Free Republic

One of the biggest lies told about open source is that it's insecure. In letting just anyone use your code, that has to include the bad guys. They're bound to find a way to compromise it, the thinking goes. But that's not the way it works in real life. Having every potential victim working on your neighborhood code watch turns out to deliver more security, not less. Having everyone who might be the victim of an online break-in organized, finding bugs, writing and testing fixes, constantly improving security tools, works. Don't believe me? Well, maybe you'll believe the National Security...

Digia has bought out Qt from Nokia. Uh oh? Nokia has announced today that Digia is acquiring the Qt software technologies and Qt business from Nokia. Digia is completely taking over Qt. Digia is the open-core company that previously took over Qt Commercial and releases their special version of Qt to customers. Digia claims they will take care of the commercial and open-source versions of the new Qt and they also want to bring the popular tool-kit to Android, Apple iOS, and Windows 8. With the Qt acquisition, a maximum of 125 people from Nokia will be joining Digia. Most...

For years, there has been one constant for users making the switch to Linux: gaming was going to be a thing of the past.Not that people havenÂ’t tried, of course. Software like WINE (with its gaming spin-offs like Cedega and PlayOnLinux) have made it possible to run Windows games on Linux with mixed results. There have also been the occasional forays into official Linux support in a handful of titles, but outside of the Humble Indie Bundle, Linux games sales have never been able to touch even Mac OS, let alone Windows.Linux users who wanted to do any serious...

I have been a Linux (Linux in this article refers to Linux based Operating System) user for a quite a number of years, actually, since I owned my first PC about four years ago. All through I have been using Fedora Linux , and it has not been an easy ride all along. Linux users have to learn how to use text editors, and how to work their way around configuration files. Initially, the issue was that Fedora Linux ships without a number of drivers, so called proprietary drivers and software. Proprietary drivers are drivers that do not conform to...

There are countless users of Microsoft's Windows operating system who become Linux users each year--an important part of the engine that drives the popularity of Linux. In some cases, these migrating users want to escape the malware storm that afflicts the Windows ecosystem; in some cases they want to run Linux alongside Windows (a dual-OS strategy that has its advantages); and in some cases they want to use specific applications that are available for Linux. For those who want to make the switch from Windows to Linux, there are a lot of good free resources that can help. There is...

I guess you could say I started cheating on Windows back in October of 2010. That’s when Apple debuted the revamped MacBook Air. For the first time, I could resume working almost as soon as I flipped the lid on a laptop, thanks to the way the notebook leveraged its flash memory. (Intel and Ultrabook makers wouldn’t offer a similar instant-on experience until a year later.) The Air was a work of art, but it didn’t feel complete until OS X Lion arrived last year. With key time-saving features like Auto Save and Mission Control for faster multitasking, I started...

Unknown to tens of millions of users, a hidden security vulnerability has been lurking on many Intel-based Windows PCs for the past six years. The vulnerability was found by researcher Rafal Wojtczuk from security firm Bromium. Wojtczuk announced his findings at the Black Hat security conference here in Las Vegas. According to Wojtczuk, the vulnerability he re-discovered was actually first exposed and patched six years ago, albeit only on Linux systems.The vulnerability involves the unsafe use of an Intel CPU instruction called 'sysret'. The risk is that if left unpatched, an attacker could have executed a user-to-kernel privilege escalation attack....

The prospect of Windows 8's planned Secure Boot restrictions has caused no end of controversy in the Linux world, where distributors and users of the free and open source operating system have been struggling to figure out just what it's all going to mean for those who don't embrace Windows. The prospect of Windows 8's planned Secure Boot restrictions has caused no end of controversy in the Linux world, where distributors and users of the free and open source operating system have been struggling to figure out just what it's all going to mean for those who don't embrace Windows....

A tidbit buried within an hour long video: http://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA At about 19 minutes, he starts talking about IBM, and how there was a drive to sell Linux. And he goes on to point out how easy to use interfaces just weren't a high priority until the commercial interests came in and did a lot of the boring stuff. They did Q and A. And other things he eludes to but doesn't specifically list. I point this out because I myself have run into a lot of the total anti-commercial venom from various people over the years, and that doesn't have...

Paolo Bonzini noticed something a little awkward in the Linux kernel support code for Microsoft's HyperV virtualisation environment - specifically, that the magic constant passed through to the hypervisor was "0xB16B00B5", or, in English, "BIG BOOBS". It turns out that this isn't an exception - when the code was originally submitted it also contained "0x0B00B135". That one got removed when the Xen support code was ripped out.

