Sneaky Microsoft, Citizen and Government Clouds
Monday, October 13 was a busy day in Linux news. One of the more interesting tidbits comes from Neil Rickert who said, "Microsoft is being sneaky" in trying to covertly upgrade his Windows installs to version 10. Another from Red Hat's Eike Rathke remembered OpenOffice.org fifteenth birthday. Elsewhere, Red Hat's Nathan Jones addressed the state of the government cloud and Marco Fioretti shared some thoughts on the "Citizen Cloud."
Neil Rickert, who usually keeps us abreast of Tumbleweed developments, tried to allow an update to Windows Defender on his Windows 8.1 machine this weekend that didn't end up quite as expected. After clicking to okay the anti-virus update, Rickert noticed that Windows 10 was downloading. Being three gigabytes in size, Microsoft has to know that would be noticed. But that's not even the worst part of the story. Rickert went into the updater and unchecked the preselected Windows 10 update, but when he reopened Windows Update, Windows 10 was preselected again - and it's supposed to be optional. Rickert was so upset, he deleted Windows right off his desktop and will do it again if Windows 7 on his laptop does the same thing. Microsoft is bound and determined to get in on the user data gold rush.
In several other tidbits from the day, blogger DarkDuck looked at Simply Linux 7.0.5 and Jesse Smith reviewed Parsix GNU/Linux 8.0. The Denver Post featured an introduction to System76 today, which is located, not coincidently, in Denver. Eike Rathke reminded us today that if not for "the original OpenOffice.org source code published by Sun Microsystems, on Friday, October 13, 2000" we'd not have LibreOffice today. Kai Uwe posted this weekend of some of improvements coming in KDE Plasma 5.5 and Paul Venezia today said, "Don’t blame Linux for the XOR botnet."
The Linux Homefront Project celebrated Free Software Foundation's 30 year anniversary by remembering some top quotes from founder Richard Stallman. Some include:
Facebook is not your friend, it is a surveillance engine.
Just about the only component in common between Android and GNU/Linux is Linux, the kernel.
The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do.
Speaking of the cloud:
* The Citizen Cloud: towards a more decentralized Internet
* Open for Business: The State of the Government Cloud