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Tentative Schedule Meets Tentative Schedule For ATO

If last year’s inaugural All Things Open (ATO) conference in Raleigh was primarily an event for developers and admins, that’ll be even more true when ATO II cranks up on October 22 at the Raleigh Convention Center. At least that’s how it appears when scanning the tentative schedule posted on the ATO website. There’s also much on tap for management types, but the main focus is on developers and system administrators.

At first glance, it might look as if there’s very little for what blogger Gary Newell calls the Everyday Linux User, those who have adopted free software at home or in a mom and pop business. To my eyes, there is barely enough — but that still qualifies as enough.

That might change. The schedule is still tentative and very much in flux. There are no descriptions of the presentations posted yet and there were still a few slots that remain unfilled, presumably waiting on schedule confirmations. However, the presentations’ names are usually descriptive enough and there are bios of all speakers, making it easy enough to get some sort of idea of what to expect.

Open Source Project Brings 11th Century Kannada Verses Online

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.

Palm Leaf Vachanas
Palm leaf of 11th and 12th Century with Vachana poems in Kannada language

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.

What a Layperson Can Gain From an Enterprise Open Source Conference

Here at FOSS Force we’re very proud to be an official media partner for the Great Wide Open conference that’ll be held in Atlanta next week. Because this is an enterprise conference, I don’t think I need to explain to those who work in IT the benefits of attending such an event. However, those of you who are primarily home users may think there’s nothing for you at a conference focused on professionals.

This isn’t true.

Any open source user, whether a professional or not, will benefit from attending an enterprise conference. Remember, the user is considered just as important to any open source project as those who develop and distribute the product. In other words, an enterprise conference is just as much about the user as the developer — even if the user is never likely to call Red Hat on the phone to order service contracts for the RHEL stack on a hundred servers.

Here are just a few reasons for a living room Linux user to attend an enterprise conference such as Great Wide Open:

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

Ubuntu Keeps MySQL, Why XP Won’t Go Away & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Cops tracking phones sans warrants

Tallahassee PoliceIt appears that the police in Tallahassee, Florida have been busy tracking folks by their cell phones without bothering to show up before a judge and ask for a warrant. Why would they violate the constitutional rights of their citizens this way? Evidently because they were using technology on loan and had signed a non-disclosure agreement.

According to Wired, this information came to light in an appeal of a sexual battery case dating back to 2008 in which a suspect was tracked using the technology to locate a phone that had been stolen from the victim. The police have admitted using the device 200 times, with no judge or warrant involved, since 2010. In a blog post made Monday, the ACLU said the device is “likely a Stingray made by the Florida-based Harris Corporation.” Evidently, the ACLU has long suspected that Harris has been loaning the devices to Florida police departments.

Is Red Hat Working for the NSA?

On Friday, Roy Schestowitz posted an article on Techrights which seems to accuse Red Hat of being in cahoots with the NSA. According to the article, the company has been building back doors into RHEL for the spy agency. However, the article appears to be long on accusations and short on proof.

I like both Techrights and Schestowitz. Both are controversial and that’s part of what I like about them. However, before making accusations it’s nice to have at least a few facts to back them up.

Red Hat logoThe article attempts to make the case for using CentOS over RHEL. Indeed, many of us who’re short on bucks and can’t afford Red Hat’s expensive support subscriptions are already using CentOS in server environments. We use it here at FOSS Force to serve web pages? Why? Because not only does CentOS have an extremely capable development team, the distro is in most ways a clone of Red Hat, which means the CentOS development team is able to leverage Red Hat’s research and development and incorporate it into their distro.

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

2013 — That Was the Year That Was

Now that the celebrating is out of the way, I thought it might be time to take a look at some of the stories we covered on FOSS Force this year.

1. The NSA. The biggest story to come down the wire this year undoubtedly had to do with Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s bag of dirty tricks. Even those of us who have long understood that the Internet isn’t necessarily a place to expect privacy were surprised at how deeply the NSA has managed to reach into the Internet. Odds are, if you’ve been using social networks, everything you’ve posted is now on file with the NSA. What’s worse, every email you’ve sent probably has a copy resting on a NSA server somewhere.

