Tag Archives: News

Stephen Hawking

Saddened to hear about Stephen Hawking this morning.

While some may not agree with him on certain things, few can dispute his genius.

And the film of his life with Eddie Redmayne is an absolute blast.

Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces Kubernetes as First Graduated Project

SONOMA, Calif., March 6, 2018 – Open Source Leadership Summit – The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which sustains and integrates open source technologies like Kubernetes® and Prometheus™, today announced that Kubernetes is the first project to graduate. To move from incubation to graduate, projects must demonstrate thriving adoption, a documented, structured governance process, and a strong commitment to community success and inclusivity.

https://www.cncf.io/announcement/2018/03/06/cloud-native-computing-foundation-announces-kubernetes-first-graduated-project/

Great news :) shows that Kubernetes is now considered more mature than previously and it definitely shows.

Hack the USAF [Engadget]

Whilst finding vulnerabilities is a bad thing, having them found by white hat hackers is a good thing. Hackathons like this one prove that it can be constructive to get a group of them in to find and help fix vulnerabilities in your system before they are found in public and exploited to death before you have a chance to fix them.

The US Air Force’s second security hackathon has paid dividends… both for the military and the people finding holes in its defenses. HackerOne has revealed the results of the Hack the Air Force 2.0 challenge from the end of 2017, and it led to volunteers discovering 106 vulnerabilities across roughly 300 of the USAF’s public websites. Those discoveries proved costly, however. The Air Force paid out a total of $103,883, including $12,500 for one bug — the most money any federal bounty program has paid to date.

 

https://www.engadget.com/2018/02/19/hack-the-air-force-2/

 

Kubernetes V1.9 released

From the Kubernetes blog, the next version of Kubernetes has been released. And one feature has definitely caught my eye:

Windows Support (beta)

Kubernetes was originally developed for Linux systems, but as our users are realizing the benefits of container orchestration at scale, we are seeing demand for Kubernetes to run Windows workloads. Work to support Windows Server in Kubernetes began in earnest about 12 months ago. SIG-Windows has now promoted this feature to beta status, which means that we can evaluate it for usage.

So users of Windows can now hook up Windows boxes into their cluster. Which leads to an interesting case of mixed-OS clusters. Strictly speaking, that’s already possible now with a mix of Linux distributions able to run Kubernetes.

http://blog.kubernetes.io/2017/12/kubernetes-19-workloads-expanded-ecosystem.html

Please keep hands and other body parts away from the doors….

Evidently this guy thought he could jump the gate, but something didn’t clear it. ^_^

 

 

Goodbye Apple, goodbye Microsoft… hello Linux

Not often I quote from a publication from Ireland, but this was quite an intriguing read. Someone who went from Windows to Mac to Linux (Mint)

Linux is everywhere – and will free your computer from corporate clutches

It was 2002, I was up against a deadline and a bullying software bubble popped up in Windows every few minutes. Unless I paid to upgrade my virus scanner – now! – terrible things would happen.

We’ve all had that right?

In a moment of clarity I realised that the virus scanner – and its developer’s aggressive business model – was more of a pest than any virus I’d encountered. Microsoft’s operating system was full of this kind of nonsense, so, ignoring snorts of derision from tech friends, I switched to the Apple universe.

It was a great choice: a system that just worked, designed by a team that clearly put a lot of thought into stability and usability. Eventually the iPhone came along, and I was sucked in farther, marvelling at the simple elegance of life on Planet Apple and giving little thought to the consequences.

Then the dream developed cracks. My MacBook is 10 years old and technically fine, particularly since I replaced my knackered old hard drive with a fast new solid-state drive. So why the hourly demands to update my Apple operating system, an insistence that reminded of the Windows virus scanner of old?

Apple is no different to Microsoft it seems.

I don’t want to upgrade. My machine isn’t up to it, and I’m just fine as I am. But, like Microsoft, Apple has ways of making you upgrade. Why? Because, as a listed company, it has quarterly sales targets to meet. And users of older MacBooks like me are fair game.

I looked at the price of a replacement MacBook but laughed at the idea of a midrange laptop giving me small change from €1,200. Two years after I de-Googled my life(iti.ms/2ASlrdY) I began my Apple prison break.

He eventually went for Linux Mint, which for a casual user is fine. I use Fedora and Ubuntu (and a really old version of Ubuntu since my workplace VPN doesn’t seem to work properly with anything above Ubuntu 14 – their way of forcing me onto either a Windows or Mac machine)

Source: https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/goodbye-apple-goodbye-microsoft-hello-linux-1.3295781

Apple can’t count….

My opinion of Apple and its practices has never been high. But this is just stupid.

Type in “1+2+3=” in an iOS 11 device’s calculator app, and you get 6 (correctly), but type it in quickly (as demonstrated in this video) and you get 24.

Sure, it’ll no doubt get patched soon and Apple will twist the incident to prove how fast they can push out updates compared to Android. But the point remains – how did such a bug make it past testing? And what OTHER, similarly stupid bugs that have yet to be detected, also make it past testing. And what if one of those bugs was in something fundamental? Something that breaks the functionality of the device? Something like the 1/1/1970 bug that would brick the device, or even the infamous “effective power” bug that would annoying reboot someone’s phone. Or even the famous crashsafari site that was only meant to crash safari but managed to crash the device too (originally, anyway).

OR, was there even ANY testing?

Why everyone is so convinced Facebook is spying on their conversations

Bipul Lama believes Facebook is spying on him.

And he’s got proof, sort of. Lama performed a test. For two days, all he talked about was Kit-Kats.

“The next day, all I saw on my Instagram and Facebook were Kit-Kat ads,” Lama said.

After his Kit-Kat experiment, he successfully repeated it with chatter about Lysol. The 23-year-old musician is now more convinced than ever that Facebook is listening to his conversations through his phone’s microphone.

“It listens to key words. If you say a word enough times, the algorithm catches those words and it sets off targeted ads,” Lama theorized.

Lama is far from alone. The belief that Facebook is actively listening to people through their phones has become a full-on phenomenon. Facebook has, of course, denied it does this. That has done little to dampen the ongoing paranoia around the theory.

Because it is just a theory… right?

Source: Why everyone is so convinced Facebook is spying on their conversations

Petition · Save Your Uber in London #saveyouruber · Change.org

Save Your Uber in London #saveyouruber

I’ve signed the petition.

Source: Petition · Save Your Uber in London #saveyouruber · Change.org

Dharni – Check it out! Phantom Of The Opera Beatbox with Edyta…

Rarely I post stuff from Facebook due to my bad history with them, but this (via Mashable) is pretty damn good