It was May of 2012 at a security conference in Calgary, Alberta, when professor Ron Deibert heard a former high-ranking official suggest he should be prosecuted. This wasn't too surprising. In Deibert's world, these kinds of things occasionally get whispered through the grapevine, always second-hand. But this time he was sitting on a panel with John Adams, the former chief of the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), the National Security Agency's little-known northern ally. Afterward, he recalls, the former spy chief approached and casually remarked that there were people in government who wanted Deibert arrested—and that he was one of them.

This week, we published articles from eight young professionals in open source—they are interns, students, and fellows working on open source projects and for teams that are part of open source businesses. Next week, we'll publish articles from open source professionals who have been working in the field for a significant portion of their careers or who have at some point in thier careers worked on an open project.

Zuck's engineers unveil formal spec based on PHP 5.6. A group of Facebook developers has decided to break with 20 years of tradition and release a formal specification for the PHP programming language. The initial draft of the spec was released on Wednesday and is available via a Git repository hosted on PHP.net.

In this tutorial I explain one way to generate a random geographical location, using simple command-line tricks.

In many respects, the BadUSB hack is more pernicious than simply loading a USB stick with the kind of self-propagating malware used in the Stuxnet attack. For one thing, although the Black Hat demos feature only USB2 and USB3 sticks, BadUSB theoretically works on any type of USB device. And for another, it's almost impossible to detect a tampered device without employing advanced forensic methods, such as physically disassembling and reverse engineering the device. Antivirus scans will turn up empty. Most analysis short of sophisticated techniques rely on the firmware itself, and that can't be trusted.

A new Ubuntu MATE 14.10 Alpha release has been made available and integrates a large number of changes and improvements.

As I write this, NASA has just passed another milestone in releasing its work to the Open Source community. A press release came out announcing the release on April 10, 2014, of a new catalog of NASA software that is available as open source. This new catalog includes both older software that was previously available, along with new software being released for the first time.

Zorin OS is one of those Linux distributions that is fighting the middle ground combining ease of use with familiarity for Windows users. Its uniqueness is driven by the customised desktop experience which lets users choose whether to use a Windows 7, Windows XP or Gnome 2 style interface. Is that enough to keep it relevant or are there too many distros competing in the same ring.

Security researchers have found a fundamental flaw that could affect billions of USB devices.

The following article will walk you through the steps on how to install LEMP (Linux, Nginx, MariaDB & PHP-FPM) on one of our CentOS 7 Linux Virtual Servers.

Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to follow it all. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just […]

Revolv released an Android app for controlling devices via its Linux-based Revolv Hub home automation controller, and added Nest Thermostat support. Revolv was one of the earlier players in the new wave of mobile app enabled home automation hubs, starting out in 2012 under the name Mobiplug. Like the new Wink system, the Revolv Hub […]

In the following article we are going to show you how to install LAMP (Linux Apache, MariaDB & PHP) on a CentOS 7 VPS.

Award-winning magazine team launch an amazing new illustrated title in the Knowledge sector. How It Works IllustratedSetting their sights on nothing less than the complete illustration of the world – or at least, all the exciting bits that fascinate both kids and grown-ups – the team behind the award-winning How It Works, All About Space, World of Animals and All About History have launched a brand new magazine.

Variscite has upgraded its Linux- and Android-ready “VAR-SOM-AM33? COM based on a 1GHz TI Sitara AM335x SoC, adding MIMO WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0 LE. The “hugely successful” VAR-SOM-AM33, in Variscite’s description, appears to be a close cousin to its circa-2010 VAR-SOM-AM35 module, which showcased the 600MHz Texas Instruments AM3505 and AM3517 system-on-chips. The SODIMM-style VAR-SOM-AM33 instead runs on the also hugely successful Sitara AM335x, which has appeared in numerous Linux-ready computer-on-modules such as the IGEP Aquila.

In today's open source roundup: Has Linux always been a viable gaming platform? Plus: The Witcher 3 may be coming to Linux, and the best Linux distro for parents coming from Windows 7?

The Linux Foundation has announced four new members, including Linaro Limited, which focuses on open source software development for ARM devices.

