Showing headlines posted by brideoflinux

Right now it’s too soon to tell what kind of CEO Satya Nadella will be for Microsoft. He may be a good guy who understands just how much his company has erred ethically, almost since day one, and who has plans to realign the company he now guides to a postion where it can become a positive force in the tech arena. I’m not expecting that. I’ve learned over the years to not expect anything sane or ethical from the Redmond company, no matter who’s in charge or doing the talking.

At about 1 p.m. this afternoon the security company behind the WordFence plugin for WordPress issued a security advisory via email informing users of their plugin that WordPress sites are currently under a brute force attack.

As deep as the NSA has dug its tentacles into the likes of industry giants such as Microsoft, why would we assume they haven’t managed to get inside some of our favorite Linux distros and/or free software applications? I would be willing to bet they have. I have no evidence; I figure it’s a numbers game. Somewhere along the line, the NSA has to have been able to make the right threat or the right offer to get some developer to send our right to privacy to storage on a government server.

It seems that Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), a Canadian spy agency, has been using the free Wi-Fi at “a major Canadian airport” to track wireless devices, which presumably would include laptops as well as phones and tablets. The surveillance would continue for days after visitors passed through the airport.

So we don’t have Steve Ballmer to kick around anymore. The buffoon is gone. He’s out the door, replaced by Satya Nadella, a 46 or 47 year old geek from India who spent 22 years rising through the ranks at Microsoft to capture Redmond’s top prize as CEO. His starting salary in his new position will be $1.2 million. Nice work if you can get it, eh?

It looks as if Red Hat has some work cut out for them if they care what impression folks in the FOSS community have about them. If the results of our Red Hat &the NSA poll are any indication, some people aren’t convinced that the most commercially successful Linux distro on the planet has clean hands when it comes to the whole NSA mess.

Now I agree, if you want to kill a party buzz all you need to do is pull out your Book of Stallman and start repeating quotes. I mean, let’s be honest here. There’s nothing particularly exciting about FOSS.

It’s common knowledge that Microsoft is making tons of money collecting licensing fees from makers of mobile devices running Android. Well, according to BGR, Redmond may be set to make more money licensing its own Windows Phone than from trolling. Don’t expect this to happen in the next few weeks or months, however.

It didn’t matter if it was a new color scheme, a new set of icons or a desktop theme. Combined, I am guessing, one third of the choices rendered an error instead of the desired change. Some of them did not install the theme but told me the link was producing an html file and asks if I want to go to that page and download the theme manually. Why is that even offered? Clicking the link is supposed to install the theme for me, not send me to a page that may or may not have the file…not to mention instructions on how to install it.

Today it was announced that Google is selling handset maker Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for $2.91 billion. The move comes less than a week after the Chinese electronics company also agreed to acquire IBM’s low-end server business for $2.3 billion. Google purchased Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in 2012.

With our decision to move Reglue to KDE, I looked the landscape over and decided that the Mint KDE LTS version would be best suited for our needs. Friend and Google Plus buddy Randy Noseworthy took the contract for putting together our new LTS release for Reglue. It wasn’t long until Randy contacted me via email and gave me some bad news.

“mintConstructor has been pulled from the repos.”

Back in the early days of the Snowden affair, when it first became obvious that Microsoft and others had co-operated with the NSA's agenda to spy on every living human being on the planet who owned a computer, we said this wouldn't bode well for those who make their living from tech in the U.S. We thought that proprietary software vendors would be most vulnerable due to their lack of transparency, i.e., the lack of available source code, especially after Redmond was exposed for building secret access into Windows.

About two weeks ago, on January 10th to be exact, a call went out for a massive Internet protest, not unlike the protest two years ago against SOPA and PIPA censorship legislation. On that day, David Segal, executive director of Demand Progress, one of the founders of the planned protest, said, “Today the greatest threat to a free Internet, and broader free society, is the National Security Agency’s mass spying regime. If Aaron were alive he’d be on the front lines, fighting back against these practices that undermine our ability to engage with each other as genuinely free human beings.”

The press calls him a “nearly seventeen-year-old” and he’s reported to be one of the people behind the malware used to compromise credit card data at Target and other locations. He lives in Russia and is said to be the author of the BlackPOS malware that was used against Target and might have been used against Neiman Marcus.

On Friday, Roy Schestowitz posted an article on Techrights which seems to accuse Red Hat of being in cahoots with the NSA. According to the article, the company has been building back doors into RHEL for the spy agency. However, the article appears to be long on accusations and short on proof.

Back in November, the popular open source image editing program GIMP ended their association with SourceForge and dropped the site as it’s host. Since that time, downloads of GIMP have no longer been available on the site but have been moved to the GIMP’s website.

Kano began raising funds in December of 2013. Their goal was to raise $100,000 to expand their ability to manufacture and sell a kit that not only taught kids how to use a computer, but how to build one and how to write code to use on that computer as well. It’s designed to fire the interest and imagination of future Anita Borgs and Linus Torvalds.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a patent case between online retailer Newegg and patent troll Soverain Software. The case involved three patents held by Soverain dealing with online shopping carts. Newegg, which has vowed to fight all software patent cases, initially lost in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, which is infamous for favoring plaintiffs in patent cases. However, Newegg went on to score a victory when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled all three patents invalid because they were obvious.

This is a trend with the potential to eventually change hardware as radically as the various open source licenses have changed software. Indeed, it’s already making changes — and the concept isn’t just being adopted by small startups either.

The returned call she promised was as icy and distant as our initial meeting had been warm and cordial. She informed me that her director of IT strongly recommended against such a change. What it all boiled down to was his statement that:

“It might even be illegal for us to remove Microsoft Office or Windows from previously purchased computers, due to the vendor agreement the school district signed with Microsoft.”