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This is the first in a series of posts in which members of our still-small staff raise topics for discussion. Since I'm a veteran of both the journalism and advertising businesses, I'll start this discussion.

For the past few years, the bulk of my consulting work has been in corporate training. Many of the participants in my courses are people who have been developing software for years already and simply want to learn new languages and techniques.

Each year, when we look back at the top government articles on Opensource.com, we see interesting case studies of government technology policies or implementations. Our most popular stories from 2017 aren't about adopting open source to solve technology problems. Instead, they demonstrate how governments and citizens are coming together through open source to solve human problems. 1. Why we need an open model to design and evaluate public policy read more

This catalog accompanies our January 2018 round-up of hacker-friendly SBCs. Here, we provide brief descriptions, specs, pricing, and links to further details for all 103 SBCs. Our January 2018 hacker-friendly single board computer round-up comprises three resources: an overview of recent SBC market trends; this catalog, which provides descriptions, specs, pricing, and links to related […]

As you've likely heard by now, there are some problems with Intel, AMD, and ARM processors. Called Meltdown and Spectre, the discovered attack possibilities are rather severe, as they impact pretty much every technical device on the network or in your house (PCs, laptops, tablets, phones, etc.).

Cloud Media’s open source “Popcorn Hour Transformer Media Computer / NAS” computer is based on Pine64’s RK3328-based Rock64 SBC, and supports Linux and Android media player, NAS, and retro gaming. Cloud Media has spun a new variant of its Popcorn Hour media player that is open source in hardware and software thanks to its mainboard....

I've written about and trained folks on various DevOps tools through the years, and although they're awesome, it's obvious that most of them are designed from the mind of a developer. There's nothing wrong with that, because approaching configuration management programmatically is the whole point.

The tourism industry has been gaining momentum for decades. In fact, many countries' economies and political stability rely on tourism and travel industries. Macau, for example, generates $26.6 billion annually from tourism, which accounts for 44% of its GDP. A subset of this economy, the hotel industry, is a powerful element that's expanding globally and growing exponentially. read more

Sometimes, while working on the command line in Linux, there may arise a situation wherein you have to merge lines of multiple files to create more meaningful/useful data. Well, you'll be glad to know there exists a command line utility paste that does this for you.

Welcome to our latest biannual round-up of hacker-friendly single board computers that run Linux or Android. Included are a brief review of recent SBC market trends, a catalog with key features, specs, and pricing of each board, and a spreadsheet that compares them all. Relative to our June report, which was accompanied by a reader […]

A new set of vulnerabilities were disclosed recently. As part of mitigating “meltdown”, the kernel introduced a new feature called Kernel Page Table Isolation (KPTI). This was a big change to come in late in the typical kernel development cycle... Continue Reading →

Enterprise Java has been defined by two players: Spring on one side and Java Enterprise Edition on the other. The Java EE set of specifications was developed in the Java Community Process under the stewardship of Oracle. The current Java EE 8 was released in September 2017; the prior version came out in 2013. read more

DevOps is a set of practices that automates the processes between software development and IT teams so they can build, test, and release software more quickly and reliably. The concept of DevOps is founded on building a culture of collaboration between IT and business teams, which have historically functioned in relative siloes. The promised benefits include increased trust, faster software releases, and the ability to solve critical issues quickly. read more

Last year, Google's Project Zero team discovered serious security flaws caused by "speculative execution," a technique used by most modern processors (CPUs) to optimize performance.

No bearded desktops with pointy hats to be seen here. The Linux Mint project turned out to be an early Christmas present, as it usually does, but this release is perhaps more important than usual given that Mint is much more alone in the Linux distro world than it was just one year ago.

Torvalds and company are not happy with Intel as they continue to move forward with delivering Linux security patches. Linux can deal with Meltdown and Spectre, the fundamental chip security problems, but that doesn't mean Linux's developers are happy about it.

Fortunately, Linux fans, you can change your console fonts. As always, the ever-changing Linux landscape makes this less than straightforward, and font management on Linux is non-existent, so we'll muddle along as best we can. In this article, I'll show what I've found to be the easiest approach.

In this tutorial, we will learn how to install and configure Concrete5 on Debian 9 server. Concrete5 is a free and open source Content Management System written in PHP language that can be used for publishing content on the Internet.

An industry-wide issue was found with the manner in which many modern microprocessor designs have implemented speculative execution of instructions (a commonly used performance optimization). There are three primary variants of the issue which differ in the way the speculative execution can be exploited. All three rely upon the fact that modern high performance microprocessors implement both speculative execution, and utilize VIPT (Virtually Indexed, Physically Tagged) level 1 data caches that may become allocated with data in the kernel virtual address space during such speculation.

We have discovered that CPU data cache timing can be abused to efficiently leak information out of mis-speculated execution, leading to (at worst) arbitrary virtual memory read vulnerabilities across local security boundaries in various contexts. Variants of this issue are known to affect many modern processors, including certain processors by Intel, AMD and ARM.