Bringing Free Software To a Street Near You

Blug_fred writes "It's that time of year again; the nights are drawing in, the leaves are beginning to turn, and literally hundreds of teams of dedicated F/OSS enthusiasts from around the world are preparing to hit the streets in celebration of Software Freedom Day 2012. In an effort to increase awareness of free and open source software among the general public, SFD teams will be standing around town centers and shopping malls, holding talks at schools and universities, giving demonstrations and handing out GNU/Linux and FOSS collections for Windows on CD. With money being tight and paranoia about malware and viruses at an all-time high, the time is right to help consumers switch to the myriad of quality open source applications available. If you would like to check for an SFD team in your area and consider attending, be it to help out or simply learn more about free software for yourself, there's an interactive map to help you find your way."

Comments

paranoia about malware and viruses

[frovingslosh]

With money being tight and paranoia about malware and viruses at an all-time high, the time is right to accept free discs from total strangers and install them on your computer.

Re:paranoia about malware and viruses

[symbolset]

Ironically, that is actually the cure for the illness. Sometimes life is counterintuitive.

Re:paranoia about malware and viruses

[MrEricSir]

With money being tight and paranoia about malware and viruses at an all-time high, the time is right to accept free discs from total strangers and install them on your computer.

Hey if money's tight, I hear one an make money building a botnet by getting strangers to install trojans on their machines...

Re:paranoia about malware and viruses

[Zero__Kelvin]

Awesome!!! ... because I'm going to be taking pictures of people from whom I grab disks, checking them for malware, and then hunting those people who hand out malware down with baseball bats, so I really hope to see you there!

Re:paranoia about malware and viruses

[__aaltlg1547]

Is it really paranoia or is the malware really out to get me, or at least my computer and my money? Anyway, I agree. If some anonymous dude hands me a free disk, I'm going to trash it.

Post the Date

[Pete Venkman]

And when is Software Freedom Day 2012? Isn't that what the summary is supposed to be about?

Outdated news

[rbprbp]

From their web site: "Celebrate SFD 2012 on Saturday, September 15th". Too late for lots of people.

Stop Trying to Convert People to Your Religion

[reallocate]

You're stil trying to convert people to your religion so they will use the software you like. People don't care. Stop playing missionaries and start marketing software that's either better than Windows/Apple or does something people want to do that they can't do with Windows/Apple.

Re:Just read the damn comment, FFS.

[maxwell demon]

> F/OSS enthusiasts
F or OSS enthusiasts? What does F stand for?

Free. F/OSS = Free/Open Source Software

Re:The need fpr physical media

[FaxeTheCat]

The fact that they do not provide a list of software with related download links does NOT mean there is a need for physical media. It simply means they need to get their act together and put that information on their website.

As for finding whatever they are giving away: I really really do not care exactly what titles they give away. If I need a piece of software for some task, I go out and find it. I do not wait for some geek to come around handing out CDs with arbitrary software collections. And I assume that is how it works for most people these days.

Re:Handing out physical media?

[anubi]

I find it puzzling why in this day of common gigabyte flash, why our machines aren't shipped with a basic OS in flash already loaded with minimal and thoroughly tested code for at least internet browsing Kinda like the old Commodore used to ship with Basic preinstalled - all you did was turn it on and it "woke up" at the BASIC prompt displayed on the screen before it ever began to look for disks or other peripherals.

I want my off-the-shelf machine opening up a browser window pointed at 0.0.0.0 upon power up without needing a disk. If no TCPIP addresses are found, then all I can see is my own machine. I think 0.0.0.0 would be perfect for accessing one's own machine as no-one would put this address onto the web. 0.0.0.0 would be my desktop. It should quite happily surf the web - until it has to deal with some proprietary content or save something - and even then it should be smart enough to display blanks where the proprietary content is and indicate what the problem is, never hanging up.

Pull the disk completely, and the machine should still run fine, albeit no flash, no movies, no additional capabilities, and a lack of saving anything. It won't need anything like a special "boot" disk or special sectors. If it even as much as finds a USB stick out there, it would offer it as a storage option. With the size of USB sticks these days, I could keep any drivers, extended code, data, whatever, on USB drives. In the event I do have some unforseen malcode which makes its way onto my removable media, there is nothing saying I can't remove everything, come back up with a virus killer program running from a known and trusted USB stick - once that program has control, plug my problem drive in and let the virus program examine the problem drive.

The ROM routines should include a TCPIP stack, at least a WAV, MP3, MPG, JPG, GIF, PNG, and BMP display routines and a rudimentary windowing system library callable from a resident C++ ( processing ? ) compiler. ( it would program like a big Arduino ).

You want special stuff that runs on top of it? Go buy it. Whoever made the special stuff takes responsibility for its behaviour ( or misbehaviour ). I can't trust any executables on rewritable media any more than I can trust contracts written in pencil. At least ROM is like a contract written in ink. ( Hint to the BSA: ROM is a physical product, and its easy to identify if you sold it or not. If you find your code in someone else's ROM, you have someone to go after. No use going after someone else's machine - there's nothing in it )

My own personal belief is that the write be disabled to the boot ROM at the factory, so no software can overwrite it. If one HAS to, he can disassemble his machine down to get physical access to the board and install a jumper plug in just the right place if he wants to reflash his ROM, but at least make it hard enough one has to deliberately go out of his way to do so. And of course, all obligations of the manufacturer regarding the security of their machine would be voided.

I hate all this malcode as much as the next guy, and I am all for cleaning up all these piles of muck everyone keeps stepping in. This muck is much like the problem a lot of us Arduino folks have where some layout guy ten years ago decided to put two pin connectors offset by .160 inches. They won't fit into 0.1 inch protoboards neatly. To this day they still build the boards with that frustrating offset because ten years ago some layout guy at his PCB workstation did not forsee people trying to use Arduinos with the 0.1" vectorboards and CSC socketboards.

I think Google ( Android ) is closing fast on this dream.

Re:Handing out physical media?

[Kalriath]

Actually, the loopback is 127.0.0.0/8 - even 127.13.4.1 will resolve to localhost.