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The bean counters at Time Warner and Comcast lost their friggin’ minds, not just in Kansas City but in Austin as well. Time Warner began rolling out plans that automatically doubled a residential customer’s speeds, with absolutely no cost to the consumer. Not only was Time Warner promising this in Austin, even little Podunk towns like Taylor, fifty miles away, were getting the deal.

Things are looking up for those of us who think we might like using a tablet if only we could find one with a real honest-to-goodness operating system like good ol’ GNU/Linux. There are a couple of Linux based tablets in the pipeline now — with one already taking preorders for a second-round limited production run.

At first, the browser had us scratching our collective heads and wondering why, since early versions weren’t much more than rebranded versions of Firefox. The “why” question was answered with haste, however, as Chrome quickly morphed into a browser with deep hooks into Google’s ecosystem. To be sure, the browser offers many things to like in the way of convenience, but the privacy issues that come with Chrome sometimes make using it seem like something of a deal with you-know-whom. The public evidently doesn’t care, as it’s the world’s most used browser.

Although some have been trying to sound the alarm, many of us have been lulled into complacency brought by a belief that Microsoft is no longer a real threat and that we are now free to concentrate all of our energies on growing Linux and FOSS, which is basically all we’ve wanted to do.

The 13th annual Ohio LinuxFest will be held Oct. 2-3 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center in downtown Columbus. Hosting authoritative speakers in a large expo hall, the OLF welcomes all free and open source software professionals, enthusiasts, and everyone interested in learning more about free and open source software.

It didn’t take long to find what I was looking for. Fact is, I wasn’t exactly looking for the thing I found. I smiled, as I knew that Fate could be a wicked bitch. Her smile is often deceiving, but what the hell. She wanted to play? Great. Let’s play. I clicked “contact us” at the bottom of the website for a German and American Linux Enthusiasts club in Bamberg.

The good guys and gals at Linux Mint are on a roll, with three long-term support (LTS) releases in a row. It all started back in May of last year, with the release of 17.0, called Qiana, followed in January by 17.1, Rebecca. At that point it looked as if we’d hit the jackpot and could sit back and relax for at least a couple of years until the next LTS release, but the Mint folks had other plans and introduced yet another LTS, 17.2, Rafaela, this summer.

Finally freed from the shackles of an eternity of other digital projects, Matt Hartley announced this week that “Freedom Penguin is just days away from being 100 percent ready.”

The usual suspects were in attendance this year, plus some I had never seen before. Conspicuously missing were my friends at ThinkPenguin. They were more than generous in giving us perks for our last fund raiser and I was a bit bummed I wouldn’t have a chance to see them in person again this year. The Ubuntu table was busy as always and the focus, at least for those visiting the exhibit, was the Ubuntu phone. No matter who I heard introducing themselves, the main topic or questions asked was about the Ubuntu phone. Many of us might have thought that the interest in the Ubuntu slabs was exaggerated or astroturfed, but from what I could tell the Ubuntu Phone most certainly is on the minds of many Ubuntu users.

In case you weren’t paying attention, there’s a new Linux file system on the horizon, thanks to a former Google engineer.

That engineer in question, namely Kent Overstreet, posted a message on LKML.org last week promoting the progress of Bcache File System, or Bcachefs, the first Linux file system written specifically for solid state disks. The purpose of the new file system is to ramp up the speed in the way Linux stores data on servers.

Many of you may remember that in 2005, Sony tried a similar method of stopping music “theft” by including a back door or rootkit via music CDs released under the Sony/BMG label. The main reason for planting this nefarious code on your computer was so it could phone home to Sony and report your proclivity for sharing certain Sony/BMG label CDs. It was also supposed to stop the copying of CDs, although Linux ignored the sneaky bytes and copied CDs anyway. When caught, Sony had the absolute and pure audacity to claim they had every right to insure the security on their investment by planting a rootkit on your computer.

In 2014 and 2015, Linux became home to a list of popular commercial titles such as the popular Borderlands, Witcher, Dead Island, and Counter Strike series of games. While this is exciting news, what of the gamer on a budget? Commercial titles are good, but even better are free-to-play alternatives made by developers who know what players like.

Out-of-the-box, Bodhi installs hardly any software, only just enough to get the user up and running. At first boot, there’s a lightweight browser (Midori), a file manager (PCManFM), a text editor (ePad), an image viewer (Ephoto) and little else. This is in keeping with the Bodhi team’s minimalist philosophy, based on a belief that users should make their own software choices and not have them made for them.

Gameranx reported this week that Steam has 1,400 Linux titles ready to go two months before the hardware’s launch. “In less than a month, Linux has seen the number of compatible games rise from 1,300 to 1,400 games,” the article states. “Among the recent editions are Shadow of Mordor, DiRT Showdown, Terraria, and Don’t Be Patchman, the first Steam game that launched on Linux first.” Although Steam’s total market share also remains low at 1 percent, the article also says, “this promises to change when Valve finally launches their Linux based Steam Machines this coming October.” We’ll have to keep an eye on this one.

For those who don’t know, since its inception back around 2011, Bodhi Linux’s biggest reason for being is as a showpiece for the Enlightenment desktop. Unfortunately, it turned out that it was really Enlightenment version 17 that was on show, and when Enlightenment moved on to 18 about a year and a half ago, and in subsequent releases, the Bodhi team began to realize that the desktop wasn’t going in the direction they would have hoped.

Now in its sixth year, Texas Linux Fest is an annual community-run conference for Linux and free/open source software users and enthusiasts based in the Lone Star State. Much like the Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles, Ohio LinuxFest in Columbus, and LinuxFest Northwest in Bellingham, Wash. — and an ever-growing list of successful regional shows — Texas Linux Fest is a weekend event geared towards individual users, rather than an expensive multi-workday expo that caters primarily to sponsored attendees.

It’s already been proven that our anonymity online is a myth. Even with tools like Tor and anything else short of a high quality VPN, finding who we are and where we live requires just a little bit of work. The Internet is forever, up until the movement for “the right to be forgotten” came about. But even with that, none of us are really safe from discovery if someone wants to find us.

The project’s original purpose, in large part, was to keep free software free. KDE had begun development the previous year using Trolltech’s then proprietary Qt framework. GNOME was built using the GTK+ toolkit, which had been created for GIMP and was licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). The GNOME desktop was released under the LGPL, with most of its applications licensed under the GPL, making GNOME and its apps totally free software.

Canonical is banking on the solution being the Snappy package manager, which includes all of an app’s dependencies in a single compressed package, “so in theory, there should be no compatibility problems.”

Last October, we published a story on the 2012 imprisonment — without charges — by the Syrian government of Bassel (Safadi) Khartabil, a 31-year-old Palestinian-Syrian computer engineer specializing in open source software development. Bassel has become known worldwide for his strong commitment to the open source paradigm, teaching others about technology, and contributing his experience freely to help the world.