04.05.14
Posted in News Roundup at 7:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Linux 3.15
-
A Radeon pull request for drm-next changes was sent in this morning for ultimately landing with the Linux 3.15 kernel.
-
Intel Broadwell processors introduce a new RDSEED CPU instruction that is used as a pseudo-random number generator (PRNG). The RDRAND instruction (also known as Bull Mountain) that was introduced with Ivy Bridge CPUs is considered by the US NIST as a cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator. The RDSEED instruction meanwhile is considered a non-deterministic random bit generator in compliance with NIST’s SP 800-90 B and C.
-
-
-
-
Landing into the latest Linux kernel code for version 3.15 is EFI mixed mode support that will allow 64-bit kernels to run from 32-bit EFI firmware.
One of the features that was merged into Git this afternoon as part of the EFI pull request for the Linux 3.15 merge window is EFI mixed mode support. The EFI mixed mode support allows 64-bit kernels to be booted from 32-bit EFI firmware as long as the boot-loader supports EFI’s handover protocol.
Collaboration Summit
-
-
Last week, I attended the Linux Storage, Filesystems, and Memory Management summit (LSF/MM) on Monday and Tuesday, and the Linux Collaboration Summit (aka Collab) from Wednesday through Friday. Both events were held at the Meritage Resort in Napa, CA. This was by invitation of some Linux developers who wanted to find out more about what PostgreSQL needs from the Linux kernel. Andres Freund and I attended on behalf of the PostgreSQL community; Josh Berkus was present for part of the time as well.
-
In the last five years I have experienced a few professional transitions, changing employers from a Software Engineering role to System Administrator role, and from developing and/or testing software for “Legacy” operating systems and proprietary software to infrastructure services delivery using large scale UNIX and Linux customer environments. I have gone from only imagining what challenges Systems Administrators have in developing systems management software, to actually knowing them first hand. Now in the last year, I have a new job working on process, procedures and tools improvements and knowledge management activities for UNIX and Linux Infrastructure Delivery at Dell.
Linus Torvalds
-
-
An argument between developers of some of the most basic parts of Linux turned heated this week, resulting in a prominent Red Hat employee and code contributor being banned from working on the Linux kernel.
-
Just as anthills have their strange way of getting repaired, the stresses between two huge tectonic plates of FLOSS will seek equilibrium and life will go on, until the next time…
-
The Linux kernel developers and systemd developers locked horns this week over a bug in systemd which would stop systems from booting up. The bug was filed by Borislav Petkov where he explained that systemd bug was not allowing him to log into the machine. Kay Sievers, the co-author of systemd, suggested kernel developers not to use ‘generic’ term “debug”, “Like for the kernel, there are options to fin-grain control systemd’s logging behaviour; just do not use the generic term “debug” which is a convenience shortcut for the kernel AND the Base OS.”
Graphics Stack
-
As anticipated, X.Org Server 1.16 when released this summer will feature initial support for XWayland.
XWayland is the compatibility layer for running legacy X11 applications atop Wayland. The XWayland code has been baking for a while and as of a few hours ago the initial support was finally merged. This XWayland merging came just in time as the merge window for the six-month update, X.Org Server 1.16, is soon closing.
-
The Jetson board was announced with a $192 MSRP and a pledge to ship in April. Now that it’s April, some Phoronix readers who also jumped on this bandwagon may be wondering about more details… Through more sources, I’ve found out that it’s planned for a late April debut. Those who pre-ordered the Jetson will find their boards shipped in about three weeks if they ordered via NewEgg or NVIDIA.com. Everything I’ve heard from my sources about this Tegra K1 board remain very positive and that it’s performing very well. Stay tuned and in three weeks we’ll have up some very interesting new ARM benchmarks on Phoronix.
-
Going back numerous months has been a proposal for a full-screen shell protocol initially for the Weston compositor but could be promoted to an official Wayland protocol in the future. The fullscreen shell protocol is designed to make it easy to support simple full-screen clients like splash screens and terminal emulators in an easy and convenient manner rather than having the simple clients talk to DRM/KMS directly, input/output abstraction, easing up development of compositors, and allowing support for screen sharing and recording.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
04.04.14
Posted in News Roundup at 7:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Full-Disclosure
-
-
Once on the cutting edge of vulnerability disclosure, Full-Disclosure has become too unpleasant to read or moderate.
-
From the time I first started writing regularly about IT security in 2003 until today, the Full-Disclosure mailing list has been a must-read resource every day—but that apparently is ending today.
‘Ethical’
Weev
-
-
We’ve been covering the ridiculous DOJ case against Andrew “weev” Auernheimer for quite some time. If you don’t recall, Auernheimer and a partner found a really blatant security hole on AT&T’s servers that allowed them to very easily find out the email addresses of iPad owners. There was no breaking in to anything. The issue was that AT&T left this all exposed. But, with a very dangerous reading of the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) and a bunch of folks who don’t understand basic technology, weev was sentenced to 3.5 years in jail (and has been kept in solitary confinement for much of his stay so far). Part of the case is complicated by the fact that weev is kind of a world class jerk — who took great thrill in being an extreme online troll, getting a thrill out of making others miserable. But, that point should have no standing in whether or not exposing a security hole by basically entering a URL that AT&T failed to secure, becomes a criminal activity.
