January 20, 2021
by sjvn01
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When Red Hat announced it was switching up CentOS Linux from a stable Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone to a rolling Linux distribution, which would become the next minor RHEL update, many CentOS users were upset. Now, to appease some of those users, Red Hat is introducing no-cost RHEL for small production workloads and no-cost RHEL for customer development teams.
Red Hat introduces free RHEL for small production workloads and development team More>
January 20, 2021
by sjvn01
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Elastic is tackling Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) with its new license change. When Elastic, makers of the open-source search and analytic engine Elasticsearch and its companion data visualization dashboard Kibana, announced it was moving both programs’ source code from the Apache 2.0-license to the Server Side Public License (SSPL) and the Elastic License, you might have thought, “Who cares?” Oh, but if you use the Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana (ELK) stack on the cloud, like Netflix, LinkedIn, Walmart, and thousands of other major companies do, you may end up caring a lot.
Elastic changes open-source license to monetize cloud-service use More>
January 19, 2021
by sjvn01
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After Amazon Web Services (AWS) Amazon Web Services (AWS) shut down the right-wing social network Parler, Parler CEO John Matze claimed Parler will be back with “many competing for our business.” Well. No. That didn’t turn out to be the case. But, a simple one-page Parler website is up and running on an Epik-hosted server.
Epik is a tiny, approximately 50 employees, domain registrar, and web hosting company based in Bellevue, Washington. It’s best known for hosting fake-news, far-right and neo-Nazi websites such as InfoWars, Gab, and The Daily Stormer.
Curiously, Epik officially denied having any “contact or discussions with Parler in any form regarding our organization becoming their registrar or hosting provider: on January 11, 2021. A whois search reveals, however, that on that same day, Epik became Parler’s internet domain registry.
In its statement, though, Epik also denounced the “kneejerk reaction” of major companies “deplatforming and terminating any relationship that on the surface looks problematic or controversial.” Besides AWS, Apple and Google removed the Parler smartphone client. As Matze himself has said on Fox News, no one wants to work with Parler after Amazon dropped the company. Matze concluded, bringing Parler back up is “basically impossible.”
Parler’sIP address itself is owned by DDoS-Guard. This Russian-owned company also hosts QAnon, 8chan, and the terrorist group Hamas. According to security expert Brian Krebs, “A review of the several thousand websites hosted by DDoS-Guard … includes a vast number of phishing sites and domains tied to cybercrime services or forums online.”
An image, purporting to show Parler’s server hardware requirements, shows the social network needs a minimum of 11,680 virtual CPUs; an internal network capable of dealing with at least 300 Gigabits per second (Gbps); and an internet connection that can handle 100 Gbps. That is well beyond Epik’s capabilities. To bring Parler back as it was would require the support of a major cloud provider.
Bringing up a one-page website, however, is trivial.
January 19, 2021
by sjvn01
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Ethical-source licenses, such as the Hippocratic License, have not been widely adopted. True, the Contributor Covenant, the first and most popular open-source project code of conduct has had success — it was adopted by the Linux kernel developers, but actual code ethical-source licenses have had a hard row to hoe. Today, seeking more users, there’s a new nonprofit group, the Organization for Ethical Source (OES).
Ethical-source movement opens new open-source organization More>
January 14, 2021
by sjvn01
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Parler, the right-wing social network, is gone. Amazon Web Services (AWS) switched it off. And, Parler, as it was, isn’t coming back. Parler’s data, however, including death threats and geotagged deleted messages, had been scraped and it’s being published on numerous public websites. Here’s how it was done.
January 12, 2021
by sjvn01
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Now that Amazon Web Services has shut down Parler, will the social network rebuild elsewhere? Parler CEO John Matze says Parler will be back with “many competing for our business.”
Don’t bet on it. There appears to be no major public cloud or hosting company willing to give Parler a home. But, even if there were, Parler would find it almost impossible to return anytime soon. Parler will need to build its own infrastructure.
Why Parler’s revival on public cloud is complicated and unlikely More>