Purism's Librem 5 To Rely On Secondary Processor For Binary Blobs

With not being able to deliver a 100% fully free software / libre system, the Librem 5 smartphone will rely upon a secondary processor for dealing with the necessary binary blobs for hardware initialization to keep them out of touch from the U-Boot boot-loader and Linux kernel. The first road-block in their effort to make the Librem 5 smartphone as open as possible is the DDR PHY with firmware blobs needed for the DDR4 memory training process at boot time. With it not being realistic for them to rewrite the firmware blob to do the DDR4 PHY training, they are planning to punt the binary-only blobs out to a secondary processor. In doing so, they can also apply for an exclusion with the Free Software Foundation for still having a device that "Respects Your Freedom" while still having necessary binary blobs at play.

Solving the first FSF RYF hurdle for the Librem 5

While investigating using the i.MX 8 for the Librem 5 phone we found an issue that would have been problematic for us to obtain the Free Software Foundation’s “Respects Your Freedom” (RYF) hardware endorsement...

Red Hat, Lord Wandsworth College and University of Surrey collaborate

Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, has announced its collaboration with Lord Wandsworth College (LWC), an independent school for girls and boys aged 11 to 18, and the University of Surrey, a public research university specialising in science, engineering, medicine and business, on the Open Schools Coding Competition, designed to inspire the next generation of coders and software developers. In so doing, the competition hopes to contribute to building the UK’s digital talent pool. The competition is now in its second year, with 10 schools and approximately 100 students in the UK taking part. The competition aims to engage children ahead of making their subject choices for GCSE, so is open to Key Stage 3 students. It challenges teams of students to use any free visual programming environment to create a gaming app that will help a charity of their choice. The competition enables participants to apply the basic principles of open source software development and open collaboration to solve a real world problem in a fun and competitive environment, with the opportunity to win a prize for their team and recognition for their school. In choosing a charitable cause, each student can gain a sense of how they can use digital skills to make their own contribution to addressing societal challenges and how open source technology and methodology can drive positive change in the world.

Red Hat Unveils Next-Generation Process Automation Offering

Red Hat Drives Mission-Critical Stability with Latest Update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Red Hat Data Grid on Three Clouds (the details behind the demo)

If you saw or heard about the multi-cloud demo at Red Hat Summit 2018, this article details how we ran Red Hat Data Grid in active-active-active mode across three cloud providers. This set up enabled us to show a fail over between cloud providers in real time with no loss of data. In addition to Red Hat Data Grid, we used Vert.x (reactive programming), OpenWhisk (serverless), and Red Hat Gluster Storage (software-defined storage.)

RedHat stock falls after Raymond James downgrade

Security updates for Tuesday

Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #164

PyRoMineIoT cryptojacker uses NSA exploit to spread

Larry Trowell, principal consultant with Synopsys Software Integrity Group, said the government shares some of the blame for the NSA exploit. "It's in every country's interest to develop systems enabling offensive and defensive strategies to protect individuals and national services," Trowell wrote via email. "There is no fault in that. If the NSA does have some blame to share in this situation, it is for allowing secrets to be exfiltrated -- not in developing them." Jett said although the NSA exploit was stolen, "they didn't create the vulnerabilities that allow for the malware to exploit devices." "As such, you can't hold them responsible for the malware that has emerged from the EternalRomance exploit. Vendors whose products are vulnerable to EternalRomance are responsible for resolving the exploit problem," Jett wrote. "Additionally, it has been more than a year since the NSA exploits were released, and vendors have created patches. It becomes incumbent on the users to make sure they are properly patching their software and reducing the threat surface for these exploits."

Can Hackers Crack the Ivory Towers?

While both researchers agreed that their colleagues would gain from incorporating hackers' discoveries into their own work, they diverged when diagnosing the source of the gulf between the two camps and, to a degree, even on the extent of the rift.

6-Year-Old Malware Injects Ads, Takes Screenshots On Windows 10

A sneaky and persistent malware has surfaced which spams Windows 10 PCs with ads and takes screenshots to eventually send it to the attackers. Security researchers at Bitdefender found this malware named Zacinlo which first appeared in 2012. About 90% of Zacinlo’s victims are from the US running Microsoft Windows 10. There are other victims too from Western Europe, China, and India with a small fraction running Windows 7 or 8.

25th Anniversary for FreeBSD

On June 19, 1993 the name FreeBSD was officially agreed on and has been used ever since. Find out more about how to celebrate this important day with us.

June 19 Has Been Declared National FreeBSD Day, Happy 25th Anniversary FreeBSD!

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce today that June 19 has been declared National FreeBSD Day to celebrate the project's official name 25th anniversary. Exactly 25 years ago on this day, on June 19, 1993, David Greenman sent an email to one of the mailing lists available at that point in time to suggest "FreeBSD" as the name for the Unix-like operating system used by billions of people all over the world, which continues to have a positive impact on us every single day.