Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The online attacks launched against multiple banks, insurance companies and television stations in South Korea Wednesday knocked targeted networks offline. But according to security experts, the attacks were relatively unsophisticated and would have required little infrastructure or expertise to launch.

Programmers love to optimize their code and their tools. Why then is there so much slow and bloated code and so many arcane and fragile tool chains? Because programmers aren’t always optimizing for efficiency. There are many things programmers can optimize for, and a team can quickly end up working at cross purposes when everyone is optimizing for something different.

Is the market becoming flooded with too many OpenStack distributions and services? There are observers who are concerned that the market is now becoming overwhelmed with distributions and companies supporting them, which could become a detriment to those who deploy them later. In five years, it's unlikely that we'll see so many distributions being supported.

The developers of GParted have released version 0.15.0 of their open source partitioning tool and the accompanying GParted Live distribution. GParted 0.15.0 includes a number of significant changes that allow users to get status information on running processes and also make the tool twice as fast, according to the developers. Work has gone into making it easier to cancel running operations as well. GParted allows users to change their partition layout, recover and resize partitions and create new ones.

Linux.com has published a short Q&A with Steven Rostedt, kernel developer at Red Hat and maintainer of the stable Linux real-time patch. Rostedt discusses issues such as “hard” vs “soft” real-time, what the Preempt-RT patch can and can’t do, and how to get started using it.

Intel hasn't yet even released their Haswell processors to the general public for use within notebooks, ultrabooks, and desktops, but Google engineers are already hard at work on prepping Haswell Chromebooks. Hitting the Coreboot repository yesterday was some Haswell-related commits by Google/Chrome developers, e.g. haswell: use dynamic cbmem and haswell boards: support added chromeos function, among others.

The early-90s Windows 3.11 operating system offered a graphical user interface that was a breakthrough for me. It was, in fact, my first GUI. I'd been using command-line, error-prone MS-DOS for two or three years before that, and it was a delight to suddenly be able to maximize screens, switch programs, and point around with a mouse, after living with the syntactically regimented MS-DOS.

ecurity vendors analyzing the code used in the cyber attacks against South Korea are finding nasty components designed to wreck infected computers. Tucked inside a piece of Windows malware used in the attacks is a component that erases Linux machines, an analysis from Symantec has found. The malware, which it called Jokra, is unusual, Symantec said.

A plan by Google, Microsoft and Netflix to integrate an extension for playing back encrypted media content in HTML5 has caused dissatisfaction among US civil rights campaigners. The bone of contention is a proposal to integrate "Encrypted Media Extensions" (EME) that will serve as an interface for playing back DRM-protected content in the browser and which is currently being reviewed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The initiators of the proposal emphasise that this is not intended as a way of anchoring Digital Rights Management (DRM) facilities into the specification. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) translates this into: "We're not vampires, but we are going to invite them into your house."

Members from the open source world will gather in Columbia, South Carolina for the Palmetto Open Source Conference (POSSCON) on March 27-28, 2013. For anyone looking to score a last minute ticket, the event is sold out. Last year, more than 600 people from 20 states and more than 20 colleges and universities, and 75 business and government organizations, came together in the spirit of open source to share knowledge and grow the open source community.

Parasound, a purveyor of fanatically high-end consumer audio equipment, has introduced a CD player that’s controlled by an internal Mini-ITX computer running embedded Linux. Using a CD-ROM drive for playing CDs, the “Halo CD 1? sucks in the CD’s contents at 4x normal speed, giving its CPU time to detect and eliminate disc errors before outputting near-perfect audio.

A little over five years after the creation of the Open Handset Alliance, Glyn Moody looks at Android's global market position and the challenges that Google faces to avoid Android disappearing under a plethora of other companies' interfaces and apps.

One of the cool projects that OKF France were hacking away on during Open Data Day last weekend was Open Food Facts. It’s a free, open collaborative database of food facts from around the world, which aims to help consumers make better choices about what they put in their body, as well as motivating industry to take more care over the production of food.

There's no denying that those of us here in the Linux community see our fair share of ups and downs in any given week or month, as events unfold that either advance or set back our favorite operating system. Sometimes, though, it's difficult not to be amazed by the way things often balance out "Even Steven" -- much the way they did for Jerry Seinfeld way back when.

A core, not side, effect of technology is its ability to magnify power and multiply force -- for both attackers and defenders. One side creates ceramic handguns, laser-guided missiles, and new-identity theft techniques, while the other side creates anti-missile defense systems, fingerprint databases, and automatic facial recognition systems.

Crudebyte has released an SDK for the JACK Audio Connection Kit for iOS developers. JACK, which is already available for Linux, Unix, Windows and Mac OS X, can route audio streams between applications and different audio hardware. To do this, JACK synchronises applications that read and write audio data at certain intervals with low latency.

In the latest evidence of the growing recognition that our patent system needs reform, last week the House Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet held an informative and well- attended hearing on "Abusive Patent Litigation".

Open Xchange has announced that the major new feature of its OX App Suite will be OX Text, a web-based collaborative word processor which handles DOCX and ODT documents natively, without conversion to an intermediate format. DOCX is Microsoft Office's native XML format and ODT is the document format of OpenOffice and LibreOffice; both are ISO standard document formats.

For those curious where the common Linux file-systems stand performance-wise for the Linux 3.9 kernel, here are benchmarks from a solid-state drive and hard drive when comparing the EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and F2FS file-systems from this yet-to-be-released Linux kernel.

If anyone is a paid-up member of the open source club, surely it is Miguel de Icaza. He helped found the GNOME UI and desktop beloved by millions and claimed to be the most popular desktop environment for GNU/Linux and UNIX-type operating systems.