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Why worry about the desktop when you've conquered everything else? Let's just get this out of the way: this isn't the year of Linux on the desktop. That year will probably never arrive. But Linux has gotten just about everywhere else, and the Linux community can take a bow for making that happen. Android, based on the Linux kernel, is so prevalent on mobile devices that it makes the longstanding desktop quest seem irrelevant. But beyond Android there are a number of places where you can find Linux that are truly odd and intriguing, and by "places" we mean both...

Ransomware targeting Linux servers has been thwarted by hard working security boffins, with help from the software itself, mere days after its existence was made public.The Linux.Encoder.1 ransomware seeks Linux systems to encrypt and like others of its ilk demands owners pay BitCoins to have files decrypted. But the first iteration of the malware has, like most betas, proven fallible.Not only can it be decrypted using scripts without the need for ransoms to be paid, but it can re-encrypt itself, corrupting files and even encrypting the ransom note that directs victims how to pay the extortion.Bitdefender security wonks report both...

I've known Linus Torvalds, Linux's inventor, for over 20 years. We're not chums, but we like each other.Lately, Torvalds has been getting a lot of flack for his management style. Linus doesn't suffer fools gladly. He has one way of judging people in his business of developing the Linux kernel: How good is your code?Nothing else matters. As Torvalds said earlier this year at the Linux.conf.au Conference, "I'm not a nice person, and I don't care about you. I care about the technology and the kernel-that's what's important to me." Now, I can deal with that kind of person. If...

Ransomware targeting Linux servers has been thwarted by hard working security boffins, with help from the software itself, mere days after its existence was made public.The Linux.Encoder.1 ransomware seeks Linux systems to encrypt and like others of its ilk demands owners pay BitCoins to have files decrypted. But the first iteration of the malware has, like most betas, proven fallible.Not only can it be decrypted using scripts without the need for ransoms to be paid, but it can re-encrypt itself, corrupting files and even encrypting the ransom note that directs victims how to pay the extortion.Bitdefender security wonks report both...

Does Linus Torvalds fail to take security in the Linux kernel seriously, and is the world doomed because of it? That's what the Washington Post suggests in a recent article about security in the open source OS. The Post sums up Torvalds's take on security as follows: "Security of any system can never be perfect. So it always must be weighed against other priorities -- such as speed, flexibility and ease of use -- in a series of inherently nuanced trade-offs."The Post also describes Torvalds as "the man who holds the future of the Internet in his hands."Taken together, the...

Celebrity programmer Eric S. Raymond has aired a theory that feminist activists are trying to find a way to lay false sexual assault claims against male leaders of the open source community.Raymond is best known for his seminal tract The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and remains active in the world of open source, which he has championed since the late 1990s. In a blog post this week, Raymond, often referred to as "ESR", dropped this bomb on the internet: The short version is: if you are any kind of open-source leader or senior figure who is male, do not be...

Moscow requires major companies to move information to servers in Russia by start of next year A Russian law could place the personal data of millions of Internet users, including Americans, at risk if international digital companies comply by the start of next year, analysts say. The law, enacted last year, requires digital companies to store the personal information of Russians in servers on Russian soil. While officials in Moscow have cited concerns that Russians’ information could be vulnerable to foreign intelligence services such as the National Security Agency (NSA) if it is located outside the country’s borders, critics of...

Celebrity programmer Eric S. Raymond has aired a theory that feminist activists are trying to find a way to lay false sexual assault claims against male leaders of the open source community. Among his many blog posts, Raymond has also identified criticized contemporary feminism, called for the demilitarization of US police and argued against gun control.

His name is Morgan, but it hasn’t always been his name. What it was before doesn’t legally matter any longer. What does matter, to us, is the concentric circles by which “Morgan” arrived…came to be. Morgan doesn’t know any better. Many metaphors of consciousness can be applied, but for Morgan, your arguments on his condition fall outside of his realm of concern. Morgan is Morgan, and what Morgan does in the present is all that matters. What might have been his reality, to you, before “the incident,” is simply pabulum to Morgan. To Morgan, you are children trying to complete...

The Linux Foundation recently put up a funny video showing what life might be like without Web search. It's tagline was "A world without Linux is hard to imagine." It also added, "A world without Linux would mean a world without the Internet." Ah. No. The Internet actually started as ARPAnet, a government sponsored packet-switching network in September 1969. Linus Torvalds wouldn't be born until December 1969. The cartoon is really about search on the Web, not the Internet itself. The Web got its start in 1991. It first ran om NeXTStations. These were Steve Job-designed Unix workstations. They're the...

It's easy to forget how intimidating it can be when trying something completely new for the first time. This is especially true when a power-user comfortable with Windows tries Linux. Since I'm a power user of various Linux distros, Windows and OS X, I have some insights that I think people looking to migrate to Linux need to read. Let's get started, shall we?Linux is not Windows The first thing that people who migrate from Windows need to understand is that Linux is not Windows. People seem to forget this fact when they experience something completely foreign while using Linux....

