These are the top ten most read articles on FOSS Force during the month of January: 1. Firefox OS: The Return of Microsoft’s Netscape Fears…
Posts published in “Site News”
It only makes sense that the NSA be confronted online. After all, it’s the Internet the agency uses to spy on us. They’re not following us down dark streets or steaming open our snail mail. Instead, they’re monitoring our emails to discover who is in our circle and stalking us on Facebook and Google Plus. Especially if we use Windows, there’s no need for them to dirty their hands sifting through our garbage when they can enter through a virtual trap door on our computer to rifle through our word processor and spreadsheet files. Phone tapping? How old school in a world where every call we make, even from a land line, becomes VoIP somewhere along the line. When we use VoIP or Skype, they can easily listen. If we visit a website located in a country on their hit list, they sit-up and take notice.

The people at the NSA don’t care about our right to liberty, happiness or even life itself. They are obsessed with what they see as their mission and are convinced, as zealots are always convinced, that the ends justify the means. They embody the worst of Stalin, Mussolini, Franco and Pol Pot. They do so with an American twist, maintaining an illusion of freedom which keeps us pacified.
February 11th will be The Day We Fight Back.
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
FOSS Week in Review
In 2013, Linux hits grand slam
Now that companies are closing-out their books on the old year, it’s becoming evident that Linux devices were a big hit in 2013.
On Friday, CNET’s Brooke Crothers reported that Chromebooks, those nifty laptops running Google’s Chrome OS that let the cloud do the heavy lifting, accounted for 21% of all laptop sales last year. As impressive as that may be, the numbers get even better when Android tablets are added to the mix. According to market research company NPD Group, January to November saw 1.76 million Chromebooks and Android tablets sold, up from only 400,000 during all of 2012.
The OEMs, of course, are paying attention and are readying new Linux devices for the market.
What were the ten best stories we published on FOSS Force this year? Well, that would depend on a lot of things, wouldn’t it, such as who’s asking? We could tell you what we think our ten best stories were this year, but we’ll hold that until next week. Today we’re going to look at the ten stories that got the most reads on our site this year.
You can be certain of one thing; if you’re a penguinista I’ll have your back at the All Things Open conference. I’ll be paying attention. Plenty of good companies and organizations will be represented at the the conference, to be held next week in Raleigh, but it is an enterprise conference so there will be a few snakes slithering about.
Mainly I’m talking about Oracle and Microsoft.
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
When IT-oLogy opens the doors to the All Things Open conference in Raleigh on October 23, the focus will be on open source in the enterprise. That’s only fitting, given the fact that Raleigh is Red Hat’s playground–and Red Hat practically wrote the book on enterprise level open source.
Every hour during the two day conference there will be six lectures or workshops with at least four of them tailored especially for the business IT crowd. There’ll be tech-centric workshops on Python, databases, big data, Github, PHP and more. Not being a developer or admin type, I can only imagine what all of this might mean to the serious IT department types as they peruse the All Things Open schedule.
So where does that leave the rest of us who work with FOSS everyday without getting our knuckles dirty writing code, building and tweaking networks or figuring out new and better ways to make big bucks with computer technology? Is there anything at All Things Open for those of us who think the word “code” must always be preceded by “morse” or that “enterprise” refers to a Federation star ship laden with photon torpedoes?
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
This really is a horse race now, with ten great blogs at the starting gate to determine who gets the bragging rights to claim the…
About 8 pm last night the email accounts we use here at FOSS Force went down. The problem was a server located at a datacenter in Pennsylvania that suddenly disappeared from the Internet. The server was used by us to host our oldest website, Alternative Approaches, a site we made unavailable to the public a few months ago as we’ve worked to reboot the site with a new look and feel. However, we have continued to utilize the domain as our main email domain. The site is our only web property that doesn’t reside on the server we use to host FOSS Force our other web properties.
We were hoping to have 20 to 25 blogs for you to choose from here in round two of our competition to see who wins the honors as FOSS Force Best Personal Linux or FOSS Blog–2013. We end up offering you a total of 19.
Voters in our qualifying poll that finished at noon today wrote-in plenty of web sites for us to consider. The trouble was, most of them didn’t meet the criteria we set-out in the article titled What’s Your Favorite FOSS or Linux Blog? which was published on July 29th when we began this competition.
To a degree, we expected that. We knew some voters would write-in names of great Linux sites that in no way qualify as personal blogs. That they did, placing votes for many of our favorite sites and for some we think downright silly. So we first cleared out votes for sites that obviously don’t qualify, such as Omg! Ubuntu!, phoronix and OStatic.
After taking care of that task we were left with a long list of sites. As most were unknown to us, we had
The first round of voting in our quest to see whom our visitors will vote “Best Personal FOSS or Linux Blog–2013” has ended. Right now we’re busy checking out all of the blogs that received write-in votes to see which qualify for round two and which do not. We’re estimating that by late afternoon or early evening eastern time in the United States we’ll be ready to announce our line-up for round two.
Round two will be an elimination round from a field of 20 to 25 blogs taken from the results of the poll that just ended. There will be no write-in votes, but voters will still be allowed to vote for up to two blogs.