GCC – Jupiter Broadcasting

Amazon’s success with EC2 and S3 is making them bleed money, as investors start to get nervous we’ll debate if the cloud’s price race to the bottom can lead to anything but awful.

Linus tells it like it is, we bust some Android FUD, and more!

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Amazon apparently set to launch Square-competitor in August as it develops biometric payment solutions

Amazon could be preparing to launch its own mobile credit card reading hardware in the coming weeks, according to internal Staples documents hinting at such a launch that we’ve obtained. According to the documents, Staples stores will prepare next month to stock a new product called the “Amazon Card Reader” alongside existing card readers from Square, PayPal, and Staples’ own in-house brand. The small hardware, which will likely connect to smartphones to process payments, will cost $9.99, according to the Staples internal sales systems…

An exact launch date for the product is unconfirmed, but Staples has asked its stores to wait until Tuesday, August 12th to put up new signage related to the Amazon Card Reader, so it’s possible that the release is scheduled for that week.

Amazon may be going after Square with a credit card reader of its own | The Verge

Amazon’s Cloud Is Growing So Fast It’s Scaring Shareholders

Yesterday Amazon said that while its cloud business grew by 90 percent last year, it was significantly less profitable. Amazon’s AWS cloud business makes up the majority of a balance sheet item it labels as “other” (along with its credit card and advertising revenue) and that revenue from that line of business grew by 38 percent. Last quarter, revenue grew by 60 percent. In other words, Amazon is piling on customers faster than it’s adding dollars to its bottom line.

The company’s chief financial officer, Tom Szkutak, blamed the drop on “substantial” price reductions the company has made to products such as its core EC2, storage and database services. “They ranged from 28 percent to 51 percent depending on the service,” he said on a conference call with analysts.

The thing is that even as Amazon’s business matures to the size of a company like VMware, its worrying to investors to see profitability slipping. That’s pretty much the meta-narrative of Amazon as a whole, though, which says it could lose as much as $810 million in the current quarter. The company is taking losses to invest in the future, and Amazon’s 10 percent stock drop today shows that some investors are uncomfortable with that.

Amazon.com Inc. missed analysts’ estimates for a second straight quarter, sending the shares tumbling 11 percent.

Trend Micro backs off Google Play malware claims

In a recent press release, Trend Micro made a fairly bold claim about malware running rampant in the Google Play Store. The release, dated July 15, 2014, began as follows:

Google Play populated with fake apps, with more than half carrying malware

Potentially evil doppelgangers for the most popular apps are inundating the Google Play store, with many carrying malware, according to a new blog post and report by Trend Micro, a global developer of cyber security solutions.

In the report more than 77 percent of the top 50 apps on the Google Play store have repackaged or fake apps associated with them.

It turns out that Trend Micro is guilty of a little over-eager language that obfuscated the nature of some of these threats. While there are indeed fake versions of many popular Android apps available for download, Trend failed to mention in their initial promotion for the report that the apps in question were posted outside the Play Store, and had to be installed manually in what’s commonly known as a side-load. This requires users to download the app in a browser, ignore a standard security warning about APK files, and disable a security option in Android’s main settings menu.

Trend Micro caught lying about Android security

Linus Torvalds: “GCC 4.9.0 Seems To Be Terminally Broken” – Slashdot

A critique from Linus Torvalds of GCC 4.9.0. after a random panic was discovered in a load balance function in Linux 3.16-rc6. in an email to the Linux kernel mailing list outlining two separate but possibly related bugs, Linus describes the compiler as “terminally broken,” and worse (“pure and utter sh*t,” only with no asterisk).

