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Do I Have to Use a Free/Open Source License?

Open source? Proprietary? What license should I use to release my software? A few weeks ago I ran into a neighbor, whom I'll call Leo, while he was out taking his dogs to the park. Leo stopped me to ask about some software he's developing. "Hey, you do open source stuff for companies, right?" Leo asked. "Yeah, that's my freelance business. Do you need some help with something?"

diff -u: Intel Design Flaw Fallout

For weeks, the world's been talking about severe Intel design flaws affecting many CPUs and forcing operating systems to look for sometimes costly workarounds. Linux patches for these issues are in a state of ongoing development. Security is always the first priority, at the expense of any other feature. Next would probably be the general speed of a running system for the average user. After that, the developers might begin piecing together any features that had been pulled as part of the initial security fix.

Private Internet Access Goes Open Source, New Raspbian Image Available, Scarlett Johansson Image an Attack Vector on PostgreSQL and More

News briefs for March 16, 2018. Private Internet Access announced that it is open-sourcing its software: "We believe that the shift to open source is the right move for a privacy-focused business, and recognise that code transparency is key. We appreciate that our code may not be perfect, and we hope that the wider FOSS community will get involved, provide feedback, feature requests, bug fixes and generally help provide a greater service to the wider privacy movement." You can check out the repo on GitHub and find them at #privateinternetaccess on chat.freenode.net.

Oracle Patches Spectre for Red Hat

Red Hat's Spectre remediation currently requires new microcode for a complete fix, which leaves most x86 processors vulnerable as they lack this update. Oracle has released new retpoline kernels that completely remediate Meltdown and Spectre on all compatible CPUs, which I show how to install and test on CentOS here. The Red Hat community has patiently awaited a retpoline kernel implementation that remediates CVE-2017-5715 (Spectre v2) and closes all Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities that have captured headlines this year.

Linus Bashes CTS Labs, GNOME 3.28 Released, Project ACRN and More

News briefs for March 15, 2018. Linus Torvalds bashes CTS Labs' AMD chip report, calling it "more like stock manipulation than a security advisory", ZDNet reports. He went on to criticize the security industry for making inflammatory reports: "security people need to understand that they look like clowns because of it. The whole security industry needs to just admit that they have a lot of sh*t going on, and they should use -- and encourage -- some critical thinking."

Help Us Cure Online Publishing of Its Addiction to Personal Data

Since the turn of the millennium, online publishing has turned into a vampire, sucking the blood of readers' personal data to feed the appetites of adtech: tracking-based advertising. Resisting that temptation nearly killed us. But now that we're alive, still human and stronger than ever, we want to lead the way toward curing the rest of online publishing from the curse of personal-data vampirism. And we have a plan. Read on.