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MariaDB 10.5.9 Release Notes
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 24th of February 2021 01:49:27 AM Filed under
MariaDB 10.5 is the current stable series of MariaDB. It is an evolution of MariaDB 10.4 with several entirely new features not found anywhere else and with backported and reimplemented features from MySQL.
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5 Free and Open Source Lightweight Alternatives to WordPress
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 18th of February 2021 01:52:10 PM Filed under

Now don’t get us wrong, WordPress is one of our favorite applications. With good reason, it’s a high quality, open source blog publishing application. It’s a mature and highly polished application with development starting in 2003, and it has an active community. The largest self-host blogging tool, a full content management system, which can be extended through thousands of widgets, plugins, and themes, is a good fit for many projects. The software was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL.
WordPress instantly springs to mind when any project is planned that needs a content management system. However, WordPress can be complicated, offering more bells and whistles than actually needed or wanted. While it’s always tempting to stick with familiar territory, this can actually stifle creativity and does not enhance an individual’s skill-set.
When embarking on a new project, there’s a lot to be said experimenting with new software. Fortunately, WordPress is not the only option. There’s a good range of lightweight open source content management systems ready to be deployed that can transform a web site.
Some of the content management systems featured in this article are well publicised, but there are many good management systems that you may not have heard of that are perfectly suited for small projects.
Here is our verdict with our recommendations. They are all free and open source goodness.
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WordPress 5.7 Beta 3
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Wednesday 17th of February 2021 07:52:55 AM Filed under


This software is still in development, so it’s not recommended to run this version on a production site. Consider setting up a test site to play with it.
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Federated/Decentralised Communications With Movim and P2P VoIP
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 13th of February 2021 01:34:11 AM Filed under



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Movim | Basic Review & Beginner's Guide
Once you read about Movim, immediately you will find about Xmpp. It is Jabber, also known as Xmpp, a secure, decentralized, and federated technology everyone can use to chat online existed strongly since 1990's. To give you how great Xmpp network is, actually when you use WhatsApp you use Xmpp, so does with Google Talk and Jitsi, so when you use those you are using Xmpp. To give you a few of its benefits, Xmpp is not controlled by a single company (so unlike Twitter) it is hard to shut down by anyone.
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Daniel Pocock: Comparing private and peer-to-peer VoIP solutionsOne of the top questions people ask RTC developers around Valentine's Day is whether we finally have a private solution people can use to communicate with their partner.
There is fresh attention on the issue this year after Twitter and other large providers flexed their muscles and demonstrated that they are more powerful than the US President.
[...]
Achieving independence from cloud services doesn't necessarily give you privacy. There are trade-offs to be made. John Goerzen recently published a blog about privacy issues in current P2P tools.
/ul>
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OpenStack: Collaboration and Charmed OpenStack
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 12th of February 2021 11:44:22 PM Filed under

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How the OpenStack community is collaborating during the pandemic
The OpenStack community is BIG. From Argentina to Morocco to Israel to Vietnam, we literally span the globe, so it's not surprising that we largely knew what to do to accommodate COVID-19's circumstances. But it still has been a struggle to keep moving forward and adapt while still delivering Ussuri and Victoria, the 21st and 22nd releases of OpenStack.
Even if you were working remotely before the pandemic, many things changed. I have worked remotely for over four years, but it was broken up by seeing coworkers and community members in real life roughly once a month at conferences and meetups. But now, I haven't seen any of them in person in a year, and I have twice as many meetings as I used to. My circumstances are certainly nothing like what frontline workers face, but when screen time is your main interaction with humanity, it gets downright lonely.
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OpenStack Ironic, Cinder volume replication and Glance multi-store – OpenStack Charms 21.01
Canonical is proud to announce the availability of OpenStack Charms 21.01. This new release includes: a tech-preview version of OpenStack Ironic operators (charms), Cinder volume replication and Glance multi-store support for Charmed OpenStack.
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Your Service is not Open Source
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 12th of February 2021 02:08:57 AM Filed under

Open Sourcing the code to your SaaS is insufficient to make it actually be Open Source. Sounds self-contradictory?
Most services that espouse “Open Source”, do so by simply throwing the code over the wall. It’s better than nothing, but really misses the point that powers Open Source: enabling users to make a change to the software they’re using.
Some other popular services powered by Open Source software, such as GitLab.com or ElasticSearch do include the tools used to operate/deploy their service. Pause for applause
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Servers: Clown Computing, Kubernetes, Docker, Sysadmins
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 10th of February 2021 07:19:55 AM Filed under
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All new Building Cloud Native and Multicloud Applications course now available
A brand new version of the Building Cloud Native and Multicloud Applications course is now available. For this second version, we completely restructured and rewrote the course from the ground up to include the most current cloud-native and multicloud knowledge, technologies, and tools. It incorporates real-world demos and hands-on labs using IBM Cloud® and its rich set of services and offerings.
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Benefits of containers for enterprises
Within just five years, Kubernetes and containers have redefined how software is deployed. Researchers expect the container market to grow by 30% year over year to become a 5 billion industry by 2022. But what is the reason behind this mass adoption of container technology in the enterprise?
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Sysadmin careers: How long do you typically stay in a job?
Some sysadmins change jobs often, while some of us stay too long in one place. Where do you fall on the job change continuum?
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Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Docker | Linux Format
Jonni’s been arguing with me this issue – he thinks Linux Format readers don’t need virtual machine orchestration. Of course, as always, he’s right, but I’ve never let being wrong stop me before… Just because you don’t actually “need” something doesn’t mean you don’t want to learn about it or try it out!
[...]
Finally, Les Pounder brings us another breaking Raspberry Pi Pico review. We managed to sneak the review into the issue just as we were going to press. The Pi Foundation does it again cramming so many features into a $4 device. This microcontroller in many ways is better for smaller projects that the main Pi was still being used for. We’re sure we’ll be seeing much more of it in the future, so I hope you enjoy!
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Becoming a Linux system administrator: From sales to sysadmin
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 9th of February 2021 10:40:50 PM Filed under



