Learn how to use the Mastodon social network platform from the comfort of your regular IRC client. When it comes to sending text between people, I've found IRC (in particular, a text-based IRC client) works best. I've been using it to chat for decades while other chat protocols and clients come and go. When my friends have picked other chat clients through the years, I've used the amazing IRC gateway Bitlbee to connect with them on their chat client using the same IRC interface I've always used. Bitlbee provides an IRC gateway to many different chat protocols, so you can connect to Bitlbee using your IRC client, and it will handle any translation necessary to connect you to the remote chat clients it supports. I've written about Bitlbee a number of times in the past, and I've used it to connect to other instant messengers, Twitter and Slack. In this article, I describe how I use it to connect to yet another service on the internet: Mastodon.

What happens when you're locked in to a vendor that's too big to fail, but is on the opposite end of a trade war? The story of Google no longer giving Huawei access to Android updates is still developing, so by the time you read this, the situation may have changed. At the moment, Google has granted Huawei a 90-day window whereby it will have access to Android OS updates, the Google Play store and other Google-owned Android assets. After that point, due to trade negotiations between the US and China, Huawei no longer will have that access.

Highlights of the 2019 Southeast LinuxFest.

Remember a.out binaries? They were the file format of the Linux kernel till around 1995 when ELF took over. ELF is better. It allows you to load shared libraries anywhere in memory, while a.out binaries need you to register shared library locations. That's fine at small scales, but it gets to be more and more of a headache as you have more and more shared libraries to deal with. But a.out is still supported in the Linux source tree, 25 years after ELF became the standard default format.

In the modern era, messaging applications are a constant target for attackers, exposing vulnerabilities, disclosing sensitive information of nation states and insider-employee inappropriate behaviors or practices. There is a constant need to prioritize one's cybersecurity and upgrade one's infrastructure to the latest and greatest of defensive technologies. However, the messaging tools that these same organizations tend to rely on often are the last to be secured, if at all.

If you use GPG keys, learn about the benefits to storing them on a smart card.

Dave tackles analysis of the ugly Apache web server log. I know, in my last article I promised I'd jump back into the mail merge program I started building a while back. Since I'm having some hiccups with my AskDaveTaylor.com web server, however, I'm going to claim editorial privilege and bump that yet again.

An eight-year-old can contribute, and you can too. Working at a company that creates free and open-source software (FOSS) and hosts all of our code on GitHub, my team and I at UserLAnd Technologies are used to seeing and reviewing contributions, which are called pull requests, from users. Recently, however, we received a pull request that is very special to me. It was from an eight-year-old, and not just any eight-year-old, but my daughter.

THIS OFFER HAS EXPIRED   Issue #1 of Linux Journal was released 25 years ago this month. To celebrate, we're partying like it's 1994! We're offering 1-year subscriptions for—you guessed it—just $19.94. That's almost $15 off our regular price. Unfortunately, this price is not sustainable for us long-run so we can only offer this special rate through April 11, 2019. If you can, subscribe now. It's a great rate for a magazine that has a lot of love put in to it each month. :-D

Daylight Linux is the only official distribution for the Raspberry Pi to work with the Fluxbox interface. With Fluxbox, Daylight Linux is one of the lightest and fastest distributions for all Raspberry Pi models. Many programs, games and system tools were developed during a long year of work in Python 3 to create version 3.