Games: Kubernetes Within the Context of Video Games, Please, RetroArch

• Kubernetes: The Video Game

  Grant Shipley was recently in China for KubeCon, where he gave a keynote talk explaining the Kubernetes ecosystem within the context of Video Games. It’s a fun way to examine the entire world of Kubernetes, from end to end, while also enabling Grant to make Mavis Beacon and Commodore 64 references. Take a gander!

• Please, a tense ten-minute experience has a Linux build available

  Got a few minutes to burn? Why not try out the short experimental experience that Please offers. Developed by somewhat, it delivers something quite surreal and freaky.

• Achievement Unlocked: RetroArch is Coming to Steam

  Fans of retro (and not so retro) gaming will be pleased to hear that RetroArch is coming to Steam. Not familiar with RetroArch? It’s a user-friendly GUI that makes use of the libretro API. That API allows developers to create, among other things, modular ‘libretro’ cores that act as game emulators for systems like the SNES, Mega Drive and Game Boy. The famed front-end for the popular Libretro API will be available to install on Steam for Windows from July 30. Linux and macOS versions will follow. The libretro cores that power RetroArch can be used with other compatible frontends (like GNOME Games app) but RetroArch is arguably the best one.

IBM, Red Hat and Fedora

• IBM Takes A Hands Off Approach With Red Hat

  IBM has been around long enough in the IT racket that it doesn’t have any trouble maintaining distinct portfolios of products that have overlapping and often incompatible functions. The System/3, which debuted in 1969, is only five years older than the System/360, which laid the foundation and set the pace for corporate computing when it launched in 1964. Both styles of machines continue to exist today as the IBM i on Power Systems platform and the System z. With the $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, which closed last week, neither of those two legacy products are under threat and IBM does not seem to be inclined whatsoever in ceasing development of the legacy operating system and middleware stacks embodied in the IBM i and System z lines. As Arvind Krishna, senior vice president in charge of IBM’s cloud and cognitive software products, put it bluntly in a call after the deal closed, IBM’s customers expect for Big Blue to maintain its own operating systems, middleware, storage, databases, and security software in the IBM i, AIX, and System z lines, and that is precisely what Big Blue is going to do. Krisha estimated that there is only about 5 percent overlap in products between Big Blue and Red Hat – something we talked about at length when the deal was announced last October – and added that in many enterprise accounts that use both Red Hat and IBM platforms, companies invest in both sets of software for different purposes – perhaps using JBoss in one case and WebSphere in another, for instance.

• Tech cos go for Edtech tie-ups to get that ready workforce

  Companies like Wipro, Accenture, IBM and others are tying up with edtech partners like upGrad, Simplilearn and Udacity to have a ready-trained workforce they can deploy on projects. Additional benefits include minimal training cost incurred post recruitment and a lesser churn as learners develop more ownership in their roles. The edtech firms provide campus recruits the required platform, content, assignments and project work in their last semester of college to ensure they are prepared with programming skills and emerging digital skills before they join.

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 improves performance for modern workloads

  Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 can provide significant performance improvements over RHEL 7 across a range of modern workloads. To put this in context, we used RHEL 7.6 to execute multiple benchmarks with Intel's 2nd generation of Intel Xeon Scalable processors, and our hardware partners set 35 new world record performance results using the same OS version. This post will highlight RHEL 8 performance gains over RHEL 7. How did we get here? The performance engineering team at Red Hat collaborates with software partners and hardware OEMs to measure and optimize performance across workloads that range from high-end databases, NoSQL databases packaged in RHEL, Java applications, and third party databases and applications from Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, SAS, and SAP HANA ERP applications. We run multiple benchmarks and measure the performance of CPU, memory, disk I/O and networking. Testing includes the filesystems we ship with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, such as XFS, Ext4, GFS2, Gluster and Ceph.

• Federation V2 is now KubeFed

  Some time ago we talked about how Federation V2 on Red Hat OpenShift 3.11 enables users to spread their applications and services across multiple locales or clusters. As a fast moving project, lots of changes happened since our last blog post. Among those changes, Federation V2 has been renamed to KubeFed and we have released OpenShift 4. In today’s blog post we are going to look at KubeFed from an OpenShift 4 perspective, as well as show you a stateful demo application deployed across multiple clusters connected with KubeFed. There are still some unknowns around KubeFed; specifically in storage and networking. We are evaluating different solutions because we want to we deliver a top-notch product to manage your clusters across multiple regions/clouds in a clear and user-friendly way. Stay tuned for more information to come!

• Duplicity 0.8.01

  Duplicity 0.8.01 is now in rawhide. The big change here is that it now uses Python 3. I’ve tested it in my own environment, both on it’s own and with deja-dup, and both work. Please test and file bugs. I expect there will be more, but with Python 2 reaching EOL soon, it’s important to move everything we can to Python 3.

Security: FOSS Updates, WhatsApp and Telegram, Windows as Malware and Respect to Fernando Corbató

• Security updates for Monday

  Security updates have been issued by CentOS (firefox), Debian (libspring-java, ruby-mini-magick, and thunderbird), Fedora (fossil, python-django, snapd-glib, and thunderbird), openSUSE (helm and monitoring-plugins), Red Hat (cyrus-imapd, thunderbird, and vim), Scientific Linux (vim), Slackware (bzip2), SUSE (bubblewrap, bzip2, expat, glib2, kernel, php7, python3, and tomcat), and Ubuntu (exiv2, firefox, and flightcrew).

• WhatsApp, Telegram Vulnerable To ‘Media File Jacking’: Change Your Settings Now!

  Instant messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram keep your messages encrypted in transit, but once a media file reaches your phone, the same cannot be guaranteed. Researchers from Symantec have demonstrated how a vulnerability in WhatsApp and Telegram can be exploited by hackers to hijack the media files that are sent through these services.

• Windows 7 & security-only telemetry - What gives?

  Sometimes, it is hard to separate fact from emotion when it comes to technology. This does not help the end user, because when people come searching for solutions to genuine concerns like this, they first have to filter through outbursts of pent-up frustration as a result of many years of salesy bullshit. From the technological point of view, there's nothing new here. However, the fact you now get non-security nonsense with security means you can't really trust updates from Microsoft anymore. So if anything, this will majestically backfire. People don't like being pushed, and I'm amazed with the repeated attempts to do so, again and again.

• Fernando Corbató, Early Operating System Pioneer And Password Inventor, Dies At 93

  Corbató and his fellow researchers at MIT made possible much of what we now think of as computing.

• Professor Emeritus Fernando Corbató, MIT computing pioneer, dies at 93

  Longtime MIT professor developed early “time-sharing” operating systems and is widely credited as the creator of the world's first computer password.