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Links 20/5/2015: Containers, OpenStack, and EXT4 Corruption





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Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • Lee Schlesinger: No one nowadays objects to FOSS
    I'm Lee Schlesinger, currently managing editor for the Spiceworks Community. Spiceworks provides a free downloadable help desk and network inventory application, and hosts a community for IT pros to discuss both work and off-topic issues. Though we have a pretty popular Linux group in the community, many of the community members, who we call SpiceHeads, work in Microsoft-centric shops.


  • Huawei launches 10KB LiteOS to power the internet of things
    Chinese telecoms giant Huawei is preparing to launch an operating system for the internet of things that's just 10 kilobytes in size. The company says that its "LiteOS" is the "lightest" software of its kind and can be used to power a range of smart devices — from wearables to cars. Huawei predicts that by 2025 there will be roughly 100 billion internet-connected devices in the world, with 2 million new sensors deployed every hour. The company also said that the OS would be "opened to all developers" to allow them to quickly create their own smart products — although it's unclear whether this means that LiteOS will be fully open-source. Huawei says LiteOS also supports "zero configuration, auto-discovery, and auto-networking."


  • Electronic IDs need open source tools
    In Sweden there is a service called BankID, it’s an electronic identity service. Banks issue the electronic ID which can be used by companies, banks and government agencies to authenticate and conclude agreements with individuals over the internet. A few months ago however it was decided that BankID software on Linux would no longer be supported. Finding an alternative can be difficult for Linux users.


  • Events



  • SaaS/Big Data



    • OpenStack: Ready for more enterprise adoption?
      OpenStack is ready for enterprise deployment, but there are rough spots that is likely to relegate it to new workloads and self-service developer use, according to Forrester Research.


    • ​Red Hat brings Gluster to OpenStack shared file service
      At OpenStack Summit, Red Hat announced it was releasing a technology preview of Red Hat Gluster Storage with integration into OpenStack's new Manila shared file system project.


    • The OpenStack Foundation Rolls Out a Community App Catalog
      A foundation can do a lot to unite a community--just look at the example set by The Linux Foundation. This week, the OpenStack Foundation has rolled out a community application catalog built to facilitate collaboration and sharing on the OpenStack scene, where many IT administrators are wrestling with deploying the open cloud platform. The concept is to encourage administrators and others to leverage the work that has already been produced in OpenStack deployments.


    • MapR Reacts to Gartner Findings on Hadoop Implementation
      Researchers at Gartner have been in the news for throwing some shade on Hadoop with the results of a new study that found that Hadoop is, well, hard. There are just not enough skilled professionals that can claim mastery of the platform, among other issues. Gartner, Inc.'s 2015 Hadoop Adoption Study, involving 284 Gartner Research Circle members, found that only 125 respondents who completed the whole survey had already invested in Hadoop or had plans to do so within the next two years.




  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice



    • LibreOffice 5.0 Open-Source Office Suite Has Been Branched
      Branching LibreOffice 5.0 now puts it under a hard feature freeze while the beta one release is to follow quite soon followed by a second LO 5.0 beta in early June. Four release candidates for LibreOffice 5.0 will come during June and July while the official release of LibreOffice 5 is still slated for the end of July or early August.




  • CMS



    • Free, Open Source & Feature Rich: An Overview of DotCMS
      dotCMS has claimed a desirable chunk of the enterprise market by landing and working alongside large clients such as Standard & Poor’s, Wiley Publishing, Thomson Reuters Foundation and Hospital Corporation of America. As such, it’s reputation as an enterprise solution is growing fast.




  • Healthcare



    • The future of open source in health IT
      I've known Fred for about 15 years or so, first as a contributor to OpenEMR and later we accidentally met in person at the University of Texas. It's pretty cool to come face-to-face with folks you've only know online and, mostly, from working with their contributed code! Over the years, Fred has hosted a couple of open source healthcare IT conferences and done some great work in the field for ClearHealth/MirrorMed with Dave Ulhman and now focusing on open data.




  • Openness/Sharing



  • Programming



    • Node.js and io.js to merge under Node.js Foundation
      The merger was put to a vote on GitHub by io.js developer Mikeal Rogers, who initially proposed the merger in February, and the io.js technical committee voted to approve the merger yesterday. According to Rogers, the team will continue releasing io.js versions while the convergence takes place, but after the merger is complete, the io.js working groups and technical committee will join the Node.js Foundation under renamed titles.


    • Code.org and College Board Team Reach Out for Talented High School Coders
      The goals of the program are to provide high-quality computer science instruction at the high school level and to identify potentially talented computer students who are in demographics underserved by the IT industry, such as women and ethnic minorities.






Leftovers



  • IT Workers Report Significant Decrease in Stress Levels
    Good news for stressed out IT professionals—a TEKsystems survey of more than 1,000 IT workers indicates a vast positive change in the stability of IT staffing environments as compared to a year ago.


