Showing headlines posted by brideoflinux

On March 7, the FCC slapped a $1.35 million fine on Verizon in a privacy case, a move that’s being hailed as a victory by some privacy advocates. If so, it would seem to me to be a hollow victory. For starters, the fine is too low to be much of a deterrent against a company which last year had income of over $63 billion. But there is much more wrong with the agreement the carrier reached with the FCC than merely the price tag.

Sometimes you have to quit cleaning your code long enough to clean your room. The people at the FreeBSD Foundation have already been doing some spring cleaning. They've even called the decorator.

If there was ever an open source conference that doesn’t need any help from the press, it’s this year’s Great Wide Open in Atlanta. In spite of getting very little media attention, IT-oLogy, the nonprofit behind the event, was able to announce nearly two weeks ago that tickets to the second day of the two day conference were already sold out, with less than 200 remaining tickets for day one. Day one was Wednesday, and as logic would dictate, day two is today.

Some of the most visited sites on the Internet began delivering malware laden ads this weekend. The sites affected included The New York Times, the BBC, MSN, and AOL. Those who visited a site delivering the ads are not at risk unless they clicked on an infected ad. After clicking, users are taken to another website which attempts to infect them with either Cryptowall ransomware or a trojan that gives the attackers control of the infected computer. The good news for FOSS Force readers is that the malware seems to only works against Windows, so GNU/Linux users are considered safe.

When last we left, I had summarized an interview conducted by The Pi Podcast with Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton concerning the release of the Raspberry Pi 3. Since then, I was lucky enough to purchase one of the devices and spent the last several days getting to use it for the first time to see how well it lives up to the hype.

The fact of the matter is, I do not encourage Reglue kids to post in many of the forums. Some of you may remember that in 2007 I almost went to jail for calling someone out on a forum and maybe crossing the the line between civil discourse and threatening to drag him out to the street and whip his…uh, backside. The jerk had brought a 14-year-old girl to tears, calling her an inbred moron and suggesting she ought to wander up to her daddy's still and have a slash with her brother.

In 2006, Oracle began trying to abscond with RHEL's paying user base. On Thursday, Microsoft announced that it's now going to give Oracle a similar treatment. What's that they say about paybacks?

Two big open source conferences are coming up next week, while this week an automaker said it doesn't have to pay attention to the GPL and the man credited with inventing email passed.

A router designed to ease the use of multiple devices through a virtual private network is the latest hardware project to receive the Free Software Foundation's official blessing.

The Document Foundation today announced the release of LibreOffice 5.1.1, the first minor release of the LibreOffice 5.1 family, with a number of mostly bug fixes over the last major release, version 5.1.0 which was released on February 10.

The upcoming release of OpenBSD's latest and greatest comes with plenty of upgrades and improvements -- plus the sound of music….

Microsoft's use of open source continues to be a one-way street to drive business Redmond's way.

I am just bustin’-at-the-seams happy to announce The New Hope Computer Technology Project here in my small town of Taylor, Texas. After way too many meetings and committees formed to insure viability, Reglue is fully operational and in the midst of installing computers for people who need them most.

The old and the new both made big news on the FOSS front this week. Representing the old was what appears to be the ending of the SCO vs IBM case after something like 13 years, which means that Caldera/SCO now gets to go it its final resting place. For the new, was the release of the Raspberry Pi 3, which comes weilding a 64-bit ARM processor with built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. But that wasn’t the only news of interest to the FOSS world this week…

Now that it's March, we can look for the first signs of spring. We can also take an early look at FreeBSD 10.3, due to be released later this month, through this beta release.

The transparency of open software means that security vulnerabilities are visible and can't be quietly swept under the rug.

The month of February kept up with the trend of bigger and better things happening in the Raspberry Pi world. From new games to updates from the International Space Station, things keep moving on for the Raspbery Pi and the Raspberry Pi community.

Most everyone reading this, to at least some point, is computer proficient. Whether we’ve written scripts for macros to make our typing tasks simpler, or created entire websites, we perceive our skills as part of our daily lives. Not a big deal. It’s simply the tools we’ve accrued to facilitate our work. Ctrl+A? Nothin’ to it. Ctrl+V? Same same. Vi vs Emacs? Don’t start it.

It appears as if SCO’s case against IBM, which began as a blustering tornado back in 2003, finally died with a whimper last week. The death notice came in the form of what is essentially a one page agreement between SCO and IBM which calls “for certification of the entry of final judgment on the Court’s orders concerning all of SCO’s claims….”

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has officially announced the launch of the Raspberry Pi 3, which is the first Pi to come with built-in wireless capabilities and a 64-bit processor.