Software

The Linux Foundation this week announced an expansion of the Dronecode project with investments from new members and the creation of three technical working groups. The foundation launched the open source project in 2014 in an effort to create a unified platform for commercial drone technology. Twen...

Black Duck Software on Tuesday announced it has added to its Hub software container-scanning capabilities that let users map open source security flaws for applications, Linux distros, and other software in Docker and other Linux containers. Adding a containerized scanner to a Docker host enables au...

The Solus Project is much like the little engine that still can't function. Version 1.0 was released last month as the first stable release from the twice-revamped Linux distro. Solus is built from scratch for the x86_64 architecture around a rewritten Budgie homemade desktop environment. Budgie is ...

Hacking team fail0verflow last week demonstrated a hack of Sony's PlayStation 4 game console that allows anyone running the modification to run the Linux OS on the appliance. The demo was part of a lightning talk session at the 32nd Chaos Communication Congress. The hackers used exploits in FreeBSD,...

The release last month of Elementary OS Freya version 0.3.2 showed little has changed in this new-style Linux distro that wraps its own lightweight desktop design around the Ubuntu core. Elementary OS first appeared in 2011. I last looked at its Freya beta release in 2014. I liked its fresh, new loo...

The Chapeau project's latest version arrived last month and is a good choice for enterprise users who want something a step above the traditional Fedora distro. An iconic Linux distro, Fedora is a very popular choice in enterprise shops, but it's less than ideal for home and SMB use without an IT st...

Researchers last week revealed a zero-day flaw that lets attackers take over a Linux system by pressing the backspace key repeatedly. Pressing backspace 17 to 20 times will overwrite the highest byte of the return address of the grub_memset() function, ultimately causing a reboot by redirecting cont...

The Linux Foundation last week announced it was teaming up with a group of high-tech and financial giants on a project to advance the blockchain technology made famous by bitcoin virtual currency. IBM, Cisco and Intel have agreed to collaborate with financial institutions including startup R3 CEV, t...

Slack this week announced its participation in an $80 million investment campaign to fund startups that build software that integrates with its own apps. The company also announced the availability of an app directory and a new development framework. The goal is to position Slack as a hub for connec...

Linux Mint upgrade to version 17.3 Rosa is one upgrade regular users do not want to skip. This latest release in downloadable ISO format, available in the MATE and Cinnamon desktop editions, hit servers earlier this month. Several days later, the upgrade was available from within the package managem...

GeckoLinux is a newcomer. I mean very new. Its first release was last week. You shouldn't view this distro as a wailing infant, however. It's based on openSuse Leap 42.1 and was leapfrogged into near-instant maturity from Suse Studio, a Web application for building and testing software applications ...

Microsoft last week revealed that it will release the core components of its Chakra JavaScript engine to open source as ChakraCore.It will be available next month on GitHub under the MIT license. ChakraCore offers best-in-class JavaScript execution with the broadest set of ES2015 feature coverage an...