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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.

DeeAnn is a nice lady. Recently widowed, she found herself unable to keep her house, so she sold it, put the money away, and found a place here with the rest of us. She invited me in and ushered me into her “office,” where her computer was set up amid a lot of half-emptied moving boxes and the sundry stuff that clutters our lives upon a change of residence. I wanted to do the “well, here’s yer problem right here” routine, but my sense of humor doesn’t always translate as, uh…funny.

Reading the post, you might be excused for thinking it’s not all wine and roses over in Debian-land. “Debian can be great,” Baumann wrote. “But depending on who you are, where you come from, and who your friends are, Debian can also be hateful and full of deceit.”

This news isn’t surprising, nor is it cause for alarm. Because WordPress is by far the most popular content management platform on the web, it’s an obvious target for hackers, and third party plugins are the most obvious way inside. However, the folks at Automattic, which develops the platform, have proven themselves to be diligent at finding vulnerabilities and keeping them patched.

In the month of October, the spotlight seems to have been on Indie games, and for the open source/Linux developer there were some exciting things happening. On October 26, the 2016 Independent Game Festival (IGF) had its last call for independent game submissions. The IGF is basically Sundance for game developers and student designers who create for Linux, Steam, Mac, and Windows as well as virtual reality and consoles, with over $50 thousand in prizes up for grabs. The competition takes place March 14-18 in San Francisco, for those interested.

Old hardware. Laptops in one corner, sitting in a crooked series of piles, some of them just daring someone to try their luck, with one pile looking as if someone, at one time or another, succumbed to that dare. That’s what I found when I arrived at the business warehouse that was donating Reglue a number of laptops and other peripherals — things such as mice, keyboards and 500GB hard drives.

From a business standpoint, Red Hat is eating Microsoft’s lunch. No surprise there, even though Red Hat is throwing the foundering Microsoft an innovation life preserver it clearly doesn’t deserve. No, Microsoft is not in danger of losing their monopoly on foisting inadequate software on an unsuspecting public through a monopolistic stranglehold on computer makers, but they’re foundering in a sense that most, if not all, of the pertinent tech innovation has been coming from the FOSS side of the street.

After corralling the widely divergent world of containers, the Linux Foundation now sets its sights on the API economy and making application program interfaces, or APIs, easier to find. For the uninitiated, open APIs, sometimes called public APIs, describes an application program interface providing developers with programmatic access to a proprietary software application.

Today’s hacker isn’t the script kiddie of old. Again, hacking for the sake of hacking isn’t as prevalent as it once was. Today’s hacker is mainly focused on the money to be made by wearing the black hat. Stories in the past week or so have revealed that ransomware from one operation was netting $30 million per year. If you think that couldn’t happen to you, think again.

Actually, the release of the next Fedora release is on time — tomorrow, if you want to go over to the Fedora Project site and give it a download — but even if it was released “late,” the standard by which a distribution is released on time depends on one thing and one thing only.

Taking place on Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 1524 Brandywine St. in Philly, the party will feature laptops for as cheap as $20 and the group will also be helping people install Linux on them. According to Reyes, the Nonprofit Technology Resources organization is still looking for volunteers to get laptops ready to use and donate.

Over the last week, many Linux users on Steam were left in a state of confusion when noticing that some Linux games have had their SteamOS icon removed. For those unaware, the SteamOS icon certifies that a title is playable on Linux, including SteamOS, and soon, on Steam Machines.