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"from the that's-not-how-it-works dept Earlier this month, we wrote about how the Copyright Officer had filed a really bizarre and legally dubious comment with the FCC concerning the FCC's plan to open up competition in TV set top boxes, ending cable company's monopoly on those boxes (for which they bring in $21 billion in revenue per year). "

"With so many articles about Linux security on the internet, you may feel overwhelmed by how to properly secure your Linux systems. With this guide, we walk through different steps, tools, and resources. The main goal is to have you make an educated choice on what security defenses to implement on Linux. For this reason, this article won't show any specific configuration values, as it would implicate a possible best value. Instead, related articles and resources will be available in the text. The goal is to make this guide into a go-to article for when you need to secure your Linux installation. If you like this article, help others and share it on your favorite social media channels. Got feedback? Use the comments at the bottom. This document in work in progress and last updated in September 2016"

"October 14, 2016 Sean LeRoy 2 Comments Opinion The prowess and power of Open Source is undeniable. From servers, to the desktop, mobile, to the underpinnings of the so-called "Internet of Things", Open Source spans sectors and continents, public and private. One profession, however, that has traditionally been dominated by closed, proprietary software solutions - and usually very expensive ones at that! - is the field of design. In this article, we'll take a look at some free and open source options"

" Who's Afraid of P2P? Corbett * 12/10/2015 * 10 Comments Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed Wired has allegedly found elusive Bitcoin creator "Satoshi Nakamoto" in Australia…and less than 24 hours later he's being raided by the Australian Federal Police. Sadly, given the attempts by the MSM and governments around the world to link the P2P economy to terror, mayhem and criminality, this is hardly surprising."

"by The StudyWeb.com Team 20 Comments For many businesses, open source VoIP programs and apps offer a great way to save thousands of dollars every year in telephony costs. Better yet, open source programs are fully customizable to a business' specific needs, making them a popular solution that often just can't be beat. "

"This summer, the EU decides on net neutrality. If we lose, European ISPs win the power to give some sites & apps special treatment-while slowing others to a crawl. On June 28, the EU Slowdown begins. Sites will protest with a slow loading icon based on Europe's flag, to drive millions of comments to EU regulators. Can you join?"

[Introduction After seeing an attempted comment thread survey on /r/Linux I thought it'd be neat to conduct a real survey using Google Docs. I created the survey and posted it as this thread. I definitely got a better reaction than I expected! Overall I'd like to thank those who took the time to respond to the survey. You guys did a pretty good job of giving me only good data. There were surprisingly few garbage responses that I had to filter out. Stay classy guys & gals.]

"Posted: Tuesday, September 11, 2012 12:00 am Marcus Williams | 0 comments For the vast majority of us who have never read the iTunes Terms of Service Agreement after downloading - for what seems like the 100th update - it may come as a surprise that we do not, in fact, own any of this "purchased" music."

" By Ernesto On: 31/01/2014 Comments: 8 Breaking Researchers from the University of Massachusetts have launched a torrent site which allows academics to share papers and datasets. AcademicTorrents provides researchers with a reliable and decentralized platform to share their work with peers, as well as the rest of the world. The site currently indexes over 1.5 petabytes of data, including NASA's map of Mars. "

" Andy On: 04/02/2014 Comments: 41 Breaking With blocking currently a hot topic there are many looking towards technical solutions that can offer a robust publishing environment free of censorship. To that end a U.S.-based developer has unveiled an experimental decentralized web browser that aims to thwart such attacks, and excitingly it's running BitTorrent under the hood."

"7th June 2013 / Blog, Linux, Open Source, Operating System, Tutorial / 3 comments Linux is the name of revolution in the field of open source technology. Ever since its advent it has grown leaps and bounds and continues to conquer the open source world. What make Linux so desirable are the features which comes with it that too for no cost. Linux was developed by "Linus Torvalds". His aim was to develop an operating system which was free from the hassles of proprietorship and should be free to use, so he developed Linux and the rest is history!"

"Neelie Kroes, VP of the European Commission (EC), has a website called Comment Neelie to initiate and maintain a two-way conversation between herself, as a politician, and the public, as citizens. Kroes says that it's "a channel to communicate, not just broadcast.""

"As part of the contest we conducted recently, we got 160+ comments from the geeky readers who choose their favorite firewall. Based on this data, the top spot goes to.. drum roll please.."

" Media AlterNet / By Thanh Lam comments_image 76 COMMENTS There's an International Plan to Censor the Internet in the Works -- Let's Stop It in Its Tracks How the Trans Pacific Partnership making its way through Washington seriously undermines citizens' rights to participate in a free and open Internet. October 14, 2013 | "

"Stacey Higginbotham 15 hours ago 5 Comments A A RIP net neutrality photo: Gigaom illustration Summary: Here's the FCC's current plan to protect network neutrality. It hopes to create a set of rules by the end of the year, and in doing so, could open the door for prioritization of internet traffic."

