Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The concept is simple; invite geeks of varying backgrounds to a central location for a weekend, supply them with food, drink, and an interesting problem, and see what happens. Kind of like the 40 Hour Famine, but with more eating, and labour donations instead of money. ThoughtWorks, an agile developement and design company, hosted and sponsored (among other sponsors, like Red Hat) the second annual Health Hack in Melbourne, bringing researchers together with technologists at their office in Melbourne’s central business district for 48 hours to create software that solved a problem in the health sciences. All the code developed at Health Hack would be released under an open source license, and in most cases, took advantage of some form of open data.

FirefoxOS_for_press_releaseMozilla, the mission-based organization dedicated to promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web, is pleased to announce that Firefox OS will soon expand to Africa. The Firefox OS ecosystem has gained support from three new key partners in the region: Airtel, MTN South Africa and Tigo, operated by Millicom, are the first carriers working with Mozilla to soon bring first Firefox OS smartphones to Africa.

Monitor Ubuntu 14.04 and Debian Wheezy Servers with Linux-Dash This document describes how to install and configure Linux-dash in Ubuntu 14.04 and Debian Wheezy for monitoring server performances easily. Linux-dash is a low-overhead monitoring web dashboard for a GNU/Linux machine. Simply drop-in the app and go! Linux-dash is a memory efficient, low resource, easy to install, server statistics monitoring script written in PHP. The web statistics page allows you to drag and drop the various widgets and rearrange the display as you desire. The script displays live statistics of your server, including RAM, CPU, Disk Space, Network Information, Installed Software’s, Running Processes and much more. The main advantage of Linux-dash is that it works on real-time basis.

Facebook has never had much of a reputation for letting users hide their identities online. But now the world’s least anonymous website has just joined the Web’s most anonymous network. In a first-of-its-kind move for a Silicon Valley giant, Facebook on Friday launched a Tor hidden service, a version of its website that runs the anonymity software Tor. That new site, which can only be accessed by users running the Tor software, bounces users’ connections through three extra encrypted hops to random computers around the Internet, making it far harder for any network spy observing that traffic to trace their origin.

According to the Open Security Foundation, three out of 10 of the all-time worst security breaches happened this year. That includes 173 million records from the NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission, 145 million records at Ebay, and 104 million records from the Korea Credit Bureau.

There will be a KDE exhibit at the upcoming LISA (Large Installation System Administration) Conference. The full conference takes place November 9 ? 14 in Seattle; the expo is open on the 12th and 13th. There is no charge to attend the expo. Several members of the KDE Community will be in the booth—presenting various aspects of KDE; answering questions; demonstrating applications (thanks especially to Krita and ogbog); recruiting contributors, users, companies and sponsors. All members of the KDE Community are welcome to visit, to jump in & represent KDE, or to just make contact with other KDE people. These small regional gatherings are necessary until we are financially self-sustaining enough to justify a national gathering such as Akademy. The Seattle KDE group is off to a great start.

Here’s a question I was asked recently by an IT buddy: where do hackers live? Where are they from? Well, new studies and reports have been bubbling up over the last month or so, and although I don’t have a definitive answer, I can take a stab at answering his question.

The Fedora 21 beta release is here, and – as usual – is packed with amazing improvements to Fedora, as well as fantastic free and open source software, gently harvested for your enjoyment. No bits were harmed in the making of this beta.

Chris C. Kemp is the Chief Strategy Officer of Nebula, Inc., a leading cloud computing and IaaS provider which helps enterprises deploy and manage OpenStack-based private clouds. Previously to founding Nebula, Chris served as NASA's first CTO where he cofounded the OpenStack project. His experience with both the public and private sector gives Chris unique insights into the present and future of OpenStack and cloud computing in general. Today he shares his those thoughts into a variety of topics ranging from public/private collaboration in open source; how CIOs can best leverage public, private, and hybrid clouds; and some of the ways cloud computing could eventually change the way we govern ourselves worldwide.

Google’s Miško Hevery, co-inventor of the popular AngularJS framework, has announced a new project to improve JavaScript by adding type annotations and other features.

Every time I write a Bash script or schedule a cron job, I worry about the day I'll star in my very own IT version of a Folger's commercial. Instead of "secretly replacing coffee with Folger's Instant Crystals", however, I worry I'll be replaced by an automation framework and a few crafty FOR loops. If you've ever had nightmares like that, you're in the right place. The truth is, the need for system administrators isn't going down—it's just that our job function is shifting a little. If you stay current, and resolve to be a lifelong learner, system administration is as incredible as it's always been. (And far better than instant coffee! Yuck!) This month, we focus on system administration. It keeps us all relevant, all informed and most important, we should all learn a little something along the way.

If you think like a super-villain, laugh like an anti-hero, and can write code, it's time to polish off the cackle, sharpen up the brain, get extra coffee, and start working on your entry to the Underhanded C contest.

Gizmo for You has gone to Indiegogo to ask for $600 for a modular, Linux based “Open Source Remote Control” for UAVs and other remote-controlled craft. Three years in the making, the Open Source Remote Control (OSRC) device is available in Indiegogo fixed-funding packages starting at 350 Euros ($600) for the basic version, or 1,250 Euros ($1,561) for an advanced version. The Linux-based OSRC device is designed to act as a hackable universal controller for all types of “drones, filming, UAV control and general RC.” It seems to be primarily aimed at high-end, hobbyist remote model airplanes.

The security world has been shocked to its foundations following ominous warnings that millions of Drupal websites that didn't apply a critical patch within hours of its release earlier this month should be regarded as hopelessly compromised. The maintainers of the Drupal content management system warned users that “automated attacks” targeting Drupal version 7 began just hours after they disclosed a highly critical SQL injection vulnerability on 15 October.

Facebook announced today that the social network will now be directly available to users as a Tor hidden service. The Tor Project is an Internet-traffic anonymization service that relays user traffic through a number of proxy servers all around the world in order to cloak their true IP address and identity.

This is a partial transcription of the two keynotes from day 1 at the All Things Open conference in Raleigh, held October 22 and 23.

In 490 BC the Greek army defeated the first Persian invasion at the battle of Marathon. Legend says that the courier Pheidippides was dispatched to deliver the news of the victory to Athens, and did so by running 40 km (26 miles), exclaiming upon arrival: "We have won!", to then collapse and die. The legend also says that the same Pheidippides had just run 240 km in two days, to request reinforces from Sparta.

The cloud is everywhere. It's unavoidable. In the words of Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, "Right now, we're in the midst of a major shift from client-server to cloud-mobile. It's a once-every-twenty-years kind of change."

LXer Feature: 02-Nov-2014

In the LXWR this week we have a UK retail chain denying warranties to users who install Linux, a big Drupal advisory, China's plans to replace Windows with Linux by 2020 and Microsoft loves Linux, for real? Enjoy!

Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to keep up with everything that goes on. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week.