Information freedom for open source users.
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Tech Broiler: “openSUSE 11.3, the latest version of Novell’s community Linux OS was released on July 15th. I’ve put the OS through its paces for the last several days and I have to say that while I continue to be impressed with the functionality of openSUSE, I’m not seeing a huge amount of sexy in the latest release.”
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Geek.com looks
at Damn Vulnerable Linux
(DVL). “Usually, when installing a new operating system the hope is
that it’s as up-to-date as possible. After installation there’s bound to be
a few updates required, but no more than a few megabytes. Damn Vulnerable
Linux is different, it’s shipped in as vulnerable a state as possible. The
idea behind DVL is to offer an operating system for learning and research
for security students.”
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Vulnerability Summary for the Week of July 12, 2010
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Dave Neary steps into the open core debate on his blog. Part of the problem is that people have divergent definitions of open core, he says. “There is another name for this which is even more pejorative, Crippleware. Deliberately hobbled software. And that’s what I think gets people riled up — if you’re releasing something as free software, then there should at least be the pretence that you are giving the community the opportunity to fend for itself — even if that is by providing an “unofficial” git tree where the community can code up GPL features competing with your commercial offering, or a nice forum for people to share templates, themes and extensions and fend for themselves. But what gets people riled is hearing a company call themselves “an Open Source company” when most of the users of their “open source” product do not have software freedom. It’s disingenuous, and it is indeed brand dilution.”
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Information security is an exalted field. Exalted both in the sense of “noble” and in the sense of “inflated”. We practice security as a dark art, a complex discipline of insiders with obscure acronyms. Even more than other areas of IT, security professionals are a “special” breed, as one can clearly see by the many certifications following our names, almost like titles of nobility. Yes, security is complex and esoteric. No, it should not be the practice of the few, but the practice of the many.
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KDE.News sat down for an interview with Dirk Hohndel, Intel’s chief Linux and open source technologist, at Akademy. Hohndel talked about various things including Aaron Seigo’s keynote, happiness at work, and his relationship to KDE. “Dirk H: I know a lot of the early KDE community members like Kalle and Matthias. I used KDE software from the start to the 2.0 release, and lost contact for a while. I’m interested in the Linux client so since a couple of years I’m trying to figure out where it is going. I follow both Gnome and KDE development, see what is going on in the open source world. I’ve been repeatedly trying the latest KDE Plasma Desktop (which still fails for me for a number of reasons). The KDE community interestingly has undergone a lot of changes – very much unlike the Linux kernel where the ‘oldtimers’ are still very much involved. Seriously, of the 20 initial Linux developers, 15 are still very active.”
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There’s no official announcement yet, but FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE is available on the FreeBSD FTP servers:
i386 - ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/8.1-RELEASE/
amd64 - ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/8.1-RELEASE/
Click here for access to a reliable and friendly Free-BSD based hosting company
Click here for access to a reliable and friendly Free-BSD based hosting company
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The FreeBSD Foundation has announced it will sponsor Max Khon to finish the DAHDI FreeBSD driver port.
DAHDI (Digium/Asterisk Hardware Device Interface) is the open source device interface technology used to control Digium and other legacy telephony interface cards.
“The purpose of DAHDI/FreeBSD project is to make it possible to use FreeBSD as a base system for software PBX [...]
Click here for access to a reliable and friendly Free-BSD based hosting company
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The New York City BSD Conference (NYCBSDCon) is the main technical conference on the US East Coast for the BSD community to get together to share and gain knowledge, to network with like-minded people, and to have fun. This event is organized by members of the New York City *BSD Users Group (NYC*BUG).
This bi-annual event [...]
Click here for access to a reliable and friendly Free-BSD based hosting company
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One of the features that sets FreeBSD apart from other open source opeating systems, is its governance structure. FreeBSD is not owned by a company, though many companies use it and contribute code back, but yet is run as if it were a company, with the Core Team taking decisions and steering the Project.
The FreeBSD [...]
