Author: Yuri Gagarin

System administrator in a non-IT company. The unbearable heaviness of being?

Being a system administrator in a small non-IT company is quite an adventure. The manager sees you as a freeloader, employees during tough times regard you as a deity of networks and hardware, during good times — as a fan of beer and gaming, the accounting department views you as an extension of 1C, and the entire company functions like a driver for successful printer operations. While you dream of a decent Cisco outfit, […]

Ansible: updates in key solutions for automating your world

The Ansible community continually delights with new content – plugins and modules – creating a lot of new work for those involved in Ansible maintenance, as new code needs to be integrated into repositories as quickly as possible. Meeting deadlines isn't always feasible, and the launch of some products ready for release gets postponed until the next official version of Ansible Engine. Until recently, […]

Google has launched a system for analyzing datasets without compromising privacy.

Google has introduced the cryptographic protocol for confidential multi-party computation called Private Join and Compute, enabling analysis and computation on encrypted datasets from multiple participants while preserving the privacy of each participant's data (each participant cannot access the data of others but can perform aggregate computations on it without decryption). The code for the protocol's implementation is open-sourced under the […]

Updates for PostgreSQL versions 11.4, 10.9, 9.6.14, 9.5.18, and 9.4.23

Cumulative updates have been released for all supported branches of PostgreSQL: 11.4, 10.9, 9.6.14, 9.5.18, and 9.4.23. The release cycle for the 9.4 branch will continue until December 2019, 9.5 until January 2021, 9.6 until September 2021, 10 until October 2022, and 11 until November 2023. The new versions fix 25 bugs and address […]

Firefox versions 67.0.4 and 60.7.2 have fixed another 0-day vulnerability

Following the releases of Firefox 67.0.3 and 60.7.1, additional corrective releases 67.0.4 and 60.7.2 have been published, which resolved a second 0-day vulnerability (CVE-2019-11708) that allows bypassing the sandbox isolation mechanism. The issue exploits manipulation of the IPC call Prompt:Open to open web content chosen by the child process within the parent process, which does not apply sandboxing. In conjunction with another vulnerability, this issue enables bypassing all […]

Free as in Freedom in English: Chapter 3. The Portrait of a Hacker in Youth

Free as in Freedom in English: Chapter 1. The Fateful Printer Free as in Freedom in English: Chapter 2. 2001: A Hacker Odyssey Portrait of a Young Hacker Alice Lippman, Richard Stallman's mother, still remembers the moment when her son showed his talent. "I think this happened when he was 8 years old," she says. It was 1961 […]

Be a mentor

Have you ever met people who, at the first sign of trouble, don't try to overcome it themselves but run to a more experienced colleague for help? The senior colleague suggests a solution, and it seems everyone is happy, but the senior gets distracted, and the junior doesn't gain any experience. Then there are people who seem to be excellent specialists and professionals. But they have low […]

Yealink Meeting Server 2.0 — new video conferencing capabilities

In the previous article: Yealink Meeting Server — a comprehensive solution for video conferencing, we described the functionality of the first version of Yealink Meeting Server (YMS), its capabilities, and structure. As a result, we received numerous requests from you to test this product, some of which evolved into complex projects for creating or modernizing video conferencing infrastructure. The most common scenario involved replacing the previous […]

Support for 32-bit packages for Ubuntu will be discontinued this fall.

Two years ago, the developers of the Ubuntu distribution ceased the release of 32-bit builds of the operating system. Now, a decision has been made to finalize the formation and corresponding packages. The deadline is the autumn release of Ubuntu 19.10. The last LTS branch with support for 32-bit memory addressing will be Ubuntu 18.04. Its free support will last until April 2023, while a paid subscription will ensure coverage until 2028. […]

Release of the HAProxy 2.0 HTTP/TCP load balancer

The release of the HAProxy 2.0 load balancer has been announced, which allows for distributing HTTP traffic and arbitrary TCP requests among a group of servers, taking into account multiple factors (for example, it checks server availability, assesses load levels, has DDoS mitigation tools), and performs preliminary data filtering (for instance, it can parse HTTP headers, filter out incorrect request parameters, block SQL injection and XSS, and connect content processing agents). HAProxy can also […]

Update of the DNS server BIND 9.14.3, 9.11.8, 9.15.1 with the elimination of the DoS vulnerability

Corrective updates have been published for the stable branches of the DNS server BIND 9.14.3, 9.11.8, and 9.12.4-P2, as well as for the experimental branch 9.15.1 currently in development. At the same time, it was announced that support for the 9.12 branch will cease, and updates for it will no longer be released. The updates are noteworthy for addressing a vulnerability (CVE-2019-6471) that allows for denial of service (process termination with assertion REQUIRE). The issue was caused by a race condition. […]

Release of the minimalist distribution Alpine Linux 3.10

The release of Alpine Linux 3.10 has occurred, a minimalist distribution built on the Musl system library and the BusyBox utility set. The distribution boasts increased security requirements and is built with SSP (Stack Smashing Protection) patches. OpenRC is used for the initialization system, and its own package manager apk is utilized for package management. Alpine is used to create official Docker container images. The bootable […]

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