Linux Foundation extends free Chromebook offer
The Linux Foundation has been offering a free Chromebook to those who purchase an instructor-led class on its site, and now the free Chromebook offer has been extended due to popular demand.
The Linux Foundation site has more details:
When you train with The Linux Foundation you’re already getting the best Linux training available. And now, to make our courses even more valuable, we are including a free Chromebook with the purchase of any Linux Foundation instructor-led training course taking place through the end of 2015.
“We want students of Linux to experience a Linux desktop and Chromebooks are a great way to do that - either through Google's Linux-based OS or by installing one of the many Linux distros available. We hope this offer can provide the freedom Linux developers and IT professionals value and spark new ideas and discoveries as they embark on our Linux training program.”
Jim Zemlin
Executive Director, The Linux Foundation
The Ubuntu Touch store gets its first malicious app
Malicious apps are nothing new to Android users, but now one has appeared in the Ubuntu Touch store despite Ubuntu's automated testing system.
Silviu Stahie reports for Softpedia:
One of our readers sent us a notice about a new application that's been uploaded to the store, which was simply named "test" (removed in the meantime) and was able to change the boot splash for the phone.
This is not something allowed, and it's not clear if the application did anything else. The advice from the Ubuntu developers is to uninstall the application. An application capable of doing that (and possibly more) is a dangerous thing to have around, and Ubuntu developers have been quick to remove it.
At this point, it's not exactly clear how many people downloaded it, but it was reported pretty fast by the community, so it's unlikely that too many people got it. Also, it has a generic name, so it's not like it popped up in searches. A much more important problem is the fact that it passed through the regular security filters, and that such important modifications were possible.
Can the Internet exist without Linux?
Linux has proven to be a very important foundation technology for many things, but how important is it to the Internet itself? Could the Internet exist without Linux? A writer at ZDNet explores this issue and tries to answer the question.
SJVN reports for ZDNet:
...Linux's importance to the Web is even more extreme. By W3Cook's analysis of Alexa's data, 96.3 percent of the top 1 million web servers are running Linux. The remainder is split between Windows, 1.9 percent, and FreeBSD, 1.8 percent.
In short, the Internet we use today really couldn't exist without Linux.
Why Linux instead of another operating system? Because only Linux combines stability, de facto standardization, high stability and security, and low cost. Ironically, for all the chatter about how "hard" Linux is, it was the perfect operating system to take the Internet from engineers to everyone.
Or, to put it another way: Every Facebook post you make, every YouTube video you watch, every Google search you run, is done on Linux.
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