May 8, 2020
by sjvn01
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Recently, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to protect the US electricity grid from cyber attacks by blocking power-equipment imports from “foreign adversaries.” Presumably, that includes Russia, Iran, and — most important of all — China. There’s only one problem with that: The vast majority of high-end electrical equipment is built outside of the US.
The best way to protect the US electrical grid is with open source More>
May 7, 2020
by sjvn01
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In 2007, Drew Houston, Dropbox‘s CEO, got sick and tired of misplacing his USB drive, so he created the first personal and small business cloud storage service. It was a radical idea in its time, and everyone loved it. Today, there are dozens of cheap or free cloud storage services. But — beyond giving you storage — they’re very different.
How do you choose which one is right for you? You could just pick on the basis of how much free storage space you get from them. That’s simple, but it only tells part of the story. The real value from a cloud storage service comes from how well it works for you or your business. As you’ll see, some work much better with some operating systems and business plans than others.
Let’s start, shall we?
Best cloud storage services in 2020: Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, and more More>
May 6, 2020
by sjvn01
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What’s really the most popular operating system? That depends on how you look at them and who’s doing the looking. For example, Net Applications shows Windows on top of the desktop operating system mountain with 88.14% of the market. That’s not surprising, but Linux — yes Linux — seems to have jumped from 1.36% share in March to 2.87% share in April. Has the Linux desktop seen a sudden surge in popularity?
Most popular operating systems of 2020: The more things change… More>
May 6, 2020
by sjvn01
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p>Almost all smartphones lock you into expensive, pretty prisons. They look great, but you can’t repair them, and they watch your every move. But now there’s the Fairphone 3, which lets you fix the hardware yourself, paired up with the privacy-first Android /e/OS operating system.
Besides being repairable by any handy person, the Fairphone uses ethically sourced materials and is built by well-paid workers, Many smartphones, such as the Apple iPhone, are built by poorly paid temporary workers.
The Android-based /e/ operating system and smartphones put privacy first. It’s based on LineageOS. This is an Android-based operating system, which is descended from the failed CyanogenMod Android fork. This version also blends in features from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) 7, 8, and 9 source-code trees.
In the /e/OS, all Google services have been removed and replaced with MicroG services. MicroG replaces Google’s libraries with purely open-source implementations without hooks to Google’s services. This includes libraries and apps that provide Google Play, Maps, Geolocation, and Messaging services for Android applications when they need them.
Put them together, and you get the first privacy-conscious, sustainable smartphone. This pairing springs from the Fairview community. They were asked what their preferred alternative OS was for the Fairphone 3, and they voted for /e/OS.
May 5, 2020
by sjvn01
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Who knew a few months ago that we’d be working from home? Or, dealing with sluggish unemployment systems written in 60-year old COBOL? Or, spending all day watching streaming TV because you’re literally stuck at home pretty much 24×7? Welcome to life with the coronavirus pandemic.
Someday soon, but not as soon as you hope, we can start returning to life as normal. Or, well, the new normal anyway. In the meantime, we’ve been finding out the hard way what technologies work well when subjected to a real-world disaster and which, well, aren’t up to snuff.
May 1, 2020
by sjvn01
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Sharing isn’t easy. It’s difficult to move photos from one social network to another or storage. Now, Facebook and Google have made it simple to copy your Facebook photos to Google Photos. This is the first fruit of an open-source project, the Data Transfer Project, to make it much easier to trade photos and other data among the Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter platforms.
How to easily move your photos from Facebook to Google Photos More>