What to expect from Scylla Summit 2019

Scylla (the company) takes its name directly from Scylla [pronounced: sill-la], a Greek god sea monster whose mission was to haunt and torment the rocks of a narrow strait of water opposite the Charybdis whirlpool. Outside of Greek history, Scylla is an open source essentially distributed NoSQL data store that uses a sharded design on each node, meaning each CPU core handles a different subset of data.

Licence to grill: A year on, MongoDB's Eliot Horowitz talks to The Reg about SSPL

A year after its controversial switch to the Server Side Public License (SSPL), and with new products livening up the summer, MongoDB remains unrepentant. The change was aimed at making vendors selling a service using the company's code share the source of applications used to run the service as well as any tweaks. The move appeared to be aimed squarely at cloud vendors, content to "capture all the value and give nothing back to the community," as Dev Ittycheria, CEO of MongoDB, told us at the time. Elements of the open source community were less than impressed. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) rejected the company's attempts to get the licence approved and eventually MongoDB withdrew the thing from the process, although the company continued to use it for its own products. Indeed, at MongoDB's London .Local event, where we met co-founder and CTO Eliot Horowitz, the company was trumpeting the opening up of its Compass GUI for MongoDB under the SSPL.

From Russia with OLAP: Percona uses ClickHouse analytics

At Percona Live Europe last week, one such example came up around the open source scene that is developing in Russia and how one of the projects that is now starting to open up to international use.

The love and the lament: Percona CEO details state of open source data

Open source has changed, obviously it has. Starting from its origins among the hobbyist programmers and hackers who dared to defy the proprietary Silicon Valley behemoths, the open community-centric model for software development has now been widely adopted by the commercial software sector. In many cases, open source has become the norm for modern platforms, tools and applications. But how has this affected the nature of open development and what impact has this shift left in its wake on the data landscape that we view today?

GraphDB 9.0 Open Sources Its Front End and Engine Plugins to Support Knowledge Graph Solutions

Ontotext has announced GraphDB 9.0, which is aimed at lowering the effort required for development and continuous operation of knowledge graphs by opening multiple integration extension points for its users and developers. GraphDB is a database for managing semantic information with more than 30 large production installations in big enterprises. With the growing complexity of enterprise data integration, many organizations are starting the journey of building knowledge graphs.

Ververica Announces Open Source Framework to Enable Lightweight, Stateful Applications at Scale

Ververica, the original creators of Apache Flink, today announced at Flink Forward Europe the launch of Stateful Functions (statefun.io), an open source framework that reduces the complexity of building and orchestrating stateful applications at scale. Stateful Functions enables users to define loosely coupled, independent functions with a low footprint that can interact consistently and reliably in a shared pool of resources. Ververica will propose the project, licensed under Apache 2.0, to the Apache Flink community as an open source contribution.

DataStax offers bidirectional data dexterity for Apache Kafka

DataStax has opened up ‘early access’ to its DataStax Change Data Capture (CDC) Connector for Apache Kafka, the open source stream-processing (where applications can use multiple computational units, similar to parallel processing) software platform. As a company, DataStax offers a commercially supported ‘enterprise-robust’ database built on open source Apache Cassandra. Stream processing is all about speed and cadence, so, the DataStax CDC Connector for Apache Kafka gives developers ‘bidirectional data movement’ between DataStax, Cassandra and Kafka clusters.

WireGuard Snapshot `0.0.20191012` Available

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256

Hello,

A new snapshot, `0.0.20191012`, has been tagged in the git repository.

Please note that this snapshot is a snapshot rather than a final
release that is considered secure and bug-free. WireGuard is generally
thought to be fairly stable, and most likely will not crash your
computer (though it may).  However, as this is a snapshot, it comes
with no guarantees; it is not applicable for CVEs.

With all that said, if you'd like to test this snapshot out, there are a
few relevant changes.

