A few minutes ago, the development team behind the Debian-based Parsix GNU/Linux computer operating system announced that new security fixes are now available for the Parsix GNU/Linux 8.10 "Erik" release.

Softpedia was informed by Apricity OS developer Alex Gajewski that the Apricity OS 09.2016 release is now available for download and it's the first to come with a 32-bit version as well.

• What Insiders Are Saying About the Sad State of the European Patent Office (EPO)
• The EPO Does Not Want Skilled (and ‘Expensive’) Staff, Layoffs a Growing Concern
• Patents Roundup: Accenture Software Patents, Patent Troll Against Apple, Willful Infringements, and Apple Against a Software Patent
• Software Patents Propped Up by Patent Law Firms That Are Lying, Further Assisted by Rogue Elements Like David Kappos and Randall Rader (Revolving Doors)
• Links 25/9/2016: Linux 4.7.5, 4.4.22; LXQt 0.11

• ReactOS running on General Dynamics Itronix GoBook III IX260+ Military Laptop

• The third beta of FREE FPS ‘Ravenfield’ is out, the game keeps getting better

• Promising top-down shooter ‘Redie’, inspired by Hotline Miami, needs support on Kickstarter, demo available

• MATE 1.16 released

  After 6 months of development the MATE Desktop team are proud to announce the release of MATE Desktop 1.16. We’d like to thank every MATE contributor for their help making this release possible.

• Breeze icons need you: new colors and shapes for mimetypes

• We’re looking for a GNOME developer

  We in the Red Hat desktop team are looking for a junior software developer who will work on GNOME. Particularly in printing and document viewing areas of the project.

  The location of the position is Brno, Czech Republic, where you’d join a truly international team of desktop developers. It’s a junior position, so candidates just off the university, or even still studying are welcome. We require solid English communication skills and experience with C (and ideally C++, too). But what is a huge plus is experience with GNOME development and participation in the community.

• MakuluLinux LinDoz 12 Beta is Ready !

• [Older] This is Zorin OS 12

  We’re excited to announce the release of the Zorin OS 12 Beta. This is a pre-release version which we have created to get your feedback & bug reports on what we’ve built so far.

• [Older] Elementary OS Loki Release Follow Up

  It’s only been a short couple of weeks since we released the latest version of elementary OS, but we already have so much to share! We’re happy to say that Loki has already passed 45,000 downloads, from 157 different countries since release with 2/3rds of those downloads coming from closed sourced OSes. We’re super proud to be reaching people all over the world who are new to an Open Source operating system. Congratulations to everyone who switched!

• Fedora Ambassadors: Measuring Success

  I have been a Linux dabbler since 1994 when I first tried Suse Linux. In 2006 I became a full-time Linux user when I converted by laptop to Linux in October of 2006. Like many Linux users I sampled many different distributions while choosing the one that best fit my personality. Eventually I settled on Ubuntu with the release of Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibon). Despite choosing Ubuntu I always saw myself as a Linux and open source advocate first and an Ubuntu advocate second. I respected and valued that Linux and open source allowed people the freedom to make personal choices.

• Azure from Debian

  Around a week ago, I started to play with programmatically controlling Azure. I needed to create and destroy a bunch of VMs over and over again, and this seemed like something I would want to automate once instead of doing manually and repeatedly. I started to look into the azure-sdk-for-python and mentioned that I wanted to look into this in #debian-python. ardumont from Software Heritage noticed me, and was planning to package azure-storage-python. We joined forces and started a packaging team for Azure-related software.

• Turn The Raspberry Pi Zero Into A Mini Dongle Computer

• N900/Neo900: September 2016 Update

  To break even, the project needs to produce and sell 800 Neo900 devices. Currently, we have around 350 pre-orders, and sourced a bit more than 100 N900 units to refurbish.

• [Older] Backports and long-term stable kernels

• What’s New in Wayland and Weston 1.12?

  The Wayland core protocol documentation has received numerous refinements to improve its clarity and consistency. Along with this, many blank areas of the protocol documentation have been fleshed out.

