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Fantasy author Thomas A. Knight discusses what drew him to the Free Software Community to begin with, and how other communities have affected his writing. Virtual communities bring people together in an amazing way, come celebrate the magic.

While much of the attention has been focused on the implications of adding everything from dot-lawyer to dot-microsoft, the bigger story is the link between new domain extensions and the future of the current Internet governance system.

Just about 24 hours ago I spread the news about a major vulnerability in X.Org / XKB that makes it trivial for anyone with physical access to a Linux-based desktop system to easily bypass any screensaver lock whether you're using GNOME, KDE, or most other desktop environments. So what's changed in the past day?..

From the 'Self-Serving Stats' files...

Yesterday the server company that hosts The Tyee had a major outage caused by a small electrical explosion in downtown Vancouver...

... While we're sympathetic to the SOPA protest, which involved high-profile sites like Wikipedia "going dark" for 24 hours yesterday, we categorically deny blowing anything up in support of the cause.

Yesterday my website, michaelgeist.ca, went dark for 12 hours with thousands of posts replaced by a single page warning against proposed U.S. legislation called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). My site was not alone as the online protest included some of the Internet’s most popular sites, including Wikipedia, Craigslist and Reddit.

Fingers Thai flood whipping boy and netbook decline Microsoft has released its quarterly results, and reports that Windows revenues are down 6 per cent when compared with the previous quarter.…

Oracle is claiming Google makes $3.65 billion a year in mobile advertising from Android, basing its estimate on Google's own boast of 700,000 daily activations for Android devices. Oracle made the new claim to encourage a favorable settlement in its lawsuit against Google, which is finally scheduled to go to trial in March....

With the Kindle Fire, we have a version of Android so different, it could be like developing for an entirely new OS and that could pose challenges for developers.

here is a **Linux website** that demands people's name, phone number and other personal information as a NECESSARY condition to download, as a "Free Offer"... a CC-licensed software manual (and other books about Linux) that is directly available online on its home page

Lanner Electronics announced an Intel Core i3/i5/i7-based PC that's ready to provide 3G, Wi-Fi, and GPS connectivity, thanks to a Mini PCI Express slot and SIM card reader. The LEC-7920 supports up to 8GB of DDR3 memory, includes a 2.5-inch SATA bay, and offers gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0, and serial I/O, plus both DVI-I and DVI-D video ports....

The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) released a security-enhanced version of Android based on the hardened SE Linux, featuring stricter access control policies. SE Android restricts the system resources available to an Android app regardless of user permissions, blocking malware such as the & GingerBreak& exploit at six different steps during execution, says the NSA....

Linus Torvalds released the Linux 3.3-rc1 kernel on Thursday afternoon that marks the closure of the two-week Linux 3.3 kernel merge window...

Devon IT announced a thin client that runs Linux on a 1.3GHz Via Eden processor. The TC5V includes 2GB of RAM, 4GB of flash, gigabit Ethernet, and dual display support via DVI-D and DVI-I connectors, according to the company....

New survey shows Linux as the preferred platform for Big Data, virtualization, and cloud computing trends.

Commercial UNIX customers use UNIX because it works for their mission-critical services but virtualization isn’t one of them.

This in depth review of Stanford's excellent course "Introduction to Databases" (covering XML, RDBMS, SQL, OLAP, and NoSQL) focuses on the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) tools that are center stage throughout. In addition Stanford's new approach to OER (Open Educational Resources) is critiqued.

By now you might have already read a couple of articles on SOPA and PIPA; the controversial and now widely notorious bills that hammer the freedom of internet. In this article we shall investigate how SOPA and PIPA negate the spirit of opensource community and virtual communities at large.

One thing conspicuously missing from the SOPA/PIPA debate was just what constitutes piracy. And we need to have a serious conversation about defining piracy because piracy is definitely real, but it's not what big media companies and the MPAA's Chris Dodd would have you believe.

It seemed like such a promising distribution especially after the split from Fedora, but one huge crash in the live session caused by an attempted LibreOffice installation brought it all crashing down.