Showing headlines posted by brideoflinux

Despite Oracle’s assurances that it’s safe for surfers to go back in the water, security experts remain uncertain about the safety of Java. On Information Week, writer Mathew J. Schwartz quotes at least one security expert who gives the security patch a thumbs up... However, Reuters reports that the same security expert still has reservations about Java security due to other unresolved issues:

When the Homeland Security folks get into the mix and urge all computer users to disable Java in their browsers, you know it’s serious. Indeed, the exploit announced yesterday seems to affect all operating systems, including Linux, and it’s already being exploited. According to Trend Micro the flaw is already being used by blackhat toolkits mainly to distribute ransomware. In a blog posted yesterday, the company advises all users to disable or uninstall Java:

My experience with “free” programs for Windows is that such shenanigans are business as usual, and justified by the fact there is no charge for the software and a buck has to be made somehow. The old saying, “there’s no such thing a free lunch,” is defined by such bad behavior.

Not the downsized “new and improved” Novell owned by Attachmate, though they have briefly been a part of this story. We’re talking about the old, basically inept Novell–the company that once practically owned enterprise networking back in the day when Bill Gates was shortsighted enough to believe that the future of computing was in stand alone and unconnected boxes. You know, the Novell that was second cousin, by way of Raymond Noorda and the Canopy Group, to SCO. The same Novell that decided to save their proprietary business by embracing open source and buying the SUSE Linux distribution in an attempt to reposition themselves as a poor man’s IBM sans hardware.

I’ve said for years that if the folks at Canonical want to get serious traction with Ubuntu and truly compete with the likes of Microsoft and Apple, they need to come out with their own line of hardware. Face it, the big OEMs still show little to no interest in pre-installed anything other than Windows and most home computer users aren’t ever going to start installing their own operating systems.

Obviously, this early in the game nobody, including Canonical, has even a clue as to how this will work out. But that doesn’t stop some writers from getting out the old crystal ball and having a go at Free Software fortune telling.

As usual, the Europeans are relieved to be able to let the United States take the lead in this sordid affair. It lets them have the appearance of having clean hands–even when their culpability is clearly visible. Think about it, the Brits won’t extradite him directly to the U.S., that wouldn’t be cricket, but they will extradite him to be “questioned” in Sweden on an unrelated matter, knowing that as soon as he lands in Stockholm he’ll be turned over to the Yanks, probably right at the airport.

Now that the New Zealand courts have the case, it appears as if the Megaupload king might, with luck, escape extradition to the United States. Even so, it’s doubtful his servers and data will ever be returned. Legitimate customers still can’t access their data, which remains in U.S. government hands. Dotcom, however, acts as if he’s holding a winning hand, having recently announced to his Twitter followers that he intends to launch a new service, Megabox, later this year.

Sometimes, however, mobs form. Posses meet up outside a hated website and hit the owners with barrages of venomous email. If a site has a forum or a Facebook page, they try to take over. If it’s supported by ad money, they might launch a campaign against the advertisers, as happened in 2010 with Cooks Source Magazine–a New England site brought down by web users for cavalierly stealing content.

If all of this fails to satisfy the mob’s thirst for blood, they might take their anger directly to the website’s landlord, the hosting company, with burlap bags filled with DMCA take-down notices the host can’t afford to ignore.

If memory serves, the only evidence we ever saw were some clumsily disguised lines of code from Linux that matched Unix code line for line. There was a good reason for the match; it was BSD code dating back to the infamous settlement between AT&T and Berkeley.

We’ve actually seen this theory in practice on numerous occasions, and it nearly always worked out just as Torvalds predicted. As an example, take the case of LibreOffice, which started as a fork of OpenOffice.org. Most users agree that The Document Foundation has greatly improved on the original OOo code, so much so that many if not most OpenOffice users have made the switch to LibreOffice.