A slice:

“Lookie here, your compiler does some absolutely insane things with the spilling, including spilling a *constant. For chrissake, that compiler shouldn’t have been allowed to graduate from kindergarten. We’re talking “sloth that was dropped on the head as a baby” level retardation levels here …. Anyway, this is not a kernel bug. This is your compiler creating completely broken code. We may need to add a warning to make sure nobody compiles with gcc-4.9.0, and the Debian people should probably downgrate their shiny new compiler.”*

The post Cloud Gateway Drug | Tech Talk Today 33 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Let’s Get RAID | BSD Now 36

chris — Fri, 09 May 2014 09:25:39 +0000

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This week on the show we\’ll be showing you how to set up RAID arrays in FreeBSD. There\’s also an interview with David Chisnall – of the FreeBSD core team – about the switch to Clang and a lot more.

Sit back and enjoy some BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

Thanks to:

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Headlines

OpenBSD 5.5 released

If you ordered a CD set then you\’ve probably had it for a little while already, but OpenBSD has formally announced the public release of 5.5
This is one of the biggest releases to date, with a very long list of changes and improvements
Some of the highlights include: time_t being 64 bit on all platforms, release sets and binary packages being signed with the new signify tool, a new autoinstall feature of the installer, SMP support on Alpha, a new AViiON port, lots of new hardware drivers including newer NICs, the new vxlan driver, relayd improvements, a new pf queue system for bandwidth shaping, dhcpd and dhclient fixes, OpenSMTPD 5.4.2 and all its new features, position-independent executables being default for i386, the RNG has been replaced with ChaCha20 as well as some other security improvements, FUSE support, tmpfs, softraid partitions larger than 2TB and a RAID 5 implementation, OpenSSH 6.6 with all its new features and fixes… and a lot more
The full list of changes is HUGE, be sure to read through it all if you\’re interested in the details
If you\’re doing an upgrade from 5.4 instead of a fresh install, pay careful attention to the upgrade guide as there are some very specific steps for this version
Also be sure to apply the errata patches on your new installations… especially those OpenSSL ones (some of which still aren\’t fixed in the other BSDs yet)
On the topic of errata patches, the project is now going to also send them out (signed) via the announce mailing list, a very welcome change
Congrats to the whole team on this great release – 5.6 is going to be even more awesome with \”Libre\”SSL and lots of other stuff that\’s currently in development

FreeBSD foundation funding highlights

The FreeBSD foundation posts a new update on how they\’re spending the money that everyone donates
\”As we embark on our 15th year of serving the FreeBSD Project and community, we are proud of what we\’ve done to help FreeBSD become the most innovative, reliable, and high-performance operation system\”
During this spring, they want to highlight the new UEFI boot support and newcons
There\’s a lot of details about what exactly UEFI is and why we need it going forward
FreeBSD has also needed some updates to its console to support UTF8 and wide characters
Hopefully this series will continue and we\’ll get to see what other work is being sponsored

OpenSSH without OpenSSL

The OpenSSH team has been hard at work, making it even better, and now OpenSSL is completely optional
Since it won\’t have access to the primitives OpenSSL uses, there will be a trade-off of features vs. security
This version will drop support for legacy SSH v1, and the only two cryptographic algorithms supported are an in-house implementation of AES (in counter mode) and the new combination of the Chacha20 stream cipher with Poly1305 for packet integrity
Key exchange is limited to elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman and the newer Curve25519 KEXs
No support for RSA, DSA or ECDSA public keys – only Ed25519
It also includes a new buffer API and a set of wrappers to make it compatible with the existing API
Believe it or not, this was planned before all the heartbleed craziness
Maybe someday soon we\’ll have a mini-openssh-portable in FreeBSD ports and NetBSD pkgsrc… would be really cool

BSDMag\’s April 2014 issue is out

The free monthly BSD magazine has got a new issue available for download
This time the articles include: pascal on BSD, an introduction to revision control systems and configuration management, deploying NetBSD on AWS EC2, more GIMP tutorials, an AsiaBSDCon 2014 report and a piece about how easily credit cards are stolen online
Anyone can contribute to the magazine, just send the editors an email about what you want to write
No Linux articles this time around

