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Updated nss, nss-util, and nss-softokn packages that fix one security issue, several bugs, and add various enhancements are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

ObjectRocket, the database-as-a-service platform owned by Rackspace, now supports Redis, the open source, in-memory key-value data cache and store.

The operating system that helps to power a Raspberry Pi – but what exactly is a Raspbian and what makes it Linux?

Patch early and patch often is the advice of security professionals when it comes to software updates. Yet sysadmins will be increasingly leery of applying such an approach to Windows systems following Microsoft's latest botch job.

In today's open source roundup: Kill switch laws could give the government the power to brick your smartphone. Plus: A review of KDE Plasma 5, and is systemd evil?

Interested in keeping track of what's happening in the open source cloud? Opensource.com is your source for what's happening right now in OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project.

Imagine yourself walking down the middle of a crowded street in a complex city like Cairo. Suddenly a protest builds ahead. A mass of people, cutting off the road. You try to evade, but then violence breaks out in mere seconds. You need help. Someone else, a car to get you out. A phone call might suffice, but wouldn't it be easier to notify all your friends that this place is dangerous and that you need their assistance? This is where a map-based social network could come into play. read more

The Ubuntu MATE project is progressing nicely and the developers have provided a short update about the work that's been done already and about the things that still need to be improved.

Humans have always formed communities. They are necessary for support both physically and, according to psychologists, emotionally as well. Until recently, though, the development of communities was constrained by geography. If you wanted to raise a barn or have a quilting circle, for example, only the folks nearby could participate. The Internet, though, has allowed communities to grow in ways that are not bounded by geography. read more

What SHOULD Microsoft call its browser? Internet Explorer could be getting a new name as Microsoft tries to escape the browser’s troubled past.…

In part one of my interview with Pia Mancini, a political activist, I investigated the technologies and background of DemocracyOS, a project aiming to become the operating system of choice for government workers. In part two of my interview with Mancini, she discusses the challenges DemocracyOS faces and how her organization, Democracia en Red, is working to overcome them. read more

Working with permissions on Linux is rather a simple task. You can define permissions for users, groups or others. This works really well when you work on a desktop PC or a virtual Linux instance which typically doesn't have a lot of users, or when users don't share files among themselves. However, what if you are a big organization where you operate NFS or Samba servers for diverse users. Then you will need to be nitpicky and set up more complex configurations and permissions to meet the requirements of your organization.

When I first started using Linux twelve years ago, no one I knew, other than folks on the local LUG, were interested in giving Linux or FOSS a try whatsoever. Don’t get me wrong; my friends were nice. They supported my enthusiasm for this Linux thing I’d discovered, but were politely uninterested when I suggested they might want to give Linux a try too. That didn’t surprise me at all. Hell, I’d been trying to get people to give Star Office a try since the turn of the millennium and they wouldn’t go for that either, even though they were paying through the nose for MS Office.

Finally, the KDE project has released KDE Plasma 5, a major new version of the venerable K Desktop Environment.

Plasma 5 arrives in the middle of an ongoing debate about the future of the Linux desktop. On one hand there are the brand new desktop paradigms represented by GNOME and Unity. Both break from the traditional desktop model in significant ways, and both attempt to create interfaces that will work on the desktop and the much-anticipated, tablet-based future (which may or may not ever arrive).

Cisco has released a guide for deploying Hadoop as a Service on Ubuntu OpenStack, Canonical's open source server platform for the cloud and Big Data.

LXer Feature: 17-Aug-2014

In the Roundup this week we have how to remove file metadata on Linux, USB ports are no longer our friends, Linux use grew 50% year-over-year in India, open source education for kids, hackers unveil their evil plans for e-mail, a new distrosharing website and a big conversation starter on why or why isn't all government software open source? Enjoy!

There are untold riches awaiting those who can create smartphone apps – luckily getting started with Android is really easy

The latest version of m23 extends the spectrum of supported client distributions by adding support for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Linux Mint 17 Qiana.

A few months ago, the Heartbleed bug was discovered in the OpenSSL cryptography library, which plays an absolutely critical role in securing confidential online transactions. We then discovered that for years this critical piece of infrastructural software has been maintained by a handful of overworked volunteers. The industry was rightly shocked by Heartbleed, and some companies – notably Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Cisco and Amazon – agreed to donate $300,000 each over the next three years to support the OpenSSL project. You can interpret this as "corporate social responsibility". I call it common sense.

The net neutrality saga continued today as well as the FCC made September 15th the final day for public opinions. It was just yesterday that the Federal Communications Commission asked for an explanation for their act of slowing down the internet for specific kind of data. According to the recent reports, the FCC has for the time being officially postponed the implementation of the new set of rules.