Issue #149 / Apr 2013

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.

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

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

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

Apache HTTP Server version 2.4 is full of exciting new features. We share a few of them with you.