Interview – David Chisnall – theraven@freebsd.org

The LLVM/Clang switch, FreeBSD\’s core team, various topics

Tutorial

News Roundup

BSDTalk episode 240

The original BSD podcaster Will Backman has uploaded a new episode of BSDTalk, this time with our other buddy GNN as the guest – mainly to talk about NTP and keeping reliable time
Topics include the specific details of crystals used in watches and computers to keep time, how temperature affects the quality, different sources of inaccuracy, some general NTP information, why you might want extremely precise time, different time sources (GPS, satellite, etc), differences in stratum levels, the problem of packet delay and estimating the round trip time, some of the recent NTP amplification attacks, the downsides to using UDP instead of TCP and… much more
GNN also talks a little about the Precision Time Protocol and how it\’s different than NTP
Two people we\’ve interviewed talking to each other, awesome
If you\’re interested in NTP, be sure to see our tutorial too

m2k14 trip reports

We\’ve got a few more reports from the recent OpenBSD hackathon in Morocco
The first one is from Antoine Jacoutot (who is a key GNOME porter, and gave us the screenshots for the OpenBSD desktop tutorial)
\”Since I always fail at actually doing whatever I have planned for a hackathon, this time I decided to come to m2k14 unprepared about what I was going to do\”
He got lots of work done with ports and pushing GNOME-related patches back up to the main project, then worked on fixing ports\’ compatibility with LibreSSL
Speaking of LibreSSL, there\’s an article all would-be portable version writers should probably read and take into consideration
Jasper Adriaanse also writes about what he got done over there
He cleaned up and fixed the puppet port to work better with OpenBSD

Why you should use FreeBSD on your cloud VPS

Here we have a blog post from Atlantic, a VPS and hosting provider, about 10 reasons for using FreeBSD
Starts off with a little bit of BSD history for those who are unfamiliar with it and only know Linux and Windows
(Spoiler) the 10 reasons are: community, stability, collaboration, ease of use, ports, security, ZFS, GEOM, sound and having lots of options
The post goes into detail about each of them and why FreeBSD makes a great choice for a VPS OS

PCBSD weekly digest

Big changes coming in the way PCBSD manages software
The PBI system, AppCafe and related tools are all going to use pkgng now
The AppCafe will no longer be limited to PBIs, so much more software will be easily available from the ports tree
New rating system coming soon and much more

Feedback/Questions

All the tutorials are posted in their entirety at bsdnow.tv
The Tor and mailing list tutorials have gotten some fixes and updates
The OpenBSD router tutorial has also gotten a bit of a makeover, and now includes new scripts for 5.5 and signify
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
If you\’ve got something cool to talk about and want to come on for an interview, shoot us an email
If any listeners have a collection of old FreeBSD or OpenBSD CDs, we\’d love for you to send in a picture of the whole set together so we can show it off
Watch live Wednesdays at 2:00PM Eastern (18:00 UTC)
We will be at BSDCan next week – be sure to say hi if you run into us!

The post Let's Get RAID | BSD Now 36 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Engineering and Powder Kegs | BSD Now 2

chris — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 10:02:50 +0000

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BSD Now is BACK to talk with Glen Barber from the FreeBSD Release team, show you how to build your own binary package repository and discuss the latest BSD news!

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Headlines

64bit time in OpenBSD

Many operating systems face an upcoming challenge, similar to (but more complicated than) Y2K: Y2038. All of the BSDs and most other operating systems track time by counting the seconds since Jan 1st, 1970. In 2038 this value will reach the maximum value of a signed 32 bit integer.
Simply changing to a 64 bit counter may not be the best solution, because there may still be 32 bit systems in use for embedded applications
Theo will be giving the keynote at EuroBSDCon on the subject, explaining how OpenBSD has implemented the solution
No other BSDs have it yet
ABI incompatibility. Updating to this kernel requires extra work or you won\’t be able to login: install a snapshot instead. Upgrading by source is for the insane only.

