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 Force
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.”
When most people think about working with or trying out the Raspberry Pi, they are usually envisioning using Raspbian. This isn’t by default, but rather because Raspbian is the only OS available for the Raspberry Pi that comes equipped with the tools that we all hear about such as Scratch, Sonic Pi, and support for using the GPIO pins. That’s all changed now with the latest release of Ubuntu MATE for the Raspberry Pi 2.
In this latest release, Ubuntu MATE now comes equipped with everything under the hood that Raspbian has to offer and then some. I’ll review some of the best parts about Ubuntu MATE and show why you might want to install Ubuntu MATE instead of Raspbian.
Most of you know I live in a retirement community. Read that to say 55 years and older living on a fixed income.
Fixed income. I’ve always liked that term. It beats the hell out of “I’m too poor and I didn’t plan adequately for retirement.” And no, that’s not really the case for many who live here. The cost of living has indeed blossomed to be out of reach for those of us who do live on a fixed income; even a well-planned retirement can need some lifestyle changes. Hence, government subsidized places like where I live.
You know what? I like it here. People my age listened to Jefferson Airplane. Not Starship…Airplane. I’ve had protracted arguments with someone who wanted to argue that Jefferson Starship was the band formed by the kids of Jefferson Airplane. No really…I’m not kidding. Sheesh, even a lame Yahoo search engine will show that to be bologna. But I have to admit it sounds good. The busted meme that is.
Recently we’ve written on FOSS Force about the progress that Ken Starks’ front end for MaryTTS, temporarily named “SpeechLess,” has made in being released as beta software. When we last looked, Ken had assembled a three-man team to create a GUI for the speech program and, to quote him from his item, “it has come along nicely.”
Although the demo is web-based, the team has been able to construct the software so the entire thing is local, meaning little or no latency between hitting enter and having the text replicated to speech.
FOSS Week in Review
Larry’s away today, hiding beneath his tinfoil hat and hoping to escape the ravishes of Friday the thirteenth, so I was volunteered to write this week’s review. Sorry. Larry will return next week.
G’bye Debian Live: By now you’ve probably heard the news that evidently the Debian Live project is no more. This according to the project’s leader, Daniel Baumann, who posted An Abrupt End to Debian Live on the Debian website on Monday. According to him, the project was “hijacked by the Debian-cd and the Debian-installer teams.”
Reading the post, you might be excused for thinking it’s not all wine and roses over in Debian-land. “Debian can be great,” Baumann wrote. “But depending on who you are, where you come from, and who your friends are, Debian can also be hateful and full of deceit.”
In the same week that we learned from W3Techs that the popular open source content management system (CMS) WordPress now powers a full 25 percent of all sites on the web, we learn that six popular WordPress plugins contain serious security vulnerabilities. The later news comes to us by way of security firm Wordfence, which specializes in WordPress security and develops the Wordfence security plugin for the platform.
This news isn’t surprising, nor is it cause for alarm. Because WordPress is by far the most popular content management platform on the web, it’s an obvious target for hackers, and third party plugins are the most obvious way inside. However, the folks at Automattic, which develops the platform, have proven themselves to be diligent at finding vulnerabilities and keeping them patched.
In the month of October, the spotlight seems to have been on Indie games, and for the open source/Linux developer there were some exciting things happening. On October 26, the 2016 Independent Game Festival (IGF) had its last call for independent game submissions. The IGF is basically Sundance for game developers and student designers who create for Linux, Steam, Mac, and Windows as well as virtual reality and consoles, with over $50 thousand in prizes up for grabs. The competition takes place March 14-18 in San Francisco, for those interested.
A few game jams, contests for developers to design a game in a short time span, usually between 24-72 hours, have just passed or are soon to be underway as well. Gaming on Linux just concluded its very first game jam last week. Ludum Dare recently finished its “October Challenge,” and as a result eleven more games have been added to the Linux roster. Their next challenge begins in four weeks, with the theme not yet determined, so feel free to visit and suggest a theme. Ludum Dare also has a mini-challenge, Fusion, scheduled to start on November 20 — so keep checking those links for updates.
Old hardware. Laptops in one corner, sitting in a crooked series of piles, some of them just daring someone to try their luck, with one pile looking as if someone, at one time or another, succumbed to that dare. That’s what I found when I arrived at the business warehouse that was donating Reglue a number of laptops and other peripherals — things such as mice, keyboards and 500GB hard drives.
While the warehouse guy went to get some paperwork, I began looking through some of the donations, taking a closer look at this “obsolete” hardware. Most of these were Dells, but there were also a mixed number of Sony, HP and Toshiba laptops and notebooks. The lack of MacBooks was obvious.