  • Hackathons 101: How to Hack Your Way to the Top


  • Security



    • Oracle Patches the Venom Security Issue in All Supported VirtualBox Branches


    • Is SELinux good anti-venom?
      Dan Berrange, creator of libvirt, sums it up nicely on the Fedora Devel list:

      "While you might be able to crash the QEMU process associated with your own guest, you should not be able to escalate from there to take over the host, nor be able to compromise other guests on the same host. The attacker would need to find a second independent security flaw to let them escape SELinux in some manner, or some way to trick libvirt via its QEMU monitor connection. Nothing is guaranteed 100% foolproof, but in absence of other known bugs, sVirt provides good anti-venom for this flaw IMHO."
    • Tuesday's security updates


    • DDoS reflection attacks are back – and this time, it's personal
      At the start of 2014, attackers' favorite distributed denial of service attack strategy was to send messages to misconfigured servers with a spoofed return address – the servers would keep trying to reply to those messages, allowing the attackers to magnify the impact of their traffic.


    • Another HTTPS Vulnerability Rattles The Internet
      Another HTTPS vulnerability has started to make its rounds earlier this morning. Dubbed Logjam by its researchers, the vulnerability stems from the US's encryption export mandate back in the 1990s. This particular vulnerability, in the transport-layer security layer protocol, breaks the Diffie-Hellman perfect forward-secrecy. Susceptibility to the vulnerability is depended on servers and clients supporting the DHE_EXPORT encryption scheme, or using a key less-than-or-equal to 1024 bits.




  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression





  • Finance



    • Europe faces second revolt as Portugal's ascendant Socialists spurn austerity
      Europe faces the risk of a second revolt by Left-wing forces in the South after Portugal’s Socialist Party vowed to defy austerity demands from the country’s creditors and block any further sackings of public officials.


    • Fox News Omits Mention Of Dangerous Consequences Of Arizona GOP Welfare Restrictions
      But the measure will not only hurt those who need such programs most, it may also increase costs to the state in the long run. As Liz Schott, a welfare policy analyst, explained to the AP: "Long-term welfare recipients are often the most vulnerable, suffering from mental and physical disabilities, poor job histories and little education ... But without welfare, they'll likely show up in other ways that will cost taxpayers, from emergency rooms to shelters to the criminal justice system."


    • Accountability? How Overseers Let Charters off the Hook; $3.3 Billion Spent (Part 4)
      Earlier in this special report series, CMD revealed how states that do not hold their charter schools and authorizers accountable have the upper hand when the U.S. Department of Education (ED) evaluates applications to the quarter-billion-dollar-a-year charter schools program. But if the review process is deeply flawed, the oversight of the $3.3 billion disbursed within the charter schools program is not much better.


    • Austerity and Neoliberalism in Greece
      Austerity is about shifting the burden of an economic crisis from one part of the population to another.




  • Privacy



  • Civil Rights



    • President Obama Rolls Back Some Police Militarization... Police Flip Out
      We've had a bunch of stories lately about the increase in militarized police and what a ridiculous and dangerous idea it is. As we've discussed in the past, much of this came from the Defense Department and its 1033 program, which takes decommissioned military equipment and gives it to police. This results in bizarre situations like the LA School District police having a bunch of grenade launchers. The program is somewhat infamous for its lack of rules, transparency and oversight.


    • The 85-Year-Old Nun Who Went to Prison for Embarrassing the Feds Is Finally Free
      Sister Megan Rice, the 85-year-old activist nun who two years ago humiliated government officials by penetrating and vandalizing a supposedly ultra-high-security uranium storage facility, has finally been released from prison. A federal appeals court on Friday overturned the 2013 sabotage convictions of Rice and two fellow anti-nuclear activists, Michael Walli, 66, and Greg Boertje-Obed, 59, ruling that that their actions—breaking into Tennessee's Y-12 National Security Complex and spreading blood on a uranium storage bunker—did not harm national security.




  • Internet/Net Neutrality



    • EU's ongoing attempt to kill Net Neutrality forever
      For more than two years hard negotiations have been conducted within European institutions regarding the regulation proposal on telecommunications, which now contains two main chapters, one on roaming and the other on Net Neutrality. In 2014, a lot of work was done by citizen organisations to ensure that the European Parliament would protect Net Neutrality and uphold the rights of citizens to access a non-discriminatory, guaranteed access to a neutral and transparent Internet networks.




  • Intellectual Monopolies



    • Copyrights



      • Popcorn Time Now Streams Movies To A Browser
        Popcorn Time has been called the Netflix for pirated movies, but it requires the installation of a desktop application. Not anymore. Now thanks to a site called Popcorn Time In Your Browser you’re just a couple of clicks away from watching a pirated movie stream.

        The in-browser app works much like the desktop version, remotely streaming torrent files from YTS through Coinado. Users do not need to install anything, and from what I can tell, the torrent files are never stored locally on the user’s machine. Just click on a title, wait a few seconds and bam, a pirated movie starts playing.


      • Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood Insists His Emails With The MPAA Are Super Secret
        Last we had checked in on the ongoing legal wrangling between Google and Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, a court had ruled pretty strongly against Hood, accusing him of acting in "bad faith," for "the purpose of harassing" Google in violation of its First Amendment rights. Checking back in on the case to see what's been going on, it appears that things have continued to get more and more heated. A little while after that ruling slamming Hood, Wingate ordered Hood to provide a bunch of information to Google as part of the discovery process for the case -- including, bizarrely, responses to Techdirt's FOIA request, which we had declined to continue after Hood's office demanded over $2,000 and made it clear that they still likely wouldn't give us anything.








Recent Techrights' Posts

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Dark Patterns
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It's Almost Fall (Autumn)
To "Facebook prison" you are bound
Bruce Schneier About "Secure Boot"
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Further Media Cut-downs
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