Reuters and many tech websites are reporting this morning that Twitter has been warning some of its users of a possible hack. This is unprecedented for the social media site, which has never issued such an alert before.
FOSS Force
Last week when Microsoft and the Linux Foundation separately announced a partnership that would see Redmond issuing a Linux certification called Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate Linux (MCSA), Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols felt the need to add the words “not a typo” to the headline of his coverage on ZDNet. A couple of days later, when the story made the pages of The Register the headline included, “Do not adjust your set. This is not an error.”
We were just as surprised here at FOSS Force, and Larry Cafiero pulled no punches when breaking the story in Friday’s Week in Review. “There’s the argument that because Microsoft ‘loves’ Linux…we should be more inclusive,” he wrote, “but this is the company that considered Linux a cancer and has fought FOSS for decades. Rather than throw the Microsoft that is treading water a life preserver, I still think throwing it an anchor would be more fitting.”
FOSS Week in Review
I honestly wish this news was better: Please allow a moment of silence for what seems to be the passing of Firefox OS. As a ZTE Open owner and a one-time regular user of that phone (until I needed something more dependable), this hits a sentimental note with me, since I was truly hoping that Mozilla would get the OS for the phone up to speed so it wouldn’t — oh, just to give a personal example — abandon users while performing important, job-dependent communications, for example.
And now, for the wrap:
Dell Fixing UEFI for Linux? Linux users may be able to update their UEFI firmware on devices, if Dell has their way. The computer manufacturing giant is looking at making things easier for Linux users, and Richard Hughes writes on his GNOME blog that this capability might be available as early as Fedora 24. “With Dell on board, I’m hoping it will give some of the other vendors enough confidence in the LVFS to talk about distributing their own firmware in public,” Hughes writes, and we have our fingers crossed here.
The FOSS Force Readers’ Poll
How do you receive and send your email? Inquiring minds want to know.
Last week’s article about Mozilla thinking of kicking Thunderbird out of the house to stay with friends started us thinking. For some reason, probably because our thoughts were on other things, such as the difference between the java in our cup (Chock full o’ Nuts, which has no nuts, by the way) and the Java on our machines (which has no Chock full o’ Nuts — go figure), it never occurred to us that the mobile revolution might’ve changed the way folks use email more than we’d realized.
Larry the BSD Guy
Parsing the developments from the BSD side of things this week for consumption by the general public is a little trickier than it is across the street on the Linux side, however with a little juggling (and an important note from iXsystems to come tomorrow in the weekly FOSS roundup), we’ll take a look at the new images ready for your testing and feedback. Also, I’ll answer some questions which arose in last week’s comments.
Before I do that, though, it bears noting that Susan Linton over at Ostatic.com has picked up the BSD ball and run with it in a recent item on that site. Of special note is this morsel: “PC-BSD is the Linux Mint of free BSDs, an easy-to-use desktop system.” Why it wasn’t referred to as the “vowel-laden-and-overbearing-Linux-distro of free BSD” is a mystery, but I’ll take Linux Mint any day. Also, extra points to Susan for putting the “f” in lower case in “free BSD” to emphasize “BSD which is free” as opposed to FreeBSD, which would have caused some confusion.
Just in time for the holiday season comes some exciting gaming news. There’s good news, not-so-good news,and bad news this week.
The Good News: The wildly popular game Rocket League is expected to be playable on GNU/Linux soon. Rocket League is a multiplayer physics based Soccer game played with fast booster, rigged vehicles in place of athletes, and is the sequel to Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars! Since its release last year for Playstation 4 and Windows, Rocket League has gathered a huge following, which has only increased the demand for a Linux version.
Anticipation has only been building since the SteamOS icon appeared briefly a few weeks ago on the Rocket League store, though to the disappointment of Steam users everywhere it isn’t ready for installation. The news was officially announced in August via Twitter that the game would soon makes its way to SteamOS/Mac after celebrating a million sales on Steam, and last week the news was broken by Steam forum moderator Volodesi that the game should be available before the end of the year. There’s no solid release date yet — the year’s end date isn’t official — but it sounds as if the release is in its final stages.
The FOSS Force Readers’ Poll
The results of our latest poll have been tallied and FOSS Force readers evidently think that Mozilla should keep Thunderbird instead of helping the project find a new home. Mozilla executive chairperson, Mitchell Baker, announced on November 30 that the foundation intended to eventually separate itself from the popular desktop email client it first released in 2004.
I stared at a blinking cursor when confronted with the question, “Your profession and position?”
It can be difficult to define the entire spectrum of my role at Reglue. Yeah, I am founder and executive director, but outside of that, in the real world where people are identified by their professional roles, how do I answer such a question?
A head scratching session ensued. The longer I looked at the blinking cursor, the more frustrated I became.
Mozilla has announced that it’s dropping a program everyone but Mozilla seemed to realize was a bad idea from the start. In a blog posting on Friday, the organization’s vice president of content services, Darren Herman, wrote that Mozilla has “made the decision to stop advertising in Firefox through the Tiles experiment in order to focus on content discovery.” The much disliked sponsored tiles won’t immediately disappear from users’ browsers, however. “Naturally, we will fulfill our current commitments as we wind down this experiment over the next few months.”
Google is getting ready to migrate all Gmail users to Inbox, which should be something of a concern for those worried about privacy, but no one seems to be noticing. The current efforts seem to be directed at users of the Gmail mobile app, but it’s my guess that desktop users of Gmail will be getting be getting the same treatment soon.
Except for those using a free version of Android such as Replicant, and who install apps from free and open software sources such as F-Droid or Fossdroid, the protection of privacy on mobile devices, by design, is hopeless. Users have come to accept that most apps from Google’s store demand a whole slew of privileges whether they need them or not, and even when not being used, many apps happily go about the business of collecting and reporting everything they’re permitted to find out about us.