Microservices are the wave of the future for Internet technology, partly because they can be tucked out of the way on the “edges” of the…
FOSS Force
All Things Open presents Open Source 101, a one day conference scheduled for February that might be a good way for tech students at N.C. State to network and talk with recruiters.
There’s a new open source conference coming to Silicon Valley East. Open Source 101 will be a single day event held Saturday February 4, 2017 on the campus of North Carolina State University in Raleigh. The event is being hosted by All Things Open, the organization behind the four-year-old All Things Open conference that’s held every October in downtown Raleigh.
When you think about it, “making” is just a more down-to-earth and less abstract version of coding, with results you touch and feel instead of…
After announcing in September that 500 million accounts had been compromised in a 2014 security breach, the company announces today that an additional billion accounts have been hacked in a separate incident.
Breaking News
If you’re a Yahoo user, you should strongly consider closing your account. If you decide to keep your account open, you might as well post your username and password to Facebook and send them out in a tweet, for all the good Yahoo’s security precautions will do for you.
A tech writer who still counts on her fingers and toes, tries to wrap her head around the size of the Linux kernel, and wonders when its weight will cause it to crash through the Earth’s mantle. She’s being silly, of course. Or is she?
An interesting factoid caught my eye in an article published by Opensource.com this morning. The article was one of those interesting and easy-to-read listicles that many websites — even FOSS Force — likes to run occasionally called 9 Lessons from 25 Years of Linux Kernel Development, and the item that caught my attention was eighth on the list, under the heading, “The kernel shows that major developments can spring from small beginnings.”
“The original 0.01 kernel was a mere 10,000 lines of code; now it grows by more than that every two days. Some of the rudimentary, tiny features that developers are adding now will develop into significant subsystems in the future.”
10,000 lines of code added every other day? Really?
A new, under development ransomware called Popcorn Time has a “refer a friend” option meant to appeal to the victim’s worst instincts.
Security
If you need any proof that malware is a business much like any other — with the big exception that it’s illegal — all you have to do is look at the latest ploy being used by the currently-in-development ransomware called Popcorn Time that was discovered December 7 by MalwareHunterTeam. The folks behind the malware are incorporating a scheme to drum up business that’s directly from a Marketing 101 textbook.
One of the things we can expect to see after Trump takes office in January is the demise of Net Neutrality, which some say will signal the end of a free Internet.
Op-ed
News organizations that like to have obituaries written and ready to go to bed well before a death actually occurs might want to go ahead and assign someone the task of writing an obit for Net Neutrality. Without a doubt, one thing that’s sure to happen when Trump begins his weekly commute to the Oval Office is an end to the legal principle that Internet service providers should treat all Internet traffic equally.
Shyama Iyer says that students can learn about open source software on their own, “but who has the time to learn by trial and error? If there is a tutor — which is what Spoken Tutorial is, a tutor for software — then they can learn in a finite period of time.”
The Video Screening Room
While colleges and universities in the United States try to figure out whether their campus needs a FOSS computer lab, no such hesitation occurs in smart higher education institutions overseas. In this short video, hear from Professor Shyama Iyer about the FOSS tools taught at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay).
Some popular Netgear routers contain a security flaw that is evidently easy to exploit and can make users vulnerable to a CSRF attack.
Breaking News
About this time I’m wondering if I’d even purchase a Netgear router.
You’d think that with all of the fuss recently about the insecure Internet of things, especially when it comes to routers, that any router maker would be on top of it and patching vulnerabilities as soon as they’re discovered.
Evidently not, as far as Netgear is concerned.
Also included: Fedora community says goodbye to Matthew Williams, Solus gets a new package build system, end-of-life for Fedora 23 and IoT security.
FOSS Week in Review
Something arctic this way comes. That”s what Lannie Pope, the weatherwoman on the local NBC affiliate, tells us, Trouble is, I’m still stuck in a house without proper heat, a situation that’s been dragging on since near the end of September. It’s a long story, but…brrr. I’m glad I don’t live in a part of the country where it gets really cold.
Now on to this week’s FOSS news, which is always warm…
You can be your own Geordi La Forge and build yourself a fully capable GNU/Linux pocket computer with this uber inexpensive five-inch touch screen and a Raspberry Pi.
The Video Screening Room
A Raspberry Pi enthusiast in Thailand shares this video showing how you can take your Raspberry Pi on the road with a $28 five-inch HDMI touch screen available from AliExpresss.