The boot took forever. Several times I thought the system had stalled, then the progress bar would creep ever so slightly forward. After more than a few minutes I was prompted for the keyboard language, so I used the USB mouse I attach to the laptop whenever I’m at home and selected “English.” After another two or three minutes the desktop started showing up, piece by piece, but still very slowly. I killed time by playing with the mouse a bit, watching the cursor play across the screen. Unfortunately, when the installation was complete, the mouse and keyboard suddenly quit working. With no way to address the system, I took it down cold with the power button and rebooted. Again, it took forever to load and I lost use of the mouse, trackpad and keyboard the instant the boot was complete. This was only a minor inconvenience. I’d soon get help on the PCLOS forums and would have this problem fixed in short measure.

UNetbootin is a simple no frills tool, the type of program that used to populate the shelves at Egghead and other software stores back before the Internet changed everything. Using it to make a bootable USB drive from an ISO image is so easy even your grandmother could do it. Not only that, the application comes equipped to download and copy quite a few tools that might come in handy on a rescue drive.

The first choice you make after opening UNetbootin is between “Distribution” and “Diskimage.” If you choose the first option, you then choose a distro and version from two drop down list boxes. If the distro you need is on the list, this saves you the chore of downloading the image yourself, it’s all done for you. In addition, this list includes the tools you need for a good rescue operation, such as Parted Magick, Dr. Web Antivirus and NTPasswd.

Trying to understand the recent patent licensing deal between Microsoft and Amdocs is like watching a poker tournament, where you never know if a player is bluffing or if they have a pat hand. In this case, it appears that Microsoft is bluffing when it comes to Linux. An inspection of the facts, as they are known, indicate that the “Linux licensing” element of the story is only more Microsoft FUD–with Amdocs being a willing participant.

The other day, when my friend’s laptop spit-up a warning from ZoneAlarm that she was no longer protected, I stood over her shoulder and instructed her to update the firewall. The warning was basically a scare tactic, of course. Without the update she would still be protected, just as protected as she had been the day before. She just wouldn’t have any new whiz-bang features included in the update, nor would she be able to take advantage of any new security enhancements.

We ran the default install. This was Windows, so there had to be a reboot. After that, we opened the browser to find that the homepage had been reset to a ZoneAlarm themed Google search page. We had not opted-in to any such change; the ZoneAlarm folks had just taken it on themselves to hijack Firefox’s revenue, which I didn’t think cricket.

This doesn’t bode well for Nokia, which has gambled it’s future on Windows, or Microsoft. Both companies would like us to believe the move was brought about by Redmond’s recent announcement there will be no upgrade path from Windows Phone 7 to Windows Phone 8 when it’s released in a few months time. The truth seems to be that consumers simply aren’t interested in portable Windows devices, despite the gee-whiz advertising that’s been showing up on network TV recently.

There was a big difference between the pre-release days then and the current situation as we wait for Windows 8?s big official debut. Back then, all the Windows fans were actually looking forward to Vista. XP had been a big hit, and the Redmond fan boys thought Vista would be even a couple of notches better. After all, they’d been working on it for ages; all that work was bound to turn into the most super duper operating system ever.

The FOSS community is understandably upset with both Red Hat and Ubuntu for their planned ways of implementing UEFI Secure Boot. Indeed, both companies plans are unacceptable for a variety of reasons. Free software isn’t free if it requires permission from an outside source before it can be loaded onto a new or used computer. This is true even if the permission comes from a well-meaning bureaucratic regulatory agency. It’s doubly true if that permission must come from a self-serving monopoly with an anti-FOSS history, like Microsoft.

Federal authorities were evidently waiting for SOPA to pass before making their move against him and his site. On the same night that public opinion forced SOPA to fail, however, the feds decided to act anyway. They took down his website and had Dotcom taken into custody by the New Zealand authorities. They seized most of his assets, without proving anything in court, and are now attempting to have him extradited to the United States.

The trouble is, too many big publicly held companies have invested tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars of shareholder money buying up patents. Eliminating software patents, then, would wipe out billions of dollars in wealth being held not only by the trolls but by the likes of IBM, Oracle, Google, Apple and Microsoft. In other words, it isn’t going to happen. Too many of these guys employ people on K Street.

Software patents are costing us even more than we realize, however. We got an inkling this week from the BBC of how much that cost might be. It seems that the trolls alone are costing the U.S. $29 billion dollars yearly, according to James Bessen and Michael Meurer who took part in a study conducted by Boston University: