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These are the ten most read articles on FOSS Force for the month of November, 2014. 1. 32-bit Man in a 64-bit World by Larry…
These are the ten most read articles on FOSS Force for the month of October, 2014. 1. Breakthrough in Wireless Technology…Or Not by Ken Starks.…
For nearly a month now, we at FOSS Force have had no trouble reaching the popular FOSS sites Tux Machines and TechRights. Both sites are published by Roy Schestowitz and both sites, especially the former, had been offline during much of September due to a prolonged DDOS attack.
On October 4th, when we last reported on this, accessibility to both sites was greatly improved but still somewhat spotty. During most of this month, however, we’ve had no noticeable difficulty reaching either site.
According to Schestowitz, although the site continues to be under fire, he and his team have developed methods to deal with the attacks.
FOSS Force won’t be covering the Seattle GNU/Linux conference (SeaGL) which is scheduled to take flight this coming Friday and Saturday. Plans to cover the…
This year IT-oLogy, the organization behind the annual POSSCON conference in Columbia, South Carolina, cancelled the event in order to focus on launching the Great Wide Open (GWO) conference in Atlanta. At the time, some expressed fear that this might signal the end of the Palmetto State event, that Great Wide Open actually meant a move and new name for the conference. At the same time, others were speculating that GWO would be a one-off event, essentially making it a one year move by POSSCON to Atlanta, which would then return to its native home in Columbia, which is where IT-oLogy is headquartered.
Now that a working exploit of the USB vulnerability that’s baked-in to the USB standard has been released, it might be a prudent move to no longer employ any USB devices that aren’t already under your control until this situation has been fixed.
The exploit was first made public two months ago at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas when Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell of Berlin based Security Research Labs (SRL) demonstrated an attack they called BadUSB to a standing-room-only crowd.
Editor’s note: This article was updated 9/4/2014 at 5:15 p.m. EDT to include latest update from Tux Machines publisher.
The DDOS attack that has rendered the popular Linux site Tux Machines virtually unreachable for nearly two weeks, now seems to be affecting sister site TechRights. Roy Schestowitz, publisher of both sites, told FOSS Force that the attack on TechRights began at about one o’clock Friday afternoon GMT.
“…an hour ago I got some automatic reports and some messages from readers saying that Tech Rights had gone offline,” he said. “I then checked logs, grepped on ‘NT’ (all the zombies are [running different versions of] NT), and saw pretty much the same pattern as on Tux Machines.”
As of eleven o’clock this evening EDT, both site were reachable from FOSS Force’s offices in North Carolina, but we’ve been unable to determine if this is because the attacks have ended or if this is only a temporary reprieve.
These are the ten most read articles on FOSS Force for the month of September, 2014. 1. Is Oracle Using Canonical to Counter Red Hat?…