If I was the type to have heroes, Richard Stallman would be near the top of my list, not far below John Lennon and Abbie Hoffman, and way out ahead of Tom Hayden or the several-times-over reinvented Bob Dylan, though the freewheeling Bob Dylan who took it down Highway 61 will always be near the top of the list.

But I digress. I was talking about RMS and GNU/Linux.

RMS is one of those people with whom I’m often in complete agreement–in theory. I just have trouble putting his ideas into practice. For example, RMS says I should always use free software, never anything proprietary. Honestly, I’d like to do just that, but I have a bank that requires I run some of their crapware on Windows if I want to stay PCI compliant. Indeed, if I had the strengths of my convictions, I’d tell the bank where to shove their proprietary junk–but I like to eat and homelessness doesn’t look like an attractive option at this stage in my life.

So RMS makes me feel guilty about nearly everything I do on a computer unless I’m doing it with free software. This is a good thing. It keeps me looking for free and open source answers for all of my computing needs. Heck, even the single Windows machine at the office is loaded with Linux software, like Bluefish and GnuCash.

Well, that’s another thing–did I say “Linux” programs? Excuse me, I probably should’ve said “GNU” programs. That’s another point RMS has been trying to drive home for years.

I used to think it was perfectly acceptable to freely use the word “Linux” to describe any part of the GNU/Linux environment. Like everybody else, I’d say things like “I run Linux,” “that’s a Linux program,” or “what a cool Linux distro.” Never did the word “GNU” spring from my lips. And never ever, ever, ever did I say “GNU/Linux.”

I knew better. I got it that calling the Mandrake distribution I used “Linux” short shrifted the hardworking folks with the GNU Project. I even understood that when I had “Linux” up and running on my screen, I was basically seeing and interacting with the GNU part of GNU/Linux, because Linux itself was doing it’s work quietly in the background, mainly unseen by me. The “Linux” part of GNU/Linux was the part that gave me the quickness and the stability I appreciated. But the “GNU” part was what I saw and understood to be “Linux.”

I knew all that, but I didn’t care. I thought RMS was nitpicking when he jumped up and down, throwing tantrums and whining because we insisted on calling it “Linux” instead of GNU/Linux. It didn’t matter that I left the GNU Project out of the name. Everybody knew what I was talking about. Linux. The operating system that ran KDE or Gnome and a cool slate of mostly free and open source software.

Of course, that was then. This is now. RMS was right, as is usual. Now I have to say GNU/Linux if I want you to know what the heck I’m talking about.

These days, when I’m out and about in the “real” world where most people think that computers come in two flavors, Apple and Windows, when I say “Linux” a lot of people will automatically assume I’m talking about Android. It hasn’t happened yet, but I know that soon, when I tell someone I run Linux on my computer, I’ll get the reply, “I didn’t know you could run Android on a computer.”

That’s going to get worse. Already another “Linux,” Chrome OS, is coming out of the gate strong, with OEMs tripping all over each other trying to get their implementation on store shelves.

When I think of Linux, I don’t think of Android or Chromebooks. Certainly I understand that these make use of the Linux kernel–which is a positive because it means they should be stable and that they’ll have to conform to the GPL. But they’re lacking the GNU DNA. Debian, RHEL, PCLOS, Slackware, Ubuntu – these are all full brothers and sisters. Android, Chrome OS and the like are only half siblings. Linux may be their mother, but they have a different daddy.

If I was going to purchase a smartphone right now, this minute, or a tablet, I’d choose something running Android–mostly because of the Linux kernel and the GPL. But wait until the Ubuntu phone comes out–then it’ll be a whole ‘nother ballgame. What I really want is GNU/Linux on my phone, on my tablet and on every single computing device I own–even on the damned Windows machine running crapware insisted upon by the bank.

There is one good thing about having to occasionally run Windows, however. It makes me appreciate how great I have it with Linux…er, GNU/Linux.

The post GNU/Linux Is Important After All appeared first on FOSS Force.

If the page looks a wee bit fuller than usual, that’s because we’ve added some features we’re hoping you’ll find useful. In fact, placing all the new content we’ve added has required a whole new column, which you can see immediately to the right of this article–if you’re reading it on our home page and not on the single article page.

Here’s a rundown of the new features we’ve added:

• We’re now displaying our latest FOSS Force Poll right on the home page. We’ll continue to place our polls within selected articles as always, but now you’ll be able to find our latest poll right at the top of our home page. How’s that for convenience?
• Immediately below our poll is a listing of Upcoming Events from our all new Events Calendar, a new feature we’re very excited about. You can access our calendar either by clicking on one of the upcoming items, or by using the calendar link on the menu bar at the top of the page, just below the FOSS Force logo. We’ll use the Events Calendar to keep you informed on Linux and free software events around the globe.
• If you’re like us, sometimes reading the comments to an article is more fun and insightful than reading the article itself–especially on FOSS sites like ours where the readership can be extremely well-informed and witty. To make sure you don’t miss out, we’re supplying a list of our most Recent Comments right here on our home page. We hope you find this useful.
• Our Twitter Feed is now displayed on our home page. If you’re interested in news about FOSS, open source, Linux or anything else connected with free tech, you’ll want to keep an eye on our feed. Each day we search the web, looking for stories to pass on to you. The feed running here on the home page is completely interactive, meaning you can Reply, Retweet and Favorite right from our site. Enjoy!
• We’re also expanding our Blogroll, which has resulted in us having to reformat the feature. We want to tell you about all the great FOSS sites we find as we roam the net, but we didn’t want to take-up a whole column or more listing them. Our solution was to take a round-robin approach, displaying eight or so randomly selected links from our Blogroll database every time the home page displays. This way you can see new great links from our Blogroll each and every time you visit our site.

None of this will intrude on your experience as you read the articles and essays we publish. On our single article pages, the new column of features will not display and the site will still employ our traditional three column configuration–so you can read without distraction.

We hope you like our new home page layout! Please don’t hesitate to let us know what you think by leaving a comment.

