Linux Foundation launches ELISA, an open source project for building safety-critical systems

Machines have a trust problem — particularly autonomous machines deployed in safety-critical scenarios, like industrial robots and driverless cars. In a pair of surveys published by the American Automobile Association last January and by Gallup in May, 63 percent of people reported feeling afraid to ride in a fully self-driving vehicle and more than half said they’d never choose to ride in one. Moreover, in a report published by analysts at Pew in 2017, 70 percent of Americans said they were concerned about robots performing tasks currently handled by humans. In an effort to allay those fears, the Linux Foundation today launched Enabling Linux in Safety Applications (ELISA), an open source project comprising tools intended to help companies build and certify Linux-based systems whose failure could result in loss of human life, significant property damage, or environmental damage. In partnership with British chip designer Arm, BMW, autonomous platforms company Kuka, Linutronix, and Toyota, ELISA will work with certification and standardization bodies in “multiple industries” to establish ways Linux can form the foundation of safety-critical systems across industries. ELISA’s launch follows last year’s rollout of Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) 5.0, the newest version of a Linux Foundation project aimed at bringing open source technology to the automotive industry. Previous releases focused mainly on infotainment systems, but 5.0 introduced telematics and mapping solutions that allow OEMs to share mapping data generated by autonomous cars, in addition to offering improved security and a functional safety platform. Toyota and Amazon expressed early support; the former is using AGL in its 2018 Camry. Slashdot: Linux Foundation Launches ELISA, an Open Source Project For Building Safety-Critical Systems

Security Password Managers, Updates, Intel/Linux, 5 Antivirus for Android Devices and Cisco

• Your Password Manager Has A Severe Flaw — But You Should Still Use One [Ed: Yet worse: 1) people putting password managers on platforms with back doors from Apple and Microsoft. 2) people putting all their password "in the cloud".]

  If you are an avid user of password managers, you might just be in for a surprise. A recent study by researchers at the Independent Security Evaluators found that a number of popular password managers were storing master passwords as plain text within the main memory of devices. To an expert hacker, this vulnerability is equivalent to getting the keys to multiple accounts as a text document on your computer. The master key of any password manager can be used to gain access to all usernames and passwords being managed by it.

• Security updates for Thursday

• Fun Little Tidbits in a Howling Storm (Re: Intel Security Holes)

  Some kernel developers recently have been trying to work around the massive, horrifying, long-term security holes that have recently been discovered in Intel hardware. In the course of doing so, there were some interesting comments about coding practices. Christoph Hellwig and Jesper Dangaard Brouer were working on mitigating some of the giant speed sacrifices needed to avoid Intel's gaping security holes. And, Christoph said that one such patch would increase the networking throughput from 7.5 million packets per second to 9.5 million—a 25% speedup. To do this, the patch would check the kernel's "fast path" for any instances of dma_direct_ops and replace them with a simple direct call. Linus Torvalds liked the code, but he noticed that Jesper and Christoph's code sometimes would perform certain tests before testing the fast path. But if the kernel actually were taking the fast path, those tests would not be needed. Linus said, "you made the fast case unnecessarily slow."

• 5 Antivirus for Android Devices That You Should Have in 2019

• Duo Security Digs Into Chrome Extension Security With CRXcavator

A brief comparison of Java IDE’s: NetBeans Vs Eclipse

Thinking about entering the world of programming? What better way to enter than through Java and joining a community of over 10 million developers worldwide? Java is one of the most popular programming languages right now. It is an interpreted, object-oriented programming language which is directly supported by major operating systems like Apple, Linux, Windows, Sun etc. Java is a portable programming language meaning a program can be written on one platform and can run on all platforms. Java supports networking (you can use TCP and UDP sockets) and access remote data using a variety of protocols. It also provides the feature of multithreading, which can utilize multiple processors and one of the prime features of Java is garbage collection. In many languages, the programmer is responsible for deallocating memory and it can become a hassle resulting in errors and segmentation faults. Java, on the other hand, has a garbage collector which manages the memory and frees up the memory by destroying objects not in use. To start coding in Java you need to have Java installed, the latest version of Java is 11 but Java 8 is still supported so having any one of these installed will be enough to get you started. Writing a program and compiling it would take some effort as you will have to write the code in a text file and then save it in .java and then have to compile it using terminal, or you can use an IDE and save yourself the time and effort used in this process and get a slew of interesting features. An Integrated Development Environment or IDE for short, is a software application which helps the user to write and compile code easily by providing features like text editing, debugging plugins etc. while providing compilation by the click of one button. Java has many IDEs but two of the most popular ones are NetBeans and Eclipse.