  A new wl_display_add_protocol logger API provides a new, interactive way to debug requests; along with this are new APIs for examining clients and their resources. This is analogous to using WAYLAND_DEBUG=1, but more powerful since it allows run time review of log data such as through a UI view.

  There have been improvements to how the protocol XML scanner handles version identification in protocol headers. This enables better detection and fallback handling when compositors and clients support differt versions of their protocols.

• XDC2016 Wraps Up After Many Wayland, X.Org & Mesa Discussions

  The 2016 X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC2016) wrapped up Friday in Helsinki, Finland. Here is a summary of the major happenings for those that may have missed it or didn't yet watch the video streams.

• IBM Claims “New Linux Based Power System Server Kicks Butt”

  IBM is a technology company worth billions of dollars and is one of the leading businesses in the field. Having formed back in 1911 in New York where their headquarters remain, IBM has provided more than 170 countries with the use of their technology. They’re a company that has always been on top of the game and today is no different. IBM has just unleashed a new Power8 processor that claims to be more powerful than anything they have ever launched before and will be the perfect tool to assist with compute-heavy workloads.

• IBM Edge 2016: Day 1 Recap

• IBM Edge 2016: Day 2 Recap

• Power 8 to the people

• TripleO Master Branch Overcloud deployment via QuickStart

• How to enable automatic updates on a Linux VPS

• Linux Pipes, Redirection, and FIFOs - In Detail

• Automating hinting for every script

• [Older] How to Install Lighttpd with PHP-FPM on CentOS 7

• Vim - A beginners' introduction

• Install Urxvt-unicode dan Configurasi

• Common pronunciations of Linux directories, commands, etc

• Host your own DNS, now with 100% more ad block!

• How to configure and secure SSH service in Linux?

• Today I learned that you want to use strace -fp

• Quickhook: a new Git hook manager

• Using gmail with mutt

• Apache, PHP, and MySQL on Ubuntu Linux

• Ubuntu Phone, Sep 2016 - Vorsprung durch Touch

  The Ubuntu Phone is getting better, and with every new iteration of the OTA, my little BQ Aquaris E4.5 is gaining more speed and functionality. Like in the air force, with an avionics upgrade, which transforms ancient wings into a powerful and modern bird of prey. Only the pace of advancement is lagging behind the market. See what Android and iOS can do, even Windows Phone, and you realize how late and insufficiently meaningful the Ubuntu Phone really is. This has to change, massively.

  This latest round does bring some fine goods to the table - more speed and stability, better icons, more overall visual polish, incremental improvements in the applications and the scopes. But that's not enough to win the heart of the average user. A more radical, app-centric effort is required. More focus on delivering the mobile experience, be it as it may. Ubuntu cannot revolutionalize that which is already considered the past. It can only join the club and enjoy the benefits of a well-established reality. And that is a kickass app stack that makes the touch device worth using in the first place.

  Still, it's not all gloomy. E4.5 is a better product now than it was a year ago, fact. Ubuntu Phone is a better operating system than it was even this spring, fact. So maybe one day we will see Ubuntu become an important if not dominant player in the phone and tablet space. It sure is heading in the right direction, my only fear is the availability of resources to pull off this massive rehaul that is needed to make it stand up to the old and proven giants. And that's it really.

  If you're keen on Linux (not Android) making it in the mobile world, do not forget to check my Ubuntu tablet review! Especially the convergence piece. On that merry note, you do remember that I'm running a wicked contest this year, too? He/she who reads my books might get a chance to win an M10 tablet. Indeed. Off you go, dear readers. Whereas I will now run the same set of tests we did here on the Aquaris tablet, and see how it likes the OTA-12 upgrade. The end.

