"Reacting to the surging popularity of the Docker virtualization
technology, Red Hat has customized a version of its Linux distribution
to run Docker containers. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Atomic Host
strips away all the utilities residing in the stock distribution of
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that aren't needed to run Docker
containers. Removing unneeded components saves on storage space, and
reduces the time needed for updating and booting up. It also provides
fewer potential entry points for attackers."
-- source: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/03/05/2240245
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174
"Jeremy Allison - Sam writes with this excerpt from a news release
from the Software Freedom Conservancy:
Software Freedom Conservancy announces today Christoph Hellwig's
lawsuit against VMware in the district court of Hamburg in Hamburg,
Germany. This is the regretful but necessary next step in both Hellwig
and Conservancy's ongoing effort to convince VMware to comply properly
with the terms of the GPLv2, the license of Linux and many other Open
Source and Free Software included in VMware's ESXi products.
Serge Wroclawski points out the SFC's technical FAQ about the suit. One nugget:
This case is specifically regarding a combined work that VMware
allegedly created by combining their own code (“vmkernel”) with
portions of Linux's code, which was licensed only under GPLv2. As
such, this, to our knowledge, marks the first time an enforcement case
is exclusively focused on this type of legal question relating to GPL"
-- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/03/05/1721231
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174
"For the nth time in the last couple of years, security experts are
warning about a new Internet-scale vulnerability, this time in some
popular SSL clients. The flaw allows an attacker to force clients to
downgrade to weakened ciphers and break their supposedly encrypted
communications through a man-in-the-middle attack. Researchers
recently discovered that some SSL clients, including OpenSSL, will
accept weak RSA keys–known as export-grade keys–without asking for
those keys. Export-grade refers to 512-bit RSA keys, the key strength
that was approved by the United States government for export overseas.
This was an artifact from decades ago and it was thought that most
servers and clients had long ago abandoned such weak ciphers. The
vulnerability affects a variety of clients, most notably Apple's
Safari browser."
-- source: http://it.slashdot.org/story/15/03/03/2036241
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174
"Linux has been able do multipath routing for a long time: it means
being able to have routes with multiple gateways and to use them in a
(weighted) round-robin fashion. But Linux is missing a tool to
actively monitor the state of internet uplinks and change the routing
accordingly. Without it, from a LAN perspective, it's like having a
RAID-0: just one uplink goes down and all of your LAN-to-WAN traffic
goes down too. Documentation and examples on the subject are lacking;
existing solutions are few and deeply integrated in firewall/routing
specific distributions. To address these issues, a new standalone tool
was just released: Fault Tolerant Router. It also includes a complete
(iptables + ip policy routing) configuration generator."
-- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/03/03/1910206
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174
Came across this article from a decade ago
<https://www.samba.org/samba/news/articles/low_point/tale_two_stds_os2.html>
about the evolution of the POSIX and Win32 standards from the viewpoint
of a veteran who earned his scars in the trenches.
While POSIX got one or two things spectacularly wrong (e.g. the
disaster that is file locking), it got a lot of things right (e.g.
abstracting data types for file offsets/sizes, timestamps etc).
Wonder why WINE has taken so long to get to where it is? It’s because
nobody can be quite sure they have flushed out every last wrinkle of
the behaviour of every Win32 API call.
"After two years of hard work (and much to the dismay of naysayers who
worried the project has been abandoned), the Xfce team has announced
the release of Xfce 4.12. Highlights include improvements to the
window switcher dialog, intelligent hiding of the panel, new wallpaper
settings, better multi-monitor support, improved power settings,
additions to the file manager, and a revamped task manager. Here is a
quick tour, the full changelog, and the download page. I have been
running it since Xubuntu 15.04 beta 1 was released two days ago. It is
much improved over 4.10, and the new additions are great."
-- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/03/01/0558259
Cheers, Peter
--
Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174
