Free Republic

It's the end of an era. As The Reg covered last week, IBM has transferred development of AIX to India. Why should IBM pay for an expensive US-based team to maintain its own proprietary flavor of official Unix when it paid 34 billion bucks for its own FOSS flavor in Red Hat? Here at The Reg FOSS desk, we've felt this was coming ever since we reported that Big Blue was launching new POWER servers which didn't support AIX – already nearly eight years ago. Even if it was visibly coming over the horizon, this is a significant event: AIX...

U.S. Senators Gary Peters (D-MI) and Rob Portman (R-OH), Chairman and Ranking Member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, have introduced bipartisan legislation to help protect federal and critical infrastructure systems by strengthening the security of open source software. The legislation comes after a hearing convened by Peters and Portman on the Log4j incident earlier this year, and would direct the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to help ensure that open source software is used safely and securely by the federal government, critical infrastructure, and others. A vulnerability discovered in Log4j – which is widely used open...

If Elon Musk is indeed able to buy Twitter, the platform could look a lot different. In his first public, non-tweeted comments since the saga began, Musk addressed why he wants to buy the company, and changes he would want to bring about. “Twitter has become kind of the de-facto town square,” he said. “It's just really important that people have both the reality and the perception that they're able to speak freely within the bounds of the law.” In terms of specific changes, Musk said Twitter should open-source its algorithms and minimize the interventions it takes in policing content....

Apple just launched its first custom processor for computers. The M1 chip is similar to the A-series processors inside the iPhone and iPad, and it powers just two devices: The late 2020 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. And yet, Intel is still terrified, having mounted a massive ad campaign in an attempt to convince the world that the M1 MacBooks can’t stand up to Windows 10 laptops running on Intel hardware. The campaign was somewhat half-baked, and has since drawn criticism and ridicule for its missteps. The M1 MacBooks offer formidable performance and excellent battery life, with M1 being built...

The Committee on Liberatory Information Technology has announced a long-standing Chromebook bug that could reveal user location history. Evidently already on the radar of Google, the platform has a feature allowing anyone with physical access to your device to connect as a guest and view your Wi-Fi logs. Of course, once said intruder has accessed these logs, they would then need the technical knowhow to make sense of them. However, if they are skilled enough, they may be able to track your place history by viewing your Wi-Fi network access over the past seven days. It turns out the bug...

I am familiar with Windows 7 and do not like Windows 10 shell, but I just switched to 10, and made it look just like 7. So now I can get Microsoft update support for many years, while the support for Windows 7 stops on January 14, 2020 making it more vulnerable to hacking after that date. The process was smooth and I like the results so far.

During me being at my parents over the holidays (Christmas 2017) I had the usual IT-support stuff to do, that always happens to tech savvy kids when they are back at home. As I am a happy Linux user for over a decade now, I asked myself if it would be a good idea to switch my parents away from Win 10 to a GNU/Linux (I will call it only Linux during the rest of the post. Sorry Richard ;) ) based system. I did that and now 2 years later I still think it was a good idea: I...

So happy for you, Microsoft, \r\n Windows Notepad users, rejoice! Microsoft's text editing app, which has been shipping with Windows since version 1.0 in 1985, has finally been taught how to handle line endings in text files created on Linux, Unix, Mac OS, and macOS devices."This has been a major annoyance for developers, IT Pros, administrators, and end users throughout the community," Microsoft acknowledged in a blog post today, without touching on why the issue was allowed to fester for more than three decades.Notepad's line feed limitations may not inspire the same level of partisan bickering as the tabs vs....

"Today we look at the reason why hackers always prefer Linux over Mac, Windows, and other operating systems. You may have your own reasons for choosing Linux but what do hackers really look forward to while working with Linux."

Redmond will support it inside Azure and send code back to the FreeBSD Foundation Microsoft has published its own distribution of FreeBSD 10.3 in order to make the OS available and supported in Azure. Jason Anderson, principal PM manager at Microsoft's Open Source Technology Center says Redmond “took on the work of building, testing, releasing and maintaining the image” so it could “ensure our customers have an enterprise SLA for their FreeBSD VMs running in Azure”. Microsoft did so “to remove that burden” from the FreeBSD Foundation, which relies on community contributions. Redmond is not keeping its work on FreeBSD...

