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Everyone is either at Seattle GNU/Linux Conference, Ohio LinuxFest or All Things Open, so there’s no one around to bounce off some ideas regarding what’s happening this week. Besides, if you were at any of those three events –- and if not, why not? — you probably know more than I do at this point.

The problem here is that this lack of civility, this absence of open-mindedness, and this departure from decent behavior scales in an enormous way in FOSS: from the new user warmed in the glow of their new-found FOSS enlightenment thinking their first distro is “the Holy Grail,” to some of those who got the ball rolling back in the day and are responsible for the world-altering digital movement in which we now find ourselves.

Ohio LinuxFest isn’t just another excuse to travel. It’s a means for us to fulfill ourselves, and to get honest, tangible feedback for what we do and for what others are doing. It’s a place where ideas are sounded, bent, crumpled and turned until they either come out of the crucible perfect…or useless.

A legitimate question might be: why? Why invite companies that have spent years putting roadblocks in open source’s path or that callously use open source licenses to sell proprietary software? Lewis believes this to be part of the “open” in open source, that if we truly believe in “openness’ then we should put our money where our mouths are and be as open as the proprietary crowd is closed.

As it turns out, neither rumor was correct. A few days back, Todd Lewis, the Executive Director-Columbia for IT-oLogy, told FOSS Force that both events are very much on the slate for 2015. “We’ll be doing POSSCON and Great Wide Open in 2015,” he wrote in an email. “We’ll announce dates at All Things Open [(ATO), another open source conference hosted by IT-oLogy] and both will take place in the spring. The Call for Speakers for both events will be open and we encourage anyone with an interest to submit a talk and participate.”

Glaringly left out, of course, is one of the better Linux hardware makers, ZaReason, a long-time FOSS manufacturer of a wide range of hardware, from tablets to servers. Truth in advertising: I have a long history of using ZaReason hardware, and every laptop and desktop that I’ve had — whether for review or purchase — has been outstanding. The laptop I once used on a daily basis was absconded by my teenage daughter, who now puts the hardware through some pretty rigorous paces for an out-of-production model (an Alto 3880).

I’m an advocate of free “as in speech” software — which includes the freedom to choose. If there’s a FOSS solution for something I need or want to do, I’ll take that every time, and encourage my friends to do so as well. However, if there’s something I need or want to do with no FOSS solution available, I might use a proprietary solution, depending on the depth of my need or want.

Apparently, working for a free and open Internet also caught the attention of the Syrian government, which sadly wasn’t as enamored with Bassel’s work as was Foreign Policy magazine. On March 15, 2012, Bassel was detained in a wave of arrests in the Mazzeh district of Damascus, Syria.

Time Warner is already beginning to hemorrhage customers due to Google Fiber rolling-out in two large areas of Austin. Not to be outdone, AT&T also polluted the airwaves in an attempt to make us believe they have already stepped into the age of gigabyte, with an advertising campaign that was misleading at best. Their gigabyte service only covers a few square blocks.

It’s that easy. Just open Chrome, go to Netflix, open up an account (if you don’t already have one) and voila!, in no time at all you can be catching up on all of the episodes of Burn Notice and The Shield that you might’ve missed in over-the-air syndication (oh yeah, I also refuse to pay for cable). I have Netflix working now on two Linux Mint boxes, so it should be working on all Ubuntu derivatives. On Friday, Swapnil Bhartiya reported on The Mukt that according to his tests, Netflix is also working out-of-the-box on openSUSE and Arch Linux as well.

The week after next the FOSS world will be brimming with opportunities to find out more about what’s going on in three separate shows around the country. If you are within a day’s drive of any of them — or if you are not adverse to flying — making it to one of them would be well worth the effort.

Back in the early 90s, when I was living in the college town of Chapel Hill, I shelled-out five bucks or so at the local Egghead Software store for a shrink wrapped floppy disk loaded with “shareware” utilities for MS-DOS. Twenty years have passed, so I don’t remember what tool I needed, but I’d gone there specifically looking for something or another and had been directed to that particular product by a clerk at the store. Once I got home, I stuck the disk into the drive, looked over its contents and installed a couple of the apps.

Now that a working exploit of the USB vulnerability that’s baked-in to the USB standard has been released, it might be a prudent move to no longer employ any USB devices that aren’t already under your control until this situation has been fixed.

There are a lot of other things that are deserving of our collective ire. Wireless shouldn’t have been one of them for me. I chastised myself for throwing my own little private snit concerning something so trivial. If you count back the years with me, the kernel update to 2.27 saw wireless go from “wireless sucks in Linux” to “holy crap, wireless works in Linux.” Or it did for the most part anyway. It was an important mile marker for desktop Linux.

Unfortunately, some researchers don’t understand the importance of making the code they use to reach their conclusions available. What’s worse, even if they do understand, the administrators at most universities do not, and the publishers of the all important scientific journals have no method in place for reviewing the code used in scientific research. The later is particularly troublesome, because the publishing of peer-reviewed journals is a huge business and not likely to go away any time soon.

The DDOS attack that has rendered the popular Linux site Tux Machines virtually unreachable for nearly two weeks, now seems to be affecting sister site TechRights. Roy Schestowitz, publisher of both sites, told FOSS Force that the attack on TechRights began at about one o’clock Friday afternoon GMT.

Other than the continuous scrambling to fix Shellshocked — if nothing else we in the FOSS world are both quick to respond to fixes and quick to come up with great names for epic bugs — this has been a relatively quiet week on our side of the digital street. Yeah, we can laugh at Apple for releasing an update that wasn’t really an update and at Microsoft for losing the ability to count, jumping from Window 8 to Windows 10, now with the improvement of having — wait for it — a command line.

But where we once were rolling up our sleeves and helping out those who came to us with questions and problems, there’s not a lot of that anymore. In our discussion last Saturday, we determined that it isn’t so much that people aren’t using Linux and FOSS, but that people are finding Linux and FOSS more user friendly, more familiar and less problematic now compared to years past, which possibly rendered our being a “help desk” remotely obsolete.

It was obvious he had no idea what I was talking about so we waited in awkward silence for the next few seconds. Finally, the Mint logo appeared on the screen. I opened Dolphin and located the Windows drive then asked him for the name of the file. He couldn’t remember but was sure it was a PDF. A few minutes later, I pulled a pen from my pocket and wrote down the number he needed and slid it back over to him with his laptop.

Since sometime last week the popular Linux site Tux Machines has been under an apparent distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack. For the last several days, those trying to visit the site have been redirected to Tech Rights, another site operated by Roy Schestowitz, the owner of Tux Machines to a post dated Saturday by Schestowitz...