Issue #161 / Apr 2014

Sometimes when I'm watching the Internet news unfolding, I feel like I'm in one of those weird dreams where everything looks the same, but all reason is inverted in some way that only the people in the dream understand. The Internet brings down barriers, including those comforting barriers that provide a cozy space for our moral certainty to flourish. We lapse into approaching problems from the circle of our own experience, sometimes not noticing that we have traveled into very different places. And we mistake our viewpoint for our values, aligning ourselves with others who share a common attitude or rhetorical framework.

This month's DVD is a version of the Knoppix Live distribution created especially for the 2014 CeBIT expo and made available before release to Linux Magazine.

Updates on Technologies, Trends, and Tools

Home and small office networks typically place their security in the hands of an inexpensive device that serves as a router, DHCP server, firewall, and wireless hotspot. How secure are these SOHO router devices? We're glad you asked …

If you are looking for a secure option for home surfing and want to protect your children against questionable web content, you need a filtering proxy. SafeSquid is a commercial proxy tool, but it comes with a free version for private users.

Version 13.1 of the community-based openSUSE offers many useful updates and will receive extended maintenance.

A laptop with no proprietary BIOS and 100 percent open source software may sound too good to be true, but that's exactly what Gluglug delivers. Is it a good deal? Read on to find out.

SuperCollider is a versatile and powerful sound generator that can be used to create, filter, and modulate sound. In this article, we tackle the basics.

The EncFS virtual filesystem reduces the configuration overhead for data encryption on Linux.

The Meteor web framework lets you do all your programming in JavaScript – and it includes some useful features for rapid development.