Posts published in “Internet”

What Would You Do for a Gigabyte Internet Connection?

By Ken Starks on October 14, 2014 |

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.

I wasn’t able to make any sense of it until someone ‘splained it to me.

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/

Easy Netflix on Linux

Easy Netflix on Linux

By Christine Hall on October 13, 2014 |

Browsers, Internet and Operating Systems

Linux’s got Netflix. No fuss, no muss, easy-peasy Netflix, straight out-of-the-box.

It wasn’t so long ago that common knowledge dictated that the reason GNU/Linux wasn’t getting traction was software, namely MS Office and Photoshop. Those days are long gone. Office is now pretty much irrevelant, with many if not most home users (at least the people I know) opting for Open Office or LibreOffice. Meanwhile, Photoshop’s moved to the cloud and although it still won’t work on Linux, many graphic artists are finding that GIMP is robust enough to tackle nearly everything thrown at it.

So that should be it, right? Wrong.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), a paradigm shift in home computing has occurred during the past seven years. These days, computers are as much about entertainment as they are about word processing, spreadsheets and the like. At the center of the computer-as-entertainment-device revolution is our favorite old DVD rental company Netflix, which offers more streaming moving image titles that you can shake a stick at — if shaking sticks at movie titles happens to be your thing — with unlimited streaming costing as little as eight bucks a month.

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

Should Everything in the World Be Facing the Internet?

Should Everything in the World Be Facing the Internet?

By Christine Hall on October 9, 2014 |

Business, Internet and Security

From its inception, we knew the Internet to be an unsafe place. Before the first server was cracked by an online hacker, we knew that was bound to happen sooner or later. We knew because people were already breaking into computers, even without the Internet offering 24/7 cracker/hacker convenience.

Back in the early 90s, when I was living in the college town of Chapel Hill, I shelled-out five bucks or so at the local Egghead Software store for a shrink wrapped floppy disk loaded with “shareware” utilities for MS-DOS. Twenty years have passed, so I don’t remember what tool I needed, but I’d gone there specifically looking for something or another and had been directed to that particular product by a clerk at the store. Once I got home, I stuck the disk into the drive, looked over its contents and installed a couple of the apps.

That was the end of it, or so I thought.

Several months later a biology major friend of mine with no computer skills — yes, in those days it was possible to earn an undergraduate science degree without knowing how to use a computer — dropped by to use my computer, a 486 with a whopping 4 megs of RAM. She was set to graduate soon and needed to use my machine to prepare a resume. I opened WordPerfect and set her loose to type away, answering any questions she had as she worked — such as how to remove a formatting code or preview how the document would look when printed.

An hour or so later, when she finished, I saved her work to a new blank floppy and sent her to see our mutual friend, Tony, to print it, as all I had was an old, noisy and beat-up Epson dot matrix printer and he had a fancy daisy wheel job. Two days later, she was back at my door, mad as hell.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

Bringing Open Source to Scientific Research

Bringing Open Source to Scientific Research

By Christine Hall on October 6, 2014 |

Community, Internet and Software

I already knew that academia is behind the curve when it comes to IT, from my non-tech part time job at a local university library. For starters, there’s the overreliance on Windows. Then there’s the use of poorly designed proprietary products when perfectly acceptable GPL solutions exist — not to mention the look of scorn and fright coming from the IT people whenever the term “free and open source” is uttered within their hearing.

Although I already knew there was a problem, I didn’t know how deep the problem is until I spoke with GitHub’s Arfon Smith. It seems that academia’s inability to catch up with the twenty-first century even puts careers in jeopardy — especially in the sciences.

“…an early career post-doctoral researcher I know has a Python package that has about 100,000 downloads per month by his peers and others,” Smith explained. “To a tenure committee at a university, none of this matters — what matters is how many papers he writes and so he’s currently running the risk of not securing a permanent job, even though the work he does is of massive value to the research community.”

In the academic world it’s still “publish or perish,” and being published online usually doesn’t count for much. The tenure committees still pretty much define “publish” as something bound in paper and sent by snail mail.

Arfon Smith is a scientist with a resume longer than both of my arms. This resume includes such bullet points as co-founding Zooniverse and building DNA sequencing pipelines at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. He’s been at GitHub since last October, where he uses his first hand knowledge of the scientific process to help research scientists leverage the organization’s resources. When I spent about an hour on the phone with him a few weeks back, he tried to bring me up to speed on some of the problems with academia, and the reality of scientific research in these postmodern times.

Christine Hall

FOSSForce.com

DDOS Attack Brings Tux Machines Down

By FOSS Force on September 29, 2014 |

Internet, Media and News

Editor’s note: This article was updated on 9/29/14 at approx. 5:30 p.m. to include update from Tux Machines publisher Roy Schestowitz.

