Showing headlines posted by bob

My last few articles have described building a pretty sophisticated password generator, except for one thing: I never quite got to the point of scrambling the end result to add a second level of randomness. I sidestepped the issue by saying it was an exercise for the reader, but in fact, it's a pretty interesting problem, so let's look at it here.

The latest wpa_supplicant package for Fedora 28 includes compile-time support for PMF (Protected Management Frames). This is a good thing, as it protects against a set of WiFi replay attacks. However, a small number of users reported WiFi connectivity problems after an upgrade to Fedora 28.

LimeSurvey is a free and an open source online survey application written in PHP and uses a MySQL or PostgreSQL database. In this tutorial, we will learn how to install LimeSurvey on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) server.

GNOME has been my favorite desktop environment for quite some time. While I always make it a point to check out other environments from time to time, there are some aspects of the GNOME desktop that are hard to live without. While there are many great desktop environments out there, GNOME feels like home to me. Here are some of the features I enjoy most about GNOME. read more

Both adult and kid hackers demonstrated at DEF CON how the hackable voting machine may be the least of our worries in the 2018 elections.

Linux command line offers several tools for user management (some of which we've already discussed). One such utility is chage, which lets you tweak password expiry information.

11-year-old Emmett Brewer is too young to vote, but it turned out that he’s not too young to learn how to change election results on a replica of Florida’s state website… in under 10 minutes, mind you, as the Voting Village announced on Friday:

If you have any experience with programming or just altering config files, I'm sure you've been dumbstruck by how one change you've made along the line affects the whole project. Identifying and isolating the problem without a version control system is often time- and energy-intensive, involving retracing your steps and checking all changes made before the unwanted behavior first occurred. A version control system is designed explicitly to make that process easier and provide readable comparisons between versions of text.

News briefs for August 14, 2018.

I’m excited to announce that Amy Keating will be joining us in September as Mozilla’s new General Counsel. Amy will work closely with me to help scale and reinforce our legal capabilities. She will be responsible for all aspects of Mozilla’s legal work including product counseling, commercial contracts, licensing, privacy issues and legal support to the Mozilla Foundation.

Wanting some Linux love, but just can't let that Windows 10 desktop go? Come this way... Linux lovers have received a double load of delight this week with the emission of the 4.18 kernel and a refresh of Windows-wannabe Zorin OS.…

Prometheus is an open source monitoring system that allows you to collect metrics from any configured target system. Prometheus implements a multi-dimensional data-model with powerful queries, great visualization, precise alerting, and comes with many integrations.

Aaeon is rolling out a new EPIC form-factor “EPIC-KBS9” SBC with 6th or 7th Gen Core S-series chips, 4x GbE ports, up to 32GB DDR3, and mini-PCIe and PCIe x4 expansion. Aaeon’s EPIC-KBS9 follows two other EPIC-KBS SBCs to support Intel’s 6th “Skylake” or 7th “Kaby Lake” generation S-Series processors: the EPIC-KBS7, which emphasized real-world […]

In the first part of this three-part series using a Raspberry Pi for network-attached storage (NAS), we covered the fundamentals of the NAS setup, attached two 1TB hard drives (one for data and one for backups), and mounted the data drive on a remote device via the network filesystem (NFS). In part two, we will look at automating backups. Automated backups allow you to continually secure your data and recover from a hardware defect or accidental file removal. read more

Penguinistas mobilise against decision to support only EXT4 Linux users are calling on Dropbox to reverse a decision to trim its filesystem support to unencrypted EXT4 only.…

The Go networking library includes the http.ServeMux structure type, which supports HTTP request multiplexing (routing): A web server routes an HTTP request for a hosted resource, with a URI such as /sales4today, to a code handler; the handler performs the appropriate logic before sending an HTTP response, typically an HTML page. Here’s a sketch of the architecture: read more

Gaming has traditionally been one of Linux's weak points. That has changed somewhat in recent years thanks to Steam, GOG, and other efforts to bring commercial games to multiple operating systems, but those games are often not open source. Sure, the games can be played on an open source operating system, but that is not good enough for an open source purist. read more

Blueberry Pi. On the face of it this is just Yet Another SBC With A Fruity Pi Name, but what caught our attention is that unlike all the others, this is one you can build yourself if you want. It’s entirely open-source, but it differs from other boards that release their files to the world in that it manages to keep construction within the realm of what is possible on the bench rather than the pick-and-place.

Many Linux commands now have options to make their output a little easier to digest. Here's a look at some that bring out the friendliness of our favorite OS.

News briefs for August 13, 2018.