• Ubuntu 16.10 Unity 8 - new window snapping feature

• Ubuntu Online Summit for Ubuntu 17.04 is Taking Place In Mid-November

• Ubuntu Online Summit: 15-16 November 2016

• 10 Top Open Source Artificial Intelligence Tools for Linux

  In this post, we shall cover a few of the top, open-source artificial intelligence (AI) tools for the Linux ecosystem. Currently, AI is one of the ever advancing fields in science and technology, with a major focus geared towards building software and hardware to solve every day life challenges in areas such as health care, education, security, manufacturing, banking and so much more.

• List of FLOSS International Conferences September 2016 Materials

• This Week In Servo 78

  Our overall roadmap is available online and now includes the initial Q3 plans. From now on, we plan to include the quarterly plan with a high-level breakdown in the roadmap page.

• Firefox 49 Release: Find out what is new

  Firefox 49.0 is the next major stable release of the web browser. Firefox 48.0.2 and earlier versions of Firefox can be updated to the new release.

• Open-Source Climate Change Data From NASA, NOAA, & Others Available For 1st Time

  Climate change has many components — rising sea levels, alterations in rainfall patterns, and an increase in severe storm activity, among others. Communities around the world are faced with the need to plan for climate change but don’t have the information available to do so effectively.

• Another Setback for 3D Printed Gun Advocate Cody Wilson as Court of Appeals Rules That National Security Concerns Outweigh Free Speech

  It’s been a long, drawn-out battle, beginning in 2013 when Cody Wilson, founder of Defense Distributed, published the open source files for his 3D printed handgun, the Liberator, online. The State Department ordered that he take the files down, and Wilson complied, but not before thousands had downloaded them and spread them elsewhere on the Internet. In 2015, with the help of gun rights organization The Second Amendment Foundation, Wilson filed a federal lawsuit claiming that the State Department had violated not only his Second Amendment but his First Amendment rights. By suppressing his right to share information online, Wilson argued, the State Department was violating his right to free speech.

• In 3D-Printed Gun Case, Federal Court Permits Speech Censorship in the Name of Alleged National Security

• Oracle tries playing nice with Java EE rebels

  With Oracle now trying to get back on track with advancing enterprise Java, the company is seeking rapprochement with factions that had sought to advance the platform on their own. The two groups involved are mostly amenable to patching up the relationship.

  Oracle's Anil Gaur, group vice president of engineering, said this week he had already been in touch with some of the concerned parties. The two factions include Java EE Guardians, led by former Oracle Java EE evangelist Reza Rahman, and Microprofile.io, which has included participation from Red Hat and IBM.

• Libreboot lead developer masks FSF Employee's disendorsement as "typofix"

  ELI5: Leah Rowe made this commit to the Libreboot website earlier today with the comment "typofix". In fact, it was more than a typo-fix as it shows that the FSF employee either no longer or never did give permission for the opposition against the FSF.

• Richard Stallman and GNU refused to let libreboot go, despite stating its intention to leave

  Leah Rowe is still libreboot's maintainer, and the GNU project has zero right to keep libreboot under its umbrella. If the maintainer of a GNU project steps down without intending for that project to leave GNU, then fine. But if a maintainer stays on as that projects maintainer while stating the projects intention to leave GNU, then GNU should honour that request.

• GDB Continues Improving, libstdc++ Is Doing Well On C++17 & More

  At the GNU Tools Cauldron earlier this month in the UK there was a presentation on forthcoming improvements to the GNU Tools, presented by Nick Clifton as part of the Red Hat Tools Team.

• Visopsys 0.8 released

• Vee One Suite 0.7.6 - The Eleventh beta release

  The Vee One Suite are free, open-source Linux Audio software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 or later.

• Flowblade 1.8

• Hugin-2016.2.0 Release Notes

• arch-audit

  I started a tiny project a couple of days ago: arch-audit.

• podlators 4.08

• Bodhi 2.2.2 released

• tint 0.0.1: Tint Is Not Tufte

  A new experimental package is now on the ghrr drat. It is named tint which stands for Tint Is Not Tufte. It provides an alternative for Tufte-style html presentation. I wrote a bit more on the package page and the README in the repo -- so go read this.

