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On Thursday I had a very brief email discussion with the distro’s project leader Clem Lefebvre — “very brief” because Lefebvre was more than little busy at the time. He and his team are in up to their elbows, working to make sure that everything works and plays well with the hardening they’ve done to Mint’s server, as well as working overtime to find any niggling security issues. In other words, they have it all under control, even as they work to get it more under control.

The poll was pretty straight forward. “Should advertisers and ad agencies be forbidden to track users as they surf the web?” we asked. There were three answers offered, “Yes,” “No” and “With exceptions.”

Because I now use PC-BSD on a daily basis, the idea going forward is to pitch talks about the conversion from one side of the Free/Open Source Software street to the other; the uplifting situations and occasional hurdle such a conversion brings, and to outline the similiarities (lots) and differences (few, but relatively significant) between Linux distros and BSD variants.

She was speaking in support of two bills: the Free and Open Source Software Act, which “would minimize city contracts for proprietary software in favor of free and open source software that can be shared between government agencies and bodies,” and the Civic Commons Act, which “would encourage the collaborative software purchasing of free and open source software among agencies, cities and states to pool resources, avoid duplicated effort, create portable expertise, grow jobs, and reduce costs.” Both bills are sponsored by New York City councilman Ben Kallos, and both were originally introduced on May 29, 2014.

In Southeast Texas, a young girl easily harnesses the power of GNU/Linux as she prepares for her future as a veterinarian in America's heartland.

Everybody understands that none of a stage magician’s tricks are real. The one thing that is real, and which a successful illusionist must practice to perfection, is the art of misdirection — which evidently turned out the be the trick under the sleeves of the cracker/hackers who were responsible for compromising ISO downloads of Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon on Saturday.

Linux Mint project leader Clem Lefebvre revealed in a blog post today that the popular Linux distribution’s servers were hacked on Saturday. During the “brief” intrusion, the hackers modified the ISO for the Cinnamon edition of Linux Mint 17.3 (Rosa) and also gained access to the distro’s forum database. Only this particular ISO is affected; other editions or releases are considered safe. Only ISO’s downloaded Saturday are potentially vulnerable.

After the accident, a call went out in the San Francisco Bay area, and in her former home of Colorado as well, to make this past Tuesday, February 16, Code for Aubrey day. Developers and coders throughout the Bay Area and elsewhere dedicated all of the code they wrote on that day to Ms. Howell, “to show her our support and to send her good vibes,” and then post comments and screenshots of their commits to Twitter using the hashtag #codeforaubrey. Her fellow coders, friends and supporters have also been donating generously to a Go Fund Me account set up to help the family.

The first song I heard about the Linux Desktop was Hold On, It’s Coming, released in 1971 by Country Joe McDonald. This was an amazing prediction, considering that Linus Torvalds was only two years old at the time. Is it possible that young Linus heard this piece and it spurred him to create the GNU/Linux operating system? We may never know.

You can rest easy, BSDers: Not our circus, not our monkeys. Dag-Erling Smørgrav, a FreeBSD developer since 1998 and the current FreeBSD Security Officer, writes in his blog that "neither FreeBSD itself nor native FreeBSD applications are affected."

This past week marked a huge turning point for Raspberry Pi users, as the Manjaro Arm project marked its first alpha release. The reason this is such big news is that many Raspberry Pi users did not have a great entryway into Arch Linux prior to the Manjaro Arm Project. Arch has always been available for the Raspberry Pi, through either a direct download or using NOOBS, but neither is as user friendly as most other Raspberry Pi distros. This is where Manjaro Linux comes into the picture. Manjaro provides a more user-friendly approach to Arch with the goal of getting users into the Arch space who found either the installation or documentation a bit overwhelming.

A helpful tip for those coming of age as a Linux Advocate: Temper your rhetoric when explaining just how much Microsoft sucks. It’s easy to come off as a wild-eyed zealot. These are lessons in advocacy learned rather quickly. And yeah…, that whole wide-eyed zealot thing? It didn’t work out so well for me. Nor will it for you.

As Richard Stallman has pointed out, when it comes to advertising, those of us who buy and use products instead of making and selling them are the inventory the ad agencies are selling, not the customer, and we have no leverage. About the only tool available to us who wish to protect our privacy is to block ads, either through browser configurations or by using an ad blocking app.

The last time I used Opera on a regular basis was back in the day when Netscape 4X was long in the tooth, Netscape 6 was a disaster and Internet Explorer was…well, Internet Explorer. Opera was $50 for the ad free version, or free for those who didn't mind a few ads. I didn't mind because I could ignore them. It stayed on my computer until Mozilla came along, then it disappeared from my radar. Something tells me that my experience wasn't uncommon.

On Monday when we ran Christine Hall’s opinion piece on why she thought the upcoming Ubuntu tablet could change the future of mobile computing, we included a poll which asked, “If the price is right, will you be considering buying a Ubuntu tablet when they’re released in March?” Guess what? Well over half of you said you’re ready to break out your credit card and make a purchase.

For those of you keeping score at home, the Lumina Desktop Environment — let’s just call it Lumina for short — is a lightweight, XDG-compliant, BSD-licensed desktop environment focusing on getting work done while minimizing system overhead. Specifically designed for PC-BSD and FreeBSD, it has also been ported to many other BSD variants and Linux distros. Lumina is based on the Qt graphical toolkit and the Fluxbox window manager, and uses a small number of X utilities for various tasks.

The case ruled upon on Tuesday goes back to the time when SCO famously tried to force enterprise Linux users to pay SCO a license fee, since according to SCO, Linux was nothing more than a stolen version of SCO Unix being dressed up under another name. IBM, already a little ticked off at SCO because they’d sued them for the billion dollars, told SCO “hell no,” or words to that effect, when they heard of the licensing scheme, terminated whatever dealings they had left with the company, and just before slamming the door in a huff on their way out, told SCO that they would encourage their partners to do likewise.

Seemingly out of the blue, Batman: Arkham Knight’s planned Linux and OS X release has been cancelled. In all likelihood, this cancellation stems from the litany of problems with the game’s Windows port, which has been panned by critics and players as glitch plagued and often almost unplayable.

Late Tuesday evening, SourceForge’s new owners announced that the controversial DevShare program has been ended as a “first order of business.” The announcement came in a blog post by Logan Abbott, a co-owner and the president of SourceForge Media. “As of last week, the DevShare program was completely eliminated,” he wrote.

On Monday, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India shot down Free Basics, a scheme that offers free Internet access to a limited number of websites, which includes selected local news and weather sites, the BBC, Wikipedia and some health sites. The plan is backed by Facebook and six tech companies: Samsung, Ericsson, MediaTek, Opera Software, Nokia and Qualcomm. Free Basics has been available in India since February, 2015 and remains available in 35 other countries.