== Changes ==

  * qemu: bump default version
  * netns: add test for failing 5.3 FIB changes
  
  Kernels 5.3.0 - 5.3.3 crash (and are probably exploitable) via this one liner:
  
  unshare -rUn sh -c 'ip link add dummy1 type dummy && ip link set dummy1 up && ip -6 route add default dev dummy1 && ip -6 rule add table main suppress_prefixlength 0 && ping -f 1234::1'
  
  We fixed this upstream here:
  
  https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/davem/net.git/commit/?id=ca7a03c4175366a92cee0ccc4fec0038c3266e26
  
  This is relevant to WireGuard because a very similar sequence of commands is
  used by wg-quick(8).
  
  So, we've now added some tests to catch this code path in the future. While
  the bug here was a random old use-after-free, the test checks the general
  policy routing setup used by wg-quick(8), so that we make sure this continues
  to work with future kernels.
  
  * noise: recompare stamps after taking write lock
  
  We now recompare counters while holding a write lock.
  
  * netlink: allow preventing creation of new peers when updating
  
  This is a small enhancement for wg-dynamic, so that we can update peers
  without readding them if they've already been removed.
  
  * wg-quick: android: use Binder for setting DNS on Android 10
  
  wg-quick(8) for Android now supports Android 10 (Q). We'll be releasing a new
  version of the app for this later today.

This snapshot contains commits from: Jason A. Donenfeld and Nicolas Douma.

As always, the source is available at https://git.zx2c4.com/WireGuard/ and
information about the project is available at https://www.wireguard.com/ .

This snapshot is available in compressed tarball form here:
  https://git.zx2c4.com/WireGuard/snapshot/WireGuard-0.0.20191012.tar.xz
  SHA2-256: 93573193c9c1c22fde31eb1729ad428ca39da77a603a3d81561a9816ccecfa8e
  BLAKE2b-256: d7979c453201b9fb6b1ad12092515b27ea6899397637a34f46e74b52b36ddf56

A PGP signature of that file decompressed is available here:
  https://git.zx2c4.com/WireGuard/snapshot/WireGuard-0.0.20191012.tar.asc
  Signing key: AB9942E6D4A4CFC3412620A749FC7012A5DE03AE

If you're a snapshot package maintainer, please bump your package version. If
you're a user, the WireGuard team welcomes any and all feedback on this latest
snapshot.

Finally, WireGuard development thrives on donations. By popular demand, we
have a webpage for this: https://www.wireguard.com/donations/

Thank you,
Jason Donenfeld

WireGuard 0.0.20191012 Released With Latest Fixes

WireGuard is still working on transitioning to the Linux kernel's existing crypto API as a faster approach to finally make it into the mainline kernel, but for those using the out-of-tree WireGuard secure VPN tunnel support, a new development release is available.

SafeBreach catches vulnerability in controversial HP Touchpoint Analytics software

Now the feature is embroiled in another minor controversy after security researchers at SafeBreach said they uncovered a new vulnerability. HP Touchpoint Analytics comes preinstalled on many HP devices that run Windows. Every version below 4.1.4.2827 is affected by what SafeBreach found. In a blog post, SafeBreach Labs security researcher Peleg Hadar said that because the service is executed as "NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM," it is afforded extremely powerful permissions that give it wide access. "The CVE-2019-6333 vulnerability gives attackers the ability to load and execute malicious payloads using a signed service. This ability might be abused by an attacker for different purposes such as execution and evasion, for example: Application Whitelisting Bypass Signature Validation Bypassing," Hadar wrote. [...] The company has long had to defend HP Touchpoint Analytics against critics who say it gives HP unnecessary access to users' systems. When it first became widely noticed in 2017, dozens of users complained that they had not consented to adding the system.

Security Tool Sprawl Reaches Tipping Point

How trusted digital certificates complement open source security

Application developers incorporating open source software into their designs may only discover later that elements of this software have left them (and their customers) exposed to cyber-attacks.

