Enisa: Backdoors Will Undermine Society and Industry

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February 16, 2016

The EU’s network and information security agency Enisa has become the latest big-name institution to publicly support strong encryption and claim that any attempts to circumvent such systems by law enforcers will undermine industry and civil society.

In a newly released paper, On the free use of cryptographic tools for (self) protection of EU citizens, the agency argued that cryptography provides the electronic equivalent of the “letter cover, the seal or rubber stamp and the signature.” It claimed first off that key escrow and recovery, while theoretically possible, would require a “fundamental change” in our communications infrastructure, making it more complex and vulnerable to attacks.

Open Source Packages for Network Functions Virtualization

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The Linux Foundation

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February 16, 2016

In our previous article, we had focused on The Network Platform for Network Functions Virtualization (OPNFV), mainly covering the virtual infrastructure and the corresponding manager that support Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). In this article, we will focus on open source options that are available for building different virtual network functions.

A Virtualized Network Function (VNF) is a network function capable of running on an NFV Infrastructure (NFVI) and being orchestrated by a NFV Orchestrator (NFVO) and VNF Manager. VNF is expected to support well-defined interfaces to other network functions, the VNF Manager, its EMS, and the NFVI, in addition to the well-defined functional behavior.

What Do Linux Developers Think of Git and GitHub?

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InfoWorld

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February 16, 2016

Octocat copy What do Linux developers think of Git and GitHub? The popularity of Git and GitHub among Linux developers is well established. But what do developers think of them? And should GitHub really be synonymous with Git itself? A Linux redditor recently asked about this and got some very interesting answers.

Dontwakemeup46 asked his question:

I am learning Git and Github. What I am interested in is how these two are viewed by the community. That git and github are used extensively, is something I know. But are there serious issues with either Git or Github? Something that the community would love to change?

Khronos Releases Vulkan 1.0 Open Graphics Specification

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The Register

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February 16, 2016

Explicit thread control and closer to the metal, but OpenGL not dead yet. Khronos has released Vulkan 1.0, the next generation open graphics API, and a Vulkan SDK for Windows and Linux is now available from LunarG.

Khronos is an industry consortium which creates open graphics standards, including OpenGL and WebGL. Vulkan was announced in March 2015 and represents the next generation after OpenGL, though Khronos is keen to emphasise that OpenGL, and the cut-down OpenGL ES designed for mobile and embedded use, remain in active development.

Pinterest Open-Sources its Teletraan Tool for Deploying Code

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The Linux Foundation

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February 16, 2016

As promised last year when the company introduced it, Pinterest today announced that it has released its Teletraan tool for deploying source code on GitHub under an open source Apache license.

â€œTeletraan is designed to do one thing, deploy code,â€ Pinterest software engineer Baogang Song wrote in a blog post. â€œNot only does it support critical features such as zero downtime deploy, rollback, staging and continuous deploy, but it also has convenient features, such as displaying commit details, comparing different deploys, notifying deploy state changes through either email or chat room, displaying OpenTSDB metrics and more.â€

How Bad Router Configuration Can Drain Smartphone and Tablet Battery Life

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ZDNet

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February 16, 2016

Your smartphone or tablet might look like it’s off, but even when the screen is dark it’s doing stuff. And that stuff drains the battery. And router configurations can have a huge impact on that power drain.

Just because your smartphone or tablet (or smartwatch for that matter) looks like it’s doing nothing, that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing going on. If it’s connected to a network, there are communications going on that constantly wake it up from sleep mode, and eat at your battery life.

These communications come in the form of Router Advertisement (RA) messages, and according to a Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) memo RCF 7772…

Attending Technical Conferences: What’s the Big Deal?

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OpenSource.com

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February 16, 2016

BUSINESS politics-1 copy If you’ve never been to a technical conference, you might be tempted to think it’s the time out of the office and the free lunches that get people excited. Not that I’m opposed to a free lunch, but that’s not even remotely why technical conferences are amazing. In fact, sometimes the lunch food is the worst part. But the conversation over lunch? Well, it could easily turn out to be the most important conversation you’ve had all year.

A chance to learn new tricks

The first and foremost reason to go to technical conferences is to learn new technical tricks.

IBM Launches z13s, Entry Mainframe with Enhanced Security

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ZDNet

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February 16, 2016

The z13s is designed for hybrid cloud deployments and can encrypt and decrypt data twice as fast as the previous version.

IBM on Tuesday launched the z13s, which is a mainframe aimed at mid-sized companies and includes a bevy of security features. The z13 is designed to bring the mainframe’s security practices to hybrid cloud deployments. The security included in the z13s include:

Cryptography features built into hardware that can encrypt and decrypt data twice as fast as predecessor systems.

Linux Kernel 3.2.77 LTS Has Crypto, x86, and CIFS Improvements, Updated Drivers

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Softpedia

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February 16, 2016

Linux kernel maintainer and developer Ben Hutchings was happy to announce this past weekend the release and immediate availability for download and update of the seventy-seventh maintenance build of the long-term supported Linux 3.2 kernel.

Now that Linux kernel 2.6.32 LTS is about to reach end of life this month, Linux 3.2 will become the oldest long-term supported kernel. Thus, the 3.2.77 release is here to improve the hardware support by bringing updated drivers, as well as to fix many of the issues reported by users or discovered by the kernel developers since the previous maintenance build.

GNOME Maps 3.20 to Allow for OpenStreetMap Editing

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Softpedia

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February 16, 2016

gnome-maps-3 GNOME 20 is almost upon us, and it’s going to be a really impressive release, especially since many of its components are getting important upgrades, like GNOME Maps, for example.

When the first edition of GNOME Maps landed just a couple of years ago, it was really hard to picture its place in the stack. It’s an application that doesn’t have any kind of competition, which might be a good indication that it’s needed. GNOME Maps remained pretty simple for much of its life, but things started to change a few months ago, and more features started to land.