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Is your smart toaster spying on you? Does your toddler’s new toy have an easily-hackable microphone or camera? This holiday season, don’t buy your loved ones an Internet-connected gadget that compromises their privacy or security — no matter how nifty or cute that gadget may be.

Microsoft has recently increased their stakes in the Kubernetes community through a variety of actions. For example, they acquired Deis, a company that specialises in Kubernetes container management technologies. And, Microsoft became a member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which is the home of the Kubernetes project.

Version 4.1.4 did fix four security vulnerabilities, and that's one less than the five that appear to be outstanding for the software, based on two reported in the November 2016 minutes of Apache Foundation Board of Directors' meeting and three reported in the April 2017 minutes.

Looking at the open organization principles (transparency, inclusivity, adaptability, collaboration, community) and the reasons we practice them (building a network of people dedicated to a purpose and sharing the same ethical standards, for example), I started wondering how these principles would be influenced by an increasingly important emerging technology: blockchain. read more

I've covered scientific software in previous articles that either analyzes image information or actually generates image data for further analysis. In this article, I introduce a tool that you can use to analyze images generated as part of medical diagnostic work.

Gnocchi is an open source time series database created in 2014 when OpenStack was looking for a highly scalable, fault-tolerant time series database that did not depend on a specialized database (e.g., Hadoop, Cassandra, etc.). read more

This article is about high availability or disaster recovery and fail-over for Linux on Power virtual machines (VMs) or logical partitions (LPARs). The solution described in this article works for all Linux distributions available for IBM POWER8 and later processor-based servers. Open source software used in this solution are: DRBD and heartbeat, which are available for all supported distributions. We have used Ubuntu v16.04, supported on IBM Power servers to explain and verify the solution.

Do you use "open source software" or "free software"? Although there are different rules for free software licenses (four freedoms) and open source licenses (Open Source Definition), what is not apparent from those two sets of rules is: read more

Buried deep inside your computer's Intel chip is the MINIX operating system and a software stack, which includes networking and a web server. It's slow, hard to get at, and insecure as insecure can be.

Compulab’s Linux-ready, 112 x 84 x 34mm “Fitlet2” mini-PC features an Apollo Lake SoC, -40 to 85°C support, and M.2 and “FACET” expansion. Compulab has upgraded its rugged Fitlet line of mini-PCs, switching from AMD to Intel Apollo Lake processors up to a quad-core Atom x7-E3950. The Fitlet2 is available with Linux Mint or Windows 10...

When we think of cloud computing, most of us envision large-scale, centralized data centers running thousands of physical servers. As powerful as that vision sounds, it actually misses the biggest new opportunity: distributed cloud infrastructure. read more

It’s not uncommon for a sysadmin to have to find needles buried deep inside haystacks. On a busy machine, there can be files in their hundreds of thousands present on your filesystems. What do you do when you need to make sure one particular configuration file is up to date, but you can’t remember where it is located?

One of the challenges (among the many advantages) of being a sysadmin is running tasks when you'd rather be sleeping. For example, some tasks (including regularly recurring tasks) need to run overnight or on weekends, when no one is expected to be using computer resources. I have no time to spare in the evenings to run commands and scripts that have to operate during off-hours. And I don't want to have to get up at oh-dark-hundred to start a backup or major update. read more

Varnish is a proxy server focused on HTTP caching. It's designed as an HTTP accelerator and can act as reverse proxy for your web server Apache or Nginx. In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configure varnish HTTP accelerator as a reverse proxy for Apache web server.

The GPL family of licenses is unique among open source licenses in how past, current, and future versions of the license may apply to the software program. By not fully understanding this unique license feature, open source software developers may inadvertently create ambiguity. read more

I've been installing a lot of POE devices recently, and the different methods for providing power over Ethernet cables can be very confusing. There are a few standards in place, and then there's a method that isn't a standard, but is widely used.

A text editor is one of the most important tools for any programmer. Visual Studio Code is an open source text editor specifically designed for editing source code. Visual Studio Code was released by Microsoft in April 2015 and later became a... Continue Reading →

Senior Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman has claimed he asked the Linux Foundation to withdraw funding from the Software Freedom Conservancy back in 2016, because he was unhappy with the way in which the SFC went about enforcing compliance with the GPL, the licence under which the Linux kernel is published.

From augmented reality training for first responders, to robotics classes for high school students, Mozilla is supporting bright ideas that leverage gigabit internet to create more open and innovative cities...

Mac and Linux versions of the Tor anonymity browser just received a temporary fix for a critical vulnerability that leaks users' IP addresses when they visit certain types of addresses. TorMoil, as the flaw has been dubbed by its discoverer, is triggered when users click on links that begin with file:// rather than the more common https:// and http:// address prefixes.