Editor’s note: This post was updated on Tuesday 5/21/13 at 12:30 pm to add Twitter functionality being added to our home page.

The post Welcome to the new FOSS Force Home Page appeared first on FOSS Force.

We mean, what’s really advanced about an advanced distro? Firefox and Chrome are the same, whether you’re in Linux or Windows, as is Thunderbird–and even grandma can usually make the jump from from Word to LibreOffice with little to no difficulty. When you get right down to it, the “advanced” part of a “not user-friendly” Linux usually has to do with either installation or configuration, and when did grandma ever do either? If your grandma’s like ours, she calls you up to get you to come over even to do a simple little configuration trick with her Windows machine.

But let’s get back to the Linux distros that have built a reputation for being user friendly.

The first distro we remember as being advertised for newbies was Mandrake, which had a really easy to use graphical installer and also allowed most system configurations to be done right from the GUI, with no need to open up a dreaded terminal and use that most scary of computer tools–the command line(by the time Mandrake came on the scene, people were so scared of the command line you’d have thought there’d never been such a thing as MS DOS).

These days there are a lot of “user friendly” distros–all with a little different take on what constitutes friendliness. There have grown to be so many of them, in fact, that they’re starting to take drastic measures to differentiate themselves, to stand out from the crowd.

Mint tries to be the Ubuntu you remember before Unity came along and destroyed everything. Mageia tries to be the Mandrake from your childhood, before you knew anything about French bankruptcy law. Fedora wants you to remember the days when you could buy Red Hat shrink wrapped at your local big box store and openSUSE wants you to forget that Novelle ever existed. Then there’s Chrome OS, which just want’s you to click on ads, and Ubuntu, which thinks it would be swell to be the new Microsoft.

The weird thing is, they’re all different. A few years back, the biggest difference in mainstream distros had to do with configuration options and graphics. Other than that they were mostly the same, different variations of the same theme running either KDE or GNOME.

It’s a whole ‘nother ball game now. We’ve got Unity, MATE, Cinnamon all trying to appeal to users GNOME abandoned. Of course, there’s still KDE and a slew of lightweight desktops, most of which were not designed with grandma in mind. Oh, then there’s Chrome, which definitely want’s to be grandma’s new laptop.

So what do you tell somebody who’s finally ready to end their codependent relationship with Redmond? What distro do you recommend for someone who’s ready to get their feet wet?

If after taking our poll you’d like to explain why you’d recommend such-and-such distro to a new Linux user–feel free to leave a comment below.

The post Best Linux Distro For a New User? appeared first on FOSS Force.

Will appeals court ruling mean death to software patents?

Absolutely no one knows what a ruling handed down last week by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals will ultimately mean–but it might be very good for those of us who’ve been arguing against software patents. Indeed, the ruling had PJ at Groklaw throwing out three separate “OMG”s in her article with the announcement. In other words, she was euphoric:

“The Federal Circuit. OMG. We’ve worked hard for so many years to get to this point, I almost can’t believe it. And I suppose it’s possible it could be appealed, but this is proof of what I’ve always told you, that education is never a waste. Judge Rader is very upset, I gather. He has written a dissent. But he didn’t prevail. And I’m sure he gave it his best effort. OMG. This is a new day…

“I remember the first time we wrote on Groklaw that software and patents need to get a divorce. Remember? So long ago, and how everybody laughed at us. I remember that too. I am thinking about Apple and Microsoft and all the software patent bullies. Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’ll read it more carefully now.”

The case was CLS Bank v. Alice and the court ruled that four patents held by electronic marketplace Alice were not enforceable because they were too abstract. Many are saying the ruling seems to overturn the long held belief that computer software is patentable. Unfortunately, however, the decision was perhaps not decisive enough to set a clear precedent. Five out of ten judges were on the majority side, while the five other judges partly agreed and partly disagreed.

In reporting the ruling for PCWorld, Grant Gross explained:

“…Julie Samuels, an intellectual property lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the ruling gives little guidance to courts on patent eligibility. While judges on the court agreed Alice’s patents weren’t valid, they agreed on little else, she said.

“‘We have not very much more direction as to what’s patentable,’ said Samuels, who filed a brief asking the court to invalidate the Alice patents. ‘This ruling is all over the place.’

The variety of opinions from the judges leaves the case open for Supreme Court review, she said. ‘The only thing the judges seem to agree on is that we need more clarity, but they can’t even figure out what that looks like,’ Samuels added. ‘No one understands what the hell is or isn’t patentable, including the … federal circuit.’”

The way we figure it, too many companies hold too many tens of billions of dollars in software patents for this to be the deciding ruling. Stay tuned for the Roberts Court to weigh-in–sooner rather than later.

Newegg & Overstock win patent battle against Alcatel-Lucent

This wasn’t the only ruling in our favor handed down by the Federal Circuit Court. On Wednesday, Reuters reported that online shopping sites Newegg and Overstock prevailed in a patent fight against Alcatel-Lucent when the court upheld a lower court ruling in the two defendant’s favor. At issue was a patent to allow computers to adapt the screen size of shopping sites, rather than having that adjustment made by the server. The lower court had invalidated the patent because the technology was “obvious.”

Reuters reported that Newegg has a clear policy of fighting patent lawsuits:

“Newegg’s chief legal officer, Lee Cheng, said the ruling vindicated a decision made about six years ago to fight infringement lawsuits that Newegg found frivolous.

“‘Patent trolling is a scam. We didn’t do anything wrong,’ he said, using the derisive industry term for companies that file large numbers of patent infringement lawsuits.

“Cheng said that fewer infringement lawsuits were being filed against his company because they have been aggressive about fighting them and about recouping legal fees.”

We figure that with this ruling, the folks over at Sears Holdings and Amazon.com are crying, “Wow! I could’ve had a V8.” They earlier settled and coughed up some bucks rather than fight the same patent claim.

