HeliOS is a Tiny Embedded OS Designed for Arduino Boards

Mannie Peterson (aka FellFromTree) has developed an embedded operating system called HeliOS that’s designed specifically for 8-bit and 32-bit Arduino boards, and can easily be used from the Arduino IDE. HeliOS is said to have only 21 function calls and implements cooperative and event-driven multitasking, task notification/messaging, timers, and memory management. It’s a non-preemptive multitasking kernel so you won’t have to deal with mutexes. The developer explains how scheduling works with HeliOS: HeliOS uses a run-time balanced strategy which ensures tasks with shorter run-times are prioritized over tasks with longer run-times. This ensures all running tasks receive approximately equal total run-time without using context switching. The other multitasking option available in HeliOS is event driven multitasking, which uses the wait/notify and timer interfaces. Mixing cooperative and event driven tasks in HeliOS is not a problem.

Debian vs Ubuntu in 2020- The Ultimate Showdown

As a computer software distribution package, Ubuntu and Debian are utilized in two ways... Desktop Operating System Server Although they are similar in many ways, they have their differences. Ubuntu is based on the testing branch of Debian and often, Debian involves too many manual works and so it is not recommended for beginners. While Ubuntu is easy to use for beginners, it is not as stable as Debian in its built. Let us have a comparison between Debian vs Ubuntu.

[email protected] ARM64 Linux Beta Release for COVID-19 Vaccine Research

A few months ago, we reported that [email protected] supported 64-bit Arm SBC’s and Servers in the Fight against COVID-19. But [email protected] did not support Arm hardware just yet, but thanks to work from Nercotix, Linaro, Arm, miniNodes, and Packet.com, we now get support for [email protected] on ARM64 meaning you can help researchers studying SARS-CoV-2 virus and help them develop a COVID-19 vaccine with Raspberry Pi 3/4 boards, or other 64-bit Arm SBC’s and servers. The solution relies on Neocortix Cloud Services Platform allowing the unused capacity of large numbers of individual mobile phones or other connected nodes to be harnessed into a single, unified computational engine. The very first application that made use of the platform was Neocortix PhonePaycheck were users get paid to let businesses perform calculations on their phones at night while charging and connected to WiFi. That way users of premium phones like Galaxy S10 or S20 can make around $80 a year when used for 8 hours a day, or $240 per year with a spare phone running 24/7.

Security Leftovers

• An Average IT Org

  Supply chain attacks are a known issue, and also lately there was a discussion around the relevance of reproducible builds. Looking in comparison at an average IT org doing something with the internet, I believe the pressing problem is neither supply chain attacks nor a lack of reproducible builds. The real problem is the amount of prefabricated binaries supplied by someone else, created in an unknown build environment with unknown tools, the average IT org requires to do anything. [...] Yes some of that is even non-free and might contain spyw^telemetry. [...] In the end the binary supply is like a drug for the user, and somehow the Debian project is also just another dealer / middle man in this setup. There are probably a lot of open questions to think about in that context. Are we the better dealer because we care about signed sources we retrieve from upstream and because we engage in reproducible build projects? Are our own means of distributing binaries any better than a binary download from github via https with a manual checksum verification, or the Debian repo at download.docker.com? Is the approach of the BSD/Gentoo ports, where you have to compile at least some software from source, the better one? Do I really want to know how some of the software is actually build?

• NSA and FBI warn that new Linux malware threatens national security

• Critical vulnerabilities in Quiz And Survey Master WordPress Plugin

  Quiz and Survey Master is a WordPress plugin for creating quizzes and surveys easily on WordPress sites. It is installed on over 30,000+ websites. Recently WordFence‘s Chloe Chamberland discovered two critical vulnerabilities in Quiz and Survey Master plugin version 7.0.

• Pros & Cons of WordPress Plugins Auto-updates

  WordPress has released a major update yesterday with some big changes. One of the features is the ability to apply all the plugins and themes updates automatically. Earlier plugins updates could be automatically applied with the help of additional plugins. One popular plugin is Jetpack that can apply available updates automatically. Now WordPress 5.5 core supports auto-updates out of the box. In this article, we will discuss the auto-update feature of WordPress. For many websites, this feature can be a lifesaver but for some, there may involve some risks.