The Video Screening Room As you might expect for someone who is constantly surrounded by bankers, Don Duet uses the term “intellectual property” a lot…
FOSS Force
The Heart of Linux
Is disk partitioning a stumbling block to the new user installing Linux for the first time?
I remember it clearly. Well, as clearly as my teen-year chemically fueled indiscretions will allow. It was directly after the 2.27 kernel was released. Almost overnight, it went from “wireless sucks in Linux” to “holy crap, wireless works in Linux.” Yeah, there are still holdouts — I don’t want to mention any names but their first initial is Broadcom — and they still suck.
Desktop Linux has made some amazing strides in the past decade. Heck, it’s made huge strides in the past two years.
However, for those of us who use and advocate the use of desktop Linux to new users, there’s a but. A big ol’ in-your-face-can’t-sweep-it-under-the-rug “but.” Regardless of how smoothly your explanation of installing and using desktop Linux goes, that big ol’ but steps in your way. That pesky, clumsy pause as you try to figure out how to tell a new user how to partition a drive.
Microsoft announced on Thursday that the end-of-life is coming soon to its free upgrade-to-Windows 10 scheme. Afterwards, the operating system won’t be cheap.
Just because Steve Ballmer is no longer at the helm in Redmond doesn’t mean Microsoft doesn’t go completely bonkers on occasion. On Thursday, the company announced in a blog that free upgrades to Windows 10 are coming to an end.
FOSS Week in Review
Also: We hear more from DuckDuckGo about its open source donations and welcome Robin “Roblimo” Miller to the FOSS Force team.
While the big news in FOSS media this week was the Ubuntu Online Summit, I wasn’t there. Too far to travel. However, the big news seems to be that Mir and Unity 8 won’t be the defaults when Canonical ships Ubuntu 16.10 on October 20, although both “will be available as an ‘alternative session,’” according to OMG! Ubuntu! Ho-hum. Now on to some real FOSS news…
By chensiyuan (chensiyuan) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 4.0-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
The Video Screening Room
The DMCA doesn’t just make it illegal for you to circumvent DRM to rip and burn a DVD of ‘War Games’ or to install a pirated copy of Windows. It also can make it illegal for you to repair or modify things you own.
Public television and radio in the United States have been surprisingly shy about covering the open source movement, but this video by Mike Rugnetta at PBS Digital Studios shows that they may be waking up.
FOSS Force has just learned from Wordfence, a security company that focuses on the open source WordPress content management platform, that a popular plugin used…
The FOSS Force Video Interview The SouthEast LinuxFest started at Clemson University in 2009. These days it’s in Charlotte, N.C., and hopes to host more…
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand what’s wrong with the proposed federal court updates to Rule 41.
Anyone who’s even halfway following the news of the proposed updates to Rule 41 probably can’t help but be struck by the irony of the situation. It’s actually humorous, in a Vonnegutian tragicomic sort of way.
In case you haven’t been following the news, the proposed changes from the advisory committee on criminal rules for the Judicial Conference of the United States would update Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure and broadly expand law enforcement’s legal authority when it comes to hacking and surveillance. The Supreme Court has already passed the proposal to Congress, which must disavow the changes by December 1 or it becomes the governing rule for every federal court in the country.
DuckDuckGo, “the search engine that doesn’t track you,” involves its users in the selection process as it hands out nine $25,000 awards to mostly FOSS projects.
It appears as if people have been using DuckDuckGo’s privacy centered search enough to make the company successful. Certainly not we-control-the-world successful like Google, but successful enough to give it some cash-on-hand breathing room. Also successful enough for the company to give back to the community by handing out $225,000 to some free and open source projects.
This isn’t the first time they’ve done this. Last year they handed out $125,000 to five projects — meaning that this year they’ve nearly doubled down on their bet. Last year’s donations included money going to the Electronic Frontier Foundations Privacy Badger — a browser add-on that stops advertisers and other trackers from following users — and Girl Develop It for its Open Source Mentorship program.
A security vulnerability in the open source ImageMagick graphics tool used by a large number of websites could allow a malicious payload to be executed onsite.
ImageMagick, an open source suite of tools for working with graphic images used by a large number of websites, has been found to contain a serious security vulnerability that puts sites using the software at risk for malicious code to be executed onsite. Security experts consider exploitation to be so easy they’re calling it “trivial,” and exploits are already circulating in the wild. The biggest risk is to sites that allows users to upload their own image files.
Information about the vulnerability was made public Tuesday afternoon by Ryan Huber, a developer and security researcher, who wrote that he had little choice but to post about the exploit.