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It sometimes surprises people that random number generation is a classically famous problem in computer science, because it seems like it should be so easy; just pick a number. And yet it's hard to get a computer to be random. Many Linux users have some awareness of the /dev/random and /dev/urandom devices, and most have some awareness that technically, the numbers generated there are not truly, scientifically random.

Opensource.com community moderator Jono Bacon kicked off keynotes at All Things Open this year to talk about open source communities.

On a continually changing network, it is often difficult to spot issues because of the amount of noise generated by expected network traffic. Even when communications are seemingly quiet, a packet sniffer will display screeds of noisy data.

You probably know by now that plugging a random USB into your PC is the digital equivalent of swallowing a pill handed to you by a stranger on the New York subway. But serial hacker Samy Kamkar's latest invention may make you think of your computer's USB ports themselves as unpatchable vulnerabilities-ones that open your network to any hacker who can get momentary access to them, even when your computer is locked.

You read the title correctly. No, this isn't The Onion and it's not April Fool's Day. Microsoft has joined The Linux Foundation.

WinSystems unveiled the first PC/104 SBC to use Apollo Lake SoCs, featuring PCIe/104 OneBank and dual GbE, and launched an EBX SBC based on Bay Trail Atoms. WinSystems announced the PC/104 form factor PX1-C415 and EBX-style EBC-C413 — two SBCs featuring Intel Atoms from the current, 14nm “Apollo Lake” Atom-E3900 generation and the 22nm “Bay Trail” Atom E3800 generation, respectively.

Today The Linux Foundation is announcing that we’ve welcomed Microsoft as a Platinum member.

ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors allows users to edit text documents, spreadsheets and presentations offline by providing access to the web-based ONLYOFFICE portals for an efficient remote team collaboration. This tutorial describes how to add one of the available plugins to ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors and start using it.

I love when technical conferences remember to include talks by the non-technical, for the non-technical. I've worked on documentation for open source projects for longer than I can remember, and it's not always easy to find a great talk about how to contribute to open source in non-technical ways. Rachel Nabors started off the second morning of All Things Open with a great talk about the need for designers in open source. read more

Congatec’s “Conga-PA5” (Pico-ITX) and “Conga-IA5” (Thin Mini-ITX) SBCs feature Apollo Lake SoCs, -40 to 85°C operation, and Linux and Android support. The list of single board computers supporting Intel’s 14nm-fabricated “Apollo Lake” Atom E3900, Pentium N4200, and Celeron N3350 SoCs has grown longer with a pair of Congatec entries. The Conga-PA5 goes up against Advantech’s […]

Few games are as notorious as the block-breaking sandbox game, Minecraft. Listed as the second best-selling video game of all-time with over 107.8 million copies sold to date, Minecraft is as popular with children as it is adults. It supports... Continue Reading →

Security contractors recently discovered preinstalled software in some Android phones that monitors where users go, whom they talk to and what they write in text messages.

Siemens’s first IoT gateway runs Linux on an Intel Quark and offers Arduino shield compatibility and connectivity to the company’s MindSphere cloud. The Simatic IOT2000 gateway is designed for “collecting, processing and transferring data in the production environment,” says German industrial giant Siemens. The company’s first Internet of Things gateway joins a number of Intel […]

Join us in this three-part weekly blog series to get a sneak peek at The Linux Foundation's Software Defined Networking Fundamentals (LFS265) self-paced, online course.

Cloud computing is on the rise. Gartner predicts that by the year 2020, “a corporate ‘no-cloud’ policy will be as rare as a ‘no Internet’ policy is today.”

The world of open source software is a busy place. Sometimes keeping up with all of the news, announcements, and cool things to be discovered can be difficult. Here's a look at some of what we're reading today.

The security hole this time is with how almost all Linux distributions implement Linux Unified Key Setup-on-disk-format (LUKS). LUKS is the standard mechanism for implementing Linux hard disk encryption. LUKS is often put into action with Cryptsetup. It's in Cryptsetup default configuration file that the problem lies and it's a nasty one.

At a time when the size of distributed denial-of-service attacks has reached unprecedented levels, researchers have found a new attack technique in the wild that allows a single laptop to take down high-bandwidth enterprise firewalls.

This article is about the layer 2 tunneling protocol (L2TP) with IPsec to provide end-to-end encryption in the layer 2 VPN. The open source implementations of IPsec are StrongSwan and OpenSwan, both are supported on all Linux distributions. In this tutorial, OpenSwan is used to provide the security channel for L2TP VPN.

The newest versions of Firefox for desktop and Android are available today. For information on what’s new with today’s release, check out the release notes. Also, keep an eye on this blog, as we have exciting Mozilla and Firefox news … Read more