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Posts published by “FOSS Force”

Redmond’s Used iPads, Spy Wars Escalate & More…

By FOSS Force on September 20, 2013 |

Business, Hardware, Internet, News, Politics, and Software

Redmond’s Used iPads, Spy Wars Escalate & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Court rules on Facebook privacy

If an employee makes a post on Facebook using a privacy setting that excludes the boss from seeing it, that post is off limits to the employer. Unless, that is, the poster has a turncoat friend who willingly supplies the post to the employer with no prodding to do so. That’s evidently the gist of a ruling handed down in August, as reported by PCWorld on Sunday.

The case involved Deborah Ehling, who was suspended by Monmouth-Ocean Hospital Service Corp. (MONOC) after she posted on Facebook in June of 2009 a response to news that a white supremacist had opened fire and killed a guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Continue readingRedmond’s Used iPads, Spy Wars Escalate & More…
Microsoft: Knock, Knock, Knocking on Nokia’s DoorUbuntu vs Microsoft

Microsoft: Knock, Knock, Knocking on Nokia’s Door

By FOSS Force on September 13, 2013 |

Business, Distros, Hardware, Internet, Mobile and News

FOSS Week in Review

The Microsoft saga continues…

Ten or twelve years ago somebody noticed that no one except IBM ever entered into a partnership with Microsoft and survived. Since then a few got lucky, but not many, and one of them wasn’t Nokia. For the life of us, we can’t figure what ever convinced the Finnish folk that hiring Stephen Elop, then head of Redmond’s business software division, as CEO was a good idea. We guess they never really grokked the whole understanding-history-or-being-doomed-to-repeat-it concept.

When Mr. Elop decided to scrap all plans for all mobile operating systems other than Windows Phone at Nokia, red flags should’ve gone up. We figure the only reason they didn’t is that the Finns spent most of the 20th century nurturing an aversion to red flags. In this case, the aversion cost them dearly. They bet the farm on an OS that no one else wanted and now the used-to-be-leader in the cell phone business is just another division of Microsoft.

Continue readingMicrosoft: Knock, Knock, Knocking on Nokia’s Door

Phishing Scam Masquerades As LinkedIn Connection Request

By FOSS Force on September 5, 2013 |

Internet, News and Security

We’ve noticed in the last week there’s a new email phishing campaign that uses emails masquerading as LinkedIn connection requests.

Although most tech savvy users long ago learned email best security practices (don’t click on links in emails unless you’re absolutely sure you know the source of the email), sometimes we get lulled into complacency and automatically click on links from trusted sources.

Continue readingPhishing Scam Masquerades As LinkedIn Connection Request
And the Best FOSS or Linux Blog Is…FOSS Force Best Blog--2013 Award

And the Best FOSS or Linux Blog Is…

By FOSS Force on August 26, 2013 |

Internet, Media and Polls

In this competition there’s a winner but no losers.

Although only one site gets to call themselves the “FOSS Force Best FOSS or Linux Blog–2013” winner, in reality everybody in the competition has won.

Today we are announcing the winner from a field of ten great blogs, all of which have already won our elimination round. Before that there were 19 truly great blogs in our competition, nine of which had been chosen by visitors to our site, the other ten being hand-picked by us here at FOSS Force as a way of getting things going. They are all winners just by dint of being in the running.

Continue readingAnd the Best FOSS or Linux Blog Is…

Our Email, Down for 18 Hours, Now Back Up

By FOSS Force on August 15, 2013 |

Site News

About 8 pm last night the email accounts we use here at FOSS Force went down. The problem was a server located at a datacenter in Pennsylvania that suddenly disappeared from the Internet. The server was used by us to host our oldest website, Alternative Approaches, a site we made unavailable to the public a few months ago as we’ve worked to reboot the site with a new look and feel. However, we have continued to utilize the domain as our main email domain. The site is our only web property that doesn’t reside on the server we use to host FOSS Force our other web properties.

Continue readingOur Email, Down for 18 Hours, Now Back Up

Second Round of Our Best Personal Linux or FOSS Blog Competition

By FOSS Force on August 13, 2013 |

Media, Polls and Site News

We were hoping to have 20 to 25 blogs for you to choose from here in round two of our competition to see who wins the honors as FOSS Force Best Personal Linux or FOSS Blog–2013. We end up offering you a total of 19.

Voters in our qualifying poll that finished at noon today wrote-in plenty of web sites for us to consider. The trouble was, most of them didn’t meet the criteria we set-out in the article titled What’s Your Favorite FOSS or Linux Blog? which was published on July 29th when we began this competition.

To a degree, we expected that. We knew some voters would write-in names of great Linux sites that in no way qualify as personal blogs. That they did, placing votes for many of our favorite sites and for some we think downright silly. So we first cleared out votes for sites that obviously don’t qualify, such as Omg! Ubuntu!, phoronix and OStatic.

After taking care of that task we were left with a long list of sites. As most were unknown to us, we had

Continue readingSecond Round of Our Best Personal Linux or FOSS Blog Competition

Are You Ready For Round Two?

By FOSS Force on August 12, 2013 |

Polls and Site News

The first round of voting in our quest to see whom our visitors will vote “Best Personal FOSS or Linux Blog–2013” has ended. Right now we’re busy checking out all of the blogs that received write-in votes to see which qualify for round two and which do not. We’re estimating that by late afternoon or early evening eastern time in the United States we’ll be ready to announce our line-up for round two.

Round two will be an elimination round from a field of 20 to 25 blogs taken from the results of the poll that just ended. There will be no write-in votes, but voters will still be allowed to vote for up to two blogs.

Continue readingAre You Ready For Round Two?
MIT Reviews Aaron Swartz, Google’s 100 Million Takedowns & More…DMCA

MIT Reviews Aaron Swartz, Google’s 100 Million Takedowns & More…

By FOSS Force on August 2, 2013 |

Business, Copyright, Hardware, Internet, Media, Mobile, News, Patents, Politics, Security and

FOSS Week in Review

USPTO shoots down Apple patent

There seems to be more than enough tit-for-tat to go around in the ongoing patent battle between Apple and Samsung. If we wanted to be snarky, we’d say we haven’t seen this much legal maneuvering since the last days of the Beatles and the “sue me, sue you blues.”

Continue readingMIT Reviews Aaron Swartz, Google’s 100 Million Takedowns & More…