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FOSS Force

‘Linux Advocates’ Looks For Angels

A few months ago, while doing my daily web perusing to keep up-to-date on FOSS stuff as well as to update our Twitter and Facebook news feeds, I began running across a Linux blog I hadn’t seen before called Linux Advocates. The site caught my eye because it was well designed and laid-out–not just another generic WordPress blog, if you catch my drift.

Other than that, there was nothing that was really exceptional about the site. It was just another Penguinista blog by a blogger, Dietrich Schmitz, who was unfamiliar to me. His writing was strong, even if he did sometimes seem to be lacking in how-it-really-works insight.

He learned quickly, however. Very quickly. It wasn’t long before Linux Advocates started showing-up more often in my morning web surfing. The writing and quality of articles improved and the major Linux news aggregators began paying attention by publishing links to selected articles. It was obvious; the site was progressing.

Why Schools Require MS Office; Nokia Plays Rope-A-Dope & More…

Friday FOSS Week in Review

Pretty fonts coming to Linux?

Most of us here at FOSS Force have been using various flavors of Linux for thirteen years or so. During that time we’ve gotten used to reading comments on the ugliness of fonts in Linux, especially when it comes to browsers.

We’ve never particularly understood this or noticed any homeliness in regards to Linux fonts. Of course, we’ve also never been able to understand reviewers who write about how unexciting they find fonts like Times New Roman or Ariel to be. In our experience, Hunter Thompson is brilliant and compelling no matter what font is being used to render his rants, while Tom Wolfe is a pompous ass, no matter how humble a typeface used to display his insufferable prose.

The Night the Digital Lights Went Out In Syria

What does it mean when a whole country’s Internet goes down? When it’s a country racked by civil war, digital silence from the entire nation can’t be a good omen, can it? The country becomes like a submarine running in silence.

Last night I first saw the news when an old colleague from Rochdale College posted an article from Umbrella Security Labs, a research division of OpenDNS, to her Facebook wall. “BREAKING NEWS: TRAFFIC FROM SYRIA DISAPPEARS FROM INTERNET.”

Ubuntu Wins Our “Tablet OS” Poll

If the unscientific poll we conducted on tablet operating systems is any indication, it appears as if Canonical can depend on a community of early adopters if and when a tablet is released with Ubuntu OS preinstalled.

In our poll we asked, “What operating system would you be most likely to consider for a tablet if available?” The options were Android, iOS, BlackBerry 10, Windows Phone 8, Windows RT, Ubuntu, webOS, None of the above and Other. Those who chose the “Other” option were given the opportunity to name another OS.

Spy vs. Spy; Wikipedia Sports New DB & More…

Friday FOSS Week in Review

Goodbye to Fuduntu, hello to FuSE

We already knew, of course, that Fuduntu was history, that the beloved distro was to be no more, evidently due to the fact that it was becoming nearly impossible to support GNOME 2 in any sort of meaningful way. We also knew there’d been talk among the developers at Fuduntu of continuing with a new distro. Well, now it’s a done deal and most of the developers of Fuduntu will be working on a new distro based on openSUSE.

Senate To Kill Current Version Of CISPA

U.S. News & World Report was the first to announce this afternoon that the Senate will evidently not vote on the cybersecurity bill known as the Cyber Information Sharing and Protection Act or CISPA. According to a report published on their website, the news organization has received assurances of the bill’s death from an unnamed member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation that has been considering the bill as passed last week by the House of Representatives:

No Time For QuickTime

It definitely wasn’t worth the effort and I wouldn’t do it again. Now I’ve got this crapware from Apple on my work computer, which I guess I could remove.

All I wanted to do was click and listen to about an eight second sound bite of a recently discovered recording of Alexander Graham Bell saying, “Hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell.” I’d found an article on the discovery and recovery of the 1875 recording on the BBC’s website, which offered a link to listen on the Smithsonian’s site, which I clicked.

1,000 Firefox Phones In the Wild!

I found out early this afternoon, when Carlos DarthRivan commented on a link on our Facebook page. The link was to an article on the anticipated release of the first phones running the Firefox OS. They were scheduled to be released by GeeksPhone, a young Spanish start-up mobile telephony company.

“Geeksphone started selling them yesterday and went ‘sold out’ in few hours. Let’s see if this will be the OSource alternative to Android and iOS.”

Excuse me if I show more than a little childlike exuberance, which I know is unbecoming to a person my age, but I found this to be exciting–perhaps the most exciting news to come out of the FOSS world since SCO’s smoking gun turned out to be lines of code “stolen” from BSD. But that’s just me.

How To Put Your Shields Up To Protect Your WordPress Site

In case you haven’t heard, the popular open source website platform, WordPress, is under attack by black hat hackers. These attacks are being waged primarily against sites using the WordPress platform that are not being hosted on wordpress.com. According to KrebsonSecurity, a small botnet is being used to break into the back door of WordPress sites in an apparent attempt to build a super botnet:

“According to Web site security firm Incapsula, those responsible for this crime campaign are scanning the Internet for WordPress installations, and then attempting to log in to the administrative console at these sites using a custom list of approximately 1,000 of the most commonly-used username and password combinations.

“Incapsula co-founder Marc Gaffan told KrebsOnSecurity that infected sites will be seeded with a backdoor that lets the attackers control the site remotely (the backdoors persist regardless of whether the legitimate site owner subsequently changes his password). The infected sites then are conscripted into the attacking server botnet, and forced to launch password-guessing attacks against other sites running WordPress.”

Oracle Serious About Java Security–Maybe

We’re not ready to tell you we think it’s safe to reactivate your Java browser plugin–in fact, just the opposite–but we will say that Oracle is at least giving the appearance they’re now serious about addressing browser-side Java’s safety. Early last week they issued a security patch that fixed either 41 or 42 Java security issues, depending on what website you’re reading.

Excuse us if we don’t seem too impressed. At this juncture all we’re willing to do is say with utmost snark, “It’s about time.”

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