Open Source Startup ‘Tidelift’ raises $25m in series B funding

Open Source startups are also booming with the rise of open source usage in the enterprise world. Tidelift is one such startup making it big with multi-million dollar fundings.

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp pose privacy risks, warns free software guru Richard Stallman

Think twice before posting anyone’s photo on Facebook, WhatsApp or Instagram, says free software guru Richard Stallman. As a few among the strongest centralised surveillance mechanisms in the world, even with a picture of the back of head, they would be able to track where you go and what you do, he added. The software guru’s lecture titled Education Freedom Day lecture, organised by International Centre for Free and Open Source Software and Society for Promotion of Alternate Computing and Employment (SPACE) in Thiruvananthapuram, had first bewildered information technology professionals and academicians when he asked them to “switch-off the geo-location feature of your smartphone, if you are taking my photos”. He said that 90% of the 1,000 free applications in Google Play stores can spy, according to the latest studies and asked why should the fleshlight application be linked to the server. Even the data on the sex toy go to the server, with its thermometer readings sharing the time of contact. He argued that owners of the firms who spy on a user’s personal data should be jailed. Richard Matthew Stallman, according to Wikipedia, “is an Amercian freedom activist and a computer programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that a user receiving it, likewise receives with it the freedom to use, study, distribute and modify that software”.

Security: Updates, Leaks, Kubernetes and Let's Encrypt

• Security updates for Thursday

• Oracle Releases First Critical Patch Update of 2019, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora to Drop MongoDB, The Linux Foundation Announces Its 2019 Event Lineup, Firefox Closing Its Test Pilot Program and GoDaddy to Support AdoptOpenJDK

  Oracle released its first Critical Patch Update of the year this week, which addresses 284 vulnerabilities. eWeek reports that "Thirty-three of the vulnerabilities are identified as being critical with a Common Vulnerabilities Scoring System (CVSS) score of 9.0 or higher."

• Over 1 Billion Login Credentials Leaked, Here’s How to See if You Were Compromised

  Good morning! A whole slew of usernames and plaintext passwords were leaked for a number of different sites—at 772 million and 21 million respectively, it’s the largest data leak in history. Here’s how to make sure your information is still safe. This collection of email address and passwords—dubbed “Collection #1”—groups together several smaller breaches into a larger master file of sorts. This huge collection of data comes from several different sites, so your personal info may have been compromised from multiple different sources. That means your information could’ve been compromised multiple times—the same email address with different passwords.

• Kubernetes security: 4 tips to manage risks

  Kubernetes has one of the liveliest (if not the liveliest) communities around. Getting involved is one of the best ways to get up to speed and stay abreast of best security practices. That community values the same thing you’re seeking: Making the most of Kubernetes’ power while minimizing any risks that come with its increasing adoption. “This community clearly cares deeply about security, and it emphasizes education and inclusion, so security staff can look forward to a helpful, educational community from whom they can learn,” Dang says. “Get educated and follow industry best practices, like the CIS Kubernetes Benchmark,” advises Amir Jerbi, CTO at Aqua Security. “Kubernetes is a complex system with many configuration options, any of which, if done wrong, could leave clusters open to attacks.” Plugging into the vibrant Kubernetes community is a great step toward ensuring your organization’s implementation isn’t creating unnecessary vulnerabilities.

• Protect Your Websites with Let's Encrypt

  Back in the bad old days, setting up basic HTTPS with a certificate authority cost as much as several hundred dollars per year, and the process was difficult and error-prone to set up. Now we have Let's Encrypt for free, and the whole thing takes just a few minutes.