Click here for access to a reliable and friendly Free-BSD based hosting company
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Cyber Cynic: “I’ve long thought that someday Windows security problems could end up fouling up the Internet for everyone. That day may be arriving.
That’s not just me being paranoid about Windows. That’s the ISC (Internet Storm Center), the group that tracks the overall health of the Internet…”
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Now, the default Dragon Media Player of KDE have a serious competition in Bangarang. Dragon player is simple yet totally functional, which I think are the most basic trait to became the default in any desktop environment. On the other hand Bangarang is new, it’s good and it is rapidly improving.
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The Free Software Foundation Europe has announced the release of a new
educational document on Free Software licensing. “Developed by
delegates of the European Legal Network, the document helps software
developers and lawyers by making it easier to decide under which licenses
they can distribute their work.”
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Hosting provider Rackspace announced Monday that it’s opening the software code for its cloud infrastructure. “Cloud technology will never look back,” the company proclaimed on its web site, adding that the OpenStack open-source cloud platform will create new technology standards and cloud interoperability. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will add its Nebula cloud technology to the initiative.
The key goal of OpenStack, according to its organizational web site, is “to allow any organization to create and offer cloud-computing capabilities using open-source software running on standard hardware.”
OpenStack Compute, Storage
NASA’s Nebula is an open-source cloud-computing project that provides an alternative to data centers for NASA scientists and engineers. Nebula was first developed in 2008 at the NASA Ames Research Center, and it will become the cornerstone for the OpenStack initiative.
Two initial projects are OpenStack Compute, for automatically creating and managing large groups of virtual private servers, and OpenStack Storage, for creating “redundant, scalable object storage using clusters of commodity servers to store terabytes or even petabytes of data.” Storage is expected to be released in mid-September, and Compute is targeted for mid-October.
The code is freely available under an Apache 2.0 license, which allows anyone to run it, build on it, or submit changes back to the project. The Storage project is based on code from Rackspace’s Cloud Files, which provides unlimited online storage and serving of files and media. Compute, based on Rackspace’s Cloud Servers software and on NASA’s Nebula technologies, provisions servers for staging and production.
Getting Back ‘Into Space Exploration Business’
NASA’s Chief Technology Officer for IT Chris Kemp said NASA and Rackspace “are uniquely positioned to drive this initiative based on our experience in building large-scale cloud platforms and our desire to embrace open source.” Both organizations said they are currently using OpenStack technologies to manage “tens of thousands”…
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VeriSign to check customer sites for malware and add security seals to some search results.
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Datamation: “You are SUCH a brown-noser!
Ouch.
That was probably the least flattering thing I had been called. Maybe even worse than being called an idiot.”
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An FBI investigation uncovered links to al-Qaeda materials on Blogetery’s servers, but the feds didn’t order Burst.net to shut it down.
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IT Professional
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Rackspace, looking for credibility in the open source cloud stack arena, found it by drawing in NASA as an active collaborator.
The new OpenStack project will power NASA’s own Nebula cloud and puts new pressure on Eucalyptus, as well as Amazon’s EC2 and the whole Hadoop ecosystem. The system is being released under an Apache 2 license.
Some differentiation between the two stacks is already apparent. NASA’s desire is for a compute-intensive stack, so rivals could market against it by calling themselves commercially-oriented.
But writing at ZDNet, James Staten of Forrester calls OpenStack pretty solid. Rackspace, by itself, would have been offering a vendor-specific stack from an infrastructure as a service (IAAS) provider.
In addition to NASA the deal also brings Chris Kemp, a well-respected leader within the government IT community. His hope is to turn Nebula into something other government agencies will want to share. So he has something of a commercial angle himself.
Calling Rackspace the Android of the cloud may be going too far, however. Open source is all over the cloud, which with the Rackspace announcement looks to become the mainframe system of the new decade.
The question I would ask is whether having rival open source stacks will help or hurt efforts to keep Microsoft Azure and other proprietary offerings from raining on its parade.
What say y’all?
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