Security updates for Thursday

Hortonworks’ Shaun Bierweiler on Enterprise Open Source’s Security Edge Over Proprietary Software

Shaun Bierweiler, vice president of U.S. public sector at Hortonworks, told Datanami in an interview published Tuesday about the advantage of adopting an open approach to technology development in the big data space. “When you think about integration points, and the various technologies and players coming to market, if you don’t have an open approach and open model and open interfaces, it’s really difficult costly and time-consuming to bring those pieces together,” he said.

Best free Linux firewalls of 2018

A firewall is an important aspect of computer security these days, and most modern routers have one built in, which while helpful, can be difficult to configure. Fortunately there are also distributions (distros) of the free operating system Linux which have been specifically designed to function as firewalls. These will generally have much more advanced features than those found on a router, and allow you to have far greater control over keeping your personal or business network safe.

The LJ Password Generator Tool

Open Source Hardware Cryptocurrency Wallet Unveiled By McAfee And Bitfi

Global payments tech firm Bitfi has launched the Bitfi Wallet. According to the payments company the hardware wallet is unhackable. Some of the digital currencies that the wallet supports include privacy-oriented virtual currency Monero (XMR) which has not previously had a hardware wallet. The wallet comes with a dashboard consisting of a wireless setup as well as support.

Zapcc high-speed C++ compiler now open source

Zapcc, a caching C++ compiler built for speed, has gone open source. Ceemple Software, Zapcc’s builder, claims the compiler offers dramatic improvements in both incremental and full builds compared to building with Clang 4.0 and Clang 5.0. Based on heavily modified code from the Clang compiler project, Zapcc uses an in-memory compilation cache in a client-server architecture. All compilation information is remembered between runs.

Heterogeneous memory management meets EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL()

One of the many longstanding — though unwritten — rules of kernel development is that infrastructure is not merged until at least one user for that infrastructure exists. That helps developers evaluate potential interfaces and be sure that the proposed addition is truly needed. A big exception to this rule was made when the heterogeneous memory management (HMM) code was merged, though. One of the reasons for the lack of users in this case turns out to be that many of the use cases are proprietary; that has led to some disagreements over the GPL-only status of an exported kernel symbol. The HMM subsystem exists to support peripherals that have direct access to system memory through their own memory-management units. It allows the ownership of ranges of memory to be passed back and forth and notifies peripherals of changes in memory mappings to keep everything working well together. HMM is not a small or simple subsystem, and bringing it into the kernel has forced a number of low-level memory-management changes. After a multi-year development process, the core HMM code was merged for the 4.14 kernel, despite the lack of any users.

An Awesome List of Apps & Resources for elementary OS

It is barely up to a day since I put up a positive review of elementary OS which is well deserved because it has come a long way from what it was 2 years ago when FossMint checked it out. The good news I’ve got for you today is that the developers have published a page on GitHub that contains “curated list of awesome applications, tools and shiny things for elementary OS”. They are grouped into categories for easy selection, are all open source, and clicking on the green tick icons will direct you to the app on elementary OS’s AppCenter.

Best Free Unified Modeling Language Tools

Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose, modeling language designed to provide a standard way for visualizing, specifying, constructing, and documenting the artifacts of distributed object systems. It’s the industry standard modeling language for software engineering. The aim of UML is to give software engineers, agile and small development teams, and system architects useful tools for analysis, design, and implementation of software-based systems. It also provides modeling business and similar processes. The language helps to visualize your object-oriented design and communicate with others. It offers limited use for other programming paradigms.

PulseAudio 12.0 release notes

When playing videos, it's important that the audio latency is known so that the video can be synchronized accurately. PulseAudio doesn't get good latency information from the kernel with A2DP playback, which has caused A/V sync problems for many people when watching videos. Now PulseAudio makes the audio buffer in the kernel much smaller, which reduces the problem a lot.

PulseAudio 12.0 Released With Many Improvements

PulseAudio 12.0 was quietly released yesterday as the newest version of this open-source, cross-platform sound server.

Zstandard – A Super Faster Data Compression Tool For Linux

This is known topic and we were using in our day to day activity to compress and decompress files & folders. You might already know zip,tar,7-zip, etc and you would have used all these application for your requirement. Even today also we are going to discuss about similar kind of topic, the tool name is Zstandard. It is super fast data compression tool and compression ratio is very very low. Zstd is lossless data compression algorithm developed by Yann Collet at Facebook. Due to high data compression ratio many of the popular companies and databases are using this tool.

CMake 3.12 Update on FreeBSD

CMake 3.12 has reached rc1. That means we’re testing the update on FreeBSD, and building lots and lots of packages. And, as I’ve written previously, every CMake update triggers a bunch of interesting software findings. As a motto, I’ve got “use it, aggressively improve it” on my website (you can hire me for odd CMake and C++ jobs, too). So hitting compile issues makes me turn to fixing software outside of KDE.

Krita 4.1 Digital Painting Program Enters Beta With Multi-Monitor Workspace Layouts

The KDE/Qt-aligned Krita digital painting program has published the first beta of their next feature release, Krita 4.1.

The day Kate Gregory enjoyed Qt

At my company we use C++ for everything, from creating microservices to website backends and as a generator for website frontends, I mean, we do a lot of c++. And because of that we always need more c++ people, but sometimes it’s hard to find developers, but it’s easy to find php / python / javascript ones. Because of that we hired Kate Gregory’s famous c++ course – “Teaching the Teacher” to train current C++ developers to teach C++. (now, that’s a lot of ‘C++’ in a simple sentence, I know. bear with me.) For those that doens’t know, Kate Gregory is somebody that uses, advocates our beloved language even before I was born, and talks all over the world about C++ and also do trainings for companies, And so I enlisted to be her student. It was a really pleasant course going thru how to proplery explain C++ for people that know how to program but don’t know how to C++, and for that I’m grateful. But then when I commented out about Qt in the middle of the class she rolled her eyes, that made me feel a bit uneasy so I talked to her on why the eye-roll. “Qt is not c++”, and I tougth this was already settled down for years, so I asked her if she would be open to see some simple c++ code written in Qt and tell me what she thinks of it. “Well, Yes. but people already tried and it was not good”.