Open Group delivers new platform for the improved use of open source software

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March 12, 2020

The Open Group, the vendor-neutral technology consortium, and the University of L’Aquila announced a partnership with a consortium of leading European research organizations, technology developers, industrial software developers, and open source forge providers. Together, they have addressed the complexity of selecting and utilizing open source software (OSS) projects available from leading online providers, including Eclipse.org, OW2, GitHub, and many others.

Supported by the European Union, the Developer-Centric Knowledge Mining from Large Open-Source Software Repositories (CROSSMINER) project has invested €4.5 million (US$4.9 million) to develop an innovative platform that examines the programming code and interactions surrounding OSS projects.

[Source: Help Net Security]

Project OWL To Offer Relief In Disaster

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 12, 2020

The Linux Foundation has announced Project OWL’s IoT device firmware effort will be hosted at the Foundation and is inviting developers worldwide to build mesh network nodes for global emergency communications networks. Project OWL, the winner of Call for Code 2018, is a cloud-based analytics tool that helps facilitate organization, whereabouts, and logistics for disaster response.

Project OWL envisions the nodes creating large-scale communications networks in the wake of natural disasters. The open source release of OWL’s firmware can quickly turn a cheap wireless device into a DuckLink, a mesh network node capable of connecting to any other Ducks physically around it.

[Source: TFiR]

Failings in open source disclosure puts users at risk

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 12, 2020

There has been a 50% rise in open source vulnerabilities, according to a study from platform provider WhiteSource. According to the State of open source security vulnerabilities report, more than 55% of reported open source vulnerabilities in 2019 were classified as “high” or “critical” severity, which WhiteSource said affected IT teams’ ability to prioritise vulnerability remediation.

The study found that the number of disclosed open source software vulnerabilities in 2019 skyrocketed to exceed 6,000. The research, which uses the WhiteSource database, is based on reported vulnerabilities, combining vulnerability reports from the US National Vulnerabilities Database (NVD), security advisories, peer-reviewed vulnerability databases and open source issue trackers.

[Source: ComputerWeekly.com]

IBM code challenge winner uses open source and IoT for disaster relief

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 11, 2020

The Linux Foundation announced Tuesday that it was hosting the open source IoT device firmware for Project OWL (organization, whereabouts and logistics), the winner of IBM’s “Call for Code” global challenge. The foundation is inviting developers worldwide to build mesh network nodes for global emergency communications networks for the challenge.

Organizers said Project OWL helps to quickly establish connectivity and improve communication between first responders and civilians in need-helping facilitate organization, whereabouts, and logistics during or after natural disasters. Project OWL’s IoT devices, “DuckLinks,” can be deployed or activated in a disaster.

[Source: TechRepublic]

Open-Source Collaboration Tackles COVID-19 Testing

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 11, 2020

When you think of open source, your mind likely jumps to projects such as Linux, Firefox, and other now-mainstream software. The ideals of the movement are applicable to other areas, too, however – and a group have come together to pool resources to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic.

The group has formed around Just One Giant Lab, a non-profit organisation operating out of Paris, France. They aim to create an open platform for scientific collaboration on a broad range of issues facing humanity. The current project aims to create an open-source method for safely testing for COVID-19 infection, in an attempt to help better manage cases popping up around the world.

[Source: Hackaday]

Linux Has This Awesome Benchmarking Tool You Probably Haven’t Heard Of

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 11, 2020

Fellow benchmarking junkies, gather ‘round and listen to this truth bomb: we know Linux is incredible, and we know Linux gaming is incredible. But benchmarking those games without a “canned” benchmark like those found in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Far Cry 5 and others? Well, that’s not so incredible. Fortunately, a developer known as FlightlessMango has answered the call with a fantastic tool called MangoHUD… Read more at Forbes.

[Source: Forbes]

Top Six Open Source Tools for Monitoring Kubernetes and Docker

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 11, 2020

Kubernetes and Docker are two of the most commonly heard buzzwords in modern DevOps conversations. Docker is a tool that enables you to containerize and run your applications, and Kubernetes provides you with a platform to orchestrate or manage these containers—since managing thousands of containers manually using the Docker CLI would be a practical nightmare.

However, simply running thousands of containers and managing them through Kubernetes is not enough. You have to observe and analyze them properly to ensure that your services are up and running optimally. This process is called Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), a term initiated and popularized by Google. Observability and analysis are a major element of SRE.

[Source: DevOps.com]

Linux and open-source conferences: List of what’s canceled or going virtual

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 11, 2020

Things can change quickly as the COVID-19 coronavirus infection numbers keep growing. It’s the same for security conferences and pretty much all other technology shows.

Here’s the current status of Linux and open-source conferences:

Linux Foundation Member Summit: March 10 to March 12, Lake Tahoe, Calif. – Canceled
Netdev 0x14: March 17 to March 20, Vancouver – Virtual.
Automotive Grade Linux: March 18 to March 19, Honolulu – Canceled
SUSECon: March 23 to March 27, Dublin, Ireland – Virtual
March Open Source RTP meetup: March 24, Durham, NC- Still running.
Linaro Connect: March 24-25, Budapest, Hungary – Virtual
KubeCon: March 30 to April 2, Amsterdam – Postponed until July/August
Open Data Science Conference: April 13 to April 18, Boston – Still running
Open Networking & Edge Summit: April 20 to April 21, LA – Postponed to the fall
Red Hat Summit: April 27 to April 29, San Francisco – Virtual

[Source: ZDNet]

Red Hat Accelerates Petabyte-Scale Object Storage for Cloud-Native Workloads

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 10, 2020

Red Hat has announced the general availability of Red Hat Ceph Storage 4 to deliver simplified, petabyte-scale object storage for cloud-native development and data analytics. Red Hat Ceph Storage 4 is based on the Nautilus version of the Ceph open source project.

Red Hat Ceph Storage 4 includes several new features:

A simplified installer experience, which enables standard installations that can be performed in less than 10 minutes.
A new management dashboard for a unified, “heads up” view of operations at all times, helping teams to identify and resolve problems more quickly.
A new quality of service monitoring feature, which helps verify storage Quality of Service for applications in a multi-tenant hosted cloud environment.
Integrated bucket notifications to support Kubernetes-native serverless architectures, which enable automated data pipelines.

[Source: Red Hat]

Debian Linux Was the Most Vulnerable Operating System in the Last 20 Years

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 9, 2020

Many believe Windows is the most vulnerable operating system, which makes users running it sitting ducks in front of attackers trying to hack into their computers.

But according to an analysis published by TheBestVPN based on data from the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s National Vulnerability Database, Debian Linux was the operating system with the biggest number of vulnerabilities in the last 20 years. Between 1999 and 2019, researchers discovered a total of 3,067 security flaws in Debian Linux, while Windows Server 2008, which is the Windows version with the biggest number of vulnerabilities, is far behind with just 1,421 security bugs.

[Source: Softpedia News]