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Underscoring just how hard it is to design secure cryptographic software, academic researchers recently uncovered a potentially serious weakness in an early version of the code library protecting Amazon Web Services.

So, you just bought a new shiny laptop and you are uncomfortable about the possibility to see it stolen and lost forever? There are many things you can do to help you recover your laptop after such an unfortunate thing happens, and almost all of them involve some kind of tracking software. Here is a quick guide on how to set up easy to use tools that will help you locate your stolen laptop.

In this week's top 5 articles of the week, we highlight Drupal-based farmOS, Astroblend for visualizing astrophysics data, the goals of Qora cryptocurrency, Mozilla's Ben Kerensa shares his open source story, and the 2015 Open Recipe Collection. Check out our 14 gifts for the holidays! read more

Until now, you've learned about the basics of Linux, the difference between a GNU/Linux operating system and the Linux kernel, as well as how a GNU/Linux operating system compares to other popular OSes.

In this blog post we will show you how to install RocketChat on an Ubuntu 14.04 VPS.

Historians and detectives share many similarities: their investigations are laborious and focused on small details. Bits of information are often murky, contradictory, and complex. Peoples' names might be spelled differently across different sources, especially if more than one language is involved. There's also a time component—they need to know where every possible culprit was at every certain point in time. In the end, they might find out that it was not one gardener who killed the old lady, but two. read more

The UK's 2014 private copying exception, which allowed you to make personal copies of your own music, including format-shifted versions, has now been definitively withdrawn, according to The 1709 Blog. As a result, it is once more illegal to make personal backups of your own music, videos or e-books, rip CDs and DVDs to standalone digital files, or upload your music to the cloud.

Raspberry Pi has always been the cheapest of computers since it came into production, but they have broken the cheap barrier with this new model. The Raspberry Pi Zero

One of those features is shown in Figure 1. Though technically not a part of the installation program itself, this gives you the option of booting into the Live desktop or to the UEFI shell. If you have a sense of adventure, the UEFI shell can be fun to muck around in, though be careful not to run a command that can mess something up.

Plenty of businesses rely on third-party payers: parents often pay for college; insurance companies pay most health care bills. Reaching out to potential third-party payers is hardly a new or revolutionary business practice. But someone should tell the Patent Office. Earlier this year, it issued US Patent No. 9,026,468 to Securus Technologies, a company that provides telephone services to prisoners. The patent covers a method of "proactively establishing a third-party payment account." In other words, Securus patented the idea of finding someone to pay a bill.

A blast from the past: Meet AMIDuOS. Welcome to the DMZ where the world’s two most ubiquitous operating systems meet and eye each other warily. It’s a place where the future platform battles are being shaped.…

Have you ever wanted a Raspberry Pi but thought that £16/$25—roughly three packs of cigarettes—was a little exorbitant for a complete computer capable of running Linux? Well, I have good news: the Raspberry Pi Foundation has just released the Pi Zero, a single-board computer that costs just £4/$5.

More than a month ago, Google announced the coming update for the 6th major iteration of its platform... Marshmallow. Of the anticipated updates, the Nexus line of devices would be the first to receive the gooey goodness that promised to bring the most significant updates to some critical Android components (think Now On Tap and app permissions).

We touched on this last week when we talked about FOSS and health care monitoring, and OpenSource.com has picked up the ball and run with it when it comes to having Benjamin Kerensa talk about how he came to develop Glucosio. It’s an interesting read on the path that led Mr. Kerensa to where he is right now.

In the IT sector, for example, it seems tertiary training institutions are completely unaware of the massive shifts that have occurred in the IT industry since 2003.

Today we will take a look on the methods that Linux users can follow in order to set up a scheduler for their torrent downloads. This can be useful for people who want to take advantage of their computer while they are not using it, like during the nighttime for example. This way, large portions of huge files can be downloaded without delaying your work activities, or interrupting/undermining your media consumption.

"If you want to escape and think/write code/...

As with the previous posts, I want to make sure that I am using the latest release and that it is well integrated with the Linux distribution, so this time I will be using Cinnamon 2.8 on Linux Mint 17.3 Beta (to be very specific, it is Cinnamon 2.8.5 at the time of this writing, once all available updates have been installed).

Here I am, almost 20 years into my own crazy open source story, and it shows no sign of abating. And my problem is that I like to know how things work and to fix things. read more

For many years now, Western governments have been complaining about China's supposed lack of respect for intellectual monopolies, and constantly pushing the country's politicians to tighten the legal framework protecting them. To anyone not blinded by an unquestioning belief in the virtues of copyright and patent maximalism, it was pretty clear where this strategy would end.