Issue #187 / Jun 2016

Sometimes you get a reminder of something you already know, and you have to stop and say, "Ah, yes, that's right, I'm awake." Several news sources ran a story recently on Google's Safe Browsing technology, which "scan websites for potential risks to warn users before they visit unsafe sites." Safe browsing is now integrated into the Chrome and Firefox browsers, which means users get a warning about sites with potentially unsafe content.

Manjaro Linux 15.12 Xfce Edition and Debian 8.4 Live Image with Cinnamon

Updates on technologies, trends, and tools

TKperf combines several SSD tools under one roof. You can use TKperf to investigate SSDs before deployment and even to measure performance.

Solid state drives make everything run faster and more smoothly, but you can squeeze out even more performance with some practical optimization steps.

Flash memory is fast but also expensive. Caching with Flash provides a way out: A smaller and cheaper SSD can speed up the disk.

Many users associate the term P2P with BitTorrent and the (not always legal) exchange of files. But peer-to-peer networks offer an option for anonymously offering websites and other services. We examine five popular alternatives for P2P networking.

Briefly tested: Dxirc 1.20.0, XS-httpd 3.7, Nmap 7.0, MegaFont NEXT, Isync 1.2.1, Zeal 0.2.1.

Companies that depend on LibreOffice have a reason to wonder whether the office suite is working on all systems. You can use Python and the LibreOffice API to check.

Even with all the talk of Big Data and the storage revolution, a steady and reliable block-based filesystem is still a central feature of most Linux systems.