Some links of stuff I appreciated this month. Links to French content are in a separate post.

In the servers world

SSL. October is the month we disabled SSLv3 protocol support from nginx following the POODLE attack. So this means we can look to this paper, nginx configuration and a tool to check SSL configuration. The provider Linode has published a comprehensive guide to mitigate the attack.

FreeBSD. FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE will soon be available. The virtual terminal console driver vt is improved. Oh, and you can now boot bhybe on ZFS. Shell servers will have to deal with the fact login.conf settings will take precedence on .profile and other shell environment for variables like path, blocksize or umask.

Docker. To improve Docker workflow, nitrous.io has released tug, a set of scripts in Go to help common tasks.

Thus shall ye compile in JavaScript

Humble Bundle launches the Humble Mozilla Bundle, games compiled in ASM.js and so playable in the browser.

Meanwhile, in the functionnal language world, a paper shows you can compile OCaml in JS, an it’s sometimes quicker in the JS JIT than it its own JIT (but well… you can also compile OCaml in native, and OCaml JIT isn’t really well optimized).

So if you want to respect this commandment, just compile your C code with clang: emscripten will then happily compile your LLVM bytecode in ASM.js.

Gamergate / NotYourShield

A CNN journalist reads the gamergate as the end of the narration controlled by journalists.

When an Examiner journalist suggests #NotYourShield is 4chan white heterosexual users posing as women and PoC, his tweet is replied with a lot of photos from women and PoC. We so now have a picture of the diversity in video games (permanent link).

On a related theme, I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup is interesting to read and heavily commented.

Finally, a call for help:

I have a new project, but I need your help. Looking for diverse female voices in STEM that could donate their time & expertise.

— Randi Actually (@freebsdgirl) October 20, 2014

Curiosities

Some scientists push to a new definition of planet, to take in account exoplanets. In such a definition, Pluto would be again a planet. Harvard organized a debate, this position wins.

At Databricks, they carved this pumpkin for halloween:

Carved something scary into pumpkin cc/ @jamesiry @databricks (office jackolantern) pic.twitter.com/sqiNaYGDQy

— Heather Miller (@heathercmiller) October 27, 2014