Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Common Criteria Certification process is a long and arduous one. Common Criteria provides Evaluation Assurance Level that is the standard that U.S. Government and other large enterprises use as the basis of software qualification for production usage.

Apparently, problems caused by last week's Ext4 bug only occur when combining several critical mount and umount options; this renders the bug harmless for most Linux users – so far, it has only affected one user. Nevertheless, ext4 lead developer Theodore "Ted" Ts'o plans to draw the necessary conclusions from the incident.

LXer Feature: 28-Oct-2012

The latest installment of the Weekly Roundup. Enjoy!

After writing this morning about the most interesting Linux 3.7 kernel features, I also decided to list some of the work that's likely to land for the Linux 3.8 kernel, This list is far from being exhaustive but just some of the interesting and known features that will likely be ready for the Linux 3.8 merge window.

The Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is moving ahead at full steam in its quest to develop, or spur the development of, humanoid robots that it can use for its own purposes — in this case, disaster response in areas too dangerous for humans but in need of a human touch (DARPA cites the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown as one example).

Being roughly half-way through the Linux 3.7 kernel development cycle, here's a recap of some of the most interesting features for this forthcoming major kernel release...

Head on over to ValveSoftware.com to participate in their Linux survey, which is used to find new Linux gamers to get involved with the beta testing process. "We're looking for Linux gamers to install and test our new Steam for Linux client. We are primarily interested in experienced Linux users. In order to take the survey, you need to first login with your Steam account to link your response with your Steam ID."

Internet memes—those bite-sized, ephemeral cultural artifacts that are shared and remixed over the Web—seem to be evermore pervasive online and offline. Many of them feature reoccurring characters, like Courage Wolf, Good Guy Greg, and Business Cat. They are "characters" in the sense that they are defined by a single unwavering archetype, but what sets them apart from traditional literary characters is that they aren't attached to stories.

According to its developers, version 2.5 of the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), a Java-based open source web framework for Ajax applications, offers significant performance improvements. Apparently, the overall code base has been reduced by 20 per cent, and the download size of the sample application dropped 39 per cent.

A Working Draft published by the W3C proposes a new push notification API for web applications. The system can use different protocols to deliver notifications to browsers even when the application in question is not in focus

Learn how to analyze the performance of your application using the cycles per instruction (CPI) analysis tool. The CPI tool is part of the IBM Software Development Kit (SDK) for PowerLinux.

For ARM's new ARMv8 64-bit architecture, Red Hat developers are creating a completely open version of the OpenJDK and the HotSpot JVM in what is believed to be the first full and open port of HotSpot since OpenJDK was freed five years ago

A lot has changed in the three years since the last major Windows announcement. Netbooks were on the rise. The iPad wouldn’t be introduced for another six months and Nokia still had the lead for most smartphone sales in the world. Only 172 million smartphones were sold in 2009 vs. an estimated 146 million units in just one quarter of this year. Without wide adoption of tablets or smartphones, Microsoft still dominated the world of personal computing. Linux, while popular in the server room, was virtually non-existent in consumer products, except for its brief rise in netbooks before Microsoft reportedly pressured its OEMs to stop production and shift back to Windows.

The Code for America Brigade recently launched Race for Reuse. It's a different kind of contest that aims to increase adoption of existing open source projects with real dollars. The goal isn't to build something brand new—it's to encourage volunteer teams (called "brigades") across the U.S. to stand up and support existing open source projects. Because one of the more difficult parts of deploying open source apps is building the user community around the projects and getting citizens engaged.

I often discuss the Linux port of Scrivener with my writer friend Ken McConnell. We both like Scrivener's interface, and we both prefer to use Linux as our writing platform. Unfortunately, the Linux port of Scrivener just doesn't compare to the OS X version. The other day, Ken told me about Plume Creator.

While it looked hopeful at first with today's announcement of a fully open-source graphics stack for the Broadcom VideoCore found in the popular Raspberry Pi development board, upon closer examination it's actually not that good.

Linux kernel developer Theodore "Ted" Ts'o has released a series of patches for what he has called "a Lance Armstrong bug" in the kernel, meaning behaviour that does not trip up tests but also makes the kernel work differently than intended. A user had reported a problem that caused them to lose data; the kernel developers quickly narrowed this down to a fault in the ext4 implementation that was introduced with the release of Linux 3.6.2, just over a week ago. Apparently, the data corruption bug was hard to track down as it only manifests itself if a system is rebooted twice in a relatively short period of time.

Today we have some really big news, which is going to mean a lot to many programmers in our community who have been asking about it ever since launch. This is one of those announcements that has been in the pipeline for quite some time, but we haven’t been able to talk about it until now.

A substantial number of apps available from Google Play had serious flaws in their Secure Sockets Layer implementations and thus were vulnerable to hack attacks, European researchers found. The team downloaded 13,500 popular free apps to study their use of the SSL or Transport Layer Security protocols, with a particular focus on the apps' vulnerabilities against Man-in-the-Middle attacks.

Lennart Poettering has announced the release of the latest version of the open source startup daemon systemd. With version 195, the tool, which is being used by Fedora, openSUSE and several other Linux distributions, has received what Poettering calls a "non-trivial amount of cool new features".