Practical Technology

As usual, NetMarketShare has Internet Explorer (IE) as the most popular Web browser with a global marketshare of 58.19 percent in February 2014. That represents a minute decrease from January’s 58.21 percent. Its rival Web browser measurement company, StatCounter, on the other hand, has Chrome as king of the world on the browser mountain with 43.82 percent of February’s market. This is a slight gain from January’s 43.67 percent. The one thing that both agree on is that the most popular Web browser wars have become trench warfare: The top browser’s marketshare aren’t moving.

Browser trench warfare: Early 2014 report. More>

More than nine out of ten IT hiring managers plan to hire Linux professionals in the next six months.. That’s great news… if you’re a Linux pro.. If you’re not, you’re out of luck. But The Linux Foundation wants to help you.

On March 6th, the Linux Foundation announced it’s building a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) program with edX, the non-profit, online learning platform launched in 2012 by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Professional online Linux classes for all – and the first one is free. More>

According to some reports you’d think the security sky was falling. Yes, GnuTLS, an open-source “secure” communications library that implements \Secure-Socket Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS), has serious flaws. The good news? Almost no one uses it. OpenSSL has long been everyone’s favorite open-source security library of choice.

Red Hat discovered the latest in a long-series of GnuTLS bugs .

Latest? Yes, latest.

You see, GnuTLS has long been regarded as being a poor SSL/TLS security library. A 2008 message on the OpenLDAP mailing list had “GnuTLS considered harmful” as its subject — which summed it up nicely.

GnuTLS: Big internal bugs, few real-world problems. More>

Talk about unlikely combinations. Red Hat, the leading enterprise Linux company, announced on March 5th that it’s bringing Microsoft .NET and SQL Server capabilities to its OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service cloud. What’s even more surprising is that Red Hat is doing this without Microsoft’s help.

Instead, Red Hat is doing this by collaborating with Uhuru Software to bring Microsoft .NET and SQL Server capabilities to OpenShift. This is being done as an open-source, community-driven effort in OpenShift Origin. Origin is the upstream community project behind Red Hat’s commercial OpenShift Online service and OpenShift Enterprise product.

Red Hat brings Microsoft .NET Apps to its OpenShift cloud. More>

It took its own sweet time, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux is finally available in the secure AWS GovCloud (US) region of Amazon Web Services (AWS). This is a major move for Red Hat in entering the world of secure government cloud computing.

AWS GovCloud is meant to enable US government agencies and customers to move sensitive workloads into the cloud while addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements. RHEL, of course, is already widely deployed in U.S. government agencies.

Red Hat Linux now available on Amazon’s secure federal cloud. More>