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Ian Murdock , the founder the Debian Linux operating system and the creator of apt-get, has passed away. Yes, it is very sad to announce that Ian Murdock is not between us. His death has touched the entire software community. He was just 42. The announcement of Murdock death came out via a blog post on Docker website, where Murdock was working as a member of the technical staff. The cause of death is unclear at present, but Murdock tweeted the same day that he would commit suicide that night. His Twitter account had since been deleted. However, at that time, some people speculated that Murdock's account had been hacked and that the tweets were not by him. Murdock posted some Tweets  on Monday suggesting he had been involved in a police case and has been beaten by the police and charged with battery. However, neither Docker, nor the San Francisco Police Department immediately commented on Murdock's actual cause of death. Murdock developed Debian in ...

Google appears to be no longer using Java application programming interfaces (APIs) from Oracle in future versions of its Android mobile operating system, and switching to an open source alternative instead. Google will be making use of OpenJDK – an open source version of Oracle's Java Development Kit (JDK) – for future Android builds. This was first highlighted by a "mysterious Android codebase commit" submitted to Hacker News. However, Google confirmed to VentureBeat that the upcoming Android N will use OpenJDK, rather its own implementation of the Java APIs. Google and Oracle have been fighting it out for years in a lawsuit, and it is hard to imagine that such a massive change is not related to the search engine giant's ongoing legal dispute with Oracle, however. What Google and Oracle are Fighting About The dispute started when Oracle sued Google for copyright in 2010, claiming that Google improperly used a part of its programming language...

The non-profit organization behind TOR – the largest online anonymity network that allows people to hide their real identity online – will soon be launching a " Bug Bounty Program " for researchers who find loopholes in Tor apps. The bounty program was announced during the recurring ' State of the Onion' talk by Tor Project at Chaos Communication Congress held in Hamburg, Germany. Bug bounty programs are cash rewards gave by companies or organizations to white hat hackers and researchers who hunt for serious security vulnerabilities in their website or products and then responsibly disclose them. Bug bounties are designed to encourage security researchers and hackers to responsibly report the vulnerabilities they discovered, rather than exploiting it. Here's what one of the founders of the Tor Project, Nick Mathewson , said about the bug bounty program as reported by Motherboard: "We are grateful to the people who have looked at ou...

North Korea has its own homegrown computer operating system that looks remarkably just like Apple's OS X, which not only prevents potential foreign hacking attempts but also provides extensive surveillance capabilities. Two German researchers have just conducted an in-depth analysis of the secretive state's operating system and found that the OS does more than what is known about it. Dubbed Red Star OS , the operating system based on a Linux 2009 version called Fedora 11 limits its users to a government-approved view of the world and has the tendency to ' watermark ' files on USB sticks to track user's shuttling contraband material. Red Star OS Tracks User's Every Move In short, whenever a user inserts a USB storage device containing photos, videos or other documents, into a computer running Red Star, the OS takes the current hard disk's serial number, encrypts that number, and writes that encrypted serial into the file, marking it. The p...

Washington State Department of Corrections (DoC) is facing an investigation after it early released around 3,200 prisoners over the course of 13 years , since 2002, when a bug was introduced in the software used to calculate time credits for inmates' good behavior. The software glitch led to a miscalculation of sentence reductions that US prisoners were receiving for their good behaviour. Over the next 13 years, the median number of days of those released early from prison was 49 days before their correct release date. "This problem was allowed to continue for 13 years is deeply disappointing to me, totally unacceptable and, frankly, maddening," Washington State Governor Jay Inslee said in a statement . "I've [many] questions about how and why this happened, and I understand that members of the public will have those same queries." What's the Bug and How did it Remain Undetected for 13 Years? The issue lies in DoC software that is...