AESNI pipelining gets a speed boost

AES-NI is a new processor instruction available on modern Intel and AMD chips that provides hardware acceleration for AES encryption and decryption. This feature is especially useful for encrypted disks, because it removes most of the performance penalty traditionally associated with encryption
The new commit has the instructions pipelined, so there is no latency between the instructions
Uses SSE2 instructions for calculating XTS tweak factor for further increased performance
GELI based disk encryption performance increased by 3x on capable CPUs
Should affect PEFS and other AES backed encryption schemes as well
Full disk encryption should be more or less transparent now

OpenBSD 5.4 Preorders

Every 6 months there is a new OpenBSD version
They include a fun song and nicely-packaged CD set
The proceeds from sale of these products is the primary funding of the OpenBSD project
The official ISOs will be uploaded on November 1st

GCC no longer built by default on FreeBSD -CURRENT

On platforms where clang is the default compiler, don\’t build gcc or libstdc++
GCC is still enabled on PC98, because the PC98 bootloader requires GCC to build
While the base FreeBSD system has been built by clang for a long time, this change also covers the ports tree

Patch to update Xorg and Mesa on FreeBSD

Updates xorg drivers
Expected to be committed in about 2 weeks
Adds option to use devd instead of HAL for X configuration
Updates the MESA stack (9.1.6), libGL, DRI, etc
Enables KMS for AMD/ATI cards
Call for Testing
OpenBSD has recently upgraded to Mesa 9.2 for their stable version of Xorg

Interview – Glen Barber – gjb@freebsd.org @g_j_b_

FreeBSD Release Engineering

Q: Tell us a little about yourself, your role with the project – K
Q: When did you join the release engineering team (re@) and how did that come about? -A
Q: What kind of tasks and decisions are in the hands of re@? – K
Q: Why it is /pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/amd64/ -A
Q: Any stand-out features of 9.2-RELEASE that you’re personally excited about? -K
Q: Tell us about net.inet.tcp.experimental.initcwnd10 in r242266 -A
Q: Why was it reverted for 9.2-RC3? Causing problems? -K
Q: Why was there an RC4 added? – A
Q: Talk about the new snapshot releases for -CURRENT/-STABLE (we’ll have a future segment on how to upgrade to these branches) – K
Q: Is there a possibility of freebsd-update someday offering snapshot-based upgrades to the -STABLE or -CURRENT branches? What technical difficulties need to be overcome? – A
Q: Are there plans to remove bind from the base system? -K
Q: Would it be possible in the future to have a “WITHOUT_BLOBS” src.conf option to remove any non-open source wifi firmware modules and such? -A
Q: Tell us about you joining the FreeBSD Foundation and what this will mean for users – K

Tutorial

Making your own binary repository

Live demo
Poudriere builds binary packages from a list of ports (or the whole tree)
Uses the fantastic BSD jail system for everything
Supports signing the repository with an RSA key
Easy way to deploy large number of systems or low-powered systems
Very flexible, works on different versions of the OS, lots of features

Place to B…SD

iXsystems hosts FreeBSD Anniversary party

Celebrating FreeBSD’s 20th anniversary
Saturday, November 2nd at the DNA Lounge in San Francisco
Notable FreeBSD figures will contribute words of wisdom on the past, present, and future of FreeBSD

News Roundup

NetBSD gets basic support for the cubieboard 1 & 2

Very preliminary support for cubieboard 1 & 2 based on the Allwinner A10 & A20 SoCs
Many drivers are stubs with autoconf glue
Contributed by Matt Thomas

Rayservers ditches Linux for BSD

Used them all, Windows, Mac, OpenBSD, Linux
Needed PF, ZFS, disk encryption, lots of networking features, better security
In Linux, \”The new cgroups based memory management ran out of memory – on a 256 GB RAM system whilst it was not using more than 40.\”
BSD now protects the privacy of their email users