• Krebs Goes Down, Opera Gets a VPN & More…

  Krebs on Security in record DDOS attack: Everybody’s go-to site for news and views of security issues, has been temporarily knocked offline in a DDOS attack for the record books. We first heard about the attack on Thursday morning after Brian Krebs reported that his site was being hit by as much as 620 Gbs, more than double the previous record which was considered to be a mind-blower back in 2013 when the anti-spam site Spamhaus was brought to its knees.

  Security sites such as Krebs’ that perform investigative research into security issues are often targets of the bad guys. In this latest case, Ars Technica reported the attack came after Krebs published the identity of people connected with vDOS, Israeli black hats who launched DDOS attacks for pay and took in $600,000 in two years doing so. Akamai had been donating DDoS mitigation services to Krebs, but by 4 p.m. on the day the attack began they withdrew the service, motivated by the high cost of defending against such a massive attack. At this point, Krebs decided to shut down his site.

• Upgrade your SSH keys!

  When generating the keypair, you're asked for a passphrase to encrypt the private key with. If you will ever lose your private key it should protect others from impersonating you because it will be encrypted with the passphrase. To actually prevent this, one should make sure to prevent easy brute-forcing of the passphrase.

  OpenSSH key generator offers two options to resistance to brute-force password cracking: using the new OpenSSH key format and increasing the amount of key derivation function rounds. It slows down the process of unlocking the key, but this is what prevents efficient brute-forcing by a malicious user too. I'd say experiment with the amount of rounds on your system. Start at about 100 rounds. On my system it takes about one second to decrypt and load the key once per day using an agent. Very much acceptable, imo.

• Irssi 0.8.20 Released

• What It Costs to Run Let's Encrypt

  Today we’d like to explain what it costs to run Let’s Encrypt. We’re doing this because we strive to be a transparent organization, we want people to have some context for their contributions to the project, and because it’s interesting.

  Let’s Encrypt will require about $2.9M USD to operate in 2017. We believe this is an incredible value for a secure and reliable service that is capable of issuing certificates globally, to every server on the Web free of charge.

  We’re currently working to raise the money we need to operate through the next year. Please consider donating or becoming a sponsor if you’re able to do so! In the event that we end up being able to raise more money than we need to just keep Let’s Encrypt running we can look into adding other services to improve access to a more secure and privacy-respecting Web.

• North Korean DNS Leak reveals North Korean websites

  One of North Korea’s top level DNS servers was mis-configured today (20th September 2016) accidentally allowing global DNS zone transfers. This allowed anyone who makes a zone transfer request (AXFR) to retrieve a copy of the nation’s top level DNS data.

  [...]

  This data showed there are 28 domains configured inside North Korea, here is the list:

  airkoryo.com.kp
  cooks.org.kp
  friend.com.kp
  gnu.rep.kp
  kass.org.kp
  kcna.kp
  kiyctc.com.kp
  knic.com.kp
  koredufund.org.kp
  korelcfund.org.kp
  korfilm.com.kp
  ma.gov.kp
  masikryong.com.kp
  naenara.com.kp
  nta.gov.kp
  portal.net.kp
  rcc.net.kp
  rep.kp
  rodong.rep.kp
  ryongnamsan.edu.kp
  sdprk.org.kp
  silibank.net.kp
  star-co.net.kp
  star-di.net.kp
  star.co.kp
  star.edu.kp
  star.net.kp
  vok.rep.kp

• Yahoo’s Three Hacks

  As a number of outlets have reported, Yahoo has announced that 500 million of its users’ accounts got hacked in 2014 by a suspected state actor.

  But that massive hack is actually one of three interesting hacks of Yahoo in recent years.

As we reported exactly an year ago, Italian Military's plans to migrate its entire fleet of desktop PCs to LibreOffice is well underway and has reached its first milestone. Since the project got started about an year ago, the Italian military have switched over 8000 PC workstations to LibreOffice.

I know what you’re probably all thinking, why isn’t this kid’s adorable face on every possible toddler related product currently on the market? Rest assured, I constantly remind my sister of how she could be exploiting his cuteness for millions of dollars- but I digress. Where were we? Oh right, Linux.