Feds case against Aaron Swartz to be released to public

On Monday a U.S. judge in Boston ordered that sealed documents in the criminal hacking case against Aaron Swartz be released. Swartz, who was charged with stealing articles from a database, committed suicide in January. As explained in a news article released by Reuters on Monday:

“The case ignited a controversy over U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz’s reliance on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act law. Prosecutors working for Ortiz used the law to charge Swartz with 13 felony counts that carried maximum prison time of 35 years although he had not profited from the JSTOR downloading.”

Katherine Landergan reported on Boston.com that MIT, whose computers were used in the alleged hacking, would be allowed to redact the names of university officials and others named in the documents. This is because the government, MIT and JUSTOR (the digital library whose data was allegedly breached) all claimed that exposing names could result in harassment and retaliation.

According to Landergan’s report, this ruling didn’t set well with the young man’s family:

“But Swartz’s father, Robert Swartz, said he wanted the university to release any relevant documents. In an interview with the Globe, he said that ‘we believe they should release all the documents related to this case and related to Aaron, whether or not those are given to the government.’”

Aaron Swartz at a Creative Commons event on December 13, 2008–Photo supplied by Wikipedia

Swartz accomplished more in his 26 years than most people do in 60 or more. At 14 he was part of the group that authored the RSS 1.0 web syndication specification and was later instrumental in the creation and growth of Reddit. He was also a dedicated social activist who diligently worked for the defeat of SOPA.

The New Yorker unveils Strongbox

It appears that Mr. Swartz left those of us who remain behind a little posthumous gift–one that called upon his considerable skills as a coder and his understanding of the needs of his fellow activists. The creation, as we’ve first seen it, is Strongbox. Revealed by The New Yorker this week, it’s a way for whistle-blowers and other sources who wish to remain anonymous to communicate with near total assurance there will be no interception by the likes of government agencies. It can also be used by bloggers living in nations where dissent isn’t tolerated to publish secretly and securely.

Strongbox is based on Swartz’s creation DeadDrop, which makes use of the Tor anonymity network. The project was commissioned by Condé Nast (publisher of Wired and The New Yorker) because the publisher recognized they had fallen behind in developing ways to protect sources who were putting themselves in danger by speaking-out. Swartz agreed to develop the program, only if it would be released as free software. DeadDrop is licensed under the GPLv3 or later.

For more information on DeadDrop, we recommend Inside Strongbox, the Hyper-Secure Inbox Built by Aaron Swartz published today on Motherboard.

Internet goes down again in Syria

Speaking of places where DeadDrop might come in handy…

On Wednesday, the Internet shut down in Syria again, this time for about an hour and a half. According to the Associated Press, authorities are claiming that the blackout was due to a cut cable during a rebel bombing about 40 miles north of Damascus. You’ll remember that on May 7th and 8th, Syria’s Internet went down for about 20 hours.

MS developer says Linux runs faster than Windows

Holy baked Alaskan, Batman! There’s a developer in Redmond who didn’t drink the Flavor Aid and is willing to honestly talk shop–as long as he can remain anonymous.

We learned of this on Monday, when Steven Vaughan-Nichols filed a report on ZDNet. Evidently, it all started when this person posted to Hacker News. When those posts disappeared from the site, they were reposted, with permission, on the blog Zorinaq, which is published by Marc Bevand, a senior software engineer for Adconion Media Group.

The Microsoft developer lays the blame for Window’s poor performance firmly in the lap of the culture in Redmond, which we’ve heard before:

“Windows is indeed slower than other operating systems in many scenarios, and the gap is worsening. The cause of the problem is social. There’s almost none of the improvement for its own sake, for the sake of glory, that you see in the Linux world.

“Granted, occasionally one sees naive people try to make things better. These people almost always fail. We can and do improve performance for specific scenarios that people with the ability to allocate resources believe impact business goals, but this work is Sisyphean. There’s no formal or informal program of systemic performance improvement. We started caring about security because pre-SP3 Windows XP was an existential threat to the business. Our low performance is not an existential threat to the business.”

The entire thread can be read over on Bevand’s blog. It’s good reading.

Google says number of Android devices reaches 900 million

900 million! Did you hear that? It has to be true; it was reported on Network World on Wednesday. Wow! If we just had a penny for each one of those–wait a minute, we’re doing the math–OMG, we’d be millionaires nine times over.

Well, that does it again. We’ll see you next Friday with another Week In Review. Until then, may the FOSS be with you…

The post Swartz’s Last Gift, the Invasion of the Androids & More… appeared first on FOSS Force.

Luckily, there are many plugins available to help keep your WordPress site safe and secure. Today we’re going to discuss three security plugins that I think are essential.

Akismet: One of the biggest security problems plaguing website operators is comment spam. One of the first things anyone starting a blog or website discovers is the comments being filled with spam messages–often praising your skills as a blogger in broken English. This is comment spam and it’s an inevitability.

With comment spam there is always a link, or links, involved. Often, the comment itself will contain a list of links to websites. If not, the commenter will have supplied a link, supposedly to his or her own website, when meeting the requirements to place a comment on the site.

These links are the whole purpose behind comment spam. The spammer might be merely trying to create back links in order to gain a better Google ranking–in which case the spam is mainly an inconvenience. Other spammers will place links to send visitors to drive-by malware sites–a more serious security issue.

In the old days, comment spammers were almost always spambots and were a little easier to keep out. These days there is often an actual human being behind efforts to spam your site, which makes keeping them at bay a little more difficult. Again, although they seem like mainly a nuisance, they pose a security danger on several different levels. Even when they’re relatively benign and aren’t out to infect your visitors with malware, the links they leave on your site might easily damage your search engine rankings.

The Akismet plugin should pretty much be the first line of defense against comment spam on any WordPress installation. The folks at Akismet do a commendable job of staying ahead of the spammers and are as good as it gets when it comes to recognizing spam and spammers. How do they do it? I’ll let them explain:

“Each time a new comment, trackback, or pingback is added to your site it’s submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down. As a result, you don’t have to waste your time sorting through and deleting spammy comments from your blog.”

