Windows needs some love too in the filesystem department and it is getting it. BtrFS has been popular on its native platform of Linux and now WinBtrFS 1.0 is released and brings the new, advanced filesystem to Windows 7 and later versions of Windows. BtrFS even brings enterprise software RAID for levels 0, 1, 5, 6 and, by extension, levels like 10 to Windows which might be a bigger deal than the filesystem itself.

You can file this under "duh, everyone already knew that", a new EU study finds that piracy might improve game sales. This is probably like how everyone already knew it helped software sales.

Wine 3.0 expected to release later this year. Wine 3.0 should include its working Direct3D 11 support as a big benefit for newer games, the initial Vulkan bits that we have seen used for DOOM and other games, the merging of Direct3D command stream support (D3D CSMT) for better gaming performance, the initial Android driver support, message mode pipes, and the base reported Windows version should indicate "Windows 7."

PostgreSQL 10.1 has released, the latest version of the most powerful open source relational database management system (RDBMS) is a powerful option in the database arena.

A new attack vector has been discovered, some new advanced malware actually attacks antivirus itself to gain access to your computer. Computers without antivirus are not at risk. The attacks so far seem to be effective against around a dozen name-brand AV products on the market today.

Microsoft Office documents are again a new attack vector for taking over your PC, even if you have macros disabled. Instead, Word's use of DDE or Dynamic Data Exchange is being exploited as a point of entry into your Windows computer. Read more on Ars Technica.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/01/emc-vmware-security-bugs-throw-gasoline-on-cloud-security-fire/

While everyone was screaming about Meltdown and Spectre, another urgent security fix was already in progress for many corporate data centers and cloud providers who use products from Dell's EMC and VMware units. A trio of critical, newly reported vulnerabilities in EMC and VMware backup and recovery tools—EMC Avamar, EMC NetWorker, EMC Integrated Data Protection Appliance, and vSphere Data Protection—could allow an attacker to gain root access to the systems or to specific files, or inject malicious files into the server's file system. These problems can only be fixed with upgrades. While the EMC vulnerabilities were announced late last year, VMware only became aware of its vulnerability last week.

Samba 4.8 RC is out and 4.9 has started development.

Biggest new features...

• KDC GPO Support (Samba itself can be managed via GPO)
• Time Machine Support with vfs_fruit
• Support for lower casing the MDNS Name
• Encrypted Secrets

LibreOffice 6.0 is now officially out. A major new feature is the Notebookbar, the LO competitor to the Ribbon interface.

Download today at LibreOffice.org

It may not have shown up in your console yet, for NC12 users, but the latest NC release, NC13 is now out.

The US SEC issued a strong warning about the use of unregulated currencies leading to a large drop in the price of Bitcoin (and other currencies) with BC now sitting at $9,500.

An older bit of malware, Slingshot, has been discovered to have been hiding for up to six years in MikroTik routers which have been co-opted into directly attacking connected Windows devices by pushing an infected DLL down to them. The malware was incredibly stealthy and has been undetected for a very long time, even through more than a hundred companies are known to have been infected by it.

Whether the malware is in other routers, has other attack vectors, is unknown.

Seagate is showing off their new Mach.2 drive technology which more than doubles performance of NL-SAS drives and shows nearly 60% performance boost over standard 15K SAS drives. New HAMR technology is breathing potential new life into mechanical drives.

US courts have ruled in favour of Oracle, that Google violated Java API copyright in their Android products. This should make anyone writing software using Java stop and rethink that decision pretty heavily. If the Java platform isn't free to use, do you want your software to be dependent on it? Google may owe billions in damages to Oracle for a product that was free, and made under fair use law. A very scary moment for developers.

Toughest Net neutrality bill in the country passes California Senate approval.

Fake error messages, phishing, and other annoyances will soon be heavily penalized.

...Google is promising to punish sites that offer what the company calls "abusive experiences." Chrome 71, due for release in December, will blacklist sites that are repeat offenders and suppress all advertising on those sites.

The behaviors deemed abusive cover a range of user-hostile things, such as ads that masquerade as system error messages, ads with fake close boxes that actually activate an ad when clicked, phishing, and malware. In general, if an ad is particularly misleading, destructive, or intrusive, it runs the risk of being deemed abusive....

AMD outlines its future: 7nm GPUs with PCIe 4, Zen 2, Zen 3, Zen 4

AMD is making the most of TSMC's 7nm process advantage over Intel.

AMD today charted out its plans for the next few years of product development, with an array of new CPUs and GPUs in the development pipeline.

On the GPU front are two new datacenter-oriented GPUs: the Radeon Instinct MI60 and MI50. Based on the Vega architecture and built on TSMC's 7nm process, the cards are aimed not primarily at graphics (despite what one might think given that they're called GPUs) but rather at machine learning, high-performance computing, and rendering applications....

...The cards also include built-in support for virtualization, allowing one card to be securely shared between multiple virtual machines. This makes it easier for cloud operators to offer GPU-accelerated virtual machines.... more on Ars technica

The 2015 Network+ Video Training Series by Prof. Messer for the N10-006 1.1 Certification

Youtube Video

Table of Contents:

Common Network Devices
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems
Content Filters
Load Balancers
Packet Shapers
VPN Conceptrators
VPN Connectors
VPN Protocols
Authentication TACACS & RADIUS
Remote Access Services
Web Services
Unified Voice Services

ITWorld OpEd piece on Half a Dozen Reasons to Use OpenSuse.

• YAST
• Major OS code contributor
• Easily add third party packages
• Rolling releases
• Great out of box experience
• Easy to choose the experience that you want