Enlarge / Open source ingredients borked some Chef users' systems because of an ICE protest by one developer. (credit: Kelsey McNeal / Getty Images) On September 17, Seth Vargo—a former employee of Chef, the software deployment automation company—found out via a tweet that Chef licenses had been sold to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement...

Enlarge / Buster is a good boy, but is he a good Linux distro release? (credit: Pixar / Disney) The Debian project, the upstream mother of countless Linux distributions, has released Debian 10, also known as "Buster." And yes, that's a reference to the character from Toy Story. All Debian releases are named after Toy Story characters. Over the...

Enlarge / The "warshipping" rig, exposed, with solar recharging panel. (credit: Sean Gallagher) LAS VEGAS—Penetration testers have long gone to great lengths to demonstrate the potential chinks in their clients' networks before less friendly attackers exploit them. But in recent tests by IBM's X-Force Red, the penetration testers never had to leave...

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft) One of the most important ways that Microsoft wants to make the new Chromium-based Edge different from the current EdgeHTML-based Edge is in its support for other platforms. The original Edge was, for no good reason, tied to Windows 10, meaning that Web developers on platforms such as Windows 7 or macOS had no way...

Enlarge / Google's Pixelbook. (credit: Valentina Palladino) Just under a year ago, there were signs that Google was modifying the firmware of its Pixelbook laptop to enable dual booting into Windows 10. The firmware was updated to give the Pixelbook the ability to boot into an "Alternative OS" ("AltOS" mode). The work included references to the...

Enlarge / The Eiffel Tower. (credit: Pedro Szekely) Search engines today are more than just the dumb keyword matchers they used to be. You can ask a question—say, "How tall is the tower in Paris?"—and they'll tell you that the Eiffel Tower is 324 meters (1,063 feet) tall, about the same as an 81-story building. They can do this even though the...