To run Akismet you’ll need to enter an Akismet API key, which will identify your site to the plugin’s servers.

You can help Akismet do its job by going to your WordPress Dashboard and going to Settings>Discussion. Set “Comment Moderation” to two links, which will hold any comment for your approval if it contains more than a single link. Remember, links are the whole purpose of comment spam.

SI Captcha puzzle image

Captchas are another tool in your security arsenal to use against comment spammers. There are quite a few captcha plugins available for WordPress and I can’t honestly say that one is any better than another. All I can say is SI Captcha is the one I’ve used for years and I’m happy with it. Maybe there’s a better captcha plugin available, I don’t know. I’m sticking with SI Captcha, because if it ain’t broke, I ain’t fixing it.

One of the things I like about SI Captcha is that it’s designed to specifically work alongside the Akismet plugin. It also has a nifty little feature, the “honeypot spambot trap,” that fools spambots into thinking there’s a field to be filled-out that doesn’t exist–at least not for humans. It’s recommended that you not enable this unless you’re having a spam problem. We have it enabled on one of our sites but not any others.

Although captchas remain an essential part of your security arsenal, they’re not nearly as effective as they once were. Again, Spambots are getting better at reading the distorted images and some spammers are now employing real human beings, who can easily get past a captcha.

Apocalypse Meow: Back in April I told you we were testing Apocalypse Meow as a replacement for Login Lock. Both security plugins ban a visitor’s IP address from accessing a site after repeated failed attempts to login. Plugins like this are primarily used to thwart the type of brute force attacks that are currently plaguing WordPress installations, where black hats attempt to gain access to accounts with administrative privileges by continually trying different usernames and passwords.

I’d actually been very happy with Login Lock and had used it for a number of years on quite a few WordPress sites. Several months back I discovered the plugin is evidently no longer being developed. This sent me scrambling to find a replacement plugin, which is how I discovered Apocalypse Meow.

Although Login Lock is currently working just fine on several of our sites, it’s not a good idea to depend on a plugin that’s no longer under active development. Why? For one thing, eventually you’ll update to a new version of WordPress and find the plugin no longer works. There are also security reasons to quit using any plugin that’s no longer being patched and kept safe from hackers. While I doubt that a plugin like Login Lock could ever be easily exploited, why take chances?

We’ve had Apocalypse Meow working on a test site for a little over a month. We’re quite happy with it. Our testing is being done on a site that’s under development, facing the public but virtually unknown with no sites linking to it. However, that bit of obscurity hasn’t kept the hackers from finding us, so we’ve been able to observe the plugin in action while under heavy fire.

Like Login Lock, Apocalypse Meow is simple and doesn’t try to do too much, while still offering plenty of configuration options. When an IP is barred, it’s confined to “Log-in Jail.” You can control the number of failed attempts before it’s jailed, as well as the length of time the offending IP address must spend there. The plugin also enforces strong passwords, which is especially important if you allow visitors to register for accounts on your site.

Another good feature is that the plugin allows you to make specific IP addresses exempt, a helpful way to keep yourself from accidentally getting locked out of your own site. You can also “pardon” someone who’s confined to Log-in Jail, which might come in handy when a writer or editor gives you a call at three in the morning because she’s locked-out of the site and can’t get in with deadline looming.

Wordfence is another security plugin that offers the same sort of protection against brute force attacks as Apocalypse Meow. It also attempts to be an all-in-one security solution, but many of the things it attempts to do, it doesn’t do well. Also, this plugin works through a third party server and by installing this plugin you’re giving the server, and the people behind the plugin, considerable access to your WordPress install. You may be comfortable with that. I’m not.

Some of the features in Wordfence are features of convienence, and probably create a new security risk by being accessible from within WordPress. For example, Wordfence makes it easy for you to block IP addresses, as well as ranges of addresses, directly from its settings menu. However, this function is easily accomplished directly from your server using cPanel, Plesk or whatever control panel you or your host have installed.

We found other problems.

To make sure you haven’t been hacked, Wordfence scans your WordPress files and performs a line by line comparison of all your files, which are then compared against clean files of the same version held on the Wordfence server. In our case, we received results indicating our Akismet plugin had been compromised. That concerned us for a moment, until we investigated and discovered that Wordfence was comparing our up-to-date version of Akismet with a previous version they were misidentifying as the version we had installed.

This later experience is evidently not unique. We found other reviewers online who had similar experiences.

The post Essential WordPress Security Plugins appeared first on FOSS Force.

These are guys and gals to whom hardware and software are all part of the same packet. This is the crowd who couldn’t care less about the usability of, say GNOME, for the average home user and who might even be tempted to look for loopholes in the GPL, because it would be easier to make money with free software if it wasn’t free. In other words, these are folks who’ve traditionally mainly stood firmly in the proprietary camp, where the rules for resellers have been more clearly defined. These are the dudes and dudettes who make RMS very wary whenever he sees them coming our way.

But I generalize. VARs are also often on our side.

If not for VARs, there would never have been a Red Hat. When you think about it, Red Hat got their start as a value added reseller pushing Linux and they depend on VARs today to move their products. If VARs had never worked with open source, IBM would never have dropped a billion bucks into Linux development in order to make the OS ready to run on their iron so they could offer Tux as an option alongside AIX. If VARs always held closed minds to open source, McNealy and Schwartz would never have open-sourced Java, Solaris or the Star Office code–nor would they have purchased MySQL.

True, VARs have traditionally chosen to go the proprietary route, which they’ve considered better paved and better marked, but they’ve not been unwilling to take a chance and go down the unmarked gravel road of open source. Mainly, VARs just want to make money, which makes them a pretty agnostic lot. They’ll worship at the cathedral or the bazaar–or anywhere else where the cash register is liable to go ka-ching.

