Practical Technology

for practical people.

February 1, 2022
by sjvn01
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Let’s pull back on virtual meetings, shall we?

On Tuesday, a week ago, I had three Zoom meetings, two Google Meets, and a Microsoft Teams get-together. With six hours of my day tied up in “meetings,” I didn’t get one bit of real work done.

Enough.

Back before I worked from home, I often had days like this. They were bad days. But once I stopped working in an office, I became largely free of meeting days from hell. Then COVID-19 came along; everyone’s office suddenly became their kitchen, den, living room, or anywhere else they could work from a desk—and videoconferencing apps became all the rage.

Remember when you couldn’t buy a webcam for love or money?

At first, it was kind of fun. After being stuck at home for a few months, I liked seeing people. I actually did purely social meetings.

Two years later, and it’s another story. As a system administrator on the Reddit Sysadmin forum said, “Virtual meetings are the new norm, and I’m seriously getting tired of loads of meetings in my calendar, as well as endless, ‘Can I give you a quick call?’ chats that are the farthest from ‘quick’ at all.”

Let’s pull back on virtual meetings, shall we? More>

February 1, 2022
by sjvn01
0 comments

Securing the open source ecosystem: SBOMs are no longer optional

In the last year and a half, one cybersecurity mess after another — the SolarWinds software supply chain attack, the log4j vulnerability, the npm bad code injection — have made it clear that we must clean up our software supply chain. That’s impossible to do with proprietary software, since its creators won’t let you know what’s inside a program. But with open-source programs, it can be done.

Here’s the progress we’ve made so far, according to the Linux Foundation in its new The State of Software Bill of Materials and Cybersecurity Readiness report.

Securing the open source ecosystem: SBOMs are no longer optional. More>

January 31, 2022
by sjvn01
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No, Linus Torvalds is not Bitcoin’s legendary creator Satoshi Nakamoto

One of the great tech mysteries is “Who really is Bitcoin’s inventor, the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto?” Recently, some people thought Linus Torvalds, the developer behind both the world’s most popular operating system, Linux, and its most popular development tool, the Git distributed version control (DVC) system, had also claimed he was the world’s most popular cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, inventor: The perplexing Satoshi Nakamoto.

This story got its start in the cryptocurrency news site, BeInCrypto. There a writer argued that “Linux creator Linus Torvalds seems to be claiming that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, the father of Bitcoin. Is he joking or is this the real deal?”

he reason for this claim? In a GitHub Linux kernel repository, it appeared Torvalds had changed a single line in the Linux Kernel. The change: ‘Name = I am Satoshi.’

And people were off to the races. News stories appeared here, there, and everywhere. The big question “Is he or isn’t he?” was debated on Twitter, Reddit, and Ycombinator.

Back in the late 2000s, no one really cared. Yes, there was a paper entitled, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” by Satoshi Nakamoto, but so what. There had been lots of papers that went nowhere. But then Nakamoto released the first Bitcoin program, version 0.1 on an early open-source code site, SourceForge, and launched the network with the genesis block of bitcoin aka block number 0. The race to cryptocurrency had started and it’s still going on today.

But, then and now, we still don’t know who Satoshi Nakamoto really is. Nakamoto, who never revealed any real clues as to his identity, stepped back from active Bitcoin involvement in mid-2010. Since then, he’s vanished from the internet.

No, Linus Torvalds is not Bitcoin’s legendary creator Satoshi Nakamoto. More>

January 28, 2022
by sjvn01
0 comments

JFrog Helps Clean up Bad npm JavaScript with 3 New Tools

When Microsoft acquired JavaScript Node package manager (npm) company npm, with its over 1.3 million packages and 75 billion downloads, I’d hoped that some of npm’s notoriously unstable releases would finally be fixed. I hoped in vain. For instance, the recent npm libraries ‘colors.js’ and ‘faker.js’ mess showed that we haven’t improved much from 2016’s infamous, ‘left-pad npm’ episode. In all three cases, tens of thousands of npm programs went up in smoke.

So it is a good thing that JFrog, a company that uses DevOps principles to secure the software supply chain, has released three new open-source programs to detect and block the installation of malicious npm packages.

JFrog Helps Clean up Bad npm JavaScript with 3 New Tools. More>

January 28, 2022
by sjvn01
0 comments

SUSE unveils Rancher Desktop 1.0 for Kubernetes on your PC

As Kubernetes users know, Rancher is a popular complete software stack for running and managing multiple Kubernetes clusters across any infrastructure. Now, since Linux and cloud-power SUSE acquired Rancher, it’s launched its first new program: Rancher Desktop 1.0

Rancher Desktop is an open source program that enables you to learn, experiment or test out Kubernetes container management. It currently works on M1 and Intel Macs; Windows, via Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL); and Linux.

SUSE unveils Rancher Desktop 1.0 for Kubernetes on your PC. More>

January 26, 2022
by sjvn01
0 comments

Attempt to shake down Linux users for Netfilter code use resolved

Once upon a time in the 2000s and 2010s, Patrick McHardy was the chair of Linux’s Netfilter core development team. Netfilter is a Linux kernel utility that handles various network functions, such as facilitating Network Address Translation (NAT) and Linux’s IPTables firewall. All was fine. But, then it was discovered that McHardy had made millions of Euros from threatening over 50 companies with legal action for using “his” code. That will never happen again.

McHardy was suspended from the Netfilter team in 2016. The Netfilter team released a document on how to deal with his attempts to extract money from vendors. This move by McHardy, who had been a leading Linux developer in the 2000s, came as a complete surprise at the time. Now, years later, the issue has finally been resolved.

On January 24, 2022, the Netfilter project announced a legally binding settlement with McHardy. This settlement has been ratified in a German court decision. This settlement governs any legal enforcement activities concerning all programs and program libraries published by the Netfilter/IPTables project and the Linux kernel.

Attempt to shake down Linux users for Netfilter code use resolved. More>