The Orange Pi 2G-IoT goes up against the recently released Raspberry Pi Zero W. Image: Orange Pi Last year the Shenzhen-based maker of the Orange Pi developer board undercut the Raspberry Pi 3 on price but only by sacrificing the better-known board’s Wi-Fi. Now, a new Orange Pi model, dubbed the Orange Pi 2G-IoT, goes in the opposition direction on connectivity, giving builders a 2G antenna for […]
Google lives and dies on open-source software. Without Linux, there would be no Google. The company both uses and makes open-source code every day of the year. In 2017 alone, Google has open-sourced Chrome for iOS; Upspin file-sharing; E2EMail, experimental end-to-end email encryption; and the Guetzli JPEG encoder. There’s only one problem. How do you find all these projects? Google finally has given us the answer: Google […]
The slowness of OneDrive that some Linux users experienced has been traced back to a failure in a browser component designed to speed up background processing. Image: Microsoft Microsoft has resolved a bug that made OneDrive and OneDrive for Business slow on Linux machines but not on any other platform, including iOS, Chrome OS, macOS, and Windows. A Microsoft OneDrive spokesman called Edgar has now confirmed that […]
Your Apple iCloud account may be open to attacks. Maybe the London-based hacker group — which goes by the name “Turkish Crime Family” — doesn’t have access to 250-million Apple iCloud account names and passwords. But they do have access to some indeterminate number of accounts, and that’s more than enough reason to exercise caution: Protect your iCloud password and data today or risk losing it tomorrow. […]
Do you need software-defined storage (SDS) for your enterprise virtualization, analytics, and enterprise sync and share workloads? If so, then Red Hat has the program for you: Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.2. Red Hat Gluster Storage 3.2 looks to be one hard-working storage ant. Red Hat likes to say its open-source Gluster SDS Scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) is for the modern enterprise workload. It’s not wrong. You […]
OK, hands up, who knows what High-Level Data Link Control (HDLC) is? It’s an archaic networking data framing protocol that’s used in modems, X.25, frame-relay, ISDN, and other now uncommon networking technologies. I know it because I used to work with them back in the day. You’ll get to know it now because a researcher discovered a security hole hidden within the Linux kernel driver that implements […]
On the third day of the Pwn2Own hacking contest in Vancouver on Friday, a Windows guest on a VMware Workstation host was escaped from twice. A team from Chinese security firm Qihoo 360 began with exploiting Microsoft’s Edge browser and chained together two more vulnerabilities to escape from the VMware virtual machine, and picked up $105,000. “In a first for the Pwn2Own competition, they absolutely succeeded by […]
HPE and SUSE, a top Linux distributor, have a complex relationship. First, HPE spun and merged its non-core software assets with Micro Focus. Micro Focus owns SUSE, a major Linux provider. Now, SUSE has finished acquiring cloud assets of HPE’s OpenStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Stackato, HPE’s Cloud Foundry implementation. SUSE will develop clouds while HPE will sell, support, and maintain them in their […]
Do you have a network-attached storage (NAS) device holding your accounts payable, document archives, or just your baby photos? If so, you’re running Samba, the open-source file and print server. Now, with the Samba 4.6 release, the program has been given a significant upgrade. Samba, the open-source Linux/Unix file server has gotten a major update. Samba is also often used in Linux and Unix servers to provide […]
The tier gives limited access to 15 services. (Image: Google) Stressing its fundamental commitment to openness, Google on Friday announced that it’s adding a free tier to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The tier gives limited access to 15 services, including Google Compute Engine (1 f1-micro instance per month in US regions and 30GB-months HDD), Google Cloud Storage (5GB a month), Google Pub/Sub (10GB of messages a […]
The WikiLeaks-hosted “Vault7” collection of documents allegedly leaked from within the CIA’s Computer Operations Group is a messy mix of jargon, incomplete info, and broken (or redacted) links. The information is interesting, but it’s quite difficult to find a basic description of many of the terms used, even using the search function. So for everybody’s convenience I’ve gone through the whole pile of docs and listed as […]
Thousands of documents said to be from the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence, a senior elite hacking unit within the US intelligence agency, have been leaked. The documents, released Tuesday by the website WikiLeaks, could not be immediately verified, but as the Associated Press noted, the website has a long track record of releasing classified government documents. WikiLeaks said that the documents span 2013 to the end […]
