Appearances can be deceiving, and in this particular case, they can make a very poignant statement. To illustrate the point of the “fast lane/slow lane”…
Posts published in “Internet”
A recent brouhaha concerning Google comes from an item that made the rounds in the last week or so regarding older browsers and Google search. It seems that some users of older browsers have been receiving an outdated version of Google’s homepage when attempting to make a search. Evidently, Google searches made using these browsers returned results just fine, using Google’s current results page, but users needed to return to the search engine’s homepage to conduct another search. The browsers affected are primarily older versions of Opera and Safari.
This led to a discussion on the Google Product Forums, which prompted a reply from a Google employee using the name nealem:
“I want to assure you this isn’t a bug, it’s working as intended.
“We’re continually making improvements to Search, so we can only provide limited support for some outdated browsers. We encourage everyone to make the free upgrade to modern browsers — they’re more secure and provide a better web experience overall.”
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
According to the Mozilla Developer Network, Firefox OS is an open source mobile operating system based on Linux, open web standards and Mozilla’s Gecko technology.
But there’s more to it that that: Firefox OS is about reinventing what mobile platforms can be, about pushing the boundaries of what is possible with the Web on mobile and about enabling entirely new segments of users to come online with their smartphone at various levels of participation, from users to developers.
On a Monday last October, Tennessee based publisher and writer Susan Linton decided her plate was too full and put the website Tux Machines up for sale. That Friday, October 28, she announced that she’d found a buyer in Roy Schestowitz, known in FOSS circles as the publisher of TechRights, a site which focuses on the political side of free tech.
For nine years, Tux Machines had been a place to read about Linux and FOSS, mainly from links to what others were writing on other sites. But it was also just a cool place to hang out and meet up with other Linux users. Certainly there were and are other sites doing almost the same thing — but Linton’s Tux Machines was different. It was kick-your-shoes-off-and-visit-a-spell homey. It was comfortable.
“I’m just getting too old and tired to keep the site up the way it and its loyal visitors deserve,” she wrote. “It may get better next spring, but this fall I’ll end up losing all my visitors I’m afraid.”
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
To say that things are going at breakneck speed in the FOSS world –- so much so that it’s hard to keep track of –- well, that would be a lie. However, there are a few things that popped up on the proverbial radar over the past week…
Ruth Suehle added to Ohio LinuxFest keynoter lineup: Yep, the Raspberry Pi queen and ruler of all she surveys in the realm of Red Hat’s Open Source and Standards group, Ruth has joined the list of keynoters for the October event in Columbus. Ruth participates in the Fedora Project and is co-author of “Raspberry Pi Hacks” (written with fellow Red Hatter Tom Callaway). She also leads discussions about open source principles at opensource.com, and serves as a senior editor at GeekMom.com.
Linus being Linus: No shrinking violet by anyone’s standards, Linus Torvalds addressed the wider Debian community on Sunday at Debconf in Portland, and his talk had people agreeing and disagreeing, sometimes simultaneously.
eBay announced this morning that they’ve been hacked and that “encrypted passwords and other non-financial data” have been compromised. They’re expected to begin notifying their customer base later today, which will include a suggestion for users to change their passwords. The company says that PayPal, an eBay subsidiary, uses its own servers and was not affected by the attack.
According to CNET, the first public news of the compromise came by way of a cryptic blog posting by PayPal:
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
Vachana sahitya is a form of rhythmic writing in Kannada poetry that evolved in the 11th century C.E. and flourished in the 12th century as a part of the Lingayatha movement. More than 259 Vachanakaras (Vachana writers) have compiled over 11,000 vachanas. 21,000 of these verses which were published in a 15 volume set, “Samagra Vachana Samputa,” by the Government of Karnataka, a state in South West India, have been digitized. Two Wikimedians along with Kannada linguist and author O. L. Nagabhushana Swamy are involved in the Unicode conversions, corrections and writing the preface for these verses. The entire work is now available as a standalone project called Vachana Sanchaya and ready to enrich Kannada WikiSource.
This project was started a year ago when Kannada Wikimedian Omshivaprakash was trying to help Professor O. L. Naghabhushana Swamy and Kannada author and publisher Vasudhendra to easily access the vachana (verses) of Vachana Sanchaya. Swamy had challenges in using publicly available content on Vachanas since the data was in ASCII and searching text was a huge problem. Pavithra Hanchagaiah started helping to collect information about about vachanas and document them into Unicode by writing scripts to customize open source software to convert the Kannada fonts from ASCII into Unicode.
FOSS Week in Review
Is Microsoft reading your Hotmail?
Last week we learned of the arrest of Alex Kibkalo, a Microsoft employee who’s charged with leaking an unreleased version of Windows 8 to a French blogger. According to Wired, during the course of an internal investigation in Redmond, an unidentified source approached Steven Sinofsky, who was then president of Microsoft’s Windows Division.
“The source gave Sinofsky a Hotmail address that belonged to the French blogger (also not named) and said that the blogger was the person who had received the leaked software. Microsoft had already been interested in the blogger, but apparently, after the tip-off, the company’s security team did something that raised alarm bells with privacy advocates. Instead of taking their evidence to law enforcement, they decided to search through the blogger’s private messages themselves. Four days after Sinofsky’s tip-off, Microsoft lawyers ‘approved content pulls of the blogger’s Hotmail account,’ the court filings state.
“By trolling through the Hotmail email messages and MSN Messenger instant message logs, Microsoft learnt how Kibkalo and the blogger pulled off the leak, says Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent Armando Ramirez III, in an affidavit filed in connection with the case. Microsoft handed over the results of its investigation to the FBI in 2013, and Kibkalo was arrested on Wednesday.”
This, of course, created quite a stir among privacy advocates. So much so that the folks in Redmond on Thrusday announced a change of policy when it comes to riffling through people’s Hotmail accounts. They’re still going to do it, but in the future the company will publish stats regarding its breaking into people’s free Hotmail accounts. In other words, we’ll know just how much they do it.
The sharing feature of the Jetpack plugin for WordPress is currently being exploited for the purpose of sending spam and possibly for DDOS attacks. FOSS…