After a headline lull, LibreOffice on Wednesday renewed its drive to replace Microsoft Office with the newest version of its open source suite of applications.

We build our very own cloud storage platform to replace other, obsolete and proprietary solutions. This episode of the Hacker Next Door show is the first in a two-part mini series.

This summer I started my first ever internship. It's certainly a culture-shock to transition from school to the workplace, but I generally like to pride myself on being a quick learner. At Red Hat, as a Systems Management intern, I learned a lot in just the first week. read more

The end of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is near, so I wanted to share with you how things worked out for me as an intern with OpenStack. Precisely, I wanted to let you know my perception about what it takes to participate in GSoC, read more

Red Hat has created a Partner Early Access Network for the ARM space, with the goal of fostering innovation and developing a common, standards-based open source platform for 64-bit ARM servers.

Bio-Linux 8 is a powerful, free bioinformatics workstation platform that can be installed on anything from a laptop to a large server, or run as a virtual machine. Bio-Linux 8 adds more than 250 bioinformatics packages to an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS base, providing around 50 graphical applications and several hundred command-line tools. The Galaxy environment for browser-based data analysis and workflow construction is also incorporated in Bio-Linux 8. Bio-Linux 8 represents the continued commitment of NERC to maintain the platform, and comes with many updated and additional tools and libraries. With this release we support pre-prepared VM images for use with VirtualBox, VMWare or Parallels.

Just a week after my first day at Red Hat, my friends were convinced that I had been brainwashed by open source culture. read more

The command line can be scary especially at the beginning. You might even experience some command-line-induced nightmare. Over time, however, we all realize that the command line is actually not that scary, but extremely useful. In fact, the lack of shell is what gives me an ulcer every time I have to use Windows. The […]Continue reading... The post What are better alternatives to basic command line utilities appeared first on Xmodulo. No related FAQ.

Personal Audio LLC is an East Texas shell company that gleaned national attention when it claimed it had the right to demand cash from every podcaster. The company was wielding a patent on "episodic content," which it said included anyone doing a podcast, as well as many types of online video. Now the company is trying to walk away from its highest-profile lawsuit against comedian Adam Carolla, without getting paid a penny—but Carolla won't let the case drop.

We are pleased to release Zorin OS 9 Educational. Zorin OS 9 Educational brings the latest and greatest software into the hands of students and teachers. Updated software and bug fixes ensure that your computer runs better than ever while improved hardware support and entirely new software ensures that you're getting the best experience you can, no matter which computer you use it on. All Zorin OS 9 editions are long-term support (LTS) releases which means that you'll continue to get software updates and security fixes until 2019, making it the ideal choice for large-scale deployments.

James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins of the Center of the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School have recognized what many people have: the academic publishing world is insane. Textbook pricing is generally insane, in part because the people who make the decision (the professors) are not the people doing the buying (the students), meaning that the buyers have little to no choice in what they buy. That enables the publishers to jack up the prices to absolutely insane rates. This even includes legal "casebooks" and "statutory supplements," which are often composed of mostly public domain material (or, legal filings where the person who put together the book had no authorship). So Boyle and Jenkins are working on an open coursebook for intellectual property, which looks like it's going to be fantastic.

Red Hat has upped its commitment to support servers based on the ARM processor architecture, with the formation of a new partner program specifically for vendors of 64-bit ARM hardware for the data center. The Red Hat ARM Partner Early Access Program is aimed at both chipmakers and server builders, and its early members include AMD, American Megatrends, AppliedMicro, Broadcom, Cavium, Dell, HP, Linaro, and ARM Holdings itself

It's well-known that monopolies can lead to price-gouging, which produces effects like this: "I still have no idea how people can get away with charging several thousand dollars for a milligram of recombinant protein. That's an amount that you can see with the naked eye, if your eyesight is really good, but even then, you can see it only just barely. If you had to make a recombinant protein in your undergraduate biology class, then you know that the cost of doing this is essentially the cost of highly refined sugar water (= culture media) plus the cost of highly refined salt water (= chromatography buffers)."