Showing headlines posted by brideoflinux

Since Edward Snowden ruined it for everyone by making us aware of the fact that we share the water with sharks when we surf, security has been a key word. This, of course, has been a bonanza for security vendors and right now everyone is clamoring to get on the gravy train.

Back on Halloween, when we ran our article on Ross Gardler’s presentation on “Microsoft and Open Source” at the All Things Open conference, we posted a poll that asked, “Is Microsoft committed to open source?” Guess what? You answered “no,” as in “nope,” “nadda” or “ain’t no way, baby.”

If the digital world is undergoing a binary version of the global warming awareness thingie, you can treat the gamers as a solar flare heading straight for our atmosphere. They don’t care about how long your smartphone battery is going to last, because they need a nuclear plant’s worth of power to play their games. They need the best games, and accordingly, the best hardware. Which means, if you want to be the gamers’ darling you need to design hardware that can do that and then provide drivers that bring all that power to bear. Like cars and their transmissions.

On Sunday, Forbes reported that FindTheBest, an online comparison shopping site, had managed to have a patent being used against it invalidated in federal court. In this case, Denese Cote, a federal judge in N.Y. state found in favor of FindTheBest and invalidated the patent.

We may hear more about this case later. After the plaintiff, Lumen View Technology LLC, demanded $50,000 from FindTheBest for infringing their patent, the site filed suit against the patent troll under the RICO act.

As news continues to be released, it becomes more and more obvious that the NSA is now the de facto owner of the Internet and at this point it appears that little can be done about it. The federal government has poured over $1.5 billion into the Bumblehive project alone, the million square foot facility in Utah that includes a 100,000 square foot data center. It seems doubtful, given the amount of money the U.S. government has put into such NSA projects, that legislators will vote to shut down these operations anytime soon — if ever.

Reuters reported on Monday that the search company has agreed to pony-up $17 million in order to settle a claim by 37 states and the District of Colombia that it had secretly tracked users of smartphones by purposefully circumventing web browser protections. This was after the firm had already reached a $22 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission in August of last year in a case related to the same activity.

We’re always bemoaning the injustices in the world, but when given the opportunity to help one child, one time, no one seizes the opportunity because “I don’t know any poor people?” Take my word for it — poor people won’t be that hard to find.

This wasn’t the case with a group of Reddit users last week, where a scene broke out in a comment thread that pretty much turned into a mob that reminded me of the Cooks Source massacre of 2010. It seems that a few folks don’t need to know the full story before picking up their virtual weapons and launching an attack. They’re ready to bring SourceForge to its knees by flooding all of SourceForge’s download mirror sites with emails vilifying the service.

On October 26th, ten year old Charlie Thompson went to a Halloween party at a friends house in rural New York state. The weather was reasonably mild, so much of the party took place outside. At some point the children began playing a game of hide and seek. Charlie and another boy found a wooden board that Charlie thought would be a perfect place to hide. He lifted the board and knelt on another board that was underneath.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has asked the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to review evidence that the NSA’s “Associational Tracking Program” is both unconstitutional and that it’s not authorized under Section 215 of the Patriot Act which the government has been using as justification of NSA practices. The EFF also provided the court with testimony from 22 separate organizations that detail how the NSA’s program of collecting telephone records is hampering their operations.

The lawsuit filed by patent troll Rockstar Consortium Inc. on Halloween against Google and at least five makers of Android handsets is about much more than merely the tons of money that would be reaped if the Rockstar cartel prevails. Mainly, it’s about gaining a competitive edge that could result in increased market share down the road.

We can’t figure out if Canonical wants to be Apple or Microsoft. Of one thing we’re certain, however, they clearly don’t want to be Linux.

It seems that Micah Lee, a technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has a website called “Fix Ubuntu,” on which he explains how keep Ubuntu from contacting Amazon and others everytime you use the OS’s search tool. Evidently, the folks at Canonical don’t like this and have instructed him that he must quit using their logo on his site. In addition, he must change the URL, https://fixubuntu.com/, to something that doesn’t contain the word Ubuntu.

After we made up our mind on our preference, we asked you what you thought with yet another of our unscientific polls, which we posted on October 10th. “Would you like your smartphone, tablet and PC interface to be the same?” we asked. We offered four choices: “Yes, exactly the same;” “Similar but not exact;” “No” and “Don’t know.”

You have no direct ability to correct change. You can request changes from your vendor. They might integrate it into a new future release. They might release a one off patch just for you. Well, guess what, you’re now your own special and unique snowflake in their world and that locks you in even further.

The legal papers were filed by Rockstar Consortium, a patent troll owned by Microsoft, Apple, BlackBerry, Ericsson, and Sony. They hold 6,000 plus patents purchased in an auction for $4.5 billion from bankrupt Canadian telecom Nortel. Google had been bidding against Rockstar for the same patents, but dropped out after placing a $4.4 billion bid that didn’t hold up. Not long afterwards, Google bought Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, in large part for its vast patent portfolio–just in case a patent war broke out.

One of the most popular Linux sites, Tuxmachines.org, announced on October 28th that it has been tentatively sold for $1,000. The Clarksville, Tennessee based site, owned and operated by Susan Linton, made the announcement in a short post on the site.

WordPress isn’t just for bloggers anymore. Although WordPress built it’s reputation as a blogging platform, it’s now much more than that. Some of the biggest sites on the web, where a temporarily broken site might have serious financial consequences, are running atop WordPress.

On October 2nd, we ran a poll and asked our readers, mostly free software devotees, to pick from a list of seven statements the one that best described where Microsoft would be five years from now.

Microsoft is embracing open source because they have no choice if they wish to keep their proprietary products relevant–especially in the cloud. If Windows Azure offered virtual machines running only on Windows, or only proprietary programs and apps for their stack, the service would fail miserably. Azure’s success depends on its ability to offer CentOS, Apache, Hadoop, Drupal and the like.

Ubuntu belongs to Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical. The last time we checked the GPL, they’re allowed to do with the code anything they want so long as they give any changes back to the community, which they appear to be doing.