Reuters reported yesterday that the Chinese government has banned the use of Windows 8 on Chinese government computers. According to the official Xinhua news agency, the ban is being put in place by the Central Government Procurement Center primarily over security concerns now that Microsoft has ended support for XP, which is thought to be the most widely used operating system within China. This news has led Forbes to speculate that this may prompt Redmond to continue to support the OS within the People’s Republic.
FOSS Force
eBay announced this morning that they’ve been hacked and that “encrypted passwords and other non-financial data” have been compromised. They’re expected to begin notifying their customer base later today, which will include a suggestion for users to change their passwords. The company says that PayPal, an eBay subsidiary, uses its own servers and was not affected by the attack.
According to CNET, the first public news of the compromise came by way of a cryptic blog posting by PayPal:
It was in 2010 when Skip Guenter began winding his way through friends and contacts, finally succeeding in finding our organization a place to call home.
That place is Taylor, Texas.
Since 2005, HeliOS/Reglue has operated from any place we could find. We’ve worked from garages, work sheds, tack rooms, barns, the back of pickup trucks and even in monthly storage places.
But we are home now.
Taylor a small town of 15.5K or so. Big enough to have a Walmart but small enough for the checkout clerk to know you by your first name, as well as the names of your spouse and kids. That’s also true of the people at the post office, the bank, the grocery store, the vehicle registration place…. And that’s kind of nice.
These are the ten most read articles on FOSS Force for the month of April, 2014. 1. What Would You Do to Improve Linux? by…
Ikey Doherty is probably one of the most tech-smart people I know. Fact is, Ikey is much like that guy you hear about on the news, the guy that can hear a string of four digit numbers and tell you the sum of them in a couple of seconds. Now, I don’t know if Ikey is capable of that feat, but I do know what he can do.
Ikey Doherty can code. Ikey Doherty can code in a number of languages.
OK, I’ll give you that. But let’s back up a bit. How much could you code before you went to college? A little bit? Was it a hobby until you decided you were interested in doing it professionally? The last time I did the calculations in my head, Doherty writes extensive and complex code in at least four languages.
The Linuxsphere is a wild, wonderful and adventurous place. By its nature alone, Linux is often considered a maverick. It’s been my observation that Linux users tend to explore and take more risks when using their computers. For better or worse, it appears that Linux users have been associated with the hacker elite. I’ve even thought of it as being the wild west of tech. I’ve referred to using Linux as computing without a safety net.
There were days past when I let my idealism and fervor dictate my thoughts and actions. I saw magnificent potential in Linux as a desktop operating system. With all my heart and soul, I evangelized for a competitive presence of Linux on the desktop. Like many idealists, I ignored the facts and barreled ahead as if by sheer will I could blow obstacles to dust that would dissipate in my wake.
Vachana sahitya is a form of rhythmic writing in Kannada poetry that evolved in the 11th century C.E. and flourished in the 12th century as a part of the Lingayatha movement. More than 259 Vachanakaras (Vachana writers) have compiled over 11,000 vachanas. 21,000 of these verses which were published in a 15 volume set, “Samagra Vachana Samputa,” by the Government of Karnataka, a state in South West India, have been digitized. Two Wikimedians along with Kannada linguist and author O. L. Nagabhushana Swamy are involved in the Unicode conversions, corrections and writing the preface for these verses. The entire work is now available as a standalone project called Vachana Sanchaya and ready to enrich Kannada WikiSource.
This project was started a year ago when Kannada Wikimedian Omshivaprakash was trying to help Professor O. L. Naghabhushana Swamy and Kannada author and publisher Vasudhendra to easily access the vachana (verses) of Vachana Sanchaya. Swamy had challenges in using publicly available content on Vachanas since the data was in ASCII and searching text was a huge problem. Pavithra Hanchagaiah started helping to collect information about about vachanas and document them into Unicode by writing scripts to customize open source software to convert the Kannada fonts from ASCII into Unicode.
These are the ten most read articles on FOSS Force for the month of March, 2014. 1. Linux for Seniors 101 by Ken Starks. Published…
The year of the Linux desktop.
The phrase has been a comical punching bag for a number of years. At the turn of every new year the question can be found on hundreds of Linux-centered websites.
“Will this be the year of the Linux desktop?”
The fact is, we’ll never see “the year of desktop Linux.” Not the way we imagine it anyway. Many of us long for the time when Linux will become a well known alternative to Microsoft Windows. That just isn’t gonna happen.
Here’s why.
FOSS Week in Review
Is Microsoft reading your Hotmail?
Last week we learned of the arrest of Alex Kibkalo, a Microsoft employee who’s charged with leaking an unreleased version of Windows 8 to a French blogger. According to Wired, during the course of an internal investigation in Redmond, an unidentified source approached Steven Sinofsky, who was then president of Microsoft’s Windows Division.
“The source gave Sinofsky a Hotmail address that belonged to the French blogger (also not named) and said that the blogger was the person who had received the leaked software. Microsoft had already been interested in the blogger, but apparently, after the tip-off, the company’s security team did something that raised alarm bells with privacy advocates. Instead of taking their evidence to law enforcement, they decided to search through the blogger’s private messages themselves. Four days after Sinofsky’s tip-off, Microsoft lawyers ‘approved content pulls of the blogger’s Hotmail account,’ the court filings state.
“By trolling through the Hotmail email messages and MSN Messenger instant message logs, Microsoft learnt how Kibkalo and the blogger pulled off the leak, says Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent Armando Ramirez III, in an affidavit filed in connection with the case. Microsoft handed over the results of its investigation to the FBI in 2013, and Kibkalo was arrested on Wednesday.”
This, of course, created quite a stir among privacy advocates. So much so that the folks in Redmond on Thrusday announced a change of policy when it comes to riffling through people’s Hotmail accounts. They’re still going to do it, but in the future the company will publish stats regarding its breaking into people’s free Hotmail accounts. In other words, we’ll know just how much they do it.