Issue #200 / Jul 2017

The news has gotten really weird recently. I suppose politicians have always blurred the line between fact and opinion, but lately things have gotten a little unglued. False facts are accepted without proof. Proven facts are ignored or denied just because they don't happen to line up with someone's preferred narrative.

Updates on technologies, trends, and tools

Long lines and interesting discussions awaited the visitor at this year's FOSDEM event in Brussels, Belgium.

The GNU General Public License was born of the simple idea that freedom matters. Yet this simple tool for protecting freedom has another important feature that makes it even more powerful, and that is the ability to build communities.

Few have had a closer view of the Free Software revolution than Eben Moglen, former lead counsel for the Free Software Foundation and founder of the Software Freedom Law Center. We asked Moglen about the legal basis for the GPL's famous copyleft protection and the long, steady effort to tell the world about the benefits of free software.

Anyone wanting to monitor logfiles could use one of the big dogs like Nagios or Icinga. However, lightweight alternatives can also sniff out threats and take much less time to set up. We put five of these little guard dogs to the test.

The professor sets the stage for Knoppix on an SD card that runs on the Raspberry Pi.

Sometimes things go wrong when you are installing an operating system on a hard disk drive or SSD. A boot repair disk gets your boot configuration back on its feet, quickly.

A number of sensors and cameras send author Mike Schilli a short message if someone tampers with his apartment door. He has now applied this security principle to the SSH entrance of his Linux computer.

A strange rule seems to dictate that the most useless products and services have the most annoying online advertising. Columnist Charly blocks the garish advertising for all computers on his network centrally with the Pi-hole tool, which is not only for Raspberry Pi devices.