Browsing Posts in Open Source
With news of a new open source NX server, dubbed NeatX, that was released by Google and promptly lost in the shuffle of the Chrome OS announcement. “NX technology was developed by NoMachine to handle remote X Window connections and make a graphical desktop display usable over the Internet. By its own admission, Google has been looking at remote desktop technologies for ‘quite a while’ and decided to develop Neatx as existing NX server products are either proprietary or difficult to maintain. ‘The good old X Window system can be used over the network, but it has issues with network latency and bandwidth. Neatx remedies some of these issues,’ Google engineers wrote on the company’s open source blog. NoMachine had released parts of the source code to its NX product under the GPL, but the NX server remained proprietary. [...] Neatx is written in Python, with a few wrapper scripts in Bash and one program written in C ‘for performance reasons.
[From Google Releases Open Source NX Server]
Gulags, Nukes and a Water Slide: Citizen Spies Lift North Korea’s Veil
With Sleuthing and Satellite Images, Mr. Melvin Fills the Blanks on a Secretive Nation’s Map
“MAKE Magazine has put together their 3rd annual ‘State of Open Source Hardware 2008′ — in just a few years, the number of projects has grown from a small handful to an amazing 60+ offerings. Similar to open source software, open source hardware is available with source code, schematics, firmware and bills of materials, and allows commercial use. The most popular project, Arduino, the open source prototyping platform for artists and engineers, has shipped over 60,000 units.” The article is formatted such that the first link for a particular device will usually take you to the project home page. Some will bring you instead to where you can purchase the items, but most still have a “How To” tab which will direct you to guides and instructions on how to build your own gadgets. There are a bunch of interesting devices, from the Game of Life on the outside of a cube to a home-made MP3 player to OpenMoko.
An interview with John De Goes in which he argues: “The tools market is dead. Open source killed it.” The software developer turned president of N-BRAIN explains the effect that open source has had on the developer tools market, and how this forced the company to release the personal edition of UNA free of charge. According to De Goes, selling a source-code editor, even a very good one, is all but impossible in the post-open source era, especially given that, “Some developers would rather quit their job than be forced to use a new editor or IDE.” N-BRAIN’s decision is but one in a string of similar announcements from tools companies announcing the free release of their previously commercial development tools.
[From Open Source Killing Commercial Developer Tools ]
IBM Developerworks’ recent analysis of how the NSA built SELinux to withstand attacks. The article shows us some of the relevant kernel architecture and compares SELinux to a few other approaches. We’ve discussed SELinux in the past. Quoting: “If you have a program that responds to socket requests but doesn’t need to access the file system, then that program should be able to listen on a given socket but not have access to the file system. That way, if the program is exploited in some way, its access is explicitly minimized. This type of control is called mandatory access control (MAC). Another approach to controlling access is role-based access control (RBAC). In RBAC, permissions are provided based on roles that are granted by the security system. The concept of a role differs from that of a traditional group in that a group represents one or more users. A role can represent multiple users, but it also represents the permissions that a set of users can perform. SELinux adds both MAC and RBAC to the GNU/Linux operating system.”
Can the Linux community get over its “not invented here” ideology which has often hindered its ability to adopt technological improvements from outside sources? I keep saying myself, I hope so. But recent events have shown me that we have a long way to go until we become a culture of inclusion and not of [...]
[From Unixfication II]
Sun platform strategist Ian Murdock presented OpenSolaris at LugRadio Live. The platform looks promising, but serious advantages of adopting it on the desktop remain elusive.
[From Sun touts big plans for OpenSolaris as first release nears]
If you’ve administered any remote Linux machines then you are already familiar with SSH, but you might not know that you can use SSH for much more than just connecting to a shell on a remote system. By using SSH’s port forwarding features, you can set up encrypted tunnels for many services, or connect to systems behind a firewall from home. [From Port Forwarding with SSH]
David Axe has an excellent contribution to Wired’s Danger Room on the military struggles to leverage open source medium for networking ideas and discussion. His suggestion caught my attention. I’m not saying that Army forums should be totally unprotected from insurgent snoopers. But they should be expanded, and loosened, to allow students, academics, journalists and, yes, even members of the [From Open Source, Professionals, Military Content, and the Future]
Role-based access control (RBAC) is a general security model that simplifies administration by assigning roles to users and then assigning permissions to those roles. Learn how RBAC in SELinux acts as a layer of abstraction between the user and the underlying TE model, and how the three pieces of an SELinux context (policy, kernel, and userspace) work together to enforce the RBAC and tie Linux users into the TE policy.
bsdphx writes “OpenSSH developers Damien Miller and Markus Friedl have recently added a nifty feature to make life easier for admins. Now you can easily lock an SSH session into a chroot directory, restrict them to a built-in sftp server and apply these settings per user. And it’s dead simple to do. If you need to allow semi-trusted people on your computers, then you want this bad!”
No royalties to pay in interop deal?
The Samba team has reached an agreement with Microsoft, with the software giant agreeing to disclose technical and legal information to the software libre project. Samba is by far the most widely-used software stack that allows non-Microsoft computer to talk to Windows machines, and use proprietary Microsoft network services.…
The unification of XML and SQL relational data has taken another significant step forward recently with the introduction of significant new XML functionality in mySQL, the world’s most popular open source database. In versions 5.1 and 6.0, mySQL adds the… [From XML Moves to mySQL]
It’s been a decade now that the very first version of the GNU Privacy Guard has been released … [From GnuPG's 10th birthday!]
Comcast Throttles BitTorrent Traffic, Seeding Impossible
Xen or VMWare? What’s your choice?:
Two days after VMWare had one of the most successful IPOs on recent years, and one day after XenSource announces that it is being acquired by Citrix. Money is flowing into the two major virtualization players at a rate we haven’t yet seen, what are your feelings about using Xen or VMWare on Linux?
Sourceforge Enterprise Edition
Did you know you can download SourceforgeEE for 15 users for free. You’ll find it on Sourceforge.net and it comes in a VMWare appliance. That version will accommodate 50 users if you want to pay for more than 15 seats. From an enterprise point of view, the cost is quite reasonable.
Sun Says File Systems are Important Differentiator:
Sun Microsystems was originally known as a workstation vendor, and it became best known as a maker of servers and their associated Solaris Unix operating system. But Sun has always been an innovator in file systems as well as operating systems, and three decades of innovation has not changed that. Sun still believes that file systems matter, and its Zettabyte File System (ZFS) and the expanding role it could play in the IT industry are proof of this belief. Given the features inside ZFS, it comes as no surprise that Sun is excited to see other companies and open source projects pick it up. According to Jeff Bonwick, who is a co-creator of ZFS with Moore and the storage chief technology officer at Sun, the open source FreeBSD variant of BSD Unix already supports ZFS in its distro and the NetBSD is adding ZFS support through Google’s Summer of Code effort, whereby Google pays young nerds to do coding for a summer job. The future “Leopard” version of MacOS X Server also has ZFS support inside of its beta versions, but it remains to be seen if the file system will make it into the final release of Apple’s server operating system.
