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Modern CPUs are quite complicated and to understand the performance profiling often needs to be used. The CPUs have performance monitoring units (PMUs) that allow to count and sample a wide variety of events. Linux perf provides an interface to the PMU.

Released this past week by Google alongside Android 4.3 and the new Nexus 7 tablet was the Chromecast, a $35 device to essentially relay web-pages and video content from your PC or mobile device to an HDMI TV. The Chromecast has now been exploited so a root shell is accessible...

With no practical alternative, a small tech group has launched a campaign to rally consumers against the use of passwords for logging into websites and services. The Petition Against Passwords, launched on Wednesday, is the brainchild of think-tank TechFreedom and rivals Clef and LaunchKey, which sell password-less technology. As of Thursday, the group had several hundred signees.

One common and stupidly simple way hosts are compromissed is weak SSH passwords. You would think people have learned by now, but evidently there are still enough systems with root passwords like 12345 around to make scanning for them a worthwhile exercise. As a result, one of my favorite honeypot tools is kippo, and we have talked about the tool before.

Multiple vulnerabilities has been discovered and corrected in ruby: The safe-level feature in Ruby 1.8.7 allows context-dependent attackers to modify strings via the NameError#to_s method when operating on Ruby objects. NOTE: this issue is due to an incomplete fix

Google’s Android 4.3-powered, second-generation Nexus 7 tablet went on sale today at the Google Play Store and also showed up at Best Buy several days ahead of schedule. Meanwhile, new features of Android 4.3 have emerged, including 4K resolution support and a hidden, user-controllable permission manager.

The Free Software Foundation's latest open-source project it's trying to push along is Replicant, a fully-free Android Linux distribution for select mobile devices.

For years, Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical has been pursuing a single dream: One operating system and one interface, Unity, for PCs, tablets, and smartphones. That dream is now becoming a reality.

This week saw a flurry of news about new mobile processor developments that will significantly impact the Android and mobile Linux worlds. Nvidia unveiled Project Logan, a Tegra SoC (system-on-chip) with faster graphics than a PlayStation 3 at a third the power of an iPad; Samsung revealed a new Exynos 5 SoC with six Mali GPUs; and Intel confirmed that a tablet-focused 4.5 Watt version Haswell-based SoC is on the way.

Several Phoronix readers have brought up an important topic recently on Twitter and within our forums: what Linux distribution should really be be benchmarked the most? Ubuntu has traditionally been the most tested Linux platform here, but times may be changing.

Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in OpenJDK, an implementation of the Oracle Java platform, resulting in the execution of arbitrary code, breakouts of the Java sandbox, information disclosure or denial of service.

Several security issues were fixed in MySQL.

A buffer overflow has been discovered in the Radius extension for PHP. The function handling Vendor Specific Attributes assumed that the attributes given would always be of valid length. An attacker could use this assumption to trigger a buffer overflow.

Multiple vulnerabilities has been discovered and corrected in squid: Due to incorrect data validation Squid is vulnerable to a buffer overflow attack when processing specially crafted HTTP requests.

It's still being investigated, but early indications are that the Linux 3.11 kernel is consuming less power at least for Intel CPUs.

This guest column by Alejandro Erives, brand manager for Sitara processors at Texas Instruments, celebrates BeagleBone.org’s fifth birthday. In a lighthearted and entertaining missive, Erives highlights the history of BeagleBoard.org, the benefits of open source hardware and software to embedded development, and the advantages of open development platforms for students, makers, entrepreneurs, and even silicon vendors.

And the Google taketh away. So it is with Google Reader. A while back, Google discontinued its Google Wave product, because it never gained traction as a social-media platform. This surprised approximately zero people. More recently, Google announced it would be closing Google Reader on July 1, 2013. Far more people were surprised, myself included. In this article, I want to explore some options for those left in the lurch.

With half a billion Android smartphones shipping worldwide in 2012 alone, it’s hardly a stretch to imagine that the global population of Android devices is nearing one billion. What if their idle CPU cycles could be harnessed for the good of humanity? With that in mind, the BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) project has just launched its first official Android app.

The XBMC media center software has been ported so it can run directly on the Mir Display Server...

We are live blogging from OSCON. Keep coming back for updates.