A screencast for beginners, just helping you navigate the profile and activity stream….

The EFF has put up a new page for a project which it calls the SSL observatory. They have spent months collecting information about SSL certificates across the net; as one might expect, they have found some interesting things. Those results are really only available as a set of slides [PDF] for now, but it's worth a look. It seems there are over 6,000 valid certificates out there for "localhost"...

When Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems — and by association, MySQL — plenty of open source pundits expressed concern. After much silence there are at least two signs Oracle plans to show MySQL customers and partners some love.

From the 2+2=less dept.:
Unfortunately for textbook publishers, Scott McNealy has some extra time on his hands since Oracle acquired Sun and put him out of a job. The Sun co-founder has turned his attention to the problem of math textbooks, the price of which keeps rising while the core information inside of them stays the same. 'Ten plus 10 has been 20 for a long time,' McNealy quips. 'We are spending $8 billion to $15 billion per year on textbooks' in the US, he adds. 'It seems to me we could put that all online for free.'

In the context of the IRMOS European Project (Interactive Real-Time Applications on Service-Oriented Infrastructures), a new realtime scheduler for Linux has been developed by the Real-Time Systems Laboratory of Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa. The purpose of this article is to provide a general overview of this new scheduler, describe its features and how it can be practically used, provide a few details about the implemented algorithms, and gathering feedback by the community about possible improvements. Click below (subscribers only) for the full article by Tomasso Cucinotta and Fabio Checconi, the developers of this scheduler.

From the Release Valve dept.:
A number of the community leaders from the OpenSolaris community have been working quietly together on a new effort called Illumos, and we're just about ready to fully disclose our work to, and invite the general participation of, the general public.

We believe that everyone who is interested in OpenSolaris should be interested in what we have to say, and so we invite the entire OpenSolaris community to join us for a presentation on at 1PM EDT on
August 3, 2010.

You can find out the full details of how to listen in to our conference, or attend in person (we will be announcing from New York City) by visiting http://www.illumos.org/announce (The final details shall be
posted there not later than 1PM EDT Aug 1, 2010.)

Paul Vixie has posted an article introducing DNS response policy zones (DNS RPZ), a sort of blacklist mechanism for domain names. "ISC is not in the business of identifying good domains or bad domains. We will not be publishing any reputation data. But, we do publish technical information about protocols and formats, and we do publish source code. So our role in DNS RPZ will be to define 'the spec' whereby cooperating producers and consumers can exchange reputation data, and to publish a version of BIND that can subscribe to such reputation data feeds. This means we will create a market for DNS reputation but we will not participate directly in that market."

There has been a lot of debate about the role open source will play in the cloud.

The GNU project developed some of the 21st century's most important software. The GNU Compiler Collection is used on Linux systems, BSD/OSX systems, and on Windows. GNAT has, for the most part, replaced any other Ada compiler ever created. The list could go on, but you get the idea. The sad thing about GNU is that it is so ideologically bent that I can no longer support it.

Here's a report on iTnews saying that Oracle has abruptly shut down a set of servers used to perform quality assurance on PostgreSQL releases. "Sun Microsystems - and for a short time its new owner Oracle - had provided three member servers to ensure PostgreSQL was stable on the Solaris operating system. The development of PostgreSQL had been supported by Sun - which contributed DTrace support, amongst other features to the database platform. At the start of July, Oracle shut down its three PostgreSQL build farm servers without warning, leaving the PostgreSQL community rushing to find replacements."