Linus Torvalds The Linux community often recognizes two anniversaries for Linux: August 25th is the day Linus Torvalds first posted that he was working on Linux and said “Hello, everybody out there…” and October 5th is the day he released the first kernel.To mark the anniversary of the first kernel release in 1991, we look at some facts and consider the progress that has been made since that early version. Version 0.01 of the Linux kernel had 10,239 lines of code (source: Wikipedia). Version 4.1, released in July 2015, has more than 19 million lines of code (source: Phoronix). ...

I love the Linux desktop. As far as I'm concerned, the Linux Mint 17.2 is the best desktop around. Heck, I was once editor-in-chief of a website called Linux Desktop. But today, I believe there's no way the Linux desktop will ever become the top desktop operating system. The Linux desktop, here Mint 17.2 with Cinnamon, is great, but it will never be popular the way Windows was. That's right. There will be no "Year of the Linux desktop." Oh, don't get me wrong, Linux, as Android tablets and smartphones and Chrome OS Chromebooks, will become the most popular end-user...

Even after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella proclaimed Microsoft loved Linux and Microsoft released a specialized Linux for switches, Azure Cloud Switch, many don't buy that Microsoft believes in Linux. What will it take? Maybe, it will be this: Microsoft has selected Ubuntu for its first Linux-based software-as-a service offering, HDInsight, Microsoft's big data Hadoop-on-Azure service. Windows and Ubuntu working together.Microsoft has partnered with Canonical, Ubuntu's parent company, and Hortonworks, a major developer of the Hadoop program. Hadoop enables distributed processing of big data over commodity server clusters and clouds. Together the three companies have made it possible to run HDInsight...

When we released Raspberry Pi 2 in February this year, we announced that Microsoft’s Windows 10 IoT Core, a version of Windows 10 for small Internet-of-Things devices that may or may not have a screen, would be available for the device. Since the Windows Insider release of Windows 10 Core in August, we’ve found that lots of people looking for a Pi 2 are arriving at sellers’ websites from sites catering for Windows developers. Many Windows developers are coming to Raspberry Pi for the first time; we couldn’t be more pleased to welcome them, and we hope they’ll encounter much...

Microsoft will later this year release its open-source friendly lake for big-data analytics in the cloud. Azure Data Lake Store – announced at Build in April – will be released as a preview, Microsoft said Monday. The store will be built on Apache YARN for developers and data scientists, to analyse information, and will use Azure HDInsight – a managed service for Hadoop, Spark, Storm and Hbase. HDInsight was developed by Microsoft working with Ubuntu-shop Canonical and Hadoop spinner Hortonworks, Microsoft and Canonical said. In preparation for the preview Microsoft Monday threw the doors open on managed Linux clusters. Microsoft’s...

Hell must be getting chilly. Microsoft is no longer just supporting Linux as Hyper-V virtual machines (VM) and Azure clouds, the Redmond giant is producing its very own Linux "distribution" -- Azure Cloud Switch (ACS) . Notice the quotes around distribution. Microsoft has not created its own server or desktop distribution. Indeed, you can't buy, lease, or download ACS. This way Microsoft gets to offer Linux-based services while staying on the right side of Linux's GNU General Public License, version 2 (GPLv2) legal requirements. Linux's GPLv2 requires that the code be made freely available only if you're actually shipping your...

Today marks a huge milestone for Steam on Linux: 1,500 games are natively available! This is quite significant while Windows is at 6,464 and OS X is at 2,323.New games continue to be ported to Linux and offered via Steam almost daily. This is all while the Steam Linux market-share is below 1%. Heck, even stats well outside the gaming space show Linux desktop use at less than 2%.While the Linux gaming marketshare right now is very tiny, game developers continue porting to Linux in anticipation of a return on investment down the road as more gamers try out SteamOS...

This week, Microsoft unveiled Azure Cloud Switch, a boring-sounding product that's only interesting to developers and IT professionals working on the bleeding edge of networking technology. The scandalous part is actually under the hood: Azure Cloud Switch is, at the core, a specialized version of Linux — a free operating system that former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer once referred to as "a cancer." Linux, created in the early 1990s by incredibly influential programming firebrand Linus Torvalds and further developed by a veritable army of volunteers from around the world, never quite toppled the dominance of Microsoft Windows on the desktop....

Redmond reveals Azure Cloud Switch, its in-house software-defined networking OS Sitting down? Nothing in your mouth? Microsoft has developed its own Linux distribution. And Azure runs it to do networking. Redmond's revealed that it's built something called Azure Cloud Switch (ACS), describing it as “a cross-platform modular operating system for data center networking built on Linux” and “our foray into building our own software for running network devices like switches.” Kamala Subramanian, Redmond's principal architect for Azure Networking, writes that: “At Microsoft, we believe there are many excellent switch hardware platforms available on the market, with healthy competition between many...