FOSS Week in Review Obama disarms Samsung An already unlevel playing field just became more tilted as far as patents are concerned. We are shaking…
Posts tagged as “Internet”
I shouldn’t have to say this, but child pornographers and users of child porn are scum and deserve just about any sentence meted out to them. This absolutely doesn’t mean, however, that we willy-nilly throw their rights out the window in order to catch them. Remember, in the United States we still claim to believe in the concept of “innocent until proven guilty.” If they forgot to teach you that in school, Google it. Try “Bill of Rights” as your search term.
With that out of the way, let’s get into our story…
It appears more and more that the malware caper discovered this weekend on the TOR network was all about harvesting MAC (media access control) addresses. We’ll probably never know the whole story of who’s behind this, but we’re getting enough pieces so that we can hobble together a broad picture of what happened.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
I like the expression, “Just when you thought it was safe to get back in the water.” I almost used it to open this article, but I didn’t. It would be inaccurate. Nobody in his right mind would consider the Internet waters safe at this junction in time.
Today while surfing tech sites looking for items for our news feed, I ran across an item on the Beeb titled Users of hidden net advised to ditch Windows, with the “hidden net” being TOR. Since it always brightens my day to discover some security geek has found yet more vulnerabilities in Redmond’s finest, I checked out the news item.
It wasn’t what I thought. TOR was singling-out Windows not because of any newfound security issues with Redmond’s operating system, but because TOR had been compromised with malware that was specifically designed to infect Windows machines.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
FOSS Week in Review
USPTO shoots down Apple patent
There seems to be more than enough tit-for-tat to go around in the ongoing patent battle between Apple and Samsung. If we wanted to be snarky, we’d say we haven’t seen this much legal maneuvering since the last days of the Beatles and the “sue me, sue you blues.”
Back on June 23, when we asked you to name the first Linux distro you ever used, we pretty much knew that the choice “Other” would take the day.
That’s because we wanted to be completely neutral, so the ten choices we offered besides “Other” were just the top ten distros from the Distrowatch “Page Hit Ranking,” which meant that those who started their Linux life with something other than Debian or SUSE in the pre-Ubuntu era were not represented.
Let’s spend a few paragraphs celebrating the small bloggers who write about FOSS and GNU/Linux. If you’re like us, you probably have a favorite blogger or three you like to read.
Let’s be clear; we’re talking blogs and not every website is a blog.
FOSS Week in Review
Ubuntu Edge–computing on the go-go
Probably the biggest news in all of tech this week, not just the FOSS world, came with Canonical’s announcement on Monday of the Ubuntu Edge. In case you’ve been away camping somewhere all week, the Edge is a hybrid device that can function both as a high end smartphone, running either Android or Ubuntu Touch, or it can be hooked up to a monitor, keyboard and mouse to work as a conventional PC running Ubuntu Linux.
That news alone would be dumbfounding enough, but as the pitchman on TV always says, “Wait! There’s more…”
Cloud computing was always a bad idea.
Not totally bad, mind you. It has its place. I use Google Docs/Drive or whatever they’re calling it this week sometimes so I can work on articles on the computer at my day job without leaving a mess behind on the bosses hard drive. But mostly cloud computing has always been a bad idea.
Ask Richard Stallman; he’ll tell you. Or ask me.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
The IAB wants you to know that if you don’t let online advertisers follow you around when you’re surfing, then you’re scum, a criminal and probably a traitor to your country. At least, that would seem to be the thick of it from reading their latest in a series of diatribes against Mozilla published last Tuesday on their website under the heading “Has Mozilla Lost Its Values?”.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
It used to be you only had to worry about the accidental insecurities in Windows. Now Redmond’s giving away the keys to everything they sell. Microsoft is beginning to surprise even me and I thought I was beyond surprise.
I get it. I understand patriotism. I also understand legal obligation. The guys and gals in Redmond would want you to believe that their cooperation with the feds is based mostly on the later. Their story is they were forced to give access to their customer’s data by a loaded court order being held to their collective head.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux