OSS Leftovers

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A Recap Of The Many Interesting Presentations At FOSDEM 2018
Over the past week and a half we have highlighted many of the interesting presentations that took place at the annual Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brussels. Here's a look back if you are behind on your Phoronix reading.
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WebRender newsletter #14
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Restricting AppCache to Secure Contexts
The Application Cache (AppCache) interface provides a caching mechanism that allows websites to run offline. Using this API, developers can specify resources that the browser should cache and make available to users offline. Unfortunately, AppCache has limitations in revalidating its cache, which allows attackers to trick the browser into never revalidate the cache by setting a manifest to a malformed cache file. Removing AppCache over HTTP connections removes the risk that users could see stale cached content that came from a malicious connection indefinitely.
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Altibase Challenges Oracle, IBM & Microsoft
...Altibase, an enterprise grade relational database, announced that it is now open source.
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Putting Open Source GIS to Use
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InfluxData scores $35 million Series C to expand time series database business
In a world where sensors are capturing ever-increasing amounts of data, being able to collect that high volume and measure it over time becomes increasingly important. InfluxData, the startup built on top of the open source time series database platform, announced it has received a $35 million Series C investment today led by Sapphire Ventures, the investment arm of enterprise software giant, SAP.
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EOH acquires LSD in open source drive
The JSE-listed company says the partnership addresses an identified gap in the market by bringing the value and innovation that open source solutions provide, in enabling EOH customers' digital transformation journeys.
LSD was founded by Stefan Lesicnik in 2001. In the early days, the company focused on supporting basic Linux servers.
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Qt 5.10.1 Ships With More Than 300 Bug Fixes
The Qt Company has announced the availability of Qt 5.10.1, the first bug-fix release to Qt 5.10 that shipped back in December.
In the approximately two months since Qt 5.10.0, today's point release has more than 300 bug fixes and around 1,400 changes in total over the previous release.
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Games: Surviving Mars and OpenMW
| Kernel and Security: BPF, Mesa, Embedded World, Kernel Address Sanitizer and More
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Blacklisting insecure filesystems in openSUSEThe Linux kernel supports a wide variety of filesystem types, many of which have not seen significant use — or maintenance — in many years. Developers in the openSUSE project have concluded that many of these filesystem types are, at this point, more useful to attackers than to openSUSE users and are proposing to blacklist many of them by default. Such changes can be controversial, but it's probably still fair to say that few people expected the massive discussion that resulted, covering everything from the number of OS/2 users to how openSUSE fits into the distribution marketplace.
On January 30, Martin Wilck started the discussion with a proposal to add a blacklist preventing the automatic loading of a set of kernel modules implementing (mostly) old filesystems. These include filesystems like JFS, Minix, cramfs, AFFS, and F2FS. For most of these, the logic is that the filesystems are essentially unused and the modules implementing them have seen little maintenance in recent decades. But those modules can still be automatically loaded if a user inserts a removable drive containing one of those filesystem types. There are a number of fuzz-testing efforts underway in the kernel community, but it seems relatively unlikely that any of them are targeting, say, FreeVxFS filesystem images. So it is not unreasonable to suspect that there just might be exploitable bugs in those modules. Preventing modules for ancient, unmaintained filesystems from automatically loading may thus protect some users against flash-drive attacks.
If there were to be a fight over a proposal like this, one would ordinarily expect it to be concerned with the specific list of unwelcome modules. But there was relatively little of that. One possible exception is F2FS, the presence of which raised some eyebrows since it is under active development, having received 44 changes in the 5.0 development cycle, for example. Interestingly, it turns out that openSUSE stopped shipping F2FS in September. While the filesystem is being actively developed, it seems that, with rare exceptions, nobody is actively backporting fixes, and the filesystem also lacks a mechanism to prevent an old F2FS implementation from being confused by a filesystem created by a newer version. Rather than deal with these issues, openSUSE decided to just drop the filesystem altogether. As it happens, the blacklist proposal looks likely to allow F2FS to return to the distribution since it can be blacklisted by default.
| gitgeist: a git-based social network proof of concept
Are you tired of not owning the data or the platform you use for social postings? I know I am.
It's hard to say when I "first" used a social network. I've been on email for about 30 years and one of the early ad-hoc forms of social networks were chain emails. Over the years I was asked to join all sorts of "social" things such as IRC, ICQ, Skype, MSN Messenger, etc. and eventually things like Orkut, MySpace, Facebook, etc. I'll readily admit that I'm not the type of person that happily jumps onto every new social bandwagon that appears on the Internet. I often prefer preserving the quietness of my own thoughts. That, though, hasn't stopped me from finding some meaningfulness participating in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more recently Google+. Twitter was in fact the first social network that I truly embraced. And it would've remained my primary social network had they not killed their own community by culling the swell of independently-developed Twitter clients that existed. That and their increased control of their API effectively made me look for something else. Right around that time Google+ was being introduced and many in the open source community started participating in that, in some ways to find a fresh place where techies can aggregate away from the noise and sometimes over-the-top nature of Facebook. Eventually I took to that too and started using G+ as my primary social network. That is, until Google recently decided to pull the plug on G+.
While Google+ might not have represented a success for Google, it had become a good place for sharing information among the technically-inclined. As such, I found it quite useful for learning and hearing about new things in my field. Soon-to-be-former users of G+ have gone in all sorts of directions. Some have adopted a "c'mon guys, get over it, Facebook is the spot" attitude, others have adopted things like Mastodon, others have fallen back to their existing IDs on Twitter, and yet others, like me, are still looking.
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