News briefs for October 16, 2018.
Canonical
announced a partnership with Eurotech to help organizations
advance in the IoT realm. In connection with this partnership, Canonical
“has published a Snap for the Eclipse Kura project—the
popular, open-source Java-based IoT edge framework. Having Kura available as
a Snap—the universal Linux application packaging format—will
enable a wider availability of Linux users across multiple distributions to
take advantage of the framework and ensure it is supported on more hardware.
Snap support will also extend on Eurotech’s commercially supported
version; the Everywhere Software Framework (ESF).”
Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla all announce the end of support for TLS
1.0 and 1.1 standards starting in 2020, ZDNet
reports. Chrome and Firefox already support TLS 1.3, and Microsoft and
Apple will soon follow suit.
Sony announced it’s planning to use the blockchain for digital rights
management (DRM). According to the story
on Engadget, the company plans to begin with the Sony Global Education
written educational materials. This blockchain system is “built on Sony’s
pre-existing DRM tools, which keep track of the distribution of copyrighted
materials, but will have advantages that come with blockchain’s inherent
security.”
NETWAYS Web Services launches IaaS OpenStack.
According to the press release, “the Open Source experts from ‘NETWAYS Web
Services’ (NWS) add with OpenStack
a customizable, fully managed Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) to their
platform.” Customers can choose between SSD or Ceph based packages, and in
addition to OpenStack, the platform offers “a diverse selection of Open
Source applications for various purposes”. If you’re interested, you can try NWS OpenStack 30 days for free.
For more information and to get started, go here.
A grey-hat hacker is breaking into MikroTik routers and patching them so
they can’t be compromised by cryptojackers or other attackers. According
to ZDNet, the hacker, who goes by Alexey, is a system
administrator and claims to have disinfected more then 100,000 MikroTik
routers. He told ZDNet that he added firewall rules to block access to
the routers from outside the local network, and then “in the comments, I wrote information about the
vulnerability and left the address of the @router_os Telegram channel, where
it was possible for them to ask questions.” Evidently, a few folks have said “thanks”, but many are outraged.
Paul Allen—”co-founder of Microsoft and noted technologist,
philanthropist, community builder, conservationist, musician and supporter of
the arts”—passed away yesterday. See the statements released on behalf
of the Allen Family, Vulcan Inc. and the Paul G. Allen network at the Vulcan
Inc. website.