Practical Technology

for practical people.

February 11, 2022
by sjvn01
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CNCF reports record Kubernetes and container adoption

A few years ago when Docker was new, we thought containers would finally be a big deal, but we weren’t sure. Fast forward to 2022, and there’s no longer any question about it. Docker sparked a container revolution that has transformed computing. Gartner predicts that 70% of organizations will run containerized applications by 2023. They’re not wrong. As the recent Cloud-Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) survey has shown, in the 2021 Cloud-Native Survey that Kubernetes, the dominant container orchestration program has reached its highest level ever, with 96% of organizations using or evaluating the technology.

Not bad for a technology that hasn’t seen its eighth birthday yet.

CNCF reports record Kubernetes and container adoption. More>

 

February 10, 2022
by sjvn01
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Security Trouble in Argo Continuous Delivery Program

Maybe someday there will a day when we don’t have a serious security problem to worry over, but that day is not today. In our latest headache, the cloud-native security company Apiiro’s Security Research team uncovered a nasty software supply chain zero-day vulnerability, CVE-2022-24348, in Argo CD, the popular open-source GitOps Continuous Delivery (CD) platform.

The problem is an oldie, but nasty path traversal bug. When abused, it enables arbitrary values files to be consumed by Helm charts. Adding insult to injury, an attacker can craft malicious Helm chart packages, which contain value files that are actually symbolic links, pointing to arbitrary files outside the repository’s root directory.

Security Trouble in Argo Continuous Delivery Program. More>

February 10, 2022
by sjvn01
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Elon Musk’s net worth will exceed $1 Trillion thanks to SpaceX

There’s rich — Amazon’s Jeff Bezos with not quite $200-billion and Microsoft’s Bill Gates with $132-billion — and then there’s Elon Musk rich: Approximately $241-billion. But, according to a note, “SpaceX Escape Velocity … Who Can Catch Them?” by Morgan Stanley‘s head of auto and space research Adam Jonas, SpaceX will launch him into being the first trillionaire.

True, SpaceX makes up less than 17% of Musk’s $241.4 billion net worth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, but Jonas is bullish on SpaceX. Jonas said SpaceX was “challenging any preconceived notion of what was possible and the time frame possible, in terms of rockets, launch vehicles and supporting infrastructure.”

Elon Musk’s net worth will exceed $1 Trillion thanks to SpaceX. More>

February 9, 2022
by sjvn01
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10-Gigabit internet: Coming to your home and office within the decade

When I started using the internet, I was glad to have a 300-baud modem hook-up. A serious business connection was a T-1, which could reach an amazing 1.54 Megabit per second (Mbps) of throughput. Things have changed. Now, I have a 1 Gigabit per second (Gbps) internet link to my home office — and someday soon, CableLabs, the cable industry’s research and development lab, promises that we’ll have 10 Gbps (10G) access for homes and offices.

10-Gigabit internet: Coming to your home and office within the decade. More>

February 9, 2022
by sjvn01
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The bill comes due: Securing open-source software isn’t going to be cheap

Open-source software has always been more secure than proprietary software, but that doesn’t mean it’s “secure.” To lock it down, we need to invest serious cash in developers and maintainers.

You may have noticed that a lot of people are getting seriously cranky about open-source software security lately. They have a reason. Our screw-ups have been making the news a lot lately.

To name but a few, there was the ongoing Log4j vulnerability fixups; the npm bad code injection fiasco; and you haven’t heard the last of the Linux PolKit security hole since many embedded systems will never be patched.

So, what can we do about it? First, as I like to remind people, if you think open-source security is bad, that’s only because you never hear about the security by obscurity blunders of proprietary software until they explode or they’re patched. Just look at Microsoft’s endless Patch Tuesday problems where the fixes can be as bad as the original problems.

But, just because closed-source developers have their problems doesn’t take away from our foul-ups. On the open-source side of things, we need to do better soon.

The bill comes due: Securing open-source software isn’t going to be cheap. More>

February 9, 2022
by sjvn01
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Best Linux distros for beginners 2022: You can do this!

Some people still insist that using Linux is hard. Sure, it was difficult — when I started with the Linux desktop back in the 1990s. But that was a long time ago. Today, the easiest desktop of all, Chrome OS, is simply Linux with the Chrome web browser on top of it. The more full-featured Linux desktop distributions are as easy to use in 2021 as Windows or macOS.

Yes, you can get a lot more from Linux if you know how to do shell programming and the like. But that’s also true of Windows and PowerShell. With both operating systems, you don’t need to know the deep ins and outs of either one to get your work done.

So why would you move? Well, for starters, Linux is far more secure than its rivals. Looking ahead, as Ed Bott points out, many of you may end up facing a security disaster if you keep using Windows 10.

Also, Linux, unlike Windows 11, will run on pretty much any PC you’ve got lying around. Linux doesn’t require much in the way of a computer to do just fine. For example, I have a 2007-vintage HP Pavilion Media Center TV m7360n PC with a 2.8GHz Pentium D 920 dual-core processor, and 2GBs of RAM and a 300GB SATA drive PC that’s still running Linux to this day. Good luck running any modern version of Windows on that.

Best Linux distros for beginners 2022: You can do this! More>