Misc.
-
Windigo, as the attack campaign has been dubbed, has been active since 2011 and has compromised systems belonging to the Linux Foundation’s kernel.org and the developers of the cPanel Web hosting control panel, according to a detailed report published Tuesday by researchers from antivirus provider Eset. During its 36-month run, Windigo has compromised more than 25,000 servers with robust malware that sends more than 35 million spam messages a day and exposes Windows-based Web visitors to drive-by malware attacks. It also feeds people running any type of computer banner ads for porn services.
-
A revamped early random number generator in iOS 7 is weaker than its vulnerable predecessor and generates predictable outcomes.
A researcher today at CanSecWest said an attacker could brute force the Early Random PRNG used by Apple in its mobile operating system to bypass a number of kernel exploit mitigations native to iOS.
-
The Tor network is in danger of being swamped by criminals abusing its anonymity to hide an underworld of parasitic botnets, malicious command and control and ‘darknet’ markets, according to research from Kaspersky Lab.
-
-
For years, security researchers have warned about the risks of keylogging software on computing platforms. Keyloggers, quite literally log and record the keystrokes taken by a user in a bid to learn passwords and other valuable information.
-
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 7:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
-
Regrettably, the owner of WikiLeaks-Forum strives to manipulate public opinion in several ways with the help of his staffers. The forum pretends to host lively discussions of a huge community while in fact most of the forum posts (more than 90 percent) are done by staffers.
-
Several in the GOP want to stop a request for scientists to disclose financial conflicts in their research. What good reason could they possibly have?
-
I had fairly well concluded that the most likely cause was a fire disrupting the electrical and control systems, when CNN now say the sharp left turn was pre-programmed 12 minutes before sign off from Malaysian Air Traffic control, which was followed fairly quickly by that left turn.
-
Almost everything is fake. The brave proverbs with which we were brought up – the truth will out, cheats never prosper, virtue will triumph – turn out to be unfounded. For the most part, our lives are run and our views are formed by chancers, cheats and charlatans. They construct a labyrinth of falsehoods from which it is almost impossible to emerge without the help of people who devote their lives to navigating it. This is the role of the media. But the media drag us deeper into the labyrinth.
There are two kinds of corporate lobbyists in the UK. There are those who admit they are lobbyists but operate behind closed doors, and there are those who operate openly but deny they are lobbyists. Because David Cameron has broken his promise to shine “the light of transparency on lobbying in our country and … come clean about who is buying power and influence” we still “don’t know who is meeting whom. We don’t know whether any favours are being exchanged. We don’t know which outside interests are wielding unhealthy influence … Commercial interests – not to mention government contracts – worth hundreds of billions of pounds are potentially at stake.” (All that was Cameron in 2010, by the way) At the same time, the media is bustling with people working for thinktanks which refuse to say who is paying them, making arguments that favour big business and billionaires.
-
The channel has made an extraordinary connection with its target audience of 16- to 34-year-olds. Its closure could alienate a generation
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Intellectual Monopoly at 6:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
-
A spokesperson for BIS (the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills), commented on the reforms, saying, “One of these measures is copyright exception for archiving and preserving. The existing preservation exception will be updated to apply to all types of media and to museums and galleries, as well as libraries and archives.”
-
-
The Saudi Arabian Ministry of Culture and Information has blocked access to The Pirate Bay, for reasons yet unknown. In addition to the notorious torrent site, Torrentz.eu, Rarbg and possibly several others are blocked too. As always, local users are already discussing ways to work around the restrictions.
-
In 1989, a little known group from New York released an album that would change the course of hip hop. De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising sounded like nothing else: spoken word, skit, and psychedelia; sampled exhaustively, sampled from life. 25 years in, it sounds all the more remarkable. It sounds like the Internet.
-
Two individuals accused of millions of dollars worth of Android piracy signed plea agreements with the U.S. Government last week, but at least one other defendant has different things in mind. With the hiring of a “much-feared civil rights lawyer”, the former operator of Applanet is going on the offensive against the DOJ.
-
It’s been almost a year since US District Judge Otis Wright issued a sanction order repudiating the lawyers behind the “copyright trolling” organization known as Prenda Law. Since then, several other judges have pounded Prenda with expensive sanction orders. Just last week, Paul Hansmeier, Paul Duffy, and John Steele—the three lawyers commonly linked to Prenda—were found to be in contempt of a devastating sanction order won by AT&T and Comcast.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 6:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Mostly chronological:
-
Next week, on 3 April, Members of the European Parliament will vote on the future of Net Neutrality and the open Internet in Europe. After years of struggle across the European Union, either solid legal protections for the freedom of expression and innovation online will be introduced or telecom operators will be given free reign to discriminate between online communications and use this to force out competition. In light of approaching European elections, citizens must call on their representatives to vote in favour of the protection of fundamental rights and the internet as we know it.
