The popular website Tux Machines has evidently fallen victim to a DDOS attack that made the site unavailable for part of the day on Friday. The announcement of the attack was initially made in a blog notice posted on the site late Friday morning GMT which opened with the line “Tux Machines has been mostly offline this morning.”
FOSS Force
Phoenix based Symple PC, which offered refurbished “web workstations” running Ubuntu for $89, has evidently ridden off into the night of no return. Since at least August 24, the company’s website has said the product is “No Longer Availabe,” although the website remains operational. Numerous attempts to contact the company for clarification have gone unanswered.
The venture was the brainchild of Jason Spisak, whose history with Linux and FOSS goes back to being the co-founder and marketing director Lycoris, which made news in 2003 when Walmart offered the Linux distro preinstalled on $199 PCs. FOSS Force first told you about the Symple PC back in March, not long after the company’s official launch.
FOSS Week in Review
The Thanksgiving holiday really put a damper on FOSS developments this week — but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to report. On the contrary. So without further adieu, and on the heels of Thanksgiving, help yourself to another slice of…
Pi Zero for $5: Our friends at Phoronix reported this week about the Pi Zero, the latest Raspberry Pi board, costing a grand total of $5 American.
You might be excused for thinking that every tech company is out to get you, especially if you still use Windows, which we like to think of as “yesterday’s operating system.”
We’ll start with the poor Windows user.
News came out on Tuesday that since August Dell computers have been coming out-of-the-box with a root certificate preinstalled that is an “unintended security vulnerability.” The source of the quote, by the way, is Dell itself.
The Steam machine is now publicly on sale as of last week, but it’s not off to the best start. A couple of weeks ago, Ars Technica compared the performance of games when running on Valve’s Linux based SteamOS and Windows 10. Six Valve games were tested on a single machine and results showed a 21 to 58 percent frame rate drop when running on Linux. While only six games were tested out of an entire collection of around 1,800 available titles, the games used Valve’s own Source engine, which is designed for Linux and SteamOS. Valve had previously stated that Steam games run faster on Linux, so it was expected that any of Valve’s own Source engine games would run smoothly.
On February 28th, 2012 at approximately 5:30 p.m., an emergency room ear, nose, throat doctor (ENT) who treated me for difficulty in breathing gathered my family around him. He reported that the throat cancer he found while inserting a trach tube was at stage 4 and that my prognosis was terminal. They were informed that the only thing they could do was to take me home and make me “comfortable.”
I don’t remember much. Diane, my youngest daughter Amanda, my ex-wife and others were at my bedside. I was heavily sedated and could barely speak. It was a carousel of faces and nurses, all in their own way, trying to bring me comfort. However, my life partner Diane wasn’t having any of the take-me-home-and-make-me-comfortable thing. She would have none of that. She demanded that an oncologist see me.
Over the last several weeks, I have to confess to doing a little soul-searching in the wake of some developments in the Linux world, and I’ve come to a decision of sorts. It’s hard to say when the actual tipping point was, but you can probably mark it around the time Sarah Sharp closed the door on any further Linux kernel work, augmented by the accompanying “lack of understanding” by some who are significantly smarter than their responses would reflect.
Really, folks, I get it: Linus Torvalds is a great and historic man, one who changed the world for the better by developing a kernel that put a huge fast-forward on technology for all, on a far-more-level playing field than it could have been with the Linux kernel’s absence.
Members of the popular Patreon crowdfunding site for makers and artists who had accounts that were open before the beginning of October are now receiving threatening emails demanding payment of one Bitcoin (about $325 U.S) or else personal information such as Social Security number, tax id, tax forms, name, address, and credit card details will be made public.
FOSS Week in Review
So before we start it should be noted that our friends on the Isle of Man have deemed today Ubuntu Community Appreciation Day, with the intention of thanking someone in the community for their contribution. So go ahead and thank someone, and remember where you heard it first.
It’s no surprise that Friday’s Paris attacks are already being used to push for both more and continued surveillance here in the U.S.
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler was on Capitol Hill on Tuesday speaking before a House subcommittee, making the case for expanding the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) which compelled telecom companies, Internet providers and some VoIP services to make their networks easier for law enforcement to access. Wheeler would like Congress to consider expanding the scope of the law to include devices such as gaming platforms, which now have capabilities that go beyond mere gaming.
“You read in the press that [the Paris attackers] were using PlayStation 4 games to communicate on,” Wheeler told the subcommittee, “which is outside the scope of anything considered in CALEA, so there’s probably opportunities to update the ‘lawful intercept’ concept.”