Issue #149 / Apr 2013

SERVICE: April 2013: DVD Inlay

Issue #149
Fedora 18 Spin SetFedora’s spins are special versions of Fedora designed to highlight special features and tools. The......

SERVICE: Welcome

Editorial

A closed-source code base is a huge, ever-fading inertial mass. When it begins, with those first exhilarating lines, or even up through the first few releases, you can truly say that you are writing it. But after a while, it is more like you are tending it – or feeding it. It becomes an investment, an asset, a castle you are protecting, which means all your strategies are defensive and your dreams will not stray far from your spot of holy ground.

SERVICE: Table of Contents: 149

What's inside the April 2013 issue

This month, we show you how to automate tasks in LibreOffice and give you some tools to tighten system security.

NEWS: Linux News

Anonymous Active

• Anonymous hacktivists launch Operation Last Resort
• KDE 4.10 released
• News Bites

Dell Goes Private

• Dell to buy back stock
• Fedora 18 released
• LibreOffice 4.0 out
• RaspPi Camera

Tech Employment

• Tech unemployment less than half national average
• Linux Foundation UEFI fix

NEWS: Tech Tools

• Google Releases C++ B-Tree Template Library
• Unmetered.com
• Oracle Releases MySQL 5.6
• Eclipse Releases Hudson 3.0

SERVICE: On the DVD: Fedora 18 Spin Set

This month's DVD

Fedora’s spins are special versions of Fedora designed to highlight special features and tools. The spin system lets the Fedora community put out several different versions of Fedora tailored to specific tasks. This month’s DVD includes a pair of the most popular Fedora spins:

COVER STORY: LibreOffice Macros

Automating Libreoffice with macros

in addition to its comprehensive tool set, Libreoffice packs a built-in Basic-like scripting language that can be used to automate repetitive tasks and extend the suite’s default functionality.

COVER STORY: Grsecurity

Airtight system security with Grsecurity

Security-conscious people dig a deep moat with crocodiles around their homes, hide their furniture in back rooms, and only let visitors into the bathroom if they know the secret password. Grsecurity follows a similarly extreme principle.

COVER STORY: Critical Security Vulnerabilities

Handling critical security vulnerabilities: Three incidents

We look at what makes a security issue critical and how upstream developers and vendors respond by examining three incidents: CVE-2013-0156, CVE-2013-0333, and rubygems.org. incident response handling.

COVER STORY: Memory Analysis

Forensic analysis of memory on Linux

In computer forensics, memory analysis is becoming increasingly important as a means for investigating security incidents. In this article, we provide an overview of the various memory dumping options on Linux and introduce the support in Linux for the Volatility Analysis Framework.