FOSS Week in Review U.S. giving up control of DNS root zone On Friday, March 14, the U.S. announced it’ll relinquish control of the Internet’s…
Posts tagged as “ubuntu”
FOSS Week in Review
Cops tracking phones sans warrants
It appears that the police in Tallahassee, Florida have been busy tracking folks by their cell phones without bothering to show up before a judge and ask for a warrant. Why would they violate the constitutional rights of their citizens this way? Evidently because they were using technology on loan and had signed a non-disclosure agreement.
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According to Wired, this information came to light in an appeal of a sexual battery case dating back to 2008 in which a suspect was tracked using the technology to locate a phone that had been stolen from the victim. The police have admitted using the device 200 times, with no judge or warrant involved, since 2010. In a blog post made Monday, the ACLU said the device is “likely a Stingray made by the Florida-based Harris Corporation.” Evidently, the ACLU has long suspected that Harris has been loaning the devices to Florida police departments.
FOSS Week in Review
India drops deal with Google over spying fears
Since the Snowden leaks revealed that Microsoft has allegedly built back doors into Windows for the NSA, we’ve been saying that the spy agency’s actions are going to hurt the U.S. tech industry’s business abroad. Well, it’s started to happen. On Thursday, Reuters reported that India has decided to drop out of a planned partnership with Google designed to help voters access information.
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“…the plan was opposed by the Indian Infosec Consortium, a government and private sector-backed alliance of cyber security experts, who feared Google would collaborate with “American agencies” for espionage purposes.”
There’s even been more digital security news from the EU, where there’s been a scramble to address privacy and security issues since the NSA scandal began. On January 3, phoneArena.com reported that European phone makers have been coming out with pricey phones designed for the security conscious.
Mark our words. This is only the beginning.
Now that the celebrating is out of the way, I thought it might be time to take a look at some of the stories we covered on FOSS Force this year.
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1. The NSA. The biggest story to come down the wire this year undoubtedly had to do with Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s bag of dirty tricks. Even those of us who have long understood that the Internet isn’t necessarily a place to expect privacy were surprised at how deeply the NSA has managed to reach into the Internet. Odds are, if you’ve been using social networks, everything you’ve posted is now on file with the NSA. What’s worse, every email you’ve sent probably has a copy resting on a NSA server somewhere.
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
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.
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FOSS Week in Review
Good news & bad on the patent front
This week we received some good news and bad on the continuing patent wars.
First the bad news.
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Down in the northeast Texas town of Marshall, an eight person jury has found that online retailer Newegg infringed on a patent held by TQP Development because they mixed the use of SSL and RC4 on their websites. The jury awarded $2.3 million, less than half of the $5.1 million that TQP’s damage expert had thought due.
Even though Newegg had a strong case, it’s not that much of a surprise that they lost, not in Marshall, where juries are infamous for siding with the plaintiffs on patent cases. Often these judgments are overturned on appeal. Make no mistake about it, Newegg’s attorney Lee Cheng plans to appeal. He made that very plain to Joe Mullin who covered the trial for Ars Technica:
FOSS Week in Review
FBI claims U.S. computers breached by Anonymous
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In an exclusive story published Saturday by Reuters, the FBI has claimed Anonymous has managed to hack into U.S. government computers and steal sensitive data. What’s more, they believe these intrusions have been going on for at least a year.
“The hackers exploited a flaw in Adobe Systems Inc’s software to launch a rash of electronic break-ins that began last December, then left “back doors” to return to many of the machines as recently as last month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said in a memo seen by Reuters.
“The memo, distributed on Thursday, described the attacks as ‘a widespread problem that should be addressed.’ It said the breach affected the U.S. Army, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, and perhaps many more agencies.
“Investigators are still gathering information on the scope of the cyber campaign, which the authorities believe is continuing. The FBI document tells system administrators what to look for to determine if their systems are compromised.”
FOSS Week in Review
Swiss cloud with, presumably, no holes
Back when the Edward Snowden brouhaha first began, we said that this was going to have serious repercussions on the tech sector here in the United States, especially after it became evident that Microsoft was actively working with the spooks by allegedly designing back doors into their operating system and keeping federal intelligence agents informed about unpatched security holes that could be used against foreign governments and “terrorist,” which now days seems to be everyone who doesn’t work for the NSA, FBI or CIA.
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Brazil is already spending big bucks in an effort to make sure that no Internet cable entering their country goes anywhere near the US of A and is working to pass laws to make sure all Brazilian businesses use only servers located in-country. Similar efforts are underway in Europe, most notably in France and Germany.
Now the frugal Swiss are jumping on board, and they rightfully intend to profit from our stupidity by taking advantage of their strong privacy laws.
The results of our “One Size Fits All” poll on phone and PC interfaces are in. Once again, we find that our thinking doesn’t match the majority.
Microsoft got themselves in a heck of a mess when they insisted their users should happily adopt their phone interface on their desktops. This didn’t work out well, with Windows PC users pretty much refusing to upgrade to Windows 8. Since then, Microsoft has backed down somewhat with version 8.1, but it’s too soon to tell how that’s going to work out for them.
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| [yop_poll id=”29″] |
Apple and Google have chosen thus far to keep desktop and mobile not only on separate interfaces, but on separate platforms as well. Apple, of course, uses iOS for the iPhone and OS X for their line of Macintosh computers. Google has Android for mobile devices and Chrome OS for laptops. In both cases, the interface and branding are completely different for mobile and traditional devices.
Earlier this week at the Gartner Symposium ITXpo in Orlando, Microsoft’s lame duck President, Steve Ballmer, once again restated his vision for “One Microsoft/one world.”
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Actually, we jest. As reported by Larry Dignan on CNET, the vision remains a single Windows GUI to be used across all devices, from smartphone to tablet to PC. That’s what he and the rest of the crowd in Redmond have been saying since long before the release of Windows 8, when Metro was still Metro, which was their first attempt at implementing this one-size-fits-all vision. Nevermind that it hasn’t worked for them so far. You know what they say about “try, try, try and try again?”