Red Hat Lures Developers with Free RHEL and Container Development Kits

Red Hat has announced the availability of a no-cost Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) subscription as part of its Red Hat Developer Program. Unlike the regular RHEL, this new subscription is a self-supported, non-production developer option. According to Red Hat, the software is the same as what you get with the paid version – only the license is different.

Developers who are targeting RHEL as a platform to deploy their apps can now use the same platform to build and develop those apps. In the past, developers had to either buy a RHEL subscription or use Fedora or CentOS as a development platform.

Developers who are building cloud-native applications or microservices also gain access to Red Hat's Container Development Kit (CDK), a curated collection of container development tools and resources.

You don't have to be a certified developer to enroll in the program. Anyone can register on the site and download the suite for free.

Microsoft Brings the Linux Command Line to Windows

At the Build 2016 developer conference in San Francisco, Microsoft announced that Ubuntu's version of the classic Bash shell will soon be coming to Windows 10. Bash support on Windows will allow developers to run Linux command-line tools and utilities natively on the Windows platform.

Microsoft's Mike Harsh explained in a blog post, "…we built new infrastructure within Windows – the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) – upon which we run a genuine Ubuntu user-mode image provided by our great partners over at Canonical, creators of Ubuntu Linux."

Canonical created an image of Ubuntu, without the Linux kernel, to run Ubuntu user mode on WSL. As a result of this work, users can simply type bash in the Start menu of Windows 10, and the system will open the Bash shell in the Windows command prompt console.

Developers can now use Windows to run Bash scripts, as well as command-line tools like ssh, rsync, wget, sed, awk, grep, and many more. You can install new command-line tools or utilities just by running apt-get in the Bash shell. Developers will also be able to access the filesystems for Ubuntu and Windows directly from the Bash shell and work on files using Linux command-line tools. Support for running command-line Ubuntu applications in Windows will arrive with the next major update, codenamed Redstone 1, slated for release this summer.

Internet Research Group Proposes Better Email Standard

A group of researchers at some of the leading Internet companies have released the draft of a new mechanism for mail service providers to declare their ability to receive TLS-based secure email connections. The new feature fixes a flaw in the SMTP STS extension, which was supposed to be an update for mail security but failed to guarantee confidentiality or proof of server authenticity.

The new document proposes a means for the receiving server to declare its TLS support in advance, thus eliminating the negotiation phase, which makes the protocol vulnerable to various attack techniques. See the article in the Register for additional information.