BeagleWire, GitHub DDoS Attack, Open Source Bonus Winners and More

on March 2, 2018

News briefs for March 2, 2018.

A Crowd Supply campaign has launched for BeagleWire, the fully open ICE40 FPGA BeagleBone Cape: "unlike most FPGA dev boards, the BeagleWire's hardware, software, and FPGA toolchain are completely open source." The BeagleWire is available through April 12, 2018 and is $85.

As reported on Wired and TechCrunch, GitHub "survived the biggest DDoS attack ever recorded" this week, taking it offline for less than ten minutes. Read GitHub's incident report for all the details.

Google announced the first round of 2018's Open Source Bonus winners yesterday: "Twice a year Googlers nominate open source contributors outside of the company for their contributions to open source projects, including those used by Google." See the full list here.

Ars Technica reports that attackers are using rTorrent to install currency-mining software on computers running UNIX-like systems. The attackers have generated nearly $4000 so far.

Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS (Xenial Xerus) was released yesterday. The update includes "security updates and corrections for other high-impact bugs, with a focus on maintaining stability and compatibility with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS". See the release announcement for more info and links to downloads.

Deadline for proposals for the Open Source Summit Japan and the Automotive Linux Summit is March 18th. The co-located events are June 20–22, 2018, Tokyo, Japan.

Jill Franklin is an editorial professional with more than 17 years experience in technical and scientific publishing, both print and digital. As Executive Editor of Linux Journal, she wrangles writers, develops content, manages projects, meets deadlines and makes sentences sparkle. She also was Managing Editor for TUX and Embedded Linux Journal, and the book Linux in the Workplace. Before entering the Linux and open-source realm, she was Managing Editor of several scientific and scholarly journals, including Veterinary Pathology, The Journal of Mammalogy, Toxicologic Pathology and The Journal of Scientific Exploration. In a previous life, she taught English literature and composition, managed a bookstore and tended bar. When she’s not bugging writers about deadlines or editing copy, she throws pots, gardens and reads.