HPN for OpenSSH 6.2

High Performance Networking is an SSH patchset to improve transfer speeds by removing the fixed window size and take better advantage of TCP
Maintained as a patchset separate from OpenSSH
First integrated into FreeBSD base as of 9.0
Updated to support 6.2 (available in the ports tree as security/openssh-portable)
The HPN patch set also includes threaded AES-CTR support to increase performance and take advantage of multiple CPU cores for encryption. In this latest patch, threaded AES-CTR now works in all situations (it failed in some specific situations previously). Expected performance increase is ~50%
NONE cipher is now separate from the main patch set. The NONE cipher allows tools like scp and sftp to switch off the encryption for file transfers (when specifically told to do so) to keep encryption from bottlenecking performance and wasting CPU time

Call for testing: OpenSSH-6.3

Mostly a bugfix release
SFTP now supports resuming partially-downloaded or uploaded transfers
More logging features
Six weeks after the initial email, still no release. des@ is not pleased.

pkgsrc gets signing

pkgsrc is used on NetBSD, DragonflyBSD and other OSes
Comes from an EdgeBSD developer
Uses GPG for signing package files
Currently just a patch on github and in its infancy
Provides a short howto

FreeBSD vs. Linux: 10 points of superiority

New FreeBSD user, ex-Linux user writes about his experience
Mentions consistency, documentation, security, filesystems, updates, jails, community
Really long post, definitely worth a read

[Feedback/Questions]

We received TONS of email. We’ll get to a few of the questions, but a lot of them will be answered in future episodes.
hoopla writes in: “I\’m looking to install PCBSD on my laptop and was wondering if there was support for encryption of the root folder in the installer. For my arch linux install I ended up setting up an encrypted lvm by hand and it was hell but if it\’s built into the installer it\’d make the transition to BSD much simpler.”
Juergen writes in: \”hi guys, I want to listen to the new BSD podcast but I couldn\’t find the RSS feed. Can you publish the feed?\”
Due to the way publishing happens at JupiterBroadcasting, there were no RSS feeds until the first episode was published. The feeds for MP3, OGG, SD and HD Video and Torrent are now in the top right corner of the BSDNow.tv page. The episodes will also be published on iTunes once the show is approved by Apple.
Sam write in with two questions: “I want a few simple python web apps. What is the best \”FreeBSD way\” to deploy this? Nginx + uWSGI? It is surprisingly hard to find a usable nginx.conf that I can throw in a jail and run a python app. Is uWSGI even the right tool?”
“The PCBSD tools are great, but the tool versions that are in the ports tree are always out of date compared to what ships with PC-BSD. Why is this? Same with FreeNAS, why is the Warden more up to date in FreeNAS than PC-BSD.. then there\’s yet a 3rd version in ports?”
Frank writes in with a long question: “My company is a major CA. We run virtualized RHEL 6 virtualized on KVM, about 3000 nodes serving different purposes on about 350 pizza boxes also running RHEL/KVM. We have kind of a sale issue. To have both TLS 1.2 support and ECC ciphers available we have to recompile both OpenSSL and NGINX and a few other system packages. I\’ve built RPM\’s, but there still are issues on a default install, relating to other not to be disclosed core business software choughJava based cachough. However, compiling it all on each machine does work.

Now I\’ve got this working on FreeBSD kvm virtual machines, which both provide better performance (almost 30% less resource usage than the RHEL nodes) and also work with our configuration management stack (puppet + homegrown). It also would allow us to drop a lot of virtual nodes because less BSD boxes can handle the same amount as the CentOS ones. And of course the lack of security issues, less software by default on a fresh install and such.

My team also likes it, has knowledge, supports a migration, and the metrics support it, however management is not happy and does not want to do such a big \”migration\”. (Not knowing that about 100 VM\’s are already FreeBSD and working). Also, they don\’t like that they\’ve got a 10 year contract with Red Hat and have paid for that… But, in the end the cost would go down because of the migration.

