Executive producer of The Chasing Grace Project, Jennifer Cloer, to keynote 2018 Red Hat Women’s Leadership Community Luncheon

An API Journey: From Idea to Deployment the Agile Way–Part III

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.10 Beta now available

Many of the applications that drive businesses are powered by the foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For nearly eight years, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 has carried our customers’ critical infrastructure because of the stability reliability, and platform security that it can offer to the modern enterprise. Today, we are pleased to announce the beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.10, continuing to deliver upon Red Hat’s 10-year lifecycle support.

Learning More About Red Hat's Stratis Project To Offer Btrfs/ZFS-Like Functionality

With Red Hat deprecating Btrfs in RHEL7 with that "next-gen" Linux file-system not having panned out like many had hoped for or expected, Red Hat has been investing in their new "Stratis" storage project. More details on Stratis have now come to light. Since last summer a lot of progress has been made on Stratis and it's being prepared for testing on Fedora. Stratis is a volume-managing file-system (VMF) that relies upon the Linux kernel's DM subsystem and is paired with the XFS file-system rather than being a new Linux file-system from scratch.

Analyzing Stocks On Analyst Opinion: Citrix Systems, Inc. (CTXS), Red Hat, Inc. (RHT)

KDE at FOSS-North

Over the weekend, while some KDE people were in Toulouse improving Akonadi, and other KDE people were in Berlin improving Plasma, I was in Goteborg at FOSS-North showing off some KDE things. Anyone who saw our FOSDEM booth knows the setup. We still had the same blue table (thanks, Sune) and selection of low-power ARM blinkenlights, the Pine64 and a Pinebook. I still think that “hey, Plasma runs fine on an overpowered x86 laptop” is not particularly interesting, but that “the past six months have seen serious work on reducing Plasma’s resource usage aimed specifically at this kind of device” is. Different from FOSDEM is that I could now run one of the just-released Netrunner images for the Pinebook.

Cutelyst 2.2.0 is out

Thanks to the release of Virtlyst – a web manager for virtual machines, several bugs were found and fixed in Cutelyst, the most important one in this release is the WebSockets implementation that broke due the addition of HTTP/2 to cutelyst-wsgi2. Fixing this was quite interesting as when I fixed the issue the first time, it started to make deleteLater() calls on null objects which didn’t crash but since Qt warn’s you about that it was hurting performance. Then I fixed the deleteLater() calls and WebSockets broke again

Security updates for Thursday

EU cyber cops shut down 'world's biggest' DDoS-for-hire service

The website's servers were seized at 11.30am in the Netherlands, the US and Germany, Europol said, effectively shutting down the service that had 136,000 registered users and enabled individuals with little or no technical knowledge to launch crippling cyber-attacks across the world for just $14.99.

ZTE router flaw put 400,000 Hyperoptic customers at hacking [sic] risk

But security firm Context IS discovered that the devices contained "the combination of a hardcoded root account and a DNS rebinding vulnerability", which could have allowed an "internet-based attacker to compromise all customer routers of UK ISP Hyperoptic via a malicious webpage".

Researchers Spent 10 Years Creating This “Master Key” To Unlock Millions Of Hotel Rooms

A team of security researchers at F-secure have created a device running custom software that can create a master key “out of thin air.” They’ve exploited vulnerabilities in the door lock software Vision by VingCard, developed by the Swedish company Assa Abloy. Their electronic door locking system is used in millions of hotel rooms across the globe.

F-Secure Researchers: Master Keys to Hotels Can be Created ‘Out of Thin Air’

F-Secure researchers have found that global hotel chains and hotels worldwide are using an electronic lock system that could be exploited by an attacker to gain access to any room in the facility. The design flaws discovered in the lock system’s software, which is known as Vision by VingCard and used to secure millions of hotel rooms worldwide, have prompted the world’s largest lock manufacturer, Assa Abloy, to issue software updates with security fixes to mitigate the issue.

Hackers built a 'master key' for millions of hotel rooms

Security researchers have built a master key that exploits a design flaw in a popular and widely used hotel electronic lock system, allowing unfettered access to every room in the building. The electronic lock system, known as Vision by VingCard and built by Swedish lock manufacturer Assa Abloy, is used in more than 42,000 properties in 166 countries, amounting to millions of hotel rooms -- as well as garages and storage units.

Localization Workshop in Kolkata (November 2017)

Last November, Jeff, Peiying and I (flod) headed to Kolkata for the last of our planned localization workshops. The group of languages represented at the event included Bengali (both Bangladesh and India), Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Tamil and Telugu. If you’re surprised by the number of languages, consider that India alone has 22 languages listed in the Indian Constitution, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg, with a much larger variety of languages spoken, and sometime officially recognized at the State level.

Making a Web Thing on the ESP8266

Today I’m going to walk you through creating a simple Web Thing using an inexpensive off-the-shelf ESP8266 board. The power of web things comes from their ability to connect the digital world of web pages with the physical world of things. We recently released the Things Framework, a collection of software intended to make it easy to create new web things. The relevant library for this example is the webthing-esp8266 library, which makes easy it to connect Arduino-programmed ESP8266 boards with the Web of Things. We hope that this lowers the barrier to creating compelling experiences with our gateway and the Web Thing API.

Introducing Hubs: A new way to get together

Today, we’re excited to share a preview release of Hubs by Mozilla, a new way to get together online within Mixed Reality, right in your browser. Hubs is the first experiment we’re releasing as part of our Social Mixed Reality efforts, and we think it showcases the potential for the web to become the best, most accessible platform to bring people together around the world in this new medium.

Enabling Social Experiences Using Mixed Reality and the Open Web

Today, Mozilla is sharing an early preview of an experiment we are calling “Hubs by Mozilla”. Hubs is an immersive social experience that is delivered through the browser. You simply click on a web link to begin interacting with others inside virtual reality.

How does dynamic dispatch work in WebAssembly?

WebAssembly is a stack-based virtual machine and instruction set, designed such that implementations can be fast and safe. It is a portable target for the compilation of languages like C, C++, and Rust. [...] But C, C++, and Rust all have some capability for dynamic dispatch: function pointers, virtual methods, and trait objects. On native targets like x86, all these forms compile down into a jump to a dynamic address. What do these forms compile down into when targeting WebAssembly?

BlinkOn 9: Working on the Web Platform from a cooperative

Last week, I attended BlinkOn 9. I was very happy to spend some time with my colleagues working on Chromium, including a new developer who will join my team next week (to be announced soon!). This edition had the usual format with presentations, brainstorming, lightning talks and informal chats with Chromium developers. I attended several interesting presentations on web platform standardization, implementation and testing. It was also great to talk to Googlers in order to coordinate on some of Igalia’s projects such as the collaboration with AMP or MathML in Chromium.