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

Google Fires Back, Alan Turing Pardoned & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Just because Christmas week is supposed to be a slow news week doesn’t mean it’s a no news week…

Good news, bad news on the phishing front

First the good news. According to security company Websense, the amount of phishing attempts we’re finding in our email dropped remarkably this year, from 1.12% of all email volume down to 0.5%. Now, the bad news. The folks doing the phishing are getting better at targeting their attempts, so they don’t need to send as many emails to hook their prey.

GIMP Leaves SourceForge, EFF Tackles NSA & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Bookstores say “no” to Kindle

Amazon Kindle ereaderWhat a surprise! Bookstores don’t want to sell Kindles.

It seems that Amazon has come up with a scheme, called Amazon Source, to let independent bookstores sell Kindle e-book readers and get a small commission on e-book sales to those readers for two years. This innitiave is being pushed in the U.S. first and might be offered in other countries at a later date. When announcing the initiative last week, Amazon said, “With Amazon Source, customers don’t have to choose between e-books and their favourite neighbourhood bookstore – they can have both.”

This led Dustin Kurtz, marketing manager with the New York publishing firm Melville House, to proclaim on the company’s website, “Amazon did a good thing on Wednesday: they made me and indie booksellers around the country laugh.”

Chrome Clamps Down, Bitcoin Vulnerability & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Swiss cloud with, presumably, no holes

Back when the Edward Snowden brouhaha first began, we said that this was going to have serious repercussions on the tech sector here in the United States, especially after it became evident that Microsoft was actively working with the spooks by allegedly designing back doors into their operating system and keeping federal intelligence agents informed about unpatched security holes that could be used against foreign governments and “terrorist,” which now days seems to be everyone who doesn’t work for the NSA, FBI or CIA.

Swisscom logoBrazil is already spending big bucks in an effort to make sure that no Internet cable entering their country goes anywhere near the US of A and is working to pass laws to make sure all Brazilian businesses use only servers located in-country. Similar efforts are underway in Europe, most notably in France and Germany.

Now the frugal Swiss are jumping on board, and they rightfully intend to profit from our stupidity by taking advantage of their strong privacy laws.

Tuxmachines Tentatively Sold to Techrights

The passage of time is sometimes just too sad, but we must accept the inevitable.

One of the most popular Linux sites, Tuxmachines.org, announced on October 28th that it has been tentatively sold for $1,000. The Clarksville, Tennessee based site, owned and operated by Susan Linton, made the announcement in a short post on the site:

“I guess tuxmachines.org has been sold for $1000. I know it’s kinda low, but times have changed and the new owner plans to carry on the tuxmachines tradition.

“I suppose that’s all I should say for now until the deal is written in stone.

“Thanks everyone for everything: all the visits, all the jokes, comments, and donations. But more on that later as well.”

Although Ms. Linton doesn’t identify the purchaser, it was evidently bought by Roy Schestowitz who is perhaps best known for publishing the FOSS site Techrights. Mr. Schestowitz blogged about the purchase of the site on October 30th.

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

WordPress Becomes Big Brother & More…

FOSS Week in Review

Is Netflix coming soon to a Linux near you?

Saurav Modak at Muktware was observant enough to note last week that Netflix is now offering-up programming with a choice heretofore unavailable. For the time being they’re still pretty much married to Microsoft’s dead or dying Silverlight, but they’ve taken HTML5 on as a lover. This gives users of the popular movie outlet a choice that, at the very least, should make things easier for Linux users who insist on using the Netflix service:

“Although hackers have already made a workaround to stream Netflix videos in Linux machines, performance is generally low and video playback is not hassle free. Some workarounds include running the entire browser in Wine, or running a Silverlight plugin in Wine and make it compatible with the browser. But all of them come at a cost of performance. Switching to HTML5 from Silverlight will greatly reduce all these hassles, as all you will need is a latest standard compatible browser to stream movies and TV shows. This will also allow support for mobile devices and tablets which are adopting more HTML5 standards day by day.”

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