Let’s talk hardware. If we’re building this little dude a Linux computer and we’re “ballin’ on a budget”, there’s no better choice than a Raspberry Pi. I mean he is a hacker in training, right? His typing (and well, hand coordination in general) isn’t that great yet, so we’ll need an over-sized keyboard. A big mouse pad, and a good wireless mouse will do well. Oh, and how about a VESA mount case for the Raspberry Pi so it stays out of the way? All of that should do nicely.

During a March hearing before the House of Commons Government Operations Committee, there was a telling exchange between an official of Shared Services Canada (SSC)–the department that manages the Canadian federal government’s IT–and rookie MP David Graham. Graham wanted to know what percentage of SSC’s data centres and servers ran on Linux or other similar source software. Patrice Rondeau, the SSC official, replied that “approximately 15 percent are running Linux.”

Russia-based Kaspersky Lab has announced that it has developed security solutions for mobile devices and Internet of Things (IOT) running on the Tizen operating system.

IOT has emerged as one of the fastest growing areas of the IT market and based on projections from various research institutions and IT companies around the world, the Internet of Things (IOT) infrastructure will integrate around 200 billion devices worldwide comprising smartphones, computers, household appliances, automobiles and several electronic items.

People are coming to Linux in droves these days. They each have their own reasons. It could be a desire to get out from under the thumb of proprietary software’s limitations, privacy concerns or just plain old economics. Some of them find a whole new world of computing happiness and others walk away frustrated. Why is that?

How you approach learning something new usually will determine just how successful you are at learning it. It’s all about attitude. Learning is a journey and those who cling to the fear of not reaching a pleasant destination usually quit before they start and stay right where they are. Those who are born with an innate curiosity and a sense of adventure often find that learning something new brings great rewards. Thus, they are constantly looking for new things to learn. It’s the naturally curious ones who tend to do well with Linux.

If you sit a child in front of a Linux computer, they usually just start using it. It’s an amazing thing to watch. Kids are curious by nature and they also have the added advantage of not having any preconceived notions when it comes to how a computer ought to work. I have found, on the other hand, that the hardest kind of person to teach Linux is the crusty old Windows power user. They are lost from the start and tend to get easily frustrated when they come across something they don’t understand. Their outbursts of anger can be quite animated! The Internet’s public forums are full of vitriol flung at the Linux Community by these sorts of folks. I learned a long time ago that the best way to deal with them is to simply ignore them. The psychological reasons for their bitter negativity are beyond my expertise to deal with, therefore, I don’t. What I try to do is focus on the positive and help folks who want to learn.

Also: Windows 10 Might Soon Track Absolutely Everything You Do for Your Own Good

The Final Release of FreeBSD 11.0 is scheduled for Wednesday, September 28, 2016. However, the release builds have started to appear on FreeBSD’s FTP mirrors and you can download the final ISO right now.

• Xiaomi Mi Box seen at Walmart shelf for $69

  We are not sure if this was a mistake or a very discrete release, but it seems a few Xiaomi Mi Box devices have managed to make it to an unknown Walmart location’s shelves. But that is only part of the exciting news. What is really getting us going is that we are finally seeing a solid price tag attached to the product.

  This photo displays a $69 price point, which happens to be quiet the deal. Keep in mind the Mi Box is no slouch; it can play 4K video at 60 fps and comes with all the goods any worthy Android TV can sport.

• Android and chill: Nougat and the root question

• Sony Xperia XZ pre-orders go live, available on October 2

• Yahoo Mail for Android adds Fingerprint security support, web and video previews, and more

I like Stallman and tend to agree with him often: regarding software, or other politics. This article tries to constructively criticize some parts of the free software movement's ideology, which I collectively refer to as "Stallmanism" (only as pun). It is not an attempt at a personal attack on Stallman, and by reading further you will probably see my politics are very far from that: I coined the term Stallmanism simply because he is at the center of the movement and himself a primary source of the ideas I am critiquing.