This set of patches implements the core Linux support for the AArch64 (64-bit ARM) architecture. ARM introduced AArch64 as part of the ARMv8 architecture and consists of a substantially revised exception model (with 4 exception levels: EL0 - user, EL1 - kernel, EL2 - hypervisor, EL3 - secure monitor), new A64 instruction set based on larger register file, new FP/SIMD instructions. The new ABI is LP64 and takes advantage of the larger register file and mandates FP. AArch64 documentation currently available (publicly, though click-through agreement required): - Instruction Set Overview:http://infocenter.arm.com/help/topic/com.arm.doc.genc010197a/index.html - ABI (PCS, ELF, DWARF, C++):http://infocenter.arm.com/help/topic/com.arm.doc.ihi0059a/index.html The AArch64 Linux port...

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 isnÂ’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. ItÂ’s doubly true if that permission must come from a self-serving monopoly with an anti-FOSS history, like Microsoft.In early June, Red Hat came under fire from the FOSS press for their...

An estimated 300,000 computers, most of them in the United States, Italy and India, could be infected and lose their Internet service, Queen's University associate professor Thomas Dean said Friday. Dean said Canadians can go to www.dcwg.org to check if their computers are infected and take appropriate measures. If computers have been infected due to the scam, they haven't been able to perform anti-virus software or system updates, leaving them vulnerable to other malware, said Dean, who teaches in Queen's University's department of electrical and computer engineering.

I have been having trouble for the last 2 weeks trying to resolve this issue..

Just got my 35 dollar Raspberry Pi Debian Linux computer and thought I'd show fellow freepers how to get on the web and freep on the cheap. It's a Linux setup so it's pretty secure compared to Windows. I'm installing a web server on it now (Apache) and trying to get a cheap USB wifi dongle to work so I can disconnect the ethernet cable...the less cables the better! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNX5Fdt7uu4&feature=youtu.be

The recent hubbub over Linus Torvalds’ comments towards Nvidia as well as Nvidia’s response to those comments have once again brought up intense debates between Linux users and the rest of the computing pack. Reading the comments on Engadget or The Verge for these news articles, I realized that the general public has some misconceptions about Linux and its ecosystem. I use Linux distributions every single day both on my phone and on the desktop. When I read such comments, I find it kind of funny, but also kind of sad that the Linux that I use so routinely and...

In a lengthy email interview with TechCrunch's Scott Merrill, Linux creator Linus Torvalds allows that he's a bit baffled at how nobody else seems to have done what Apple did with the MacBook Air - even several years after the Air's first release. Torvalds pronounces the Air "special" and "ahead of its time", elaborating that he wants his office to be quiet, with the loudest thing in the room the occasional purring of the cat, and that when he travels, he wants to travel light, contending that a notebook weighing more than a kilo (2.2 lb.) is less than ideal,...

Linus Torvalds developed Linux in 1991 while at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He became a US citizen in 2010.Linux creator Linus Torvalds has won the Millennium Technology Prize and an accompanying cheque for 600,000 euros ($756,000; £486,000) from the Technology Academy of Finland.He was nominated for the award in recognition of the fact he had created the original Linux operating system and has continued to work on it, deciding what modifications should be made to its kernel - the code that lets software and hardware work together.Today variants of the system power much of the world's computer servers, set-top...

The US Navy has signed off on a $27,883,883 contract from military contractor Raytheon to install Linux ground control software for its fleet of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) drones. The contract covers the Naval Air Station at Patuxent River in Maryland, which has already spent $5,175,075 beginning to install Linux systems. The no-bid contract was awarded to finish the work and get the Navy's drone fleet fully operational using a Linux backbone. The Navy's only listed VTOL drone is the Northrup-Grumman MQ8B Fire Scout, which is designed to be carried by frigates and to provide electro-optical and infrared reconnaissance...

(Brief disclaimer - while I work for Red Hat, I'm only going to be talking about Fedora here. Anything written below represents only my opinions and my work on Fedora, not Red Hat's opinions or future plans) Fedora 17 was released this week. It's both useful and free, and serves as a welcome addition to any family gathering. Do give it a go. But it's also noteworthy for another reason - it's the last Fedora release in the pre-UEFI secure boot era. Fedora 18 will be released at around the same time as Windows 8, and as previously discussed all...