News Digest

List of things I find interesting and think people should know about:

• Caylon is a new programming language from RedHat that is meant for large system development and can run on both the Java virtual machine (JVM) and web browsers’ JavaScript engine. This makes it useful for programming both the client and server-side components of modern applications.
• Bad Bios is the nickname given by Dragos Ruiu, an apparently well-known security researcher to a new type of malware found in the wild that seems to be able to infect computer BIOS components directly and then escalate the attack in infect all popular operating systems, Linux-based ones included. Not stopping there, it also seems this malware is capable of communicating with an infected computer even when all its communication components have been disconnected. It seems to do this by utilizing high-frequency sound-waves. This technique of using sound to facilitate communications with otherwise disconnected computers was also explored by scientists from Germany.
• InfiniSQL seems to be one man’s projects to produce a very scalable multi-node database. It seems to be network-protocol-compatible with PostgreSQL and may have an interesting future.
• Webminstats is a server performance statistics collection plug-in for Webmin. Used together those tools can provide a useful monitoring and management solution (although not very pleasant looking, though that can be somewhat  remedied) for small to medium sized networks.
• ExplainShell is a new web-based tool for  breaking down complex Linux shell commands and explaining their components. It was recently open-sourced and seems to have a good potential of becoming a very useful tool for people trying to learn Linux shell usage and scripting. The developer was even kind enough to include a readme file listing instruction on how to run your own copy of the website.