Showing headlines posted by caitlyn

Criminals are using an old weakness in the Ruby on Rails web application framework to recruit vulnerable servers into a botnet. Developers running Ruby on Rails should install an update that was released in late January for a serious remote execution flaw that attackers began exploiting in the past week.

The discussion in the working group that is supposed to detail when Italy's public administrations should prefer open source over proprietary solutions, is stalling, says lawyer Ernesto Belisario, professor at University of Basilicata in the city of Potenza. "Some of the members think the law stipulates a technical and economical assessment, instead of reading it as a statement supporting open source."

The Drupal.org security team says it has discovered unauthorised access to Drupal.org and groups.drupal.org account information which has exposed user names, country, and email addresses along with hashed passwords. No credit card information was stored on the servers, but the investigation is ongoing and the team says it "may learn about other types of information compromised".According to Drupal.org, there are over 967,000 registered users on the Drupal.org.

Today it became clear that I wouldn't be writing for Linux Advocates after all. I've learned a lot in the past week and I've come to the conclusion that this is for the best.

Debian GNU/Linux, the world's largest Linux distribution and the ultimate cooperative software project that extends across many countries on all continents, has recently released a new stable version. Continuing its time-tested tradition of stability and reliability over cutting-edge features, "Wheezy" represents a new milestone in the evolution of open-source software and it is the subject of this week's first-impression review by Jesse Smith. In the news section, Clement Lefebvre and Gaël Duval revisit the humble beginnings of their respective Linux distributions, Fedora developers manufacture a somewhat humorous controversy over password inputs during system installation, Ubuntu unveils some of the possible new features in "Saucy Salamander", and FreeBSD restores its binary package build service that was suspended six months ago following a security incident. Also in this issue, an entertaining Tips and Tricks session on interacting with graphical applications via command-line scripts, an introduction to Italy's PoliArch distribution...

The Neptune team is proud to announce the release of Neptune 3.1 (Codename “Brotkasten”).

This release features the linux kernel 3.9.2 and is exclusively meant to run on 64bit CPUs. The Debian base system was updated to the released version 7.0 wheezy to provide a stable user experience. The KDE Plasma Desktop ships with version 4.10.3.

The federal government has been accused of sneaking mandatory web filtering through the back door after one of its agencies inadvertently blocked 1200 websites using a little-known law. Technology news website Delimiter this week revealed the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) last month used a telco law to ask major internet service providers (ISPs) to block a website it believed was defrauding Australians.

Three months after hackers working for a cyberunit of China’s People’s Liberation Army went silent amid evidence that they had stolen data from scores of American companies and government agencies, they appear to have resumed their attacks using different techniques, according to computer industry security experts and American officials.

Ten years ago, Nick Carr said IT doesn't matter -- sort of.

The jarring headline of Carr's May 2003 article, "IT Doesn't Matter," is what many people remember, and it tends to overshadow his more thought-provoking thesis: that companies have overestimated the strategic value of IT, which is becoming ubiquitous and therefore diminishing as a source of competitive differentiation.

"The opportunities for gaining IT-based advantages are already dwindling," Carr wrote in the Harvard Business Review article. "Best practices are now quickly built into software or otherwise replicated. And as for IT-spurred industry transformations, most of the ones that are going to happen have likely already happened or are in the process of happening."

MariaDB is a community-developed fork of the MySQL relational database management system, the impetus being the community maintenance of its free status under the GNU GPL. As a fork of a leading open source software system, it is notable for being led by its original developers and triggered by concerns over direction by an acquiring commercial company Oracle. Contributors are required to share their copyright with Monty Program AB.

In the open source community focused on graphics tools, GIMP gets a great deal of attention, and there are many free online resources available for it, but if you're in search of an open source illustration tool that can compete with Adobe Illustrator and is increasingly useds by designers for effects, logos and still graphics, give Inkscape a try.

Adobe Photoshop is not just a requirement for web designers, but it is a growing need of professional photographers as well. Not everyone who wants to use the Adobe photoshop can use it and the reason for it is not the lack of skills, as we all know there are plenty of tutorials available for almost every functionality of this image editing tool. The reason why so many people cannot use Adobe Photoshop or the reason why so many people are looking for open source alternatives to it is its price. The current version, which is the Adobe Photoshop CS6, costs $628.88 on Amazon.com. Now considering its price as high as it is, it is almost impossible for many people to afford it, which is why we have compiled the best 4 open source alternatives to Photoshop, so you can fulfill your photoshop needs without having to spend a fortune over it.

Over time it is common for fans in laptops to become clogged with dust, fluff and even hair. The symptoms are usually a hotter laptop and a noisier fan that runs more frequently. The solution is to open up the laptop’s body in order to get at the fan and remove the crud with tweezers and by blowing. However, dismantling many laptops to access the fan makes the Mission Impossible break-in look simple, and this seems to be getting worse as laptop prices continue to decrease. If you are not confident you can unblock the fan yourself, you’ll have to find a local computer repair shop and you may find it’s not cheap.

I use the Debian Experimental repository to update Iceweasel to the latest Firefox release version provided by the Debian Mozilla team.

Microsoft announced its support for an international standard on secure software development, while an industry group offered a free training program for developers. A collection of large software companies has thrown its weight behind two initiatives that attempt to make the process of developing secure software more attainable to smaller software makers.

Three British members of the notorious LulzSec hacktivist crew and a hacker affiliate were sentenced today for a series of attacks against targets including Sony, News International, the CIA and the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency. The youngest of the four accused avoided jail with a suspended sentence while the other three were jailed for terms ranging from 24 to 32 months.

I've been a professional UNIX/Linux systems administrator for 18 years now. I've had to implement, maintain and support servers from all of the enterprise distributions and a few distributions not generally used in the enterprise as well for my employers and customers over the years. I'm a big advocate for Red Hat and the various free clones (CentOS, Scientific Linux and Springdale Linux) as the best solution for most organizations.

The U.S. House of Representatives has passed the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protect Act (CISPA) by a vote of 288 to 127, RT reports.

Declan McCullough of CNET details why the bill — which encourages private businesses to voluntarily share "cyberthreat information" with the U.S. government —has privacy advocates up in arms.

The Obama Administration on Tuesday issued a veto threat against the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, warning the bill could violate Americans’ privacy rights and civil liberties.

The White House Office of Management and Budget said the bill in its current form lacked provisions that would protect Americans from having their personal online information shared with the government. CISPA allows private companies to share cybersecurity data with federal agencies and protects companies from liability for providing the information.

{Note: Posted for the tech / information privacy issues, not for political content.]

The Raspberry Pi makes a great home server. But it also makes a solid hardware development platform for makers if your needs go a bit beyond the capabilities of the Arduino, and you don’t need something quite as capable as the BeagleBone, or another ARM-based board designed specifically for talking to hardware.