Last week the Linux world was surprised to find that DistroWatch was not available at its usual domain name. Many wondered what was happening with the site, and it turned out that it had some domain registrar problems. Ladislav Bonar clarifies what went wrong last week and assures DistroWatch readers that the site has already been transferred to a new registrar.

When it comes to surfing the web, our options are limited: the market is dominated by three or four mainstream web browsers, all of which share major similarities in design and function. Unless you want to build your own browsing program, you're stuck with their modern browsing paradigms. For San Francisco programmer Stanislas Polu, that wasn't good enough, so, he created Breach -- an open source modular web browser designed to allow anybody to tweak and modify it on a whim.

It appears that DistroWatch went down because of some kind of account issue with its web-hosting provider. This would not be the first, nor last, time an important site went down because of a simple payment problem. The website's last update, a listing for the new version of Scientific Linux, was posted on July 4th.

The one thing we know for certain is that DistroWatch's dropping off the net at this point is not because its domain registration has expired. DistroWatch's domain doesn't expire until July 3, 2018.

It appears that DistroWatch went down because of some kind of account issue with its web-hosting provider. This would not be the first, nor last, time an important site went down because of a simple payment problem. The website's last update, a listing for the new version of Scientific Linux, was posted on July 4th.

The one thing we know for certain is that DistroWatch's dropping off the net at this point is not because its domain registration has expired. DistroWatch's domain doesn't expire until July 3, 2018

At the end of April LGP was migrating servers and expected to "keep downtime to an absolute minimum" while more than two months later the once leading Linux game publishing company remains offline.

It's been more than two months now that LinuxGamePublishing.com has gone dark and no status about their game DRM copy-protection servers. There's also been no new updates via their Facebook page when mentioning, "As part of improving our infrastructure and leading towards some exciting new developments LGP will be migrating hosts and servers over the next few days. We will, of course, attempt to keep downtime to an absolute minimum but there will be downtime. The absolute priority must be our game servers so that everyone can continue playing games. These will be up on the new platform first, followed by the website and other services." I've also received no updates via email.

Web frameworks have gotten much more powerful since the original Freshmeat was built 17 years ago; today, I think building a replacement wouldn’t be a huge project. It is not, however, something I am willing to try to do alone. Whether or not this goes forward will depend on how many people are willing to step up and join me. I figure we need a team of about three core co-developers, at least one of whom needs to have some prior expertise at whatever framework we end up using.

If you are reading this article, you’ve probably already heard of DuckDuckGo. Internet users that stick with the status quo usually don’t look any farther than the first search option offered by their web browser. On the other hand, inquisitive users that depend on the Internet for statistics, comparisons, and hidden pearls of useful information are probably all too familiar with the perks and pitfalls of the current Internet search engines. DuckDuckGo was nothing more than a miniscule blip on the radar of demanding Internet searchers since its inception in 2008. However, the recent scandal of NSA monitoring resulted in a massive influx of users defecting to DuckDuckGo. And a major refresh of DuckDuckGo’s interface in May, 2014 also attracted the attention of many new users, including myself. So, how does DuckDuckGo compare to the big players in the Internet search engine field? Will users who prefer DuckDuckGo for privacy related issues find what they are searching for? And are there any advantages to using DuckDuckGo based solely on the merits of its interface and search result quality? That’s what we hope to determine in this article.

Dear Commissioner Malmstroem,

we are writing to you on the occasion of the international Day Against Digital Restrictions Management, which today is being celebrated around the world. We are very concerned about the security of European citizens, and we ask you to take action to protect them.

The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is an independent charitable non-profit dedicated to promoting Free Software and freedom in the information society. Today we would like to direct your attention to a very specific threat to the freedom and security of computer users everywhere.

On Tuesday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation called on hackers to revolutionize how everyday people contact Congress — and it’s been absolutely floored by the response.

The digital rights advocate is building a free, public domain tool that makes it simple to contact any member of Congress from one central location. The EFF and project partner Sunlight Foundation finished the backend themselves, but they needed help from web developers to test all the different forms for each member of Congress.

Echelon introduced its IzoT Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) framework for peer-to-peer networking of embedded controllers last October. At that time, the building automation and smart grid networking vendor released the IzoT multi-protocol stack in an ARM-ready beta version and reference implementation optimized for the Linux-based Raspberry Pi SBC. Since then, support has extended to the BeagleBone Black.

Read more ►

Open source projects garner the attention of the tech community because the passionate people behind these developments occasionally cause major disruption and create opportunities to change industries, as Android and Linux did.

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linux-blog.org: Many times in IT job settings, you’ll find that you need to become one of ‘the good ole boys’ in order to accomplish your job. You have to like the things others’ like (or pretend to), you have to laugh at the things others’ laugh at. In other words, you may have to become all things to all people. It’s stupid that things are this way…

linuxinsider.com (blog safari): Groklaw is "truly the canary in the coal mine," suggested blogger Martin Espinoza. "When it is no longer possible to tell the truth online sufficiently for it to exist, none of us have the freedom of speech.

groklaw.net: The owner of Lavabit tells us that he's stopped using email and if we knew what he knew, we'd stop too. There is no way to do Groklaw without email. Therein lies the conundrum. What to do? And the conclusion I've reached is that there is no way to continue doing Groklaw.

theregister.co.uk: It might be dubbed "unbreakable", but Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux website is certainly stoppable.

ostatic.com: I'd been wondering when some news was going to come out of the OpenMandriva camp, but today's tidbit wasn't what I hoped. Instead of a developmental release to test, Anurag Bhandari posted to announce that the OpenMandriva network was back up and running.

fossforce.com: Cloud computing was always a bad idea. Ask Richard Stallman; he’ll tell you. Or ask me. We’ve learned that while we’ve been busy wearing tinfoil hats to keep the government from picking our brains, they’ve been doing it anyway, through our computers.

zdnet.com: Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu operating system, has suffered a massive data breach on its forums. All usernames, passwords, and email addresses were stolen.

h-online.com: Although The H has produced many widely read stories, it has not been possible to effectively monetise that traffic to produce a working business model.

fsf.org/blogs: For the last few months, we've been raising an outcry against Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), a plan by Netflix and a block of other media and software companies to squeeze support for Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) into the HTML standard.

linuxadvocates.com: It's more than a bit worrisome not just for Amazon Web Services, but other Cloud ISPs as well as their customers who need to come to terms with the legality of what the disclosure of the NSA PRISM surveillance program means in pure risk management terms.