Free Republic

By Brad SeraphinAs one of the leading IT recruiting firms in the nation, CyberCoders has accumulated a wealth of data relating to the most in-demand development skills for job seekers.As a follow up to last year's article, 3 years of data (2013, 2014, and 2015) has been analyzed to yield 10 trends that provide skill demand insight for software engineers in 2016.1. Java remains atop the list as the most demanded skill companies were looking for in 2015. This trend proceeds Java's 2014 dethroning of C++, the most demanded skill of 2013.2. SQL consistently remains in the top 3...

Docker today announced that Ian Murdock, a member of the startup's technical staff and a former Sun and Salesforce employee known for founding the Debian Linux operating system, has passed away. He was 42. A cause of death was not provided in the blog post announcing the news. Docker declined to comment. The San Francisco Police Department did not immediately have information on Murdock's cause of death.

... After publishing details about the availability of new kernel packages for the Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS computer operating systems, Canonical now reports that the Linux kernel for Raspberry Pi 2 was updated for Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf). According to the Ubuntu Security Notice USN-2843-3, four kernel vulnerabilities discovered by various developers in the upstream Linux kernel 4.2 branch, which is now officially maintained by Canonical's Ubuntu Kernel Team, as we reported a couple of days ago, were patched for the Raspberry Pi 2 port of Ubuntu 15.10. The first security flaw was...

Pressing the backspace key 28 times can bypass the Grub2 bootloader's password protection and allow a hacker to install malware on a locked-down Linux system. GRUB, which stands for the Grand Unified Bootloader, is used by most Linux distributions to initialize the operating system when the computer starts. It has a password feature that can restrict access to boot entries, for example on computers with multiple operating systems installed. This protection is particularly important within organizations, where it is also common to disable CD-ROM, USB and network boot options and to set a password for the BIOS/UEFI firmware in order...

GRUB password protection can be bypassed According to Canonical'a latest Ubuntu Security Notice, it would appear that there's a zero-day security vulnerability in the GRUB2 (GNU GRand Unified Bootloader) packages, affecting all GNU/Linux distributions running 2.02 Beta. The security flaw was discovered by developers Ismael Ripoll and Hector Marco in the upstream GRUB2 packages, which did not correctly handled the backspace key when the bootloader was configured to use password-protected authentication, thus allowing a local attacker to bypass GRUB's password protection.

Last week when Microsoft and the Linux Foundation separately announced a partnership that would see Redmond issuing a Linux certification called Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate Linux (MCSA), Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols felt the need to add the words "not a typo" to the headline of his coverage on ZDNet. A couple of days later, when the story made the pages of The Register the headline included, "Do not adjust your set. This is not an error." We were just as surprised here at FOSS Force, and Larry Cafiero pulled no punches when breaking the story in Friday's Week in Review. "There's...

Right after Microsoft releasing MS-Linux, a few years ago I would have said the next most unlikely thing for Microsoft to do would be to offer a Linux certification. Guess what? They are.Yes, there's now a joint Microsoft Linux certification. Who would have imagined this even a year ago?On December 9, Microsoft released a Linux certification: Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate (MCSA) Linux on Azure. You know what's even more amazing? Microsoft created this certifcation with the help of the The Linux Foundation. Maybe dogs and cats can live together! This important step in broadening the technology integration between Microsoft and...

Why worry about the desktop when you've conquered everything else? Let's just get this out of the way: this isn't the year of Linux on the desktop. That year will probably never arrive. But Linux has gotten just about everywhere else, and the Linux community can take a bow for making that happen. Android, based on the Linux kernel, is so prevalent on mobile devices that it makes the longstanding desktop quest seem irrelevant. But beyond Android there are a number of places where you can find Linux that are truly odd and intriguing, and by "places" we mean both...

Ransomware targeting Linux servers has been thwarted by hard working security boffins, with help from the software itself, mere days after its existence was made public.The Linux.Encoder.1 ransomware seeks Linux systems to encrypt and like others of its ilk demands owners pay BitCoins to have files decrypted. But the first iteration of the malware has, like most betas, proven fallible.Not only can it be decrypted using scripts without the need for ransoms to be paid, but it can re-encrypt itself, corrupting files and even encrypting the ransom note that directs victims how to pay the extortion.Bitdefender security wonks report both...

