What were the ten best stories we published on FOSS Force this year? Well, that would depend on a lot of things, wouldn’t it, such as who’s asking? We could tell you what we think our ten best stories were this year, but we’ll hold that until next week. Today we’re going to look at the ten stories that got the most reads on our site this year.
Posts tagged as “Oracle”
So far the state of Oregon has paid Oracle at least $43 million dollars for a website primarily intended for residents to use to enroll for healthcare insurance under the Affordable Care Act. The site was initially due for delivery on October 1, which now has been pushed back on numerous occasions because the site doesn’t work. In fact, by all accounts, it’s an outright disaster.
The most recent missed deadline was announced on December 5, according to a report from KOIN TV.
“Cover Oregon’s former director, Rocky King — who took a long-term medical leave of absence last week — had said the online system would be ready Monday for insurance agents and community groups that have contracts with Cover Oregon, and then Dec. 16 for all individuals. King was replaced by Goldberg, who is the director of the Oregon Health Authority…
“Both those deadlines will be missed. In an email to KOIN Monday, Cover Oregon spokesman Michael Cox alleged that the Dec. 9 and Dec. 16 dates were ‘targets set by Oracle, not deadlines set by Cover Oregon.'”
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
FreeBSD rethinks encryption after Snowden leaks
Only three months after the Snowden leaks on NSA snooping began, we learn from Ars Technica that the developers at FreeBSD have decided to rethink the way they access random numbers to generate cryptographic keys. Starting with version 10.0, users of the operating system will no longer be relying solely on random numbers generated by Intel and Via Technologies processors. This comes as a response to reports that government spooks can successfully open some encryption schemes.
FOSS Week in Review
Google wants to put your face on ads
We’ve always wanted to like Google. We want to believe them when they chant their informal motto, “Don’t be evil,” as if it were a mantra. We believe they have good intentions, just as we believe that Mark Zuckerberg is clueless when it comes to the privacy rights of Facebook’s users. We also believe it’s much too easy to convince oneself that wrong is right.
The latest news concerning Google puts Google+ in the same camp as Facebook when it comes to user privacy issues. Here at FOSS Force, we first heard about a change in Google’s privacy policy on Monday in an article posted by the BBC. It seems the search and advertising giant has modified its policy to allow it to soon pull endorsements from its user base for advertising purposes.
You can be certain of one thing; if you’re a penguinista I’ll have your back at the All Things Open conference. I’ll be paying attention. Plenty of good companies and organizations will be represented at the the conference, to be held next week in Raleigh, but it is an enterprise conference so there will be a few snakes slithering about.
Mainly I’m talking about Oracle and Microsoft.
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
When it comes to Oracle as caretaker of FOSS projects, users are voting with their feet.
The company that already very quickly lost control of OpenOffice when most of the project’s developers bolted, formed the Document Foundation and forked the code to create LibreOffice, is now in danger of losing another open source jewel it inherited when it took over Sun. LibreOffice, as you know, is now the defacto office suite of choice among Linux users and is rapidly gaining traction in the Windows world as well. OpenOffice is pretty much only a memory.
Of course, no one ever expected Oracle to be a good open source caretaker.
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 will probably come as no surprise to anyone that Microsoft topped the list in our “Who Don’t You Trust” poll. That’s the poll, launched on May 27th and closed on June 20th, in which we asked the question, “What tech company would you least trust to manage a FOSS project?” 411 people took the poll, which might be characterized by it’s lack of surprising results. In fact, we have to go to nearly the bottom of the list to find some small surprises.
Friday FOSS Week in Review
We may be paranoid but they are out to get us
In week three (or is it week four?) of the Spy vs. Spy scandal, the Obama folks keep saying things like “what’s the big deal?” while trying to convince us that the secret oversight court called FISA (we prefer “the Star Chamber”) has nothing but our constitutional rights in mind when it rubber stamps requests to secretly steal our privacy. Obama likes to talk about transparency. Indeed, he becomes more transparent by the moment; we’re beginning to see right through him. The 22nd amendment should now be seen as a face saver for Mr. Obama–as we would think no self respecting liberal or progressive would vote again for this man who once represented our best hope. Pity.
Some of the biggest and most important FOSS projects are controlled by big business. Rarely does corporate ownership of free and open software work out completely in the interests of the user base, since corporate owners absolutely always have an agenda of their own. However, it works out better in some cases than in others.
Back in March and April, when the Java browser plugin was getting hammered with security holes that were being exploited in the wild, we conducted a couple of unscientific polls here on FOSS Force to determine how our visitors were handling this security crisis.
To call the problems that Java was experiencing at the time a “crisis” is not an exaggeration. If you’ll remember, the situation was considered so serious that here in the U.S., the Department of Homeland Security was urging everyone to disable the Java plugin.
These two Java polls were among the first we conducted on FOSS Force and received about the fewest votes of any polls we’ve conducted so far. Undoubtedly, this was partially due to the fact that we were just beginning to conduct polls on the site, and so polling here was something new to our visitors. Also, our articles on Java security issues received a smaller number of page views than most articles we publish. However, low readership notwithstanding, we will continue to cover serious security issues, because we think it’s important that we do so.