Red Hat: PodCTL, Security Embargos at Red Hat and Energy Sector

• [Podcast] PodCTL #50 – Listener Mailbag Questions

  As the community around PodCTL has grown (~8000 weekly listeners) we’ve constantly asked them to give us feedback on topics to discuss and areas where they want to learn. This week we discussed and answered a number of questions about big data and analytics, application deployments, routing security, and storage deployment models.

• Security Embargos at Red Hat

  The software security industry uses the term Embargo to describe the period of time that a security flaw is known privately, prior to a deadline, after which time the details become known to the public. There are no concrete rules for handling embargoed security flaws, but Red Hat uses some industry standard guidelines on how we handle them. When an issue is under embargo, Red Hat cannot share information about that issue prior to it becoming public after an agreed upon deadline. It is likely that any software project will have to deal with an embargoed security flaw at some point, and this is often the case for Red Hat.

• Transforming oil & gas: Exploration and production will reap the rewards

  Through advanced technologies based on open standards, Red Hat deliver solutions that can support oil and gas companies as they modernize their IT infrastructures and build a framework to meet market and technology challenges. Taking advantage of modern, open architectures can help oil and gas providers attract new customers and provide entry into markets where these kinds of services were technologically impossible a decade ago.

BlackArch Linux Ethical Hacking OS Now Has More Than 2000 Hacking Tools

The BlackArch Linux penetration testing and ethical hacking computer operating system now has more than 2000 tools in its repositories, announced the project's developers recently. Used by thousands of hundreds of hackers and security researchers all over the world, BlackArch Linux is one of the most acclaimed Linux-based operating systems for hacking and other security-related tasks. It has its own software repositories that contain thousands of tools. The OS is based on the famous Arch Linux operating system and follows a rolling release model, where users install once and receive updates forever, or at least until they do something that can't be repaired and need to reinstall.

Debian Patches for Intel's Defects, Canonical to Fix Ubuntu Security Flaws for a Fee

• Debian Outs Updated Intel Microcode to Mitigate Spectre V4 and V3a on More CPUs

  The Debian Project released an updated Intel microcode firmware for users of the Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" operating system series to mitigate two of the latest Spectre vulnerabilities on more Intel CPUs. Last month, on August 16, Debian's Moritz Muehlenhoff announced the availability of an Intel microcode update that provided Speculative Store Bypass Disable (SSBD) support needed to address both the Spectre Variant 4 and Spectre Variant 3a security vulnerabilities. However, the Intel microcode update released last month was available only for some types of Intel CPUs, so now the Debian Project released an updated version that implements SSBD support for additional Intel CPU models to mitigate both Spectre V4 and V3a on Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" systems.

• Announcing Extended Security Maintenance for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS – “Trusty Tahr” [Ed: Canonical looking to profit from security flaws in Ubuntu like Microsoft does in Windows.]

  Ubuntu is the basis for the majority of cloud-based workloads today. With over 450 million public cloud instances launched since the release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, a number that keeps accelerating on a day-per-day basis since, many of the largest web-scale deployments are using Ubuntu. This includes financial, big data, media, and many other workloads and use cases, which rely on the stability and continuity of the underlying operating system to provide the mission-critical service their customers rely on. Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) was introduced for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS as a way to extend the availability of critical and important security patches beyond the nominal End of Life date of Ubuntu 12.04. Organisations use ESM to address security compliance concerns while they manage the upgrade process to newer versions of Ubuntu under full support. The ability to plan application upgrades in a failsafe environment continues to be cited as the main value for adoption of ESM. With the End of Life of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in April 2019, and to support the planning efforts of developers worldwide, Canonical is announcing the availability of ESM for Ubuntu 14.04.

• Canonical Announces Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) Extended Security Maintenance

  Canonical announced today that it would extend its commercial Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) offering to the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system series starting May 2019. Last year on April 28, 2017, when the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system series reached end of life, Canonical announced a new way for corporate users and enterprises to receive security updates if they wanted to keep their current Ubuntu 12.04 LTS installations and had no plans to upgrade to a newer LTS (Long Term Support) release. The offering was called Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) and had a great success among businesses.

Graphics: NVIDIA and AMD

• Initial NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Linux Benchmarks

  This article is going to be short and sweet as just receiving the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti yesterday and then not receiving the Linux driver build until earlier today... The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti has been busy now for a few hours with the Phoronix Test Suite on the Core i7 8086K system running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with the latest drivers.

• NVIDIA Introduces A Number Of New OpenGL Extensions For Turing

  As part of the GeForce RTX 2080 series launching with the new GPU architecture, NVIDIA has published a number of new OpenGL extensions for making use of some of Turing's new capabilities.

• Vulkan 1.1.85 Released With Raytracing, Mesh Shaders & Other New NVIDIA Extensions

  Leading up to the Turing launch we weren't sure if NVIDIA was going to deliver same-day Vulkan support for RTX/ray-tracing with the GeForce RTX graphics cards or if it was going to be left up to Direct3D 12 on Windows for a while... Fortunately, as already reported, their new driver has Vulkan RTX support. Additionally, the NVX_raytracing extension and other NVIDIA updates made it into today's Vulkan 1.1.85 release.

• Radeon/GPUOpen OCAT 1.2 Released But No Linux Support Yet

  A new feature release is out for the Radeon/GPUOpen "OCAT" open-source capture and analytics tool. OCAT 1.2 is their first release of the year and includes VR head-mounted display (HMD) support, new visualization tools, system information detection, new settings, and other enhancements.