I've known Linus Torvalds, Linux's inventor, for over 20 years. We're not chums, but we like each other.Lately, Torvalds has been getting a lot of flack for his management style. Linus doesn't suffer fools gladly. He has one way of judging people in his business of developing the Linux kernel: How good is your code?Nothing else matters. As Torvalds said earlier this year at the Linux.conf.au Conference, "I'm not a nice person, and I don't care about you. I care about the technology and the kernel-that's what's important to me." Now, I can deal with that kind of person. If...

Ransomware targeting Linux servers has been thwarted by hard working security boffins, with help from the software itself, mere days after its existence was made public.The Linux.Encoder.1 ransomware seeks Linux systems to encrypt and like others of its ilk demands owners pay BitCoins to have files decrypted. But the first iteration of the malware has, like most betas, proven fallible.Not only can it be decrypted using scripts without the need for ransoms to be paid, but it can re-encrypt itself, corrupting files and even encrypting the ransom note that directs victims how to pay the extortion.Bitdefender security wonks report both...

Does Linus Torvalds fail to take security in the Linux kernel seriously, and is the world doomed because of it? That's what the Washington Post suggests in a recent article about security in the open source OS. The Post sums up Torvalds's take on security as follows: "Security of any system can never be perfect. So it always must be weighed against other priorities -- such as speed, flexibility and ease of use -- in a series of inherently nuanced trade-offs."The Post also describes Torvalds as "the man who holds the future of the Internet in his hands."Taken together, the...

Celebrity programmer Eric S. Raymond has aired a theory that feminist activists are trying to find a way to lay false sexual assault claims against male leaders of the open source community.Raymond is best known for his seminal tract The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and remains active in the world of open source, which he has championed since the late 1990s. In a blog post this week, Raymond, often referred to as "ESR", dropped this bomb on the internet: The short version is: if you are any kind of open-source leader or senior figure who is male, do not be...

Moscow requires major companies to move information to servers in Russia by start of next year A Russian law could place the personal data of millions of Internet users, including Americans, at risk if international digital companies comply by the start of next year, analysts say. The law, enacted last year, requires digital companies to store the personal information of Russians in servers on Russian soil. While officials in Moscow have cited concerns that Russians’ information could be vulnerable to foreign intelligence services such as the National Security Agency (NSA) if it is located outside the country’s borders, critics of...

Celebrity programmer Eric S. Raymond has aired a theory that feminist activists are trying to find a way to lay false sexual assault claims against male leaders of the open source community. Among his many blog posts, Raymond has also identified criticized contemporary feminism, called for the demilitarization of US police and argued against gun control.

His name is Morgan, but it hasn’t always been his name. What it was before doesn’t legally matter any longer. What does matter, to us, is the concentric circles by which “Morgan” arrived…came to be. Morgan doesn’t know any better. Many metaphors of consciousness can be applied, but for Morgan, your arguments on his condition fall outside of his realm of concern. Morgan is Morgan, and what Morgan does in the present is all that matters. What might have been his reality, to you, before “the incident,” is simply pabulum to Morgan. To Morgan, you are children trying to complete...

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...

It's easy to forget how intimidating it can be when trying something completely new for the first time. This is especially true when a power-user comfortable with Windows tries Linux. Since I'm a power user of various Linux distros, Windows and OS X, I have some insights that I think people looking to migrate to Linux need to read. Let's get started, shall we?Linux is not Windows The first thing that people who migrate from Windows need to understand is that Linux is not Windows. People seem to forget this fact when they experience something completely foreign while using Linux....

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). ...

I love the Linux desktop. As far as I'm concerned, the Linux Mint 17.2 is the best desktop around. Heck, I was once editor-in-chief of a website called Linux Desktop. But today, I believe there's no way the Linux desktop will ever become the top desktop operating system. The Linux desktop, here Mint 17.2 with Cinnamon, is great, but it will never be popular the way Windows was. That's right. There will be no "Year of the Linux desktop." Oh, don't get me wrong, Linux, as Android tablets and smartphones and Chrome OS Chromebooks, will become the most popular end-user...