Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

On the second day of Pwn2Own, no browser or plugin survived the hacking contest. Mozilla and Google have already shipped updates for Firefox and Chrome to fix the holes exploited on day one

Red Hat has announced that it is assuming the leadership of the OpenJDK 6 community, just days after Oracle issued what it said would be the final patch for version 6 of its commercial Java SE 6 Development Kit. Oracle posted JDK 6 Update 43 on Monday as an emergency patch for the latest in a series of severe vulnerabilities that have plagued the Java browser plugin. But although Oracle is already investigating other flaws, it said that this would be the last set of public fixes for Java SE 6.

Toradex will soon ship the first member of a new SODIMM-like COM (computer-on-module) family. The 82x42mm Apalis T30 is powered by a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3, and supported with an embedded Linux OS. The company sees ARM as a growing alternative to x86 CPUs, in applications such as digital signage and high-end multimedia, thanks the increasing integration of interfaces such as 3D graphics engines, PCI-Express, gigabit Ethernet, and HDMI within ARM chipsets.

Karim Yaghmour, founder of OperSys founder and a well-known luminary in the real-time and embedded Linux market, led a panel discussion on this topic at the Android Builders Summit in San Francisco last month. “The idea ignited a lively debate among embedded Linux pros with three of the four panelists ultimately siding with Yaghmour,” writes Libby Clark in a post at Linux.com. “What seemed to be their litmus test? If Android can conceivably be used in ‘classic’ embedded projects, it is embedded Linux.”

Here in the Linux blogosphere, most fans of FOSS are nothing if not outspoken with their many opinions. Those opinions tend to be unequivocal on matters large and small, so it's always notable when a new technology comes along that leaves bloggers scratching their heads in uncertainty. That's a rarity, needless to say, but just recently a shining example emerged: the Chromebook Pixel.

Self-promotion in an open source world, it starts with a shameless plug—a simple way to make people aware of something you’re passionate about. Then, over time, you get more comfortable with using the shameless plug and that desire to make people aware transforms into purposeful marketing. At some time or another when working on an open source project, you're bound to have to promote it. Self-promotion can be an uncomfortable topic for some people, but I've found word of mouth is the best way to promote open source.

Updated java-1.7.0-openjdk packages that fix two security issues are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having critical..

SourceForge is pleased to announce our new Enterprise Directory—a sub-section of our site focused specifically on Enterprise projects. These are the projects that are geared specifically for use within a company. This might include areas such as project management, office suites, or customer relationship management (CRM) software. Often, software in this category is backed by a company, but this isn’t always the case, nor is it a requirement for inclusion in the directory.

Responding to ongoing discussions and speculation about the future for Ubuntu's release cadence, Canonical Founder Mark Shuttleworth published a blog post today, detailing his thoughts on the issue. Shuttleworth, who holds the position of "Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life" of the Ubuntu project, has in the past publicly stated his opinion on cadence and the importance of regular releases for the Ubuntu project. In his latest post, Shuttleworth is of the opinion that "rolling releases are not real releases" and are therefore not the right method for Ubuntu to adopt, but that he is considering accelerating Ubuntu's release cycle.

F-Secure's latest Mobile Threat Report for the last three months of 2012 names Android as the home of 96% of the new "mobile threat families". Of 100 new threat families detected in that quarter, 96 of them were based on Android, up from the previous quarter's 49 out of 74, and only 4 were resident on Symbian, down from 21 in the previous quarter. The numbers are for newly detected families of malware only and do not reflect overall numbers found in the wild.

Android was everywhere at Mobile World Congress last week - there seems to be no stopping Google's mobile operating that's now almost as ubiquitous as a colour display. But the success hides the platform's problems, insists one analyst. Former Nomura analyst Richard Windsor paints a picture of increasing fragmentation creating a clear dividing line down the middle - with one half of the split populated by shoddy low-end devices that look good but "barely work".

The ‘rolling release’ meme has been a popular one for years in Ubuntu. It’s one of the top requests from members of our user community. And it’s popular with Canonical team members too (who, largely, come from the community and share its values). The problem for me is straightforward: a rolling release isn’t actually a release at all. It offers little certainty for those who need certainty. And we essentially accommodate the need for daily crack with our development releases, which have become highly usable (for developers) because of the strong commitment the Canonical and community teams made to daily quality throughout the release cycle.

Right now on Ubuntu they use ConsoleKit for managing logged-in users, but ConsoleKit is no longer maintained. The functionality of FreeDesktop.org's ConsoleKit has since been integrated within systemd. With no longer having upstream maintenance provided to them, the plan is to switch to logind. However, the logind component can mostly work without a full systemd-based system, so that's the only part they're looking at using for the future of Ubuntu.

Server provisioning and configuration management and automation are the latest examples of where the tech industry is being driven, largely by open source software. The leading open source server and IT infrastructure automation frameworks, Opscode Chef and Puppet Labs' Puppet, sit on the leading edge of significant trends under way in enterprise IT.

Few jargonistic terms have annoyed me as much as, "The Cloud." When the term was first coined, its meaning was ambiguous at best. For some companies, it meant shared web hosting (but with a cooler sounding name). For others it was simply, "let us host your servers in our datacenter, which we now refer to as a cloud."

Barry Kauler, the developer of the Puppy family of Linux distributions, has released version 5.5 of the Wary and Racy branches of the project. Wary is the edition of Puppy designed to be run on older hardware, whereas Racy has more features and needs more system resources but is based on Wary. For version 5.5, both editions had most of their underlying system libraries and some of the applications updated during the development phase; this took almost a year from the release of Wary 5.3 in April 2012.

Blender Master Class is a must-have for anyone who uses or even plans to use the Blender graphics tool. It is a learn-by-doing guidebook that takes all the frustration and guessing out of the Blender equation. He is a professional 3D artist and co-director of Gecko Animation Ltd.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced that since the release of Apache OpenOffice 3.4.0 in May 2012, it has seen 40 million downloads of the 3.4.x release series. This number counts only raw downloads of full install images from SourceForge; language packs and source tarballs were not counted. The ASF has released a comma-delimited text file with the download numbers for every individual day and has plotted the results in a graph showing the cumulative and daily downloads.

The X Window System is old, but it works. Many distros including Ubuntu, had been headed toward the use of Wayland as an alternative Linux display technology. Though apparently Wayland is not good enough for Ubuntu anymore. "The traction that Ubuntu Touch is creating is great and the team is happy with where this is leading us," Ubuntu Developer, Oliver Ries wrote. "However, in order to implement the vision of converged devices, some changes to our Display Stack are necessary. After thorough research, looking at existing options and weighing in costs & benefits we have decided to roll our own Display Server, Mir."

A new system launched to curb online piracy of intellectual property is meant to be educational, not punitive, says the organization behind it. But suspended Internet service or slowing service to a crawl sounds pretty punitive to critics of the Copyright Alert System (CAS).