Since sometime last week the popular Linux site Tux Machines has been under an apparent distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack. For the last several days, those trying to visit the site have been redirected to Tech Rights, another site operated by Roy Schestowitz, the owner of Tux Machines, to a post dated Saturday by Schestowitz which reads:

“Windows botnets have been hammering on Tux Machines for nearly a week. It got a lot of worse yesterday and the site became unaccessible much of the time. We don’t know who the attacker is and what the motivations are, but in the mean time the site can be read via the RSS feed. The RSS feed links to all the latest news and the pages ought to work as usual. We apologise for this issue and we are working hard to find a permanent solution.”

Bullies in the Machine or Pick On Someone Your Own Size

Bullies in the Machine or Pick On Someone Your Own Size

By Ken Starks on September 23, 2014 |

Community and Internet

Decency…it’s what’s for ~~dinner~~ forums.

It wasn’t but a few days ago that I approached the KDE community in Google Plus to ask a question. In asking that question, I included a screenshot to present a graphical representation of my problem. Three community members responded right away. The first two responses were legitimate queries: questions seeking to gather information needed to calculate an effective attack vector. The third response was…well, not so much.

“Stop, I can’t. My eyes are bleeding. x_x “

The remark about “eyes bleeding” was obviously a reaction to a perceived lack of aesthetics in the screenshot. And yeah, it pissed me off. I didn’t seek a critique on my icon set or color scheme. I was asking how to fix my friggin’ frappin’ problem.

With my verbal weapons cache set to full snark, I proceeded to dress the commenter down for the misplaced and unhelpful comment. I trimmed and honed every word so that my obvious displeasure at the opinion would not be mistaken for anything else.

There are specific and discrete techniques that can help you call someone a jerk. I used a method designed so that the target momentarily believes that you are a nice guy, while everyone else in proximity is checking their clothing for blood spatter. I have become a master of this technique. Whether that’s good or bad, I dunno. It is what it is.

That wasn’t the end of it, however.

Ken Starks

linuxlock.blogspot.com/

Linux Tech Support & Time Warner

By Ken Starks on September 16, 2014 |

Hardware, Humor and Internet

I’ve spent my time in the tech support trenches…and someone else’s time as well. Please mark my dues paid in full. I’ve worked from the script-reader doing basic trouble-shooting, up to floor supervisor and level three support. My point? Not everybody who works support at a call center is an idiot, but some certainly are…

Since 2005, I have helped financially-disadvantaged kids get computers in their homes. While it’s become a cliché in the past few years, the “digital divide” most certainly exists. Since our early days of Komputers4Kids, The HeliOS Project and now Reglue, the gap between the tech haves and have-nots remains a problem.

Way more than many of us would think.

With that being established, I want to take a walk down memory lane…to let’s say 2005.

Back then, getting a Linux computer bolted-up to broadband internet was straight forward. Even nine years ago, the biggest challenge to getting Time Warner or eternal-hell-and-damnation Comcast routers online might have been to reboot the router.

Maybe. The majority of the time, not even that.

So imagine my surprise when I wasn’t able to get one of our established Reglue kids online. The oldest boy, Rex, had been using his Reglue computer for four years and it was time for an upgrade. I was working with a brand new Time Warner modem and wireless router, out of the box. I even went back in and made sure I was accessing the modem properly. I was. This task shouldn’t have taken ten minutes and I was now on minute thirty.

Ken Starks

linuxlock.blogspot.com/

Internet Slowdown Shifts Into High Gear

By Larry Cafiero on September 12, 2014 |

Business, Internet and News

Internet users spoke loudly, firmly, and in no uncertain terms on Wednesday in sending a message of overwhelming support for net neutrality protections during the Internet Slowdown campaign.

Tech companies, websites, public interest organizations and more than a million users joined forces to bring the message of net neutrality forward by posting icons and links on their sites symbolically representing a slow-loading Internet, and by directing those clicking on the links to messages to Congress, the White House and the Federal Communications Commission.

“The numbers tell the story: People everywhere are using the Internet to save the Internet from phone and cable companies,” said Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future. “We’ve shown that the best way to fight these powerful special interests in Washington is through mass action by people from outside Washington. The FCC and Congress can no longer dismiss the overwhelming consensus of public support for real Net Neutrality protections.”

Wednesday’s Internet Slowdown action generated just over 300,000 calls and nearly 2.2 million emails to Congress by Thursday afternoon. Facebook shares of the spinning “loading” icon topped 1.1 million. In addition, 722,364 filed comments Wednesday at the Federal Communications Commission, bringing the total number of comments since March 1 to 7.7 million.

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

The Web May Look Slow Today…

By Larry Cafiero on September 10, 2014 |

Internet, News and Politics

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”…

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Posts published in “Internet”

What Would You Do for a Gigabyte Internet Connection?

Easy Netflix on Linux

Should Everything in the World Be Facing the Internet?

Bringing Open Source to Scientific Research

DDOS Attack Brings Tux Machines Down

Bullies in the Machine or Pick On Someone Your Own Size

Linux Tech Support & Time Warner

Internet Slowdown Shifts Into High Gear

The Web May Look Slow Today…