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Posts published in “Internet”

SourceForge Not Making A Graceful Exit

By Christine Hall on June 11, 2015 |

Business, Community, Internet, Software and Web Apps

SourceForge Not Making A Graceful ExitSourceForge logo

If SourceForge were a person and I were the New York Times, I’d make certain I had an obituary on file right about now. It’s obvious that the once essential code repository for open source projects is terminally ill, although it’s just as obvious that Dice Holdings, which took over ownership of the site nearly three years ago, has no plans of letting SourceForge go gently into the good night, so we’ll probably see more kicking and noise-making until the lights are inevitably extinguished.

SourceForge logoNewer converts to open source probably don’t know much about the site, but it wasn’t long ago when Linux users were very aware of SourceForge and how to use the service, at least well enough to download software — perhaps more aware than they wanted to be. It was the go-to site when looking for a program not available in a particular distro’s repository. Not anymore. Not for a while. These days, the more important projects have either migrated to GitHub or are hosting their own.

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OSCON Moves, Nokia’s on the Phone & More…OSCON logo

OSCON Moves, Nokia’s on the Phone & More…

By Christine Hall on April 24, 2015 |

Community, Internet, Mobile, News and Operating Systems

FOSS Week in Review

Larry’s hanging out up near the 49th parallel, in Bellingham, Washington, for the LinuxFest Northwest conference. He’ll be filing reports over the weekend and possibly on Monday, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, I get to do the Week in Review — because the boss likes me best.

OSCON’s packing its bags

Speaking of conferences, OSCON’s making a big move. Although the annual conference presented by publisher O’Reilly Media started in my old stomping grounds of Monterey, California in 1999, the event has been held in Portland, Oregon every year since 2003, except for 2009 when it made a one-off stop in San Jose. This year OSCON will once again be held in Portland, on July 20-24, then that’s it, for at least a year.

OSCON logoLate last week, Rachel Roumeliotis reported in a blog on the OSCON website that after this year’s event, the conference will be packing up and making a move. In 2016, OSCON will unfold it’s tents in Austin, Texas, with the conference being held May 16=20.

Why Austin? Cited for reasons are the city’s many software communities, such as All Girl Hack Night and Google Development Group Austin, as well as Texas based tech firms such as Rackspace, Dell, SoftLayer, Continuum, and OpenStack. It doesn’t look like this move will be permanent, however. According to the post: “As with OSCON in Amsterdam…we want to explore these communities and offer those software engineers and architects the OSCON experience.”

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

FOSSForce.com
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WordPress Plugin ‘Simple Ads Manager’ Exploit

By Christine Hall on April 13, 2015 |

Internet, Software and Web Apps

Anyone who runs sites using the WordPress platform and the plugin Simple Ads Manager will want to read this and learn from our mistake. Even those not using this particular plugin, but who have deactivated plugins not being used but still residing on their servers might find this useful. Luckily, in our case no harm was done, but that’s only because the incident occurred on a test site, so we were able to just take the site down. Lucky for us, it wasn’t FOSS Force or one of our other active sites.

Early Saturday evening we began receiving numerous email notices with two worrisome subject lines from our server. One subject was “LOCALRELAY Alert for sitename,” being sent to us at the rate of about every five minutes, with each showing info on the “first ten of 101 emails” that had been sent by the server since the last email notification. The other subject, “Script Alert for /path/to/script” was coming with the same frequency. To make a long story short, someone had hacked into a site we use to evaluate and test WordPress plugins before possibly deploying them on active sites, and was using it to send spam. Our test site had been turned into a spambot in other words.

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

FOSSForce.com
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The Trouble With SEO

By Christine Hall on April 9, 2015 |

Internet

Before Google, search engines didn’t get in the way too much.

This isn’t necessarily Google’s fault. There were a lot fewer websites then, and also many fewer people looking for them. Even then, however, unscrupulous web designers were working overtime to scam the system in an effort to gain ranking — which is why search engines now only pay scant attention to the “keyword” meta tag, which is so often stuffed with keyword spam that it’s not to be trusted.

Obviously, search engine ranking is important because it’s one of the main ways people find a site. People can’t read content they can’t find. And if nobody finds a site’s content to read it, what’s the use of writing it? So getting an article off of page twenty in a search result and onto page one is key — which is why you read so much about SEO, or “search engine optimization.”

SEO is basically giving Google what Google wants, for the purpose of improving the chances of getting a page to the top of a search list. For content sites, SEO can be sort of a deal with the devil, as writers who pay too much attention to “best SEO practices” will find that doing so will effect the quality of their writing.

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

FOSSForce.com
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The AT&T Mafia, LibraOffice Online & More…LibreOffice Online Logo 2011

The AT&T Mafia, LibraOffice Online & More…

By Christine Hall on March 27, 2015 |

Distros, Hardware, Internet, Operating Systems and Software

FOSS Week in Review

Larry Cafiero’s off doing some important Larry stuff and I was told I could avoid detention if I wrote the Week in Review for him, so here I am.

LibreOffice as SaaS

This from our “it’s about time but it ain’t time yet” department. The Document Foundation, those fine folks who bring us the LibreOffice productivity suite, announced on Wednesday the unveiling of an online SaaS version of the suite, complete with the catchy name LibreOffice Online or LOOL.

LibreOffice_OnlineWell, it wasn’t exactly an unveiling. It was more an announcement of things-we-are-working-on-and-are-really-really-sure-are-going-to-happen. According to the notice on the Document Foundation blog, LOOL isn’t scheduled to pull into the station just quite yet. According to the blog: “The availability of LibreOffice Online will be communicated at a later stage.”

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

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingThe AT&T Mafia, LibraOffice Online & More…
Google Wants to Be Super NielsonGoogle Fiber logo

Google Wants to Be Super Nielson

By Christine Hall on March 24, 2015 |

Business, Internet and News

Last night I bought a Tracfone online. This morning, when I bring up FOSS Force on the browser, I’m greeted by an ad hawking Tracfones. Likewise, a few months ago after I purchased a coolant reservoir for my 27 year old BMW, I was greeted by ads on every site I visited for companies specializing in parts for old BMWs. We’re all used to this, right? Even if we just conduct a simple Google search, we’re liable to be followed around by ads pertaining to that search for hours, if not days or weeks.

Google Fiber logoWell, guess what? This sort of targeting is coming to your TV soon.

Ad buyers have been saying for quite a while that television advertising is something of a bargain these days when compared to the prices they’re paying to advertise on the Internet. Much of that has to do with targeting, which Google has perfected to a surgical science on the Internet, with a precision that pretty much hasn’t been possible on television. On TV, a company selling articles which primarily appeal to young teen age girls, for example, can buy time on a show that has high numbers in that demographic, but that’s about it — and that’s kept television time relatively cheap.

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

FOSSForce.com
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Net Neutrality Clears Hurdle & Other Things

By Larry Cafiero on February 27, 2015 |

Community, Internet, Media and Politics

FOSS Week in Review

Net Neutrality symbolWell, much of the focus for the week was on the Federal Communications Commission vote on increased net neutrality protections, and according to rational news sources reporting on the issue (e.g., just about everyone but Fox News and their wannabes), this is a good thing.

Enough has been written about it, but I did want to point out a post by Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker, where she says, “We just accomplished something very important together. Today, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission voted for strong net neutrality protections. This happened because millions of people — including many hundreds of thousands
in Mozilla’s community — joined together as citizens of the Web to demand those strong protections.”

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate and is involved in several FOSS projects. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

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Is Net Neutrality Now a Done Deal?FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler

Is Net Neutrality Now a Done Deal?

By Christine Hall on February 5, 2015 |

Business, Internet, News and Politics

Does FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s announcement on Wired yesterday mean that a level Internet playing field is now a done deal? Probably, but not necessarily. There are still hurdles to be overcome.

In care you missed the news, Wheeler yesterday wrote that he’s putting the whole force of his agency behind reclassifying broadband providers as Title II services and creating sweeping new Net Neutrality rules, which will also bring wireless providers into the fold.

The first hurdle to his proposal comes on February 26, the date on which the FCC is expected to vote on the new rules. This is probably already a done deal, as it’s unlikely that Wheeler would’ve penned yesterday’s piece for Wired if he wasn’t confident that he already has the support of his fellow commissioners.

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

FOSSForce.com
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Old News Anew: Fixing Zen Cart for SSL v3 VulnerabilityZen Cart Logo

Old News Anew: Fixing Zen Cart for SSL v3 Vulnerability

By Christine Hall on January 15, 2015 |

Internet and Web Apps

PayPal was supposed to have made the change on December 3, the date it announced as the target for no longer accepting secure connections from sites using SSL v3 instead of TLS. As I manage a Zen Cart site which uses PayPal’s express checkout as it’s only payment option, I checked with the server’s technical support staff to make sure we were covered. Yup. We got you set up with that, they said. I was good to go.

When December 3 came and went with the site continuing to take orders, I figured I had weathered the storm quite handily, although this seemed a little too easy to me.

Then came Monday night.

While I was away from home and office, sitting at a borrowed computer, I received a series of emails from PayPal, notifying me that a customer was making repeated unsuccessful attempts to place an order — unsuccessful because PayPal was refusing the handshake from the server. I easily recreated the problem by logging on to the site using a dummy customer account and attempting to make a purchase. At the point where the order was sent to PayPal, the process failed with a red letter warning saying something like “(35) error:14094410:SSL routines:func(148):reason(1040).” Not cool.

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

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingOld News Anew: Fixing Zen Cart for SSL v3 Vulnerability
‘Linux Advocates’ Throws in the Towel

‘Linux Advocates’ Throws in the Towel

By FOSS Force on January 10, 2015 |

Internet, Media and News

The website Linux Advocates is no more. The site, which focused on a variety of Linux issues, went offline on January 7th with little fanfare and no advance notice. The site had been being published for two years, having gone live in early 2013.

Before taking the site down, a notice was posted by site owner Dietrich Schmitz, which can still be read on the site’s Facebook page.

Continue reading‘Linux Advocates’ Throws in the Towel