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Conjecture on cracked primes for the Diffie-Hellman asymmetric algorithm is in recent news, suggesting that several nations have broken primes in common use and can read all traffic:

Recently, I drove to the Netherlands for a day to hang out with about half the people who work at Greenpeace International. The meetup actually lasted an entire week, but I only attended Thursday, a day on which newly formed teams gathered to do some bonding and better understand each other's work. We talked about purpose and vision, as it was the first in-person meeting after a rather large re-organization that has been taking place over the last year or so. read more

The new Director of Community at GitHub, Jono Bacon, delivered a keynote at All Things Open this year titled: The new era of community. His talk was largely a call action to do better job of leading, guiding, and engaging in open source communities. Here's how. read more

SFC GPL enforcement hearing scheduled for 2016 Software Freedom Conservancy has spat out a “high level” update on the GPL enforcement case it is backing against VMware, ahead of an expected first hearing next year.…

Python is everywhere. These days, it seems it powers everything from major websites to desktop utilities to enterprise software. Python has been used to write all, or parts of, popular software projects like dnf/yum, OpenStack, OpenShot, Blender, Calibre, and even the original BitTorrent client. read more

LISA is an annual technical conference for IT operations professionals, organized by The USENIX Association. The first LISA was held back in 1986, and the event still has a reputation for delivering top-notch technical content and an exceptional hallway track. This year, Amy Rich (Mozilla Corporation) and Cory Lueninghoener (Los Alamos National Laboratory) co-chaired the conference. In this interview, Amy offers a preview of what's in store at LISA15 and tips for conference-planning teams. read more

Aaeon’s first SMARC module features quad- or dual-core Bay Trail SoCs, soldered RAM, eMMC, dual display outputs, PCIe expansion, and -40 to 80°C operation. The “?COM-BT” marks Aaeon’s first venture into SMARC territory. Interestingly, Aaeon chose to use SMARC’s “short” (80 x 52mm) option, rather than SMARC’s larger 82 x 80mm size that’s closer to […]

Learn how to set up your computer hardware for Linux and how to find information about your hardware via Linux commands and tools. You can use the material in this tutorial to study for the LPI 101 exam for Linux system administrator certification, or to learn for fun.

Red Hat is opening up Ceph's open-source, object and block cloud program leadership to other leading companies such as Canonical and SUSE.

Avogadro is a molecule editor and visualizer, and one of the most advanced open source scientific software tools. It features many capabilities that can be useful in teaching as education can be much more effective when theory is combined with the actual depiction of realistic models. Here is a basic tutorial on how to use Avogadro in education.

In my last article, I introduced the Libreboot project: a free software distribution of coreboot, which is itself an open-source BIOS replacement. I also talked about some of the reasons you may want to run a free software BIOS and discussed some of the associated risks.

In 1992 I started working for the Tandem Computers subsidiary in Sao Paulo, Brazil. I was part of the team that started Tandem's operations in Brazil, and at the time I was the one and only techie in the group. Tandem was later acquired by Compaq, and now it's the NonStop division inside HP. At the time, Tandem manufactured and sold a high availability Unix System, the NonStop Integrity. It ran a customized version of AT&T's Unix System V Release 4.0, and used a Veritas file system, which is quite similar to what we have today with LVM (Logical Volume Manager). read more

OpenStack can be an enigma. We have open source purists who profess by the virtues of OpenStack, even as a multitude of enterprise aficionados wonder if OpenStack is right for them. Fortunately we have cloud practice leader Vijay Chebolu and cloud architect Vinny Valdez to cut the clutter. In their roles at Red Hat Cloud Innovation Practice, Vijay and Vinny deliver Open Stack solutions to customers. read more

Welcome back to the systemd series, where we explore more about how this central part of your Fedora system works. This installment talks about unit files. As a long-time Fedora user, I hadn’t thought much about systemd actually worked until recently.... Continue Reading →

Last year, I brought two new Roborovski hamster pups into our home. They looked identical at the time, so I named them both Hamtaro. (Fast forward the 1.5 years I've owned them, and one has grown significantly tubbier than the other... So I've nicknamed her Hamtaro Grande.) read more

Using the Fibonacci sequence computation as an example, this article analyzes the speed advantage of an inline assembly implementation in comparison to the performance of other programming techniques such as the recursive algorithm, the dynamic programming implementation, the iterative approach, and the optimized matrix power algorithm. The target audience is software engineers interested in further accelerating the execution of their applications by handcrafting the assembler codes for the most performance-critical sections.

Google launched developer access to its lightweight, Android based “Brillo” OS for IoT, which initially supports a trio of ARM, Intel, and MIPS hacker SBCs. Google today launched a Brillo developer portal where code, development tools, and documentation for the Android-based Brillo embedded OS for Internet of Things devices can obtained. For now, gaining access […]

A controversial draft law, which one senator called a "surveillance bill by another name," has passed the Senate. CISA, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (S. 754), will allow private companies to share cyber-threat data with the federal government, including personal user data, in an effort to prevent cyberattacks... Companies that share data with federal agencies, including the National Security Agency (NSA), will be given legal and liability protections...

In my last article, I continued looking at the Django Web framework, showing how you can create and modify models. As you saw, Django expects you to describe your models using Python code. The model description is then transformed into SQL and compared with any previous version of the model that might have existed.

What is globalization? In software, globalization means two ways to make software useful globally:  internationalization and localization. Because technical folks don't enjoy typing long words, these are often abbreviated.