News briefs for October 16, 2018.
Canonical announced a partnership with Eurotech[1] to help organizations advance in the IoT realm. In connection with this partnership, Canonical "has published a Snap for the Eclipse Kura project—the popular, open-source Java-based IoT edge framework. Having Kura available as a Snap—the universal Linux application packaging format—will enable a wider availability of Linux users across multiple distributions to take advantage of the framework and ensure it is supported on more hardware. Snap support will also extend on Eurotech's commercially supported version; the Everywhere Software Framework (ESF)."
Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla all announce the end of support for TLS 1.0 and 1.1 standards starting in 2020, ZDNet reports[2]. Chrome and Firefox already support TLS 1.3, and Microsoft and Apple will soon follow suit.
Sony announced it's planning to use the blockchain for digital rights management (DRM). According to the story on Engadget[3], the company plans to begin with the Sony Global Education written educational materials. This blockchain system is "built on Sony's pre-existing DRM tools, which keep track of the distribution of copyrighted materials, but will have advantages that come with blockchain's inherent security."
NETWAYS Web Services launches IaaS OpenStack. According to the press release, "the Open Source experts from 'NETWAYS Web Services' (NWS) add with OpenStack a customizable, fully managed Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) to their platform." Customers can choose between SSD or Ceph based packages, and in addition to OpenStack, the platform offers "a diverse selection of Open Source applications for various purposes". If you're interested, you can try NWS OpenStack 30 days for free. For more information and to get started, go here[4].
A grey-hat hacker is breaking into MikroTik routers and patching them so they can't be compromised by cryptojackers or other attackers. According to ZDNet[5], the hacker, who goes by Alexey, is