Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to Google Maps

Google has a firm grip on the desktop. Their products and services are ubiquitous. Don’t get us wrong, we’re long-standing admirers of many of Google’s products and services. They are often high quality, easy to use, and ‘free’, but there can be downsides of over-reliance on a specific company. For example, there are concerns about their privacy policies, business practices, and an almost insatiable desire to control all of our data, all of the time. What if you are looking to move away from Google and embark on a new world of online freedom, where you are not constantly tracked, monetised and attached to Google’s ecosystem. In this series, we explore how you can migrate from Google without missing out on anything. We’ll recommend open source solutions.

Proprietary Software and Security

• Four zero-day exploits used to attack Microsoft Exchange Server

  It said the four vulnerabilities being exploited — CVE-2021-26855, CVE-2021-26857, CVE-2021-26858, and CVE-2021-27065 — had all been patched on Tuesday US time. The announcement and fixes came a week ahead of the company's regular monthly updates.

• Last Week on My Mac: Users are losing out against Big Sur’s sealed System

  Big Sur’s sealed System volume seemed like a good idea. Although the read-only version in Catalina may look impregnable, guaranteeing integrity using a Merkle Tree of hashes, then locking the whole lot in a snapshot, looks even more robust. Like other good engineering ideas, though, it also needs thinking through thoroughly.

• How long before grid attacks become the new normal?

  In the news roundup, David Kris digs into rumors that Chinese malware attacks may have caused a blackout in India at a time when military conflict was flaring on the two nation's Himalayan border. This leads us to Russia's targeting of the U.S. grid and to uneasy speculation on how well our regulatory regime is adapted to preventing successful grid attacks.

• Biggest Data Breaches of 2020 – and What Developers Should Learn From Them

  2020 was not a good year for hacks, data breaches, and other cyber-attacks. As far as those things go, it was among the worst years on record. Businesses far and wide experienced some of the most damaging and embarrassing hacks imaginable last year. And some of the incidents led to serious security failures that could end up having grave international implications. But despite all of the problems, some of 2020's hacks can yield valuable lessons for programmers and software engineers to help them to harden their products against future attacks.

• SQL Injection Tutorial - What is SQL Injection and How to Prevent it

  SQL injection is when you insert or inject a SQL query via input data from the client to the application. Successful attacks allow an attacker to access sensitive data from the database, modify database data, potentially shut the database down or issue other admin commands, recover the contents of files, and occasionally issue commands to the operating system. This type of attack is relatively easy to detect and exploit, so it's particularly important that any vulnerable systems are quickly remediated.

Arduino and Raspberry Pi Misc.

• Arduino IDE 2.0 beta released with live debugger, revamped user interface

  Arduino programming language and the Arduino IDE are the most popular software development tools for the makers market, but it lacks some of the features found in professional tools like autocompletion and the ability to add breakpoints via a debugger, and that’s why the company announced its work on the Arduino Pro IDE in 2019. Work is now nearing completion with the release of the beta version of the Arduino IDE 2.0 based on the Eclipse Theia framework.

• Host your website with dynamic content and a database on a Raspberry Pi | Opensource.com

  Raspberry Pi's single-board machines have set the mark for cheap, real-world computing. With its model 4, the Raspberry Pi can host web applications with a production-grade web server, a transactional database system, and dynamic content through scripting. This article explains the installation and configuration details with a full code example. Welcome to web applications hosted on a very lightweight computer. [...] The client could be a browser, a utility such as curl, or a hand-crafted program fluent in HTTP. Communications between the client and Nginx occur through HTTP, but then uwsgi takes over as a binary-transport protocol between Nginx and the application server, which interacts with request-handling code such as requestHandler.py (described below). This architecture delivers a clean division of labor. Nginx alone manages the client, and only the request-handling code interacts with the database. In turn, the application server separates the web server from the programmer-written code, which has a high-level API to read and write HTTP messages delivered over uwsgi. I'll examine these architectural pieces and cover the steps for installing, configuring, and using uwsgi and Nginx in the next sections.

• François Marier: Creating a Kodi media PC using a Raspberry Pi 4

  Here's how I set up a media PC using Kodi (formerly XMBC) and a Raspberry Pi 4.

• Make an animated sign with Raspberry Pi Pico