Linux Outlaws 294 – Gentlemen of the Road
January 17th, 2013
A new RHEL, new systemd, lots of security vulnerabilities, CNET reporter resigns over CBS meddling, Operation Red October, VMware stakes claim on Vert.x, Steam on Linux market share and more
Uncut video version of this episode on YouTube
0:00:56 INTRODUCTION
- Red Book Prediction: Fab says Canonical will release a version of Ubuntu with a BSD-licensed kernel, Dan says they won’t
- Linux Outlaws Live
- Fab did a live Media Assassination of the Shuttleworth video after the last show
- The new Corvette looks stunning
The 2014 Corvette Stingray
0:11:30 RELEASES & NEWS
Kris Letang
It’s Vulnerability Week!
- Critical security update for MoinMoin wiki
- Critical vulnerability in Ruby on Rails parameter parsing, exploits now in circulation
- Aaron Swartz commits suicide; heartbreaking account by a very close personal friend; #pdftribute
- Critical vulnerabilities in Asterisk
The Systemd illustration from c’t magazine
- CNET reporter resigns over CBS meddling
- The “Operation Red October” malware
- $17,000 Linux-powered rifle brings “auto-aim” to the real world
- VMware stakes IP claim on Vert.x; Red Hat and VMware “in active discussion”
- VMware joins the Open Source Software Institute
- Netflix Janitor Monkey
- Wayland’s Weston now able to run without 3D drivers
- Steam for Linux has 0.8% market share
1:11:06 MICROWATCH
1:15:55 FEEDBACK
Supporters: Thanks to Marcus Wilson, Mans Edstrom, Tony Hughes (from Blackpool LUG) and everyone who flattr’d us!
- Gary doesn’t like Cisco routers and prefers the Buffalo WZR-HP-G450H which runs DD-WRT he also recommends SeatGuru.
- Sam Bull has created a GNOME extension to put sticky notes on your Activities screen
- Rorie sends us some comments on tea and milk
- Tom Link, who has listened to the show for a couple of years, tells us what happened to him during a recent internet outage in Canada
- Jonathan Nadeau tells us that Northeast Linux Fest has been announced: 16 & 17 March at Harvard University
- Jeff G says the fifth annual OpenNMS User Conference Europe will take place 12-15 March at the University of Applied Sciences in Fulda, Germany
- Pedro wants to hear more about Secure Boot and tells us about his pet project which is a tiny application that binds keyboard shortcuts to window tilling actions on non tiling window managers
We had other emails from: Nehemiah Dacres, Christopher Vella and Garjola.
Song: The Final Rewind by Tryad from the album Public Domain (licensed Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0)
Concerning the sad Aaron Swartz story I have two comments:
a) There are some crimes in many countries (of course, I have no clue about the particulars of the U.S. federal law), where approval of the victim is required (or at least non-existence of objections). It is apparently the case JStor dropped the case, and (to their eternal shame) MIT didn’t.
b) I think you were really sleepy when researching the issue. Aaron was depressive (aside from almost every source about him mentioning it, you can try https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aaaronsw.com%20depression ). Not that it would be any excuse for MIT behaving like idiots (disclosure: I have a completely intangible stake in the case … my wife was a PhD student at MIT, and OTOH I have some patches in Aaron’s rss2email program).
c) http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/01/15/humanity-deficit/bj8oThPDwzgxBSHQt3tyKI/story.html?s_campaign=sm_tw is a great article.
Thanks for reporting this.
Matěj
BTW, Python has at least two more easter eggs included:
>>> import this
>>> from __future__ import braces
For DNS debugging use `nslookup`.
`nslookup heise.de` ← that uses your “default” DNS-Server
After that, try another DNS-Server:
`nslookup heise.de 8.8.8.8`
Well, I was trying to give people an easy way to figure out if their DNS was the problem or the general Internet connection.
That’s pretty easy
But yeah, its in the terminal.
Easy Syntax:
[PROGRAMM] [HOST] [DNS]
Easy Name:
name system lookup
Easy Output with great error messages: ** server can’t find hlub: NXDOMAIN
nslookup is great fpr telephonsupport, because there is not much information and it is easy to understand.
I know how nslookup works. I have four years of professional experience supporting these things. It’s not my definition of “easy” though, and it’s nothing I will recommend to end-users on the fly like that. Listen to the email on the show again, that didn’t sound like a person I would give a terminal command like this. You need to tailor your recommendations a bit to the kind of person you are talking to.