Security: Updates, VPN, BleachBit, TenFourFox and Steam

• Security updates for Friday

• Linux apps on Chrome OS will soon support Android-based VPN connections

  Google is finally fixing Chrome OS's inability to protect Linux apps with a VPN, like the ones downloadable from the Play Store.

• BleachBit 2.2

  Designed for Linux and Windows systems, it wipes clean thousands of applications including Firefox, Internet Explorer, Adobe Flash, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari, and more. Beyond simply deleting files, BleachBit includes advanced features such as shredding files to prevent recovery, wiping free disk space to hide traces of files deleted by other applications, and vacuuming Firefox to make it faster. Better than free, BleachBit is open source.

• Stand by for urgent security update

  Pwn2Own came and went and Firefox fell with it. The __proto__ vulnerability seems exploitable in TenFourFox, though it would require a PowerPC-specific attack to be fully weaponized, and I'm currently evaluating the other bug. Builds ("FPR13 SPR1") including fixes for either or both depending on my conclusions will be issued within the next couple days.

• Steam vulnerability exposed users to account hijacking and malware [Ed: proprietary software cannot hide its holes for very long (or until it's too late to hide)]

Graphics: Vulkan in OpenArena and GDC 2019 Week

• vkOpenArena: The ioquake3-Powered OpenArena Game Gets Ported To Vulkan

  OpenArena, one of the most well known open-source games built atop the ioquake3 engine of what started out as id Tech 3, has now seen an independent port to the Vulkan graphics API. The vkOpenArena game now marks the latest vintage game seeing a port to Vulkan. Independent developer Sui Jingfeng has been working on vkOpenArena as a port of the OpenArena engine over to using the Vulkan graphics API rather than Vulkan.

• AMDVLK Has A Small Weekly Code Push For GDC 2019 Week

  With many AMD driver developers being over in San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference, this week AMDVLK saw rather small changes for this open-source AMD Vulkan Linux driver.

Servers: Kubernetes, Docker, and Software Defined Infrastructure

• Kubernetes End-to-end Testing for Everyone

  More and more components that used to be part of Kubernetes are now being developed outside of Kubernetes. For example, storage drivers used to be compiled into Kubernetes binaries, then were moved into stand-alone Flexvolume binaries on the host, and now are delivered as Container Storage Interface (CSI) drivers that get deployed in pods inside the Kubernetes cluster itself. This poses a challenge for developers who work on such components: how can end-to-end (E2E) testing on a Kubernetes cluster be done for such external components? The E2E framework that is used for testing Kubernetes itself has all the necessary functionality. However, trying to use it outside of Kubernetes was difficult and only possible by carefully selecting the right versions of a large number of dependencies. E2E testing has become a lot simpler in Kubernetes 1.13.

• Why Docker Containers Matter, 6 Years After the Project First Started

  Docker, the eponymous name of the container technology and the company behind it, celebrated its six-year anniversary on March 20. From its earliest days, even as just a 1-year-old effort back in 2014, there was no shortage of optimism and excitement about Docker. With the Docker model, applications are more portable and run inside of containers, which are isolated instances that provide a more agile approach for development and deployment. Docker also introduced the "dockerfile" packaging format, which defines how a container image should be built. The container model that Docker first introduced has evolved over the past six years and is now the cornerstone of the broader cloud-native space, which includes the open-source Kubernetes container orchestration system. In this eWEEK Data Points article, we look at some of the key facts about Docker and the cloud-native revolution it has inspired.

• Planning for a Software Defined Infrastructure

  Seems you can’t pick up an IT magazine these days without hearing the term software defined infrastructure. It’s easy to get caught up in the hype. You might be thinking ‘people are talking about so it must be something that we need.” Some of you are wincing from the pain felt in trying to adopt the latest technologies without properly looking at what will work for your environment and business. In a software defined world, the computing infrastructure is virtualized. That is, it is delivered as a service. Management and control of the networking, storage and/or data center infrastructure is automated by intelligent software rather than by the hardware components of the infrastructure.