Getting started with GitHub’s desktop and mobile tools

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February 5, 2020

Microsoft has taken a very hands-off approach with GitHub since its acquisition last year. It’s an approach that makes a lot of sense; Microsoft’s past relationship with the open source community hasn’t been the best, and there’s still not much trust there, despite significant moves towards open design and open development models from Redmond.

However, that hasn’t left GitHub stagnant and drifting. Instead, under new leadership and with more clarity about its future, GitHub has accelerated its product development and rollout, adding features to its Web services and to its platform. GitHub’s own developer-focused tools have gotten much more attention in the past year, with regular updates to GitHub Desktop and the release of its first native mobile applications for iOS and Android.

[Source: InfoWorld]

IBM CTO: Edge Will Implode Without Open Source

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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February 5, 2020

Edge computing devices are proliferating at an astonishing rate, jumping from about 15 billion devices today to about 55 billion by 2022, according to Rob High, VP and CTO of IBM Watson.

“This marketplace around edge computing is enormous,” he said. “We don’t really know where the saturation point is … There will be a limit at some point, but we don’t know what that is.”

As edge devices continue to hit the market, “the No. 1 thing you begin to realize is that this industry is at risk of imploding on itself if it does not solve the problem of creating a standard way of managing it, [and] creating a set of standards that developer communities can begin to form and create ecosystems from,” High said.

[Source: SDxCentral]

The Top 10 Free and Open Source HR Technology Solutions

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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February 5, 2020

Searching for HR technology solutions can be a daunting (and expensive) process, one that requires long hours of research and deep pockets. The most popular HR tech tools often provide more than what’s necessary for non-enterprise organizations, with advanced functionality relevant to only the most technically savvy users. Thankfully, there are a number of free and open source HR technology solutions out there. Some of these solutions are offered by vendors looking to eventually sell you on their enterprise product, and others are maintained and operated by a community of developers looking to democratize HR tech.

Let’s examine free and open source HR technology solutions, first by providing a brief overview of what to expect and also with short blurbs of the options currently available in the space.

[Source: Solutions Review]

Oreboot Continues Advancing For Open-Source, Rust-Based Booting On RISC-V

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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February 5, 2020

Oreboot is the effort that has been taking shape over the past year as an open-source focused, Rustlang-based downstream of Coreboot. Oreboot continues advancing in its own right concurrent to the wonderful Coreboot advancements.

Oreboot continues to pride itself on being as open-source as possible though acknowledging at least for now on x86 CPUs they need the likes of ME/FSP firmware. Oreboot is also still focused on using Rust code rather than C code in the name of better security and reliability.

[Source: Phoronix]

Nasty Linux, macOS sudo bug found and fixed

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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February 4, 2020

A vulnerability has been discovered in ‘Sudo,’ a powerful utility used in the Linux and macOS Terminal, one that could allow for users with restrictive privileges or malicious software to be able to run commands with administrative-level privileges, which could result in the loss or theft of user data in unpatched Macs. According to sudo developer Todd C. Miller, the bug can be observed “by passing a large input to sudo via a pipe when it prompts for a password.” As the attacker has “complete control of the data used to overflow the buffer,” this means there is a “high likelihood of exploitability.”

[Source: AppleInsider/ZDNet]

UBank releases open source accessibility kit on Github

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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February 4, 2020

UBank has released an open source accessibility kit on Github in a move to help iOS app developers and contributors improve the accessibility for users that experience issues such as low vision, cognitive impairment, or neurological impairment. UBank digital banking chief product officer Peter O’Malley said making the accessibility kit openly available for the first time is part of the bank’s mission of “making technology accessible to everyone”.

[Source: ZDNet]

Amazon Linux Users Win a Major Migration Reprieve

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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February 4, 2020

Are you running AWS on the original Amazon Linux AMI? Good news, you’ve won a major reprieve from plans to end support for the operating system this summer, with the cloud provider bowing to “customer feedback” and agreeing to extend end-of-life to December 31, 2020.

AWS had planned to phase out support by June, but push-back from customers has seen it extend that date by six months; and add a minimal three-year maintenance support period to June 30, 2023 for good measure. Maintenance will be limited: users of the 10-year-old AMI (Amazon Machine Image) will only get critical and important security updates for a reduced set of packages, with no guaranteed support for new AWS features.

[Source: Computer Business Review]

WireGuard comes to Linux

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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February 4, 2020

After years of development WireGuard, a revolutionary approach to Virtual Private Networks (VPN) was finally fast-tracked to the Linux kernel. Now, at long last, WireGuard is in Linus Torvald’s code tree. That means WireGuard should appear in the Linux kernel 5.6 release. This may be as early as April 2020.

This has the potential to change everything about VPNs — not just in Linux, but in the entire VPN world. That’s because essentially all VPN services run off Linux servers. Some VPN services, such as StrongVPN and Mullvad VPN, have already seen the writing on the wall and are moving their software stacks to WireGuard.

[Source: ZDNet]

HPE acquires identity management startup Scytale

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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February 4, 2020

HPE today announced that it’s acquired Scytale, a startup providing tools that help engineers build identity-driven and large-scale distributed software, for an undisclosed sum. According to HPE fellow and general manager Dave Husak, cofounders Sunil James, Emiliano Berenbaum, and Andrew Jessup will join HPE, where they’ll develop cryptographic-identity technology that offers customers the ability to design, deploy, and achieve IT operational goals regardless of supplier or location.

San Francisco-based Scytale — which raised $8 million in venture capital prior to the acquisition — was founded in 2017 by Jessup, Berenbaum, and James alongside a workforce hailing from cloud-native enterprises like Amazon Web Services, Duo Security, Google, Okta, PagerDuty, and Splunk.

[Source: VentureBeat]

Qt-Powered Lumina Desktop 1.6 Released For BSD/Linux Systems

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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February 3, 2020

Out this weekend is Lumina 1.6 as the latest release of this Qt-powered desktop environment originally developed by iXsystems as part of PC-BSD / TrueOS. While TrueOS has been forging a new direction for this iXsystems operating system derived from FreeBSD and ultimately is less desktop focused these days as a result, the Lumina desktop continues to be developed. In fact, Lumina founder Ken Moore of iXsystems continues to lead the releases on this Qt-based desktop environment seeing adoption on both BSDs and Linux distributions.

[Source: Phoronix]