The abacus-shufflers of analyst firm IDC have revised their 2016 PC sales forecasts downwards. The firm now says PC shipments “... are forecast to decline by 7.3% year over year”. That's “roughly two per cent below earlier projections as conditions have been weaker than expected.” The firm names “weak currencies, depressed commodity prices, political uncertainty, and delayed projects” as the weaker conditions impacting sales. Windows 10 isn't helping matters either, because lots of people are availing themselves of free Windows 10 upgrades rather than buying a new PC. The firm also says that “while a large share of enterprises are...

My buddy David Gewirtz recently wrote about the question of whether you should move from Windows 7 to Windows 10 or a Mac. I have another suggestion: Linux. Specifically Linux Mint 17.3, Rosa, with the Cinnamon desktop. Linux Mint 17.3 is a great replacement for Windows 7. In fact, it's a great desktop operating system period. sjvn Yes, I'm serious. I use all the above desktops -- yes I'm a Windows 7 and 10 user as well as a Linux guy -- and for people I think Mint 17.3 makes a great desktop. I've been using Mint as my main...

Security is something that is always on the minds of users these days, and that includes those who use Linux. TechWeek Europe has a disturbing article about a Linux trojan that captures audio and takes screenshots. It remains to be seen how widespread this Trojan is among Linux users and what the exact attack vector is for it. Steve McCaskill reports for TechWeek Europe: Security researchers have found a new Linux Trojan capable of taking screenshots of infected systems and even recording sound. Russian anti-virus firm Dr Web says that once the Linux.Ekoms.1 malware is launched it checks for two...

A zero-day vulnerability in the FFmpeg open-source multimedia framework, which is currently used in numerous Linux kernel-based operating systems and software applications, also for the Mac OS X and Windows platforms, was unveiled recently. The vulnerability was discovered on January 12, 2016, by Russian programmer Maxim Andreev in the current stable builds of the FFmpeg software, and it would appear that it allows anyone who has the necessary skills to hack a computer to read local files on a remote machine and send them over the network using a specially crafted video file. The vulnerability is limited to reading local...

On Jan. 1, 1970, Unix time was born. It didn't actually exist on that day; the Unix operating system only kind of/sort of existed then anyhow. But when the first edition of the Unix manual was released in 1971, it was thus declared that the beginning of Unix time—the Unix epoch, correctly—hath began on New Year's Day, 1970. Maybe you've heard of the Unix epoch. Simply, it's the reference date that Unix-based computers use to tell time. It is just a count of the number of seconds that have elapsed since the beginning of the epoch. If you're running a...

The Linux Foundation recently put up a funny video showing what life might be like without Web search. It's tagline was "A world without Linux is hard to imagine." It also added, "A world without Linux would mean a world without the Internet." Ah. No. The Internet actually started as ARPAnet, a government sponsored packet-switching network in September 1969. Linus Torvalds wouldn't be born until December 1969. The cartoon is really about search on the Web, not the Internet itself. The Web got its start in 1991. It first ran om NeXTStations. These were Steve Job-designed Unix workstations. They're the...

Linus Torvalds The Linux community often recognizes two anniversaries for Linux: August 25th is the day Linus Torvalds first posted that he was working on Linux and said “Hello, everybody out there…” and October 5th is the day he released the first kernel.To mark the anniversary of the first kernel release in 1991, we look at some facts and consider the progress that has been made since that early version. Version 0.01 of the Linux kernel had 10,239 lines of code (source: Wikipedia). Version 4.1, released in July 2015, has more than 19 million lines of code (source: Phoronix). ...

In Unix, what do some obscurely named commands stand for? A list of some of the more obscurely named Unix commands follows: awkAho, Weinberger, and Kernighan The awk scripting language was named by its authors, Al Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan. For more, see What is awk, and how do I use it?grepGlobal regular expression print The grep command comes from the command used by the ed program (a simple and venerable Unix text editor) to print all lines matching a certain pattern: g/re/p For more, see What is grep, and how do I use it?fgrepFixed grep The...

Had enough of $ and #? You can make your bash prompts far more interesting and likely a lot more useful by customizing them. You can even change the font color or set up your prompt to change depending on where you're sitting in the file system, what system you're working on, or what time it is.A customized prompt can serve as a gentle reminder of what system you're working on -- especially helpful if you often find yourself logged into 3-4 systems at a time, window hopping to get several things done at the same time. or if...

Remember Heartbleed? Well, this is probably worse. Here's a (somewhat simplified) explanation of what Shellshock actually is. Don't worry: I haven't included instructions on how to actually exploit it. The moral of the story is: keep your security patches up to date!