These are the people the writer known as The VAR Guy serves. He’s not looking at operating systems in order to tell folks what distro might possibly work on an old 486 that’s collecting dust in the garage. Nor is he likely to write an article bashing the likes of Microsoft’s and Oracle’s reliance on proprietary formats and vendor lock-in instead of embracing open standards. But he might write an article about the success some vendors have been having pitching an open source enterprise stack’s use of open formats with no vendor lock-in.

In other words, he’ll cover both the goose and the gander. He’ll write about anything the VARs can turn into moolah. Again, the VARs are all about the ka-ching, ka-ching. They don’t pretend anything else and there’s nothing wrong with that as long as it’s done ethically and honestly. It’s called sales. It’s how a lot of fathers and mothers feed their children and put them through school.

I wrote about The Var Guy back in September of 2011, when the site was sold to Penton Media. I wondered aloud on these pages if this would mean an end to fair treatment of FOSS news by this faceless, anonymous blogger. In those days he reported a little on FOSS products, and he was fair, but it was mostly Microsoft, Oracle and the usual suspects that he pitched to his readership. I didn’t hold that against him. Again, that’s where the money was to be found.

About a week after that article was posted, The Var Guy used my article as an opportunity to reassure the FOSS community that nothing would change under the new ownership of his site. He pointed out that he employed a mixture of open and closed source to meet his own computing needs and promised that his reporting would never be biased either for or against FOSS products:

“…The VAR Guy’s home office includes a MacBook Pro, an Ubuntu Linux netbook from ZaReason, a Dell workstation running Ubuntu, and a Lenovo IdeaPad running Windows 7. The VAR Guy also has a Samsung tablet running Android, and an Apple iPad (version 1; our resident blogger didn’t open his wallet for iPad 2).

“But here’s the thing: The VAR Guy won’t get caught in a religious war between open source and closed source. Instead, he judges each piece of technology on its business value. If Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) gains ground on VMware, The VAR Guy will report it. But if Microsoft gets a big win against Red Hat Enteprise Linux, The VAR Guy will report that as well.”

It’s a promise he’s kept. In the twenty months since that exchange, I can’t remember an open source story that would be important to the enterprise that hasn’t been covered, either by The Var Guy himself or by Christopher Tozzi, his main open source go-to guy.

Which finally gets me to my point.

In last few months it seems that coverage of FOSS and other open source software has increased dramatically on The Var Guy site. I don’t have any metrics or hard facts to back this up, but I spend several hours each day scanning the web for FOSS news stories, and lately I’ve been noticing that The Var Guy site has been showing up more and more often in my searches.

Part of the reason for this is that the site’s new owners have been beefing-up coverage of everything. It’s a much more vibrant and important site now than it was even a few months ago. Naturally, more coverage of everything means more coverage of Red Hat, OpenStack, Ubuntu and other FOSS projects. But it seems like it’s more than that. It seems as if there’s been a dramatic uptick in FOSS reporting since, let’s say, the beginning of the year.

If true, this doesn’t surprise me. FOSS is becoming more and more important to the business community with each passing day for a variety of reasons. It’s not just because of the great products that are already out there, waiting to be deployed. We all know there’s a wealth of those, from servers to the cloud to CRMs; these days there’s pretty much viable open source solutions for all business needs, but the open source products already on the market aren’t the whole story.

What’s becoming increasingly more important to the enterprise is the open source model itself. Some businesses are starting to realize there is money to be saved and flexibility to be found, not by buying some shrink wrapped binary, installing it on their iron and trying to shoehorn it into working for them, but by working with other businesses with similar needs to design a solution that everybody can use, own and modify.

It’s only natural that the VAR community, therefore The VAR Guy, would be at the forefront of this movement. The business folks can’t easily do this on their own. Their business is retailing or banking or manufacturing. They hire the VAR folks to do it for them; they’re the ones with the expertise and the know-how to get it done.

From where I sit, the VAR guys seem to be making more money peddling open source than ever before. That’s a good thing. By the VAR metric, FOSS is healthy.

The post Measuring Linux By the VAR Metric appeared first on FOSS Force.

To call the problems that Java was experiencing at the time a “crisis” is not an exaggeration. If you’ll remember, the situation was considered so serious that here in the U.S., the Department of Homeland Security was urging everyone to disable the Java plugin.

These two Java polls were among the first we conducted on FOSS Force and received about the fewest votes of any polls we’ve conducted so far. Undoubtedly, this was partially due to the fact that we were just beginning to conduct polls on the site, and so polling here was something new to our visitors. Also, our articles on Java security issues received a smaller number of page views than most articles we publish. However, low readership notwithstanding, we will continue to cover serious security issues, because we think it’s important that we do so.

In both polls, we attempted to limit votes to one vote per IP address. Although this is not a perfect way to limit votes, we feel that it suffices for the purpose of these unscientific polls.

The first Java poll began on April 14th and ended on April 28th. It ran inside the article Java Remains Unsafe–Not Likely To Be Fixed Soon. In this poll we wanted to see if our visitors were taking the security warnings about Java seriously, and to see if they were heeding concerns expressed by some security experts that Internet-facing Java was inherently unsafe.

This poll posed the question, “Have you disabled Java in your browser and do you intend to keep it disabled even after all security issues have been fixed?” This poll received a total of 35 answers. Those taking the poll were allowed to select one answer only from a list of seven. In the list below, after each answer is the percentage and exact number of votes received by that answer.

I’ve disabled Java and I intend to keep it disabled forever – 40% ( 14 votes )

I’ve disabled Java but I’ll enable it again as soon as it’s safe – 17% ( 6 votes )

I have not disabled Java but I intend to do so – 6% ( 2 votes )

I haven’t disabled Java and I’m not going to do so – 26% ( 9 votes )

I don’t know how to disable Java – 0% ( 0 votes )

I don’t know – 6% ( 2 votes )

Other – 6% ( 2 votes )

Those who chose the answer “Other” were given the opportunity to supply their own answer. The two answers received here were “needed for work” and “either fix or trashcan Java security hole.”