Securing the Container Supply Chain

Chris J. Terry, Internet Industry Veteran, Joins Open Source Blockchain Project Ether1.org

UK forcing AML regulations on cryptocurrency exchanges, ATMs, and open-source wallets

UNICEF Launches Cryptocurrency Fund to Back Open Source Technology

UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, has launched a crypto fund to receive, hold and distribute donations of bitcoin and ether in its aim to back open source technology for children around the world. UNICEF said in an announcement on Wednesday that in a first for United Nations organizations, the Cryptocurrency Fund will receive contributions in cryptocurrency and grant out in the same digital currency form.

ConsenSys Gives Ethereum A Boost: $175k Given to 7 Open-Source Initiatives

ConsenSys, a Brooklyn, New York-based Ethereum development studio studio, is awarding $175,000 to seven different open-source projects being developed on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain. Revealed on October 10, the software development projects include Lighthouse, an innovative Ethereum software client, Tellor, an oracle network for handling off-chain data, Alice, a mobile-based platform for developing decentralized applications (dApps).

FINOS Spearheads Open Innovation In Fintech Space With Open Source Strategy Forum

Benzinga is highlighting nominees for the fifth annual Benzinga Global Fintech Awards ahead of the event Nov. 19 in New York City. One nominee is the Fintech Open Source Foundation, or FINOS, a nonprofit for the promotion of open innovation in the financial services and tech spaces.

0x introduces OpenZKP, an open-source zk-STARK implementation

Minsheng Life partners with open-source blockchain infrastructure project

Minsheng Life Insurance has come onboard as a partner of the PlatONE open-source blockchain infrastructure, a project recently launched by non-profit research institution Wanxiang Blockchain and the PlatON global computing network.

Xilinx unveils open source FPGA platform

The Vitis unified software platform from FPGA vendor Xilinx is the result of five-year project to create software development tools using familiar languages like C++ and Python to develop a wide range of applications for its reprogrammable chip.

Listen: How ActiveState is tackling “dependency hell” by providing enterprise-level support for open source programming languages [Podcast]

“Open source back in the late nineties – and even throughout the 2000s – was really hard to use,” ActiveState CEO Bart Copeland says. “Our job,” he continues, “was to make it much easier for developers to use open source and much easier for enterprises to use open source.”

10 open source projects proving the power of Google Go

Now 10 years in the wild, Google’s Go programming language has certainly made a name for itself. Lightweight and quick to compile, Go has stirred significant interest due to its generous libraries and abstractions that ease the development of concurrent and distributed (read: cloud) applications. But the true measure of success of any programming language is the projects that developers create with it. Go has proven itself as a first choice for fast development of network services, software infrastructure projects, and compact and powerful tools of all kinds.

The Eclipse Foundation Launches The Eclipse Cloud Development Tools Working Group for Cloud Native Software

The Eclipse Foundation today announced the launch of the Eclipse Cloud Development Tools Working Group (ECD WG), a vendor-neutral open source collaboration that will focus on development tools for and in the cloud. The ECD WG will drive the evolution and broad adoption of emerging standards for cloud-based developer tools, including language support, extensions, marketplaces, and developer workspace definition. Founding members of the ECD WG include Broadcom, EclipseSource, Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Red Hat, SAP, Software AG, and Typefox among many others.

You cannot cURL under pressure

With cURL having this many features (with the general mass of them being totally unknown to me, let alone how you use them) got me thinking… What if you could do a game show style challenge for them?

Follow-up on ‘ASCII Transliteration without ICU or iconv’

By an anonymous commenter, I got pointed to that Unicode (in Qt) is slightly more complicated than I had considered when writing the code: I missed to handle planes beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) and the ‘surrogates’ between code points 0xD800 and 0xDFFF. In a series of recently pushed Git commits I addressed problem of surrogates and fixed some more issues. Some preparatory work has been done to support more planes in the future, but as of now, only the BMP is supported. For details, please have a look at the five commits posted on 2019-10-12.