Do you use Google Chrome? Do you want to become a Google Chrome guru? Read on! What follows are a collection of tips, tricks, and tools to help you get the most from Google Chrome. There are tips on speeding up the browser and making it consume less RAM, ways to increase your privacy, and extensions that you can install to help you get more done in […]
Credit: Mærsk Line IBM and Maersk will partner to use blockchain technology to conduct, manage and track transactions in the shipping supply chain. The companies said they collaborated on creating blockchain tools for cross-border transactions among shippers, freight forwarders, ocean carriers, ports and customs authorities. According to Maersk and IBM, the blockchain effort, built on the Linux Foundation’s open source Hyperledger platform, will aim to replace paper-heavy […]
The Gemini PDA is an Android-Linux clamshell with a physical QWERTY keyboard. Image: Planet Computers There may still be a market for the PDAs, or personal digital assistants, which were largely made extinct by the iPhone’s arrival in 2007. But UK mobile startup Planet Computers will be testing just how big that market is with the Gemini PDA, an Android-Linux clamshell smartphone with a physical QWERTY keyboard. […]
Last fall, we saw the biggest distibuted denial of service (DDoS) attack ever. This year we’ll see even bigger ones. According to Akamai‘s latest State of the Internet Security report, here’s what’s behind them. Behind today’s DDoS attacks you’ll find botnets and they’re using the same old techniques hackers have always used to bring down your servers. Akamai First, you should know that while the total DDoS […]
PCLinuxOS 2017.02 KDE Desktop Image: J.A. Watson One of my oldest ‘friends’ in the world of Linux distributions is PCLinuxOS. I have watched it change over the years from a group of add-on packages for Mandake Linux to its own distribution, and seen it become one of the most solid, stable, and best community-supported distributions available today. I have seen the founder and primary moving force behind […]
The fate of Munich’s Linux project is only part of the story of open source software. Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto After a nearly decade-long project to move away from Windows onto Linux, Munich has all but decided on a dramatic u-turn. It’s likely that, by 2021, the city council will start to replace PCs running LiMux (its custom version of Ubuntu) with Windows 10. Going back maybe 15 […]
special feature Harnessing IoT in the Enterprise The tech revolution is spreading to every corner of the earth with the Internet of Things, and it’s enabling data analytics and automation in ways never before imagined in business. Depending on whose numbers turn out to be right, there will be somewhere between 20 and 200 billion “things” connected to the internet by 2020. We all know about the […]
The Xen Project has requested feedback from the community in thrashing out new disclosure guidelines which may only reveal the most serious vulnerabilities affecting the hypervisor. The Xen Project is a group which brings together developers from the open-source community for the purpose of the Xen Project hypervisor, microkernel-based software which allows users to utilize vitualization technologies. As with any software, bugs and vulnerabilities will emerge during […]
About 10 years have passed since Google’s stalwart engineers started creating a system that, in all reality, defeats the conventional logic of database services. It’s now named Cloud Spanner, and it’s the first global database — an information storage system spanning millions of machines across data centers placed all throughout the world, which Google itself has long used to maintain proprietary services like Gmail, Google Photos and […]
Munich mayor Dieter Reiter: “Employees are not satisfied with our IT. More than half are not happy.” Image: ZDNet/Munich City Council Munich’s city council has resolved to draw up a plan for abandoning LiMux, a Linux distribution created especially for its use, which the mayor wants ditched in favor of Microsoft’s Windows 10 by the end of 2020. Despite heavy criticism from opposition parties, the city’s governing […]
Getty Images/iStockphoto Operating systems are the core of our digital civilization. Hack-proofing them means that billions of devices – PCs, network switches, IoT devices, drones and much more – are much more secure. That forces cybercriminals to move up to less common layers of the software stack. special feature Cyberwar and the Future of Cybersecurity Today’s security threats have expanded in scope and seriousness. There can now […]
If the new proposal is approved next Wednesday, Munich employees’ desktops will be running Windows 10 by the end of 2020. Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto Munich’s city authority is a step closer to moving thousands of council computers from Linux to Windows, in a reversal of one of open-source software’s marquee successes. The authority’s administrative and personnel committee this week made a long-awaited recommendation for the reorganization of […]
