Home Blog Page 195

Tails 4.4 released

Version 4.4 of The Amnesic Incognito Live System (or Tails) has been released. It has fixed a bunch of security vulnerabilities in Tails 4.3; users are advised to “upgrade as soon as possible”. Tails 4.4 brings new versions of the Tor Browser (9.0.6), Thunderbird (68.5.0), and the Linux kernel (5.4.19). It also fixes some problems with WiFi. Tails is a Linux distribution that runs from removable media; it is focused on privacy, security, and anonymity.

[Source: LWN.net]

Aqua Security debuts open-source container image registry scanner

Container security startup Aqua Security Software Ltd. says its open-source tool for scanning container images is now integrated by default with registries from Docker Inc. and the Mirantis Docker Enterprise platform, as well as Harbor, an open-source image registry project run by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
[Source: SiliconAngle]

GitHub Acquires npm.inc

npm.inc, the company behind the popular Node Package Manager (npm) is set to be acquired by GitHub. Founded in 2009, npm became extremely popular and is the default package manager for JavaScript runtime environment Node.js. With this acquisition GitHub will invest in the infrastructure and the platform “to ensure that npm is fast, reliable, and scalable,” said Nat Friedman, CEO of GitHub.
[Source: TFiR]

Debian 11 “Bullseye” To Begin Code Freeze In Early 2021

The Debian release team has published their tentative freeze dates for the next major version of their Linux operating system, Debian 11 Bullseye.

In their draft calendar published this morning, the first milestone for Debian 11.0 would be the transition and build-essentials freeze set for 12 January 2021. The second milestone is the soft code freeze one month later on 12 February 2021. The third milestone is the actual hard freeze for the key packages and other packages lacking automated testing, which would be on 12 March.

[Source: Phoronix]

How to Install Netbeans on Ubuntu and Other Linux

NetBeans is an open source integrated development environment that comes with good cross-platform support. This tool has been recognized by the Java and C/C++ development community widely.

The development environment is quite flexible. You can configure this tool to support a wide array of development objectives. Practically, you can develop Web, Desktop and Mobile Applications without leaving this platform. It’s amazing, isn’t it? Besides this, the user can add a wide array of known languages such as PHP, C, C++, HTML, Ajax, JavaScript, JSP, Ruby on Rails and the list goes on and on!

If you are looking to install Netbeans on Linux, you have several ways to do that. I have written this tutorial primarily for Ubuntu but some installation methods are applicable to other distributions as well.

[Source: It’s FOSS]

10 Open-Source Datasets For Text Classification

One of the popular fields of research, text classification is the method of analysing textual data to gain meaningful information. According to sources, the global text analytics market is expected to post a CAGR of more than 20% during the period 2020-2024. Text classification can be used in a number of applications such as automating CRM tasks, improving web browsing, e-commerce, among others.

Check out 10 open-source datasets, which can be used for text classification. The Amazon Review dataset, for instance, consists of a few million Amazon customer reviews (input text) and star ratings (output labels) for learning how to train fastText for sentiment analysis. The size of the dataset is 493MB.

[Source: Analytics India Magazine]

Chrome OS 82 will bring major Linux terminal improvements

Google has been allowing Chrome OS users to run Linux apps for a few years. But the optional “Crostini” feature which makes this possible sort of feels tacked onto Chrome OS as an afterthought (which… to be fair, it was).

That could change when Chrome OS 82 is released on May 5th. It’s expected to include a major update to the Linux terminal app and user experience. The folks at Chrome Unboxed have published a sneak peek.

[Source: Liliputing]

Open Source vulnerabilities up almost 50 per cent

The number of vulnerabilities in open source projects surged almost 50 per cent in 2019, according to security biz WhiteSource, which can be seen as good news in the sense that you don’t find what you’re not looking for.

In its annual vulnerability report, the biz attributes the growing vulnerability count with increased awareness of open source security. That’s a consequence of widespread adoption of open source components and the overall growth of the community in recent years, not to mention media attention of data exposure. In other words, the bugs were always there but they’re more visible because we’re paying closer attention.

[Source: The Register]

How to enable the zRAM module for faster swapping on Linux

If you’ve dealt with Linux long enough, you are fully aware of swap. If you’re relatively new to Linux, this is what you need to understand about a swap partition: The swap partition is a dedicated partition to be used when a system runs out of RAM. When this happens, inactive pages are moved out of RAM and into the swap partition.

The problem with swap is that it typically resides on drives that are slower than the RAM installed on a system. Of course, this is Linux, so there’s always a way around this. Said way is the zRAM module. What this does is dedicate a portion of RAM to serve as the swap space.

[Source: TechRepublic]

AWS launches Bottlerocket, a Linux-based OS for container hosting

AWS has launched its own open-source operating system for running containers on both virtual machines and bare metal hosts. Bottlerocket, as the new OS is called, is basically a stripped-down Linux distribution that’s akin to projects like CoreOS’s now-defunct Container Linux and Google’s container-optimized OS. The OS is currently in its developer preview phase, but you can test it as an Amazon Machine Image for EC2 (and by extension, under Amazon EKS, too).

As AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr notes in his announcement, Bottlerocket supports Docker images and images that conform to the Open Container Initiative image format, which means it’ll basically run all Linux-based containers you can throw at it.

[Source: TechCrunch]