Working under my own banner felt great, and I could only blame myself when things went wrong. I could follow my curiosity and use my common sense to avoid some pitfalls while still being young enough to walk straight into others. I loved every minute of it, and when I landed my first few contracts as a Lotus Notes developer, I managed to find a lot of limitations in the application, which kept me both challenged and motivated.
I tried expanding my business and hired some staff. At the peak, I had six employees. However, I was too young and inexperienced at managing staff. They looked to me for guidance, but I had my head buried in development and the early days system administration. With my company on the brink of disaster, I realized I was not ready to be a manager and had to let everyone go. This was a very humbling experience, and I felt like dirt, but we all got through it with several lessons learned.
The one-man-band company was back in the game, but I had run into issues because my applications were not performing as expected, and workflows were interrupted. I realized that my code was good, but the servers were poorly administered. Curiosity had me caught once again, so I started to learn server administration.
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Open-Source Slack Alternative ‘Rocket.Chat’ Raises $19M To Add Smart Bots, Improve Security & More
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 5th of February 2021 12:41:31 AM Filed under
Rocket.Chat is undoubtedly one of the most impressive open-source slack alternatives available out there.
Even we at It’s FOSS, utilize it daily to communicate and work. It may not be a perfect Slack alternative from every aspect depending on your requirements, but it does the job that we expect.
Also, it’s no surprise that every collaboration platform (open-source or not) have seen a significant rise in their user base after the pandemic. Similarly, Rocket.Chat has seen a growth of 500% in their user base and a 260% increase in their open-source community.
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Proprietary Software Leftovers
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 3rd of February 2021 06:00:49 AM Filed under



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Google’s cloud business lost more than $5.5 billion last year, but it’s growing fast
Google parent company Alphabet weathered the tail end of 2020 to post better-than-expected earnings for the fourth quarter of the year. But the bigger story is that Alphabet broke out Google Cloud’s sales for the first time ever, revealing an eye-popping $5.6 billion annual loss last year, but a nearly 50 percent jump in revenue (to $13 billion) compared to 2019. And Google Cloud maintained that growth well into the fourth quarter, when the division generated $3.8 billion in sales. That’s a 46 percent jump from the fourth quarter of 2019.
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Google Cloud Reports Huge Operating Losses in New Disclosure
Alphabet Inc. said its Google Cloud business had an operating loss of $1.2 billion in the fourth quarter, a new disclosure that may disappoint some Wall Street analysts.
The Mountain View, California-based company revealed the number on Tuesday in a statement. For 2020, the cloud division lost $5.6 billion, Alphabet said.
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Microsoft 365 Becomes Haven for BEC Innovation
Two fresh business email compromise (BEC) tactics have emerged onto the phishing scene, involving the manipulation of Microsoft 365 automated email responses in order to evade email security filters.
In one case, scammers are targeting victims by redirecting legitimate out-of-office (OOO) replies from an employee to them; and in the other, read receipts are being manipulated. Both styles were seen being used in the wild in the U.S. in December, when auto-responders were more prevalent due to holiday vacation.
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The reshaped Mac experience
[...] I’ll quote the relevant ones here (emphasis mine):
"The selling point of the Macintosh was never the hardware, it was the user interface. So if the selling point now is the hardware, that’s a damning indictment of the current user interface.
I cannot emphasize enough how everyone seems to have lowered their standards with regard to the user interface. The “Overton window” has moved. The Overton window now has rounded rects.
We’ve gone from “insanely great” and “It just works” to “Catalyst is good enough for most people.”
That’s fucking BS, and I won’t tolerate it. [...]"
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‘ValidCC,’ a Major Payment Card Bazaar and Looter of E-Commerce Sites, Shuttered
ValidCC, a dark web bazaar run by a cybercrime group that for more than six years hacked online merchants and sold stolen payment card data, abruptly closed up shop last week. The proprietors of the popular store said their servers were seized as part of a coordinated law enforcement operation designed to disconnect and confiscate its infrastructure.
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The U.S. Spent $2.2 Million on a Cybersecurity System That Wasn’t Implemented — and Might Have Stopped a Major Hack
As America struggles to assess the damage from the devastating SolarWinds cyberattack discovered in December, ProPublica has learned of a promising defense that could shore up the vulnerability the hackers exploited: a system the federal government funded but has never required its vendors to use.
The massive breach, which U.S. intelligence agencies say was “likely Russian in origin,” penetrated the computer systems of critical federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Treasury Department, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Justice, as well as a number of Fortune 500 corporations. The hackers remained undetected, free to forage, for months.
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