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Patch early and patch often is the advice of security professionals when it comes to software updates. Yet sysadmins will be increasingly leery of applying such an approach to Windows systems following Microsoft's latest botch job.

Interested in keeping track of what's happening in the open source cloud? Opensource.com is your source for what's happening right now in OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project.

Imagine yourself walking down the middle of a crowded street in a complex city like Cairo. Suddenly a protest builds ahead. A mass of people, cutting off the road. You try to evade, but then violence breaks out in mere seconds. You need help. Someone else, a car to get you out. A phone call might suffice, but wouldn't it be easier to notify all your friends that this place is dangerous and that you need their assistance? This is where a map-based social network could come into play. read more

Humans have always formed communities. They are necessary for support both physically and, according to psychologists, emotionally as well. Until recently, though, the development of communities was constrained by geography. If you wanted to raise a barn or have a quilting circle, for example, only the folks nearby could participate. The Internet, though, has allowed communities to grow in ways that are not bounded by geography. read more

What SHOULD Microsoft call its browser? Internet Explorer could be getting a new name as Microsoft tries to escape the browser’s troubled past.…

In part one of my interview with Pia Mancini, a political activist, I investigated the technologies and background of DemocracyOS, a project aiming to become the operating system of choice for government workers. In part two of my interview with Mancini, she discusses the challenges DemocracyOS faces and how her organization, Democracia en Red, is working to overcome them. read more

Working with permissions on Linux is rather a simple task. You can define permissions for users, groups or others. This works really well when you work on a desktop PC or a virtual Linux instance which typically doesn't have a lot of users, or when users don't share files among themselves. However, what if you are a big organization where you operate NFS or Samba servers for diverse users. Then you will need to be nitpicky and set up more complex configurations and permissions to meet the requirements of your organization.

A few months ago, the Heartbleed bug was discovered in the OpenSSL cryptography library, which plays an absolutely critical role in securing confidential online transactions. We then discovered that for years this critical piece of infrastructural software has been maintained by a handful of overworked volunteers. The industry was rightly shocked by Heartbleed, and some companies – notably Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Cisco and Amazon – agreed to donate $300,000 each over the next three years to support the OpenSSL project. You can interpret this as "corporate social responsibility". I call it common sense.

The net neutrality saga continued today as well as the FCC made September 15th the final day for public opinions. It was just yesterday that the Federal Communications Commission asked for an explanation for their act of slowing down the internet for specific kind of data. According to the recent reports, the FCC has for the time being officially postponed the implementation of the new set of rules.

The speakers and sessions planned for this year’s events showcase how leaders in diverse industries are using the power of open source and collaboration to innovate and advance technology for all. The open source principles espoused by Linux and other projects have grown and expanded to now be used in many other areas including healthcare, manufacturing, data science and more.

The -- very old -- laptop of a friend of mine died the other day and I offered to give her my old laptop as a replacement. Problem was, an old version of Windows was installed on my old laptop which I had to get rid of. Since I did not have any spare Windows product keys at the time, I decided to install Linux on the device instead. While the main reason was that I could do so without paying a dime, it would improve the overall system security as well which is always a good thing. Since I'm not really a Linux guy, I had to do some research on how to get Linux on the device. Turns out, it is pretty simple and straightforward.

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Many of the Flock talks were logged in PiratePads. We’re hoping to gather a list of them all, so if you have a link to one not listed here, please […]

Samsung is acquiring home automation firm SmartThings, setting up the potential integration with Tizen inside an upcoming Linux version of the SmartThings hub. As TechCrunch predicted a month ago, Samsung announced an agreement to acquire SmartThings. In July, TechCrunch pegged the sale at $200 million, which if true would be a steal compared to the […]

With a little hunting, you can find some fantastic games on Fedora if you look. Recently, I unearthed OpenTTD and have been having a great time playing it! I haven’t […]

WhoaVerse is an open source platform for creating social media communities where users apply democratic principles to shape the content. read more

System administrators (sysadmins) are responsible for day-to-day operations of production systems and services. One of the critical roles of sysadmins is to ensure that operational services are available round the clock. For that, they have to carefully plan backup policies, disaster management strategies, scheduled maintenance, and security audits. In most cases, end users are oblivious […]Continue reading... The post What are useful CLI tools for Linux system admins appeared first on Xmodulo. Related FAQs: How to speed up directory navigation in a Linux terminal How to set up MailScanner, Clam Antivirus and SpamAssassin in CentOS mail server How to close an open DNS resolver How to set up Samba as a Primary Domain Controller How to set up a Samba file server to use with Windows clients

Linux New Media has published a special edition magazine called Free From XP, which features a DVD with Fedora 20 Desktop Edition and the LXDE Spin, and includes articles from Fedora contributors about getting started with our favorite distro.

The federal government is the single largest purchaser of code in the world. So why is this code—taxpayer-funded and integral to the day-to-day working of our democracy—so often hidden from public view? There are two sides to answering that question: Why does the government so often build on closed platforms, and once built, why isn't the code released to the public? read more

For Careers in Open Source Week here at Opensource.com, I thought I would turn to the people I work with everyday to see how open source has changed their view on things. I interviewed Melissa Lefebvre who joined our Koha support team almost a year ago after working on Evergreen, another open source ILS system, for four years as Project Manager at Bibliomation, Inc., a large public and school consortium in Connecticut. read more

Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to follow it all. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each. This article summarises the five things for August 12th, 2014: