Posts published in “Internet”

MPAA Wants to Use DMCA to Effectively Bring Back SOPA

By Christine Hall on December 18, 2014 |

Business, Copyright, Internet, Media and News

MPAA Wants to Use DMCA to Effectively Bring Back SOPA

In “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” Winston Smith’s job was to rewrite the past for the Inner Party. Mainly, he made people vanish from the pages of history. Anyone who came under the party’s bad graces suddenly disappeared from all media; from all newspaper articles, books, television archives and any other mentions. In Orwell’s world, anyone declared a nonperson was completely erased. S/he never existed.

According to memos leaked from the recent hack on Sony, the big studios would like to employ a Winston Smith to remove domain name listings from ISPs DNS directories, effectively removing entire websites from the Internet for most users, as if they never existed.

MPAA Logo

The movie moguls want to do this in the name of fighting their old monster-under-the-bed, content piracy. Not surprisingly, they plan on evoking an old enemy of a free and open Internet in the process, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), while attempting to revive at least a part of the ghost of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which was killed back in 2011.

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

San Francisco & LA Sue Uber

By Christine Hall on December 10, 2014 |

Internet, Mobile and News

There’s more bad news for Uber. The company was sued yesterday in a joint action by San Francisco and Los Angeles. San Francisco is the online ride sharing company’s headquarters.

The lawsuit lists several areas in which the DAs for both cities claim the company acts illegally. For starters, it misleads its customers about the extent of background checks its drivers undergo, while charging UberX passengers a “Safe Rides Fee” of one dollar related to those checks. In addition, the suit claims the company’s rates are set without the required approval of state agencies and that it operates illegally at state airports while charging special airport fees that are not turned over to the airports.

At a press conference yesterday, San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon said that Uber claims to have an “industry-leading background check process,” which he said is far from the truth.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

Uber’s Problems With Local Regulators

By Christine Hall on December 9, 2014 |

Internet, Mobile and News

Uber’s been shut down again.

It seems as if city officials in Portland, Oregon take exception with the online car-for-hire service’s plans to take to their city’s streets without bothering with little things like acquiring taxi permits for their cars and drivers, proper liability insurance and vehicle inspections.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

The Ongoing Wars Against Free Tech

By Christine Hall on December 4, 2014 |

Internet, Politics and Security

After a few months of not hearing much from Microsoft, the company has been in the news a bit recently. First there was the brouhaha when it announced it was offering the .NET framework as open source. Then there were several big security problems with Windows, with one serious vulnerability going all the way back to Windows 95.

Although this would’ve been big news in the old days, the FOSS press has been relatively quiet about all this. There were a few articles about the .NET thing, with some writers pointing out that the MIT license which Redmond is using will offer no patent protection for Redmond owned .NET related patents, and the Windows security issues got next to no FOSS coverage at all.

My how times have changed.

A decade ago the open sourcing of any major program by Microsoft would have FOSS writers in a dither, even if released under the GPL. We would’ve been uber suspicious, certain that this was only the front end of a plan to end Linux and FOSS as we know it. As for the Windows security woes, we’d be rubbing our hands with glee, writing paragraph after paragraph on how much this proves the inferiority of Windows and the superiority of our beloved Linux. In those days, we had to take our good news wherever we could find it.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

Friendship & the Linux Community

Friendship & the Linux Community

By Ken Starks on December 2, 2014 |

Community and Internet

friend

noun
1. A person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard.
2. A person who gives assistance; patron; supporter: friends of the Boston Symphony.
3. A person who is on good terms with another; a person who is not hostile: Who goes there? Friend or foe?

It would seem a simple thing, defining who and what a friend is. Deciding who is your friend is a fairly simple process.

Do I like that person?

Yes.

Does that person like me?

Allegedly.

Do we enjoy each other’s company?

Mostly.

Okay…then, I think we can safely assume that the two people cited above are friends.

Friendships have been forged since man decided to get up off his haunches and walk on two legs. Of course, back then deciding who was your friend had more to do with the amount of trust in mutuality. Could you go to sleep knowing that person will remain awake and alert to danger? Will that person share his food when you have none? Will that person help or protect you in times you are not able to help or protect yourself?

Those were weighty considerations and friendships were born more out of the ability to survive another sunset rather than if they made a good Spades partner.

People have become friends basically the same way for hundreds or thousands of years. But that all changed not too long ago. The method by which many people became friends happened with the flip of a switch…the switch that turned on the Internet.

Ken Starks

Ken Starks is the founder of the Helios Project and Reglue, which for 20 years provided refurbished older computers running Linux to disadvantaged school kids, as well as providing digital help for senior citizens, in the Austin, Texas area. He was a columnist for FOSS Force from 2013-2016, and remains part of our family. Follow him on Twitter: @Reglue

linuxlock.blogspot.com/

Firefox to Default to Yahoo’s Microsoft Search

By Christine Hall on November 20, 2014 |

Browsers, Business and Internet

There have been rumblings for some time now about Google’s search contract with Mozilla coming to an end this year. For ten years, the search giant has been the default go-to when it comes to search on Firefox, a deal which has supplied more than 80 percent of the browser’s funding. There’s been talk that Google or Mozilla wasn’t interested in renewing the deal, either because Firefox competes directly with Google’s Chrome browser or because the folks at Mozilla are unhappy with Google’s open web policies, depending on who’s doing the talking.

A week ago, in an attempt to make up for this projected loss of revenue, Mozilla began displaying advertising tiles in new tab pages on Firefox in newer versions of the browser. The first two sponsors, according to a Mozilla blog post, are CVS Health and Booking.com. Then yesterday, in another blog post, the organization announced that it’s signed a five year deal with Yahoo to make the once uber popular, still somewhat popular web portal the default for searches in Firefox.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

Linux Outlaws Ride Into the Sunset

By Larry Cafiero on November 19, 2014 |

Community, Internet and Media

The introduction was inconspicuous enough. Philip Newborough, the lead developer for CrunchBang, tweeted to me: “They’re talking about you on LO.”

“LO?”

“Linux Outlaws.”

A few questions and a search or two later, I was at a Google Hangout where Dan Lynch, an English musician in the band 20lb Sounds from Liverpool, and Fabian Scherschel, a German tech journalist and rabid Pittsburgh Penguins fan, were discussing the FOSS issues of the day; Lynch with his subtle and deadpan delivery serving as an anchor and foil for Scherschel’s occasional — and hilarious — flights-of-ranting-fancy.

That was episode 303 of their podcast, and I was hooked on the Monday night taping of Linux Outlaws (usually on Monday nights, GMT, and fortunately for me, on the U.S. West Coast, Monday night GMT usually meant sitting in on the broadcast at around two in the afternoon).

Linux Outlaws is not for shrinking violets — it is portrayed on its site as “very much like listening to two friends sitting in a pub, having fun and talking about things they find interesting.” However, I think that sells the show short — it is far more entertaining than that (and when they say, “Not recommended for the faint of heart or the ignorant,” they mean it). Always straightforward and honest, always informative and humorous, Linux Outlaws never met an issue they couldn’t tackle with their unique brand of wisdom, insight and jocularity.

Now, Lynch and Scherschel — Dan and Fab to their relatives, friends, and a wide listener base — are at the crossroads. Recently, with the episodes well into the 360s in number, they decided to finish out the year with Linux Outlaws and ride off into the sunset.

I was able to catch up with them and ask where they’ve been, where they’re going, and other items of interest.

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero, a.k.a. Larry the Free Software Guy, is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate. He is involved in several FOSS projects and serves as the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

Firefox Turns 10, Making Reglue Stick & Outlaws Ride

By Larry Cafiero on November 7, 2014 |

Browsers, Internet and Media

FOSS Week in Review

Arguably it was a fairly miserable week in areas that are not exactly FOSS, but let’s not think about that now. Here’s what is on-the-radar worthy of mention as this week ends:

An anniversary worth celebrating: A while back, many in the FOSS world quaffed copious amount of Kool-Aid in celebrating the 10th anniversary of a particular vowel-laden distro. What unfortunately seems to be ready to fly inconspicuously under the radar is a far more important 10th anniversary celebrating a far more useful and ubiquitous software program.

Good thing I’m here to make sure the word gets out.

In a full-page ad in “The New York Times” on Nov. 9, 2004, the Mozilla project announced the release of Firefox 1.0, the first full version of the browser which has become the third most popular way to navigate the Internet, behind Google Chrome and Internet ~~Exploder~~, er, Explorer. What makes Firefox unique is that it’s the only one of the three leading browsers that’s completely open source. Ten years later, more than 450 million people use Firefox, of which about 40 percent of the code is written by volunteers. In addition, its reach can be measured by the fact that more than half of the users employ non-English versions. The browser is available in 75 languages.

Larry Cafiero

Drupal Hack & WordPress Users

By Christine Hall on October 30, 2014 |

Internet and Security

It’s not a good day for Drupal users, with the security folks at the CMS platform telling all users to consider themselves compromised if they didn’t install a security patch within seven hours of its release on October 15th.

Fixing the infected sites will require a bit of work. Sites will need to be taken offline, and the current install of Drupal blown-up and replaced with a backup from before October 15th. Any changes made made to a site since that date will have to be redone. Site owners will also need to notify their hosting companies of the situation, since the Drupal exploit could also be used to hack into other sites on a host’s server. Hosts will not be happy to hear this.

Users of other CMS platforms can give a sigh of relief — after all, they’ve dodged a bullet — but they’d be well advised to pay attention; a similar scenario could play out on any platform at any time.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

Free Bassel Khartabil

By Larry Cafiero on October 15, 2014 |

Community, Internet, News and Politics

As of today, Bassel (Safadi) Khartabil has been detained by the Syrian government for 943 days. For those of you who may not be aware…

What Would You Do for a Gigabyte Internet Connection?

What Would You Do for a Gigabyte Internet Connection?

By Ken Starks on October 14, 2014 |

Business and Internet

We knew it was coming several months ago. At first, just from flimsy rumors, but then mention of the free Time Warner speed upgrade began showing up on credible news sites. Credible enough for me to call Time Warner and find out where these upgrades would take place. When I found out that our small town of Taylor, Texas was included in the upgrade area, I became separated by only 3 degrees from Happy Dance.

When my euphoria dropped to a more manageable level, I took some time to mull it over. Specifically, I was asking myself why Time Warner would include small towns almost fifty miles away from the city in this upgrade? I mean…gifts, horses, mouths and all that. I thought it was a legitimate question.