June 28, 2025
Keeping tech free
Hopefully everyone had a pleasant holiday season. Only weeks into the new year and already some interesting gaming news has happened.
Noted hacker group fail0verflow has hacked the PlayStation 4, running a custom Linux port on the system. Linux has been run on prior Playstation systems, usually via USB boot, but no one expected it to happen on this system so quickly, with rough estimates of a hack being months, maybe years, down the line.
Are you an enthusiastic individual that is interested in using the Raspberry Pi in the classroom and in community education programs? Then get ready to fill out your application for Raspberry Picademy USA! This will be the first time ever that the Raspberry Pi Foundation will be offering a Picademy in the United States. If you haven’t ever heard of Picademy, or have and are looking to participate, then I’ll answer some basic questions for you on the ins and outs of Raspberry Picademy USA.
What is Picademy? Picademy is a two day series of classes taught by certified Raspberry Pi educators. These classes involve learning all hardware and software aspects of the Raspberry Pi. You will also be learning from some of the brightest minds that make up the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
So you think you know your Linux history, eh? It’s time to put on your thinking cap and find out whether or not that’s true.…
“You’ve got mail compromised mail!”
The emails started coming in slowly at first. Friends and colleagues were telling me that my Gmail address was pushing out spam.
“Spam? Really?”
My first inclination was to push those emails aside as a temporary albeit bothersome incident. Something similar had happened a few years earlier, but subsided quickly with no real or evident damage. I guessed that some bot did a drive by and picked up my email contacts and started pumping out spam and other messages.
But this incident wasn’t to be pushed aside. The emails started coming in faster and faster, until I acknowledged that I had a real problem.
Sure you go to Linux expos such as SCALE to sharpen your coding skills and to learn about how to get your hands dirty going under the hood with you favorite open source applications. You might even go to learn a little bit about the business of open source. But you have to admit that an added attraction is just getting to see presentations from FOSS rock stars, the well known movers and shakers who have taken a big part in shaping the past, present and future of free and open source software. These are people whose presentations you’ll be tempted to attend no matter what the subject because…well, just because. Some of these are legends; some are not. But they’re all rock stars. And as usual, there’ll be an abundance of them at SCALE.
Our Indiegogo campaign with the descriptive title “FOSS Force: 2016 Fund Drive” has begun. We’d like you to pull out your wallet and make a contribution to help us continue to supply you with all of the great content you’ve come to expect from FOSS Force. Actually, you don’t even have to go to the effort of pulling out your wallet, you can just click and pay using your PayPal account. Then again, you might need to dig for your wallet if you want to pay by credit card, unless you’ve memorized the number.
If this were an NPR outlet, right about now I’d start telling you that your contributions help pay for all of the content you read on our site. That’s true; it does. Also if this were an NPR outlet, I’d be telling you that we’re user supported (in NPR’s case listener supported) and that 90 percent of our funding comes from readers like you. That’s not true. We run ads, offer sponsorships and such. It’s just that right now that’s not enough to pay the bills — but revenues are increasing and if we keep on keeping on we’ll soon be able to stand on our own two feet. Right now, we just need some help to see us through.
The voting is over in the first round of our annual GNU/Linux distro poll, which sought an answer to the simple question, “What Linux distro do you currently use most?” The result was a complete surprise, at least to us. By a decisive margin, you voted for Arch Linux. The poll was certainly one for the record books. By the time it was closed to voting, a total of 5,784 of you had cast votes, more than double from any previous FOSS Force poll. The poll was online for approximately one week.
Wow. It certainly didn’t take long after the holidays for the FOSS news wire to heat up again. It’s like all the newsmakers have been chomping at the bit to get back to work doing what they do best, which would be, well, making news. Let’s start with some breaking news concerning a well known FOSS personality…
First things first: I’m the new kid on the BSD block. While in the process of still figuring things out on PC-BSD — dang that Synaptics! — and finding a place to contribute in the community, I have no real handle on the nuances of the inner workings of the wider BSD community. To my self-promoting credit, I am a quick study and the learning curve is not as difficult as I imagined. On the whole, I like what I see in those contributing to BSD, especially in the way of eagerness to help new users.
However, when Randi Harper decided to bail on participation in FreeBSD as she outlined in her blog, it raises the question, “Where have we seen this before?” Taking a step back, it raises the question, “Why does this keep happening in FOSS communities?”
One of my New Year’s resolutions this year is to only use cloud services when absolutely necessary. Web apps are great tools when you need to collaborate at a distance, but other than that you’re better off keeping your work on your own machines, for privacy reasons if nothing else.