" By Andy on June 15, 2014 C: 33 News The Commissioner of City of London Police admitted this week that just 4% to 10% of sites shut down when contacted by the new Intellectual Property Crime Unit. Alongside odd comments about the threat of "BitNet" and Tor making up "90% of the Internet", Leppard noted that enforcement will not provide a way out of the piracy problem. cityoflondonpoliceThis week's IP Enforcement Summit in London"

"May 19 Update: We've added an FAQ below the text of the original post to address some of the questions and comments Mozilla has received regarding EME. With most competing browsers and the content industry embracing the W3C EME specification, Mozilla has little choice but to implement EME as well so our users can continue to access all content they want to enjoy. Read on for some background on how we got here, and details of our implementation."

Good review comparing the leaders in the sync-share-store file category. Some very interesting comments from users in the pro-con sections. "Dropbox, Box, OneDrive and Google Drive are among the most popular cloud services for storing, syncing and sharing files. Picking the best service for your organization can be a challenge, but this guide will help determine which cloud service is right for you."

I still maintain that any file sync service that doesn't do end-to-end encryption should be avoided like the plague. However, my love affair with Wuala is nearing its end. Comcast has been having difficulties with keeping me online lately and I discovered that Wuala requires that you be both logged in and *online* or you have no access to your synced files. None. I'm in the process of switching over to Barracuda Networks' Copy, https://www.copy.com/ which stores local files in a local directory structure, rather than in a JRE virtual drive.

"If there was ever any doubt about whether Microsoft or Google would win the war of office suites, there should be no longer. Within the last several weeks, Microsoft has pulled so far ahead that it's game over. Here's why. When it comes to which suite is more fully featured, there's never been any real debate: Microsoft Office wins hands down. Whether you're creating entire presentations, creating complicated word-processing documents, or even doing something as simple as handling text attributes, Office is a far better tool. Until the last few weeks, Google Docs had one significant advantage over Microsoft Office: It's available for Android and the iPad as well as PCs because it's Web-based. The same wasn't the case for Office. So if you wanted to use an office suite on all your mobile devices, Google Docs was the way to go. Google Docs lost that advantage when Microsoft released Office for the iPad. There's not yet a native version for Android tablets, but Microsoft is working on that, telling GeekWire, "Let me tell you conclusively: Yes, we are also building Android native applications for tablets for Word, Excel and PowerPoint." Google Docs is still superior to Office's Web-based version, but that's far less important than it used to be. There's no need to go with a Web-based office suite if a superior suite is available as a native apps on all platforms, mobile or otherwise. And Office's collaboration capabilities are quite considerable now. Of course, there's always the question of price. Google Docs is free. Microsoft Office isn't. But at $100 a year for up to five devices, or $70 a year for two, no one will be going broke paying for Microsoft Office. It's worth paying that relatively small price for a much better office suite. Google Docs won't die. It'll be around as second fiddle for a long time. But that's what it will always remain: a second fiddle to the better Microsoft Office."

Google acquired "Writely", a small company in Portola Valley that pioneered document editing in a browser. Writely was perhaps the first cloud computing editor to go beyond simple HTML; eventually crafting some really cool CSS-JavaScript-JSON document layout and editing methods. But it can't edit native MSOffice documents. It converts them. There are more than a few problems with the Google Docs approach to editing advanced "compound" documents, but two stick out and are certain to give pause to anyone making the great transition from local workgroup computing, to the highly mobile, always connected, cloud computing. The first problem certain to become a show stopper is that Google converts documents to their native on-line format for editing and collaboration. And then they convert back. To many this isn't a problem. But if the document is part of a workflow or business process, conversion is a killer. There is an old saw affectionately known as "Reuters Law", dating back to the ODF-OXML document wars, that emphatically states; "Conversion breaks documents." The breakage includes both the visual layout of the document, and, the "compound" aspects and data connections that are internal to the document. Think of this way. A business document that is part of a legacy Windows Workgroup workflow is opened up in gDocs. Google converts the document for editing purposes. The data and the workflow internals that bind the document to the local business system are broken on conversion. The look of the document is also visually shredded as the gDocs layout engine is applied. For all practical purposes, no matter what magic editing and collaboration value is added, a broken document means a broken business process. Let me say that again, with the emphasis of having witnessed this first hand during the year long ODF transition trials the Commonwealth of Massachusetts conducted in 2005 and 2006. The business process broke every time a conversion was conducted "on a busines