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A child’s education should start with free and open source software. When we help them build their futures on the rock-solid base of FOSS, we are exposing them not only to the ones and zeros behind our software, but more importantly, to the ideas and the philosophy on which FOSS culture sits. We are teaching them that collaboration and cooperation can outproduce the dog-eat-dog world that rules us now.

The project to recreate Edsac was undertaken to help fill gaps in knowledge about the way that this early British computer was built and worked. Once complete it will become a living exhibit at The National Museum of Computing where it will be used to help teach schoolchildren about programming.

The early months of the reconstruction scheme were taken up studying photographs of the finished computer to try to work out how its 3,000 valves were laid out and how they formed the logic that lent the machine its computational power.

Mozilla is already facing an uncertain financial future, and Friday’s announcement doesn’t make it any brighter. Late last year, the organization lost its profitable long standing deal with Google, which had annually added hundreds of millions of dollars to the coffers. It doesn’t appear that the new deal with Yahoo will come anywhere near matching that, as the web portal’s once dominant search engine isn’t very popular and it’s likely that many users will change their search preference in the browser’s settings.

Except for those using a free version of Android such as Replicant, and who install apps from free and open software sources such as F-Droid or Fossdroid, the protection of privacy on mobile devices, by design, is hopeless. Users have come to accept that most apps from Google’s store demand a whole slew of privileges whether they need them or not, and even when not being used, many apps happily go about the business of collecting and reporting everything they’re permitted to find out about us.

No date? No problem. In case you have nothing planned as 2015 dovetails into 2016 on the final day of this month, Ubuntu has you covered. According to an article in Softpedia, the first alpha for Ubuntu 16.04 — bestowed with the release name handed down by The Mark as “Xenial Xerus,” for those of you keeping score at home — will be released on December 31, just in time for the lighted ball to fall in Times Square before the strains of “Auld Lang Syne” waft through the air. Enjoy the holiday!

“Is that Run GCC, like Run DMC?” He asked about one of the more prevalent stickers on the cover of my ThinkPad T500. We laughed about it, we introduced ourselves — his name is Roger and he’s a Java developer — and we started a conversation about what we were working on.

Every month it seems like the Raspberry Pi Foundation keeps wowing us, and this November was no exception. As a matter-of-fact, this past month was jam packed with headlines, so much so that I’m eagerly waiting to see what the month of December will offer. Since there was so much that happened, here is a recap of the biggest stories that headlined the Raspberry Pi for the month of November.

It’s more likely that the real problem the higher-ups have with Mozilla is they can’t figure out how to monetize it. Sure, they could cut a deal with their friends at Yahoo to display ads in Thunderbird, similar to what Google does with Gmail, but that wouldn’t work. It would only drive away the user base.

Rocks and a stick? That’s a curious way to express Linux, the kernel that is the center of the majority of supercomputers around the world. I’ve heard it expressed or compared a lot of ways, but I don’t think “rocks and a stick” was one of them — up until then at least. But he’s not alone in his way of thinking. I remember a conversation I had with a colleague in 2005 who held the same view and went so far as to stop working with our newly-formed organization. He stated that he would not put his efforts into a losing cause.

The popular website Tux Machines has evidently fallen victim to a DDOS attack that made the site unavailable for part of the day on Friday. The announcement of the attack was initially made in a blog notice posted on the site late Friday morning GMT which opened with the line “Tux Machines has been mostly offline this morning.”

Phoenix based Symple PC, which offered refurbished “web workstations” running Ubuntu for $89, has evidently ridden off into the night of no return. Since at least August 24, the company’s website has said the product is “No Longer Availabe,” although the website remains operational. Numerous attempts to contact the company for clarification have gone unanswered.

We touched on this last week when we talked about FOSS and health care monitoring, and OpenSource.com has picked up the ball and run with it when it comes to having Benjamin Kerensa talk about how he came to develop Glucosio. It’s an interesting read on the path that led Mr. Kerensa to where he is right now.

And you thought all you had to worry about was Superfish, the adware Lenovo installed on its computers that left users vulnerable to man-in the-middle attacks — even when running Linux. At least the latest dumb move by Dell seems to be Windows specific, meaning most readers of FOSS Force can breath easy and repeat the official Linux mantra rewritten from an old Dial soap campaign. Aren’t you glad you use Linux? Don’t you wish ever everybody did?

There is evidence that across different Linux systems and distributions results of game play may vary, with performance issues such as random loss of audio, poor and delayed rendering, lowered frame rates and more. But there is also evidence that games built specifically to utilize OpenGL and run on Linux might outperform their Windows counterparts. Back in August, Phoronix ran benchmarks comparing performance between Windows 10 and Ubuntu 15.04 on the open source Quake clone OpenArena, and found Linux coming out on top across a variety of graphics cards.

I don’t remember much. Diane, my youngest daughter Amanda, my ex-wife and others were at my bedside. I was heavily sedated and could barely speak. It was a carousel of faces and nurses, all in their own way, trying to bring me comfort. However, my life partner Diane wasn’t having any of the take-me-home-and-make-me-comfortable thing. She would have none of that. She demanded that an oncologist see me.

A clear majority of FOSS folks are okay with “letting Linus be Linus,” and having the chips fall where they may. Me? I’d prefer to “let Linus be Jon ‘maddog’ Hall” or “let Linus be Bob Young.” In other words, I prefer my great and historic figures to have a high degree of grace and leadership skills, and understand and accept the gravity and responsibility the glorious burden of being a historical figure entails, and then act appropriately.

Members of the popular Patreon crowdfunding site for makers and artists who had accounts that were open before the beginning of October are now receiving threatening emails demanding payment of one Bitcoin (about $325 U.S) or else personal information such as Social Security number, tax id, tax forms, name, address, and credit card details will be made public.

Meanwhile in Canada, “Cooking with Linux” guy Marcel Gagne reported an interesting item about a Liberal MP who has some serious Linux and FOSS cred. David Graham, who serves in Ottawa as the representative from Laurentides-Labelle in Quebec, is a Linux user and more. His distro? Debian, he says, but he’s not a johnny-come-lately: He’s been using Debian since Bo, which would be summer of 1997. But wait, there’s more: “Slackware before that.”

It’s no surprise that Friday’s Paris attacks are already being used to push for both more and continued surveillance here in the U.S. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler was on Capital Hill on Tuesday speaking before a House subcommittee, making the case for expanding the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) which compelled telecom companies, Internet providers and some VoIP services to make their networks easier for law enforcement to access. Wheeler would like Congress to consider expanding the scope of the law to include devices such as gaming platforms, which now have capabilities that go beyond mere gaming.

When most people think about working with or trying out the Raspberry Pi, they are usually envisioning using Raspbian. This isn’t by default, but rather because Raspbian is the only OS available for the Raspberry Pi that comes equipped with the tools that we all hear about such as Scratch, Sonic Pi, and support for using the GPIO pins. That’s all changed now with the latest release of Ubuntu MATE for the Raspberry Pi 2.