In the second Java poll we attempted to discover if people thought the security problems in Java were specifically due to the program’s ownership by Oracle, a company that’s often not held in high esteem by members of the Free Software community. This poll was very simple and straightforward, asking the question, “Do you trust Oracle to keep browser-side Java secure?” The four answers available in this poll were Yes; No; Doesn’t matter, I’ve disabled Java; and Other. Again, users answering “Other” were allowed to supply their own answers.

This poll ran from April 22nd through May 6th and was placed inside the article Oracle Serious About Java Security–Maybe and received a total of 16 votes, half of which voted No. Second place went to “Doesn’t matter, I’ve disabled Java” with five votes or 31% of those cast. Two people voted Yes and Other received one vote. The Other vote indicated that he or she trusted Oracle “somewhat.”

Although both of these polls represent much too small of a sampling to be considered indicative of anything–it’s still fair to say that FOSS Force’s readers don’t particularly trust either browserside Java or Oracle, which is pretty much what we expected.

The post FOSS Force Poll: We Don’t Trust Oracle Or Java appeared first on FOSS Force.

Other than that, there was nothing that was really exceptional about the site. It was just another Penguinista blog by a blogger, Dietrich Schmitz, who was unfamiliar to me. His writing was strong, even if he did sometimes seem to be lacking in how-it-really-works insight.

He learned quickly, however. Very quickly. It wasn’t long before Linux Advocates started showing-up more often in my morning web surfing. The writing and quality of articles improved and the major Linux news aggregators began paying attention by publishing links to selected articles. It was obvious; the site was progressing.

Then, a few weeks back, the site unwittingly got caught in the middle of some silliness that exploded and threatened to go viral, when an amateur blogger in a snit wrote a blog claiming censorship by Schmitz, who had evidently deleted some comments the blogger had posted to the Linux Advocates site.

I had a good chuckle. I was glad it was Schmitz and not me in the middle of it–and reminded myself again of my policy to not delete comments no matter how idiotic, unless they cross certain rude, untasteful and offensive thresholds. You know, sticks and stones and all that. Schmitz handled it well. He penned a kiss-and-make-up reply, that was also published by the folks at Techrights–much to the chagrin of the self-styled rough trade crowd on the forums who thrive on flame wars.

Since then the site has rapidly progressed in a direction that can only be seen as positive. It’s now on my list of sites to check every morning as I prepare our Twitter and Facebook feeds. Schmitz has started partnering with Katherine Noyes, who writes as Linux Girl over at LinuxInsider. She’s not only contributing her journalistic skills, but is acting as an adviser, evidently helping Schmitz learn to navigate the labyrinth that leads to a successful publication.

He’s also started adding guest bloggers, which is something we’ve been planning to do here at FOSS Force as well, and has managed to put together a pretty impressive roster which includes Dr. Roy Schestowitz from Techrights, Robert Pogson and several others. In addition, Ken Starks from The Blog of Helios has been taken on as a “regular contributing” author.

Schmitz and his helpers would seem to have all their ducks in a row to build a successful site that could contribute greatly to our open source community, except for one thing–money.

The plan is for the site to be supported solely by donations–which is difficult to make work even when you’ve got all the time in the world to get it off the ground. The trouble is, Schmitz doesn’t have a lot of time. By his own admission, he’s close to being broke. He specifically doesn’t want to go the advertising route. His vision, it seems, is for Linux Advocates to be “visitor supported,” not dissimilar to National Public Radio’s “listener supported” model sans pledge week.

He has a campaign running through FundRazr, with a goal of raising $10 thousand by June 15th. He’s got a long way to go. As of noon this morning, he’s picked-up $80 in donations. A previous fundraiser, now completed, through Indiegogo, garnered $955.

At present, any donations to Linux Advocates are not tax deductible. In an email exchange this morning, Schmitz explained:

“I have looked into filing as a 501c3. What I lack is the funds to hire an attorney at the moment. It’s kind of like a catch-22, I am afraid. Part of my funding goal will be applied to doing just that if/when said funds become available.”

Again, it’s a steep hill that Schmitz is trying to climb. Launching a successful website is never easy–especially when you’re in a hurry. He’s got some well known talented people who obviously believe in him, or his vision, and who are willing to put shoulder to stone to help him out. It’s a good site. I like it. I like it’s potential even more. Here’s hoping that the cute little penguin chick that adorns the site’s masthead proves to be the exception–a penguin that can fly.

Editor’s note: Article updated 5/13/13 at 5:33 PM EST to identify Ken Starks as a “regular contributing” author instead of as a guest blogger.

The post ‘Linux Advocates’ Looks For Angels appeared first on FOSS Force.

Pretty fonts coming to Linux?

Most of us here at FOSS Force have been using various flavors of Linux for thirteen years or so. During that time we’ve gotten used to reading comments on the ugliness of fonts in Linux, especially when it comes to browsers.

We’ve never particularly understood this or noticed any homeliness in regards to Linux fonts. Of course, we’ve also never been able to understand reviewers who write about how unexciting they find fonts like Times New Roman or Ariel to be. In our experience, Hunter Thompson is brilliant and compelling no matter what font is being used to render his rants, while Tom Wolfe is a pompous ass, no matter how humble a typeface used to display his insufferable prose.

If you’re one of the people who sits up nights worrying about ugly fonts–refusing to read Dan Brown’s latest effort, for instance, not because Mr. Brown is a horrible writer but because you can’t overcome the subpar font rendering on your Android device, you’re problems are about to be solved, if we understand the news coming from Google and Adobe. According to an article published last Friday on PCWorld, the two companies have teamed up to fix some of the problems that plague how FreeType, the font software used in Linux and iOS, does it’s display work:

“Specifically, Google and Adobe on Wednesday released into beta the Adobe CFF engine, an advanced Compact Font Format (CFF) rasterizer that ‘paves the way for FreeType-based platforms to provide users with richer and more beautiful reading experiences,’ as Google put it in an online announcement on the Google Open Source Blog.”

