glued to their TVs as the Clinton/Trump heavyweight bout gets underway in earnest, but this has been a slow news week in the FOSS world. However, there are some notable items worth mentioning.

Wi-FiFCC supports open source Wi-Fi firmware. For the last several months many open sourcers have been up in arms because it looked as if the door was being closed on open source on Wi-Fi routers after the agency changed it’s rules around radio interference on the 5 GHz band, making it difficult for router makers to allow users to install open source firmware on their routers. All along, the FCC claimed that shutting out open source use wasn’t part of the game plan, but we FOSSers are a suspicious lot and we weren’t buying it.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

When Slashdot Was the Hub for FOSS News and Discussion

The original Slashdot crew was declared redundant in early 2016 by the site’s latest owner, Slashdot Media. Timothy Lord was the last of the early Slashdot editors to be let go, and has posted more stories on Slashdot than anyone else, ever, so we turned to him to learn how and why Slashdot helped the FOSS movement grow and eventually infiltrate mainstream IT.

The FOSS Force Video Interview

Starting in the last years of the last century, when Linux and free software were first making their mark on the world, a website called Slashdot was the king-hell news and discussion site for such things, along with a variety of other topics that interested the kind of people you might meet at a LUG meeting or in the CS department of your local university. The original Slashdot tagline (no longer visible on the site) was “News for nerds, stuff that matters.” And one of the people who worked on Slashdot during those heady days was Timothy Lord, who is such a devout Linux person that he has a Tux tattoo (which we forgot to have him show in the video, darn it).

Robin "Roblimo" Miller

Robin “Roblimo” Miller is a freelance writer and former editor-in-chief at Open Source Technology Group, the company that owned SourceForge, freshmeat, Linux.com, NewsForge, ThinkGeek and Slashdot, and until recently served as a video editor at Slashdot. Now he’s mostly retired, but still works part-time as an editorial consultant for Grid Dynamics, and (obviously) writes for FOSS Force.

Comic-Con and FOSS Comic Book Solutions

After whetting his appetite at this year’s Comic-Con, our resident Linux newbie discovers free and open source apps for reading digital comics, as well as a treasure trove of available sources for free comics online.

The Linux Gadabout

San Diego Comic-Con 2016 has come to a close and baby, I got the blues. On one hand, I really don’t like crowds. On the other hand, there’s something inspiring about experiencing more than 130,000 geeks — many of them dressed like superheroes, supervillains, and other denizens from the realm of science fiction and fantasy — annually invading downtown San Diego for the better part of a week. So even during the years I don’t attend the convention itself, I usually make it to the general vicinity of the convention center to behold the chaotic spectacle of it all.

Man of War comics

Robert Glen Fogarty

“Bob” Fogarty was the editor-in-chief at Chris Pirillo’s LockerGnome.com for nearly 12 years, and has written for ReadWrite.com and TheArtofCharm.com. He lives in San Diego with his wife and a medium-sized menagerie of beasties great and small. Follow him on Twitter: @Fogarty

SJVN Talks FOSS, Linux, Microsoft & More…

SJVN has been writing about Linux and FOSS since dinosaurs roamed the Earth, and started writing about IT back when single-celled organisms and CP/M dominated the landscape.

The FOSS Force Video Interview

The official Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols LinkedIn page says, “I’ve written over 9,000 articles on business and technology subjects. Highlights include the first popular news story about the web and the first Linux benchmarks. My articles range from features to reviews to OpEd to news reporting.”

A large percentage of those articles have been about Linux and FOSS, so it was logical for us to ring up SJVN (as he is commonly known) and ask him what’s the biggest news about FOSS so far in 2016, and what we can expect in the rest of the year.

Robin "Roblimo" Miller

Robin “Roblimo” Miller is a freelance writer and former editor-in-chief at Open Source Technology Group, the company that owned SourceForge, freshmeat, Linux.com, NewsForge, ThinkGeek and Slashdot, and until recently served as a video editor at Slashdot. Now he’s mostly retired, but still works part-time as an editorial consultant for Grid Dynamics, and (obviously) writes for FOSS Force.

Oracle Loses Again, Red Hat Competes With FOSS & More…

Also included: LinuxQuestions.org has a birthday, six new distro releases, Ubuntu considering dropping 32-bit support and the feds were after Snowden.

FOSS Week in Review

Happy birthday America. And happy birthday to LinuxQuestions.org. America, more correctly known as United States of America since we’re not the only country on this big piece of land, turns 240-years-old on Monday, if you accept July 4, 1776 as it’s “born on” date. If it’s not too hot, I’ll be going to the Shoals community ballpark to watch the fireworks display and eat some 50 cent hot dogs. I’ll be ordering mine “all the way,” which around here means chili, slaw, mustard and onions. The birthday wish for LinuxQuestions.org is a little belated. The site was started by Jeremy Garcia sixteen years ago last weekend.

Now on to this weeks FOSS news highlights…

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

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