Any tips to get support from them?”
+ The first thing that comes to mind is to see what other people have done in the past. There was a presentation at BSDCan 2013 in May of this year on this specific topic: Case study: Switching from Linux to FreeBSD

All the tutorials are posted in their entirety at bsdnow.tv
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, etc to feedback@bsdnow.tv
We don’t check YouTube comments, JB comments, Reddit, etc. If you want us to see it, send it via email (the preferred way) or Twitter: @BSDNow (also acceptable)
Watch live Wednesdays at 2:00PM Eastern (18:00 UTC)

The post Engineering and Powder Kegs | BSD Now 2 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Outrageous Fortune | CR 11

chris — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 12:23:59 +0000

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As Yoda would say — “Always in motion the future is”. Change is a fact of life and a fact of software development. It’s great to be the one driving change, but what happens when change seems to be driving you?

This week’s all about gritting your teeth and hanging on.

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Feedback

Cole is doing some Django but is wondering if ROR generates enough HTML/JS that he would not have to fiddle with it if he used ROR.
Chris writes in to share some QT deployment wisdom and to share his current OSS project: personal audio server
Macarthur writes us a letter in C/C++ and took extra care to have it compile on compilers and machines. Also,has some interesting ideas on OO.
Macarthur (maybe same dude?) writes in to tell us that he has great success with Clang+LLVM for debugging but releases uses GCC.
Forlian writes in to share his success with Pomodoro and shares an extension for GNOME
Daniel asks about design patterns and needs a jumping off place for research.
Nick is using D with QT but is having a hard time configuring QTD. Also, some clarifications on Mike C++ and Java.
Jason’s Email — Jason has a tough choice to make. Oh and he made me build his email with Ant — Java fans REJOICE!
Ewoud writes in to remind us that there a lot of embedded developers out there working in C and to offer Bill (our aspiring Linux dev) some encouragement. Oh Also, he has robotics experience, so when the robots take over — blame him.

Code School Affiliate

Chris was Right About Code Journal

Castles on Sand

Platforms and frameworks are great… until they move your cheese.
Case Study: Phil Phish’s Fez and XNA.
Here today gone tomorrow — what do you mean it’s not supported???

Orders from on High

Management can be… interesting in some of their technical decisions. What happens when your specialty becomes legacy.
About those distribution platforms.

Tool of the Week

OmniPlan

Book of the Week

[asa]0201633612[/asa]

Getting in Touch

The post Outrageous Fortune | CR 11 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Eat Your Greens | CR 07

chris — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 12:08:23 +0000

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Sometimes doing the things you hate to do, is exactly what you need to do. From working with designers, pushing your clients for extra security, and taking needed time off.

This episode is all about why you need to do the things, you don’t want to do!

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Show Notes:

Feedback

Emett checks in again with some more details on his situation — the outlook is still pretty tough.
Louis sent me an email in C++
Joel got in touch asking about my Linux dev setup
Abe would like some clarifications on CLANG, GCC , and LLVM
Hey wait C++ isn’t really low level, said the Java dev
Nelson needs some help figuring out where to host his Python app
Scott has a gift for Chris

The Power of User Experience

The Nexus 7 is the Android tablet you’ve been looking.
What does it mean for devs?
What’s a designer and why do I care?
Ok but my project isn’t consumer facing…

Chris Calls Devs Lazy!

We take a broader look at what really caused the in app purchase mess and what the situation on the ground is regarding purchase receipts.
How do budgets and external constraints affect best practices?

Working hard? You might be doing it wrong…

The article inspired it all
Does working longer hours really lead to better developer productivity?
Isn’t it worth it at the end to get in on the ground floor?

Il Mio Pomodoro

You say tomato I say “efficient day of coding”
25 up 5 down.
The catch with Pomodoro — unplugging
The Pomodoro Technique

Project update

Check out the project on Github

Tool of the week

KDiff, yes it is an icy day in Hell

Book of the week

[asa]020161622X[/asa]

The post Eat Your Greens | CR 07 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.