Over at the aforementioned Google blog we’re offered some gee-whiz graphics of the new engine at work, as well as this explanation:

“Text rasterization produced by the new Adobe CFF engine in FreeType is dramatically more faithful to the typeface design. The improvements include better stem widths and placement, fewer dropouts, dramatic reduction in the ‘blobbiness’ of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and more even visual weight. While all of this may sound somewhat technical, the advantages are not, and will benefit technical and non-technical users alike. These improvements lead to more beautiful looking text that is easier to read.”

Actress Huong “Junie” Hoang–born July 16, 1971

“Jane Doe” appeals IMDb verdict

We’re not sure exactly why we believe this item belongs on a FOSS news page, but it’s raised a number of questions in our minds and we figure if we’re going to be confused we might as well confuse you too.

On Monday we learned from Reuters that Huong “Junie” Hoang, the actress who sued website IMBb.com because they (gasp!) revealed that she’s evidently fortysomething years old, has appealed the verdict that didn’t go her way. The article didn’t say on what grounds she’s filing the appeal, only that it’s being filed with the Ninth Circuit court of appeals.

“Hoang filed suit against IMDb anonymously in October 2011, claiming that IMDb damaged her career by revealing her age after she signed up for the site’s subscription service, IMDbPro. Hoang claimed that the site had obtained her age when she used her credit card to sign up for IMDbPro.”

Wait a minute! IMDb has a subscription service? How does that work exactly? Do they run a boiler room of telemarketers phoning Hollywood A-listers and pitching them? That, we’d like to hear…

“Well, Mr. Dicaprio, you can do what you want. If you think your career can take the hit of not being given the treatment that goes with our Pro service, then by all means just settle for our free listing…”

We also can’t figure out the treatment Ms. Hoang is getting. Do you seriously mean that after shelling out real honest-to-goodness USA bucks, the Pro treatment doesn’t even allow for a little creative license when it comes to age? Are you implying that lying about age is against IMDb’s ethics, but listing her alongside real actors like Susan Sarandon or Robert Redford isn’t? Come on, guys, take a lesson from Marshall Field and “give the lady what she wants.”

By the way, if you’re trying to remember where you might’ve seen Ms Hoang on screen, according to her IMDb listing she’s been in such critically acclaimed classics as Disorders: The Dark Side of the Human Mind and the TV series Exotic Dancers of Houston. If you missed those, never fear; she’s got three projects in post production.

Hmmm… We just noticed… According to IMDb, she’s been involved in 100 projects since 1992. Seven of those projects began after IMDb destroyed her chances of having a career in 2011. Something’s not adding up here…

Why schools require the use of Redmond’s products

Ken Starks, who does tons of good work getting computers in the hands of kids who need them with HeliOS and Reglue, on Monday posted a guest blog on the Linux Advocates website.

Did you ever wonder why schools are so insistent about requiring students use Microsoft products when there’s plenty of free stuff available? Knowing academic types as we do, we’ve always suspected it’s because the educated idiots who run our school systems don’t realize there’s an alternative. It turns out, according to Starks, our suspicions might be true.

“Said teacher had no idea what Google Docs is. I had to physically walk her through a Gmail install over the phone and guide her to the Google Docs page. After a bit over 1.5 hours in conversation, the light finally came on and she absolutely gushed over the marvels of technology and Google in particular.…

So, as I understand it…the necessity for Microsoft Office has been lifted and kids with no Internet connection will be allowed to use LibreOffice. She even gives instructional handouts as to how best to get LibreOffice and install it.”

Keep up the good work Ken!

Nokia shareholders ready to riot

On Tuesday, Reuters reported on shareholder unrest in Finland. It appears the shareholders of Nokia have been reading the riot act to Chief Executive Stephen Elop, demanding he turn the ship around. They’re also suggesting that Nokia’s exclusive deal with Microsoft perhaps isn’t such a good idea:

“Many shareholders at the annual general meeting in Helsinki said Elop should reconsider his 2011 decision to switch to the phone operating software made by his former employer Microsoft, which has left the company scrambling to get back in the race from a standing start with its new Lumia range of smartphones.

“‘You’re a nice guy … and the leadership team is doing its best, but clearly, it’s not enough,’ one shareholder, Hannu Virtanen, told Elop. ‘Are you aware that results are what matter? The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Please switch to another road,’ he said.”

Nokia investors have good reason to be upset. Back in 2000, when the company was the unbeatable leader of the cellphone world, shares of Nokia were going for 65 euros. On Tuesday, when the shareholder meeting took place, shares were trading at 2.72 euros.

CEO Elop pretty much told the investors there would be no move away from the company’s exclusive deal with Microsoft. As far as he’s concerned, Windows is the way to “compete with competitors like Samsung and Android.”

Some big shareholders disagree:

“Juha Varis, senior portfolio manager at Danske Capital, which owns Nokia shares, said Elop may be making a mistake.

“‘He has closed doors,’ he said in a phone interview. ‘They don’t have new ideas now. Their fate is all in Windows Phones.’”

We see it this way. Microsoft was the iceberg. Nokia was Titanic. It’s time to man the lifeboats. Women and children first.

Secure Boot comes to 64-bit ARM

We’re certain to hear more about this in the weeks and months to come. On Wednesday, PCWorld informed us that ARM tablets are now safe for 64-bit Windows RT.

“The UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) Forum on Wednesday announced that its boot firmware specifications will now support ARMv8, a 64-bit processor architecture announced by ARM in 2011. ARM’s processors are used in most smartphones and tablets, and chip makers such as Nvidia and Samsung are expected to release 64-bit processors for smartphones and tablets in the future.

“Microsoft on Windows 8 and RT requires PCs and tablets to carry a feature called Secure Boot, which prevents a system from being hijacked. The Secure Boot environment is based on UEFI firmware and ARM has already said it is working with Microsoft to develop a 64-bit version of Windows for ARM-based devices. However, it is not yet clear when the OS will come out.”