-
A few days before the vote that will decide the future of Net Neutrality and the Internet commons in Europe, La Quadrature du Net calls on all Members of the European Parliament to support the amendments proposed by the Social-Democrats (S&D), the Greens (Greens/EFA), the United Left (GUE/NGL) and the Liberals1 (ALDE). These amendments contain strong provisions to protect freedom of expression and freedom of information online, reassert the principle of fair competition and guarantee that users may freely choose between services online. From now until 3 April, citizens should urge their representatives to support this cross-party package of amendments in order to preserve the Internet commons.
-
The battle to preserve the open internet is reaching its final stage, with the big European Parliament vote taking place on April 3rd. The report adopted by the Industry Committee two weeks ago includes provisions undermining the principle of net neutrality, putting the open internet and freedom of speech at risk. The good news is that four political groups have tabled proposals for final vote that would prevent discrimination and enshrine real net neutrality in law. Now it is up to our representatives to choose – openness and competition or closed, uncompetitive networks.
-
-
The European Parliament took a major step towards enshrining net neutrality in law today, when the EU Parliament voted yes to a new Regulation for a Telecommunications Single Market.
-
-
-
-
-
Today the European Parliament adopted in first reading the Regulation on the Single Telecoms Market (see the vote call). By amending the text with the amendment proposals made by the Social-Democrats (S&D), Greens (Greens/EFA), United Left (GUE/NGL) and Liberals (ALDE), the Members of the European Parliament took a historic step for the protection of Net Neutrality and the Internet commons in the European Union. La Quadrature du Net warmly thanks all citizens, organisations and parliamentarians who took part in this campaign, and calls on them to remain mobilised for the rest of the legislative procedure.
-
-
-
Earlier this month, the U.S. government surprised the Internet community by announcing that it plans to back away from its longstanding oversight of the Internet domain name system. The move comes more than 15 years after it first announced plans to transfer management of the so-called IANA function, which includes the power to add new domain name extensions (such as dot-xxx) and to alter administrative control over an existing domain name extension (for example, approving the transfer of the dot-ca domain in 2000 from the University of British Columbia to the Canadian Internet Registration Authority).
Permalink
Send this to a friend
04.03.14
Posted in News Roundup at 10:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
-
-
-
GOG (Formerly Good Old Games) have become extremely popular amongst gamers for a number of reasons: Lack of DRM, good selection and a variety of both new indie titles and, as the name suggests, “good old games”, classic titles like System Shock and Baldur’s Gate, many from the golden era of PC gaming.
-
Voglperf is a quick Valve tool for benchmarking Linux OpenGL games that comes down to just spewing frame information (FPS, frame time and min/max values) every second. That data can then be plotted, etc. Voglperf doesn’t integrate any test automation but just dumps the frame data for whatever OpenGL game/application is loaded by it. Voglperf is supported on SteamOS and works with Steam on Linux.
-
Valve recently put up their patched branch of the Mesa on github for anyone to study and modify. The company used it for SteamOS. With this move Valve has once again showed that they not only support Linux programming practices, but also embrace the Linux culture practices.
-
At its core, the game is about designing airships and fighting with them. Ships are put together out of modules, and the layout of modules matters a great deal: everything on board is done by individual airsailors who need to run around, ferrying coal, ammunition, water and repair tools – and sometimes their fallen comrades.
-
-
-
-
Leadwerks was kickstarted back in July of last year, so it’s good to see it so soon. It promises to be an easy-to-use game development system.
-
-
The developers of Star Conflict, a massively multiplayer space simulation game developed by Star Gem Inc. and published by Gaijin Entertainment, have confirmed that a Linux version is in the works.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 10:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
-
-
-
-
-
Default file managers are usually limited in what they offer. While you can perform all major file operations with them, how you do so is often not that comfortable.
-
Midnight Commander, a visual file manager and a feature-rich full-screen text mode application that allows users to copy, move, and delete files and whole directory trees, search for files, and run commands in the subshell, is now at version 4.8.12.
-
It has been a long time in the making, but I have finally cut a new release of the Transmageddon transcoder application. The code inside Transmageddon has seen some major overhaul as I have updated it to take advantage of new GStreamer APIs and features. New features in this release include.
-
VLC is definitely one of the best media player applications available for any platform. I make it a point to keep it on all of my computers. OMG! Ubuntu! reports that VLC is about to get even better with the addition of an add-ons manager in version 2.2.
-
-
-
-
When I started the Zed project about a year ago I intended to build an editor just for me: something minimal, simple and stable. Writing something for myself seemed a natural thing to do after spending about a year and a half having a job building an IDE: once you’ve built your own tools, there’s no going back. Also, having built this sort of thing before (although not from “scratch”), it was fairly quick to get something working.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 10:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
-
-
-
-
-
Imagine having the equivalent of four 1920×1080 monitors in a 2×2 grid, on your desk, with absolutely no seam between them. This article describes my journey towards that goal…
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Permalink
Send this to a friend
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »
Content is available under CC-BY-SA