Our bet is that it’ll be a long, long time before we see a 64-bit version of RT made available to consumers. Microsoft is probably going to drop the RT version of Surface, and OEMs aren’t going to want to touch it until there’s a decent list of apps available for it–which will probably be never.

If you don’t believe us, you might want to read what Toshiba had to say about RT at a product launch in Sydney, Australia this week.

Web servers under attack

It might be time to batten down the hatches on your open source web server. According to Ars Technica the black hats have been busy installing malicious back doors on sites running Apache, nginx and Lighttpd web servers. This news comes from antivirus vendor Eset, which says that over 400 web servers have been infected so far, 50 of them being sites with a top 100,000 raking by Alexa.

“‘This is the first time I’ve seen an attack that will actually target different Web servers, meaning the attacker is willing to create the backdoor for Apache, Lightttp, and nginx,’ Pierre-Marc Bureau, Eset’s security intelligence program manager, told Ars. ‘Somebody is running an operation that can victimize various Web servers and in my opinion this is the first time that has ever happened. This is a stealthy, sophisticated, and streamlined distribution mechanism for getting malware on end users’ computers.’”

Protecting a server against this attack evidently isn’t easy. The attackers are quite stealthy, and are using sophisticated techniques to keep from being detected.

“…Cdorked also stores most of its inner workings in a server’s shared memory, making it hard for some admins to know their sites are infected. Compromised systems can receive up to 70 different encrypted commands, a number that gives attackers fairly granular control that can be remotely and stealthily invoked.

“In another testament to the ambition of its operators, Cdorked relies on compromised domain name system servers to resolve the IP addresses of redirected sites. The use of ‘trojanized DNS server binaries’ adds another layer of obscurity to the attacks, since they make it easier for attackers to serve different sites to different end users.”

With that we’ll leave you to stew in your paranoia while you run every kind of test on your server that comes to mind. We’ll be back with another week-in-review next Friday. Until then, may the FOSS be with you…

The post Why Schools Require MS Office; Nokia Plays Rope-A-Dope & More… appeared first on FOSS Force.

Last night I first saw the news when an old colleague from Rochdale College posted an article from Umbrella Security Labs, a research division of OpenDNS, to her Facebook wall. “BREAKING NEWS: TRAFFIC FROM SYRIA DISAPPEARS FROM INTERNET.”

“At around 18:45 UTC the OpenDNS resolvers saw a significant drop in traffic from Syria. On closer inspection, it seems Syria has largely disappeared from the Internet.”

The article did a good job of explaining the situation without using too much geek talk. It seems that Syria has two top level domain (TLD) nameservers. Both were unreachable. Two other nameservers used for Syria were reachable, presumably because they’re not located within the country. There were more explanations on how this was accomplished–but the gist of the story was that Syria was down.

Nobody in Syria was telling the world what was happening on Facebook or through Tweets. Nobody was uploading photos of the atrocities of war. Also, no one knew if this silence was designed to allow bands of government forces to roam through streets killing everything in sight, whether it moved or not.

This wasn’t the first time the Internet had gone down in Syria since the civil war began. In November there was a blackout that lasted for three days. At that time, activist within Syria feared that the Assad regime was going to launch a major offensive or that the shut-down was an attempt to effectively keep the opposition from being able to communicate, both with the outside world and within Syria for strategizing.

There is nothing new about this sort of action. In the days before the Internet, radio and TV stations, more often than not government owned, often went silent or dark during times of military insurrections. If not dark, they dropped regular programming to broadcast wall-to-wall marches, interspersed with announcements ordering all citizens to remain indoors while reassuring them that government forces had everything under control.

The intent, of course, was rarely reassurance but was meant to strike fear in the citizenry and thereby pacify them–or at least make them think twice about cooperating with the other side. Pulling the plug on the Internet accomplishes the same thing–and more. Not only does it cut lines of communications though social networks like Twitter and Facebook, it also effectively disrupts telephone communications, as even calls made from land lines are apt to be routed through the Internet these days.

Indeed, manipulation of broadcast outlets seems to have been in the playbook last night, with state run radio and television stations reporting that a “fault in optical fiber cables” was the cause of the blackout.

In it’s report on the incident this morning, the BBC turned to a spokesperson with Akamai Technologies, a company that serves between 15 and 20 percent of all web traffic worldwide, who called the government claims “unlikely.”

“David Belson, of Akamai, said: ‘Our monitoring shows that Syria’s international internet connectivity is through at least four providers, and published submarine cable maps show connectivity through three active cables.

“‘As such, the failure of a single optical cable is unlikely to cause a complete internet outage for the country.’”

Although I went to bed last night half-expecting to awaken this morning to news of a bloodbath or some other military tragedy in Syria overnight, that doesn’t seem to be the case–at least not yet. According to the OpenDNS folks, Syria came back online at 14:13 UTC, which would be around 10:13 this morning here on the East Coast of the U.S., if I’m doing the math right. According to OpenDNS, they were down for 19 hours and 27 minutes.

Graphic from OpenDNS showing Internet traffic to and from Syria during the period of the blackout.

During the November Internet blackout in Syria, the hacker group Anonymous swung into action, providing dial-up access numbers to help those in Syria get back online. According to Legal Insurrection, the same was true again last night:

“Meanwhile, internet activists – many with the hacker collective Anonymous – are again furiously tweeting out dial-up access information for Syrians to reach the outside world today.”

This Twitter outreach to the people of Syria is taking place under the username “opsyria.”

Although there’s been no “official” word yet on the cause of the blackout, it’s a dollars-to-doughnuts winning bet that the Assad regime will lay blame on “terrorist,” which would be a code word for everyone who’s in opposition to what passes for a government in Syria these days.

The blackout may very well have been an act of sabotage by anti-government forces. We may never know. Remember, it’s sometimes called “the haze of war” for a reason.

The post The Night the Digital Lights Went Out In Syria appeared first on FOSS Force.