Wikipedia, RHEL ditches MySQL and moves to MariaDB

Prior to this Wikipedia has moved to MariaDB from MySQL recently.

According to news from the Red Hat summit which concludes in Boston on Friday, RHEL 7 will also include MongoDB.

The switch was expected to happen after Red Hat's community distribution Fedora announced earlier this year that it would be moving to MariaDB. But it will come as a major jolt to Oracle, the owner of MySQL. (openSUSE, the community distribution of SUSE, announced a switch to MariaDB at the same time as Fedora.)

Many changes in Fedora foreshadow changes in the enterprise distribution.

Once RHEL makes the switch, it will flow on to CentOS, a distribution that provides RHEL without the trademarks, hence making it free in terms of cost. CentOS is widely used by small businesses.

MySQL became Oracle's property after the company bought Sun Microsystems in 2010. There have been many complaints about its stewardship of what was once the last word in open-source database software.
MariaDB is a fork of MySQL that was begun by Ulf Michael Widenius under his new company, Monty Program. Widenius is one of the three co-founders of the original MySQL. The company was sold to Sun in 2008.

Earlier this year, Monty Program merged with SkySQL, a company set up in October 2010 by former employees of the original MySQL. Notable among SkySQL's ranks are former MySQL senior vice-president of global services, Ulf Sandberg, and adviser David Axmark, another of the three co-founders of MySQL.

Widenius and several others raised objections to Oracle's acquisition of MySQL but failed to stop the sale going through.

MySQL's first employee in Australia, Arjen Lentz, said Fedora and OpenSuSE were community driven, whereas RHEL's switch to MariaDB was a corporate decision with far-reaching implications.

"I presume there is not much love lost between Red Hat and Oracle (particularly since the "Oracle Linux" stuff started) but I'm pretty sure this move won't make Oracle any happier," said Lentz, who now runs his own consultancy, Open Query, from Queensland. "Thus it's a serious move in political terms."

He said that in practical terms, MariaDB should now get much more of a public footprint with people (people knowing about MariaDB and it being a/the replacement for MySQL), and direct acceptance both by individual users and corporates.

"Monty Program actually merged (aka was bought) by SkySQL a few months ago. SkySQL does not have significant activity in Australia and New Zealand, Open Query has. SkySQL is currently mainly active in Europe.

"So in terms of significance for AU/NZ, Open Query is definitely happy with this move, and is set to gain business for it. Which is nice in economic terms for Australia, it's not a foreign company with Australian clients."

Hackers invade Oregon computers

Hackers defaced the home page of the Oregon University System, posting a caustic message telling President Barack Obama to mind his own business and stop talking about the disputed Iranian election.

Attempts to access the university system's Web site were automatically redirected to another page, where readers viewed a message said to be from Iran that asserted there was no cheating in the election. That message was up for 90 minutes before university system technicians intervened Wednesday morning.

The hackers apparently took advantage of third-party software that had not been properly updated, university system spokeswoman Diane Saunders said. Hackers frequently attack the system's computers, but technicians usually beat back their efforts, she said.

"They are able to stomp on most of them," Saunders said.

She said nobody's personal computers were attacked. Also, no malicious software — which could give hackers remote access to computer hard drives — was introduced.

There was no immediate indication why the hackers targeted the system, which oversees Oregon's seven public universities.

The message that was posted on the Web site, made available to The Associated Press by the university system, addressed Obama and said it was being posted from Iran. The text, in red on a black background, calls on Obama to focus on the economic crisis instead of commenting on the Iranian election.

The message also makes derogatory comments about Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, who has contended the June 12 vote was rigged.

Twitter hacks spreads porn trojon

Former Apple Macintosh evangelist Guy Kawasaki [cq] posts Twitter messages about a lot of different thing, but the message he put up on Tuesday afternoon was really out of character.

"Leighton Meester sex tape video free download!"

His message included a link that, after some further clicking, landed Kawasaki's followers on a fake porn site where online criminals try to install a nasty Trojan horse program on victim's computers. And in an interesting twist, the program attacks both Mac and Windows users.

Kawasaki, a well known entrepreneur who is now a a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, isn't the only person whose account was misused during a new round of Twitter hacking Tuesday, but with nearly 140,000 followers he's the most high-profile. Meester, the star of the TV Show GossipGirl is also said to be the subject of a homemade sex tape that is reportedly in circulation.

It's not clear how hackers managed to gain access to Kawasaki's account -- security experts say that he and others may have fallen victim to earlier Twitter phishing attacks, where attackers tried to trick victims into logging into fake Twitter sits in hopes of stealing their login credentials.

Other hacked accounts are being used to to promote pornographic Web sites. Victims include an Arizona political blogger, an up-and-coming Canadian musician, and a Gay news site. (note, some of these Twitter pages still include pornographic and possibly malicious links)

Twitter has had its share of security problems over the past months. Earlier this year someone gained access to the Twitter accounts of U.S. President Barack Obama, Britney Spears, and others.

Recently scammers have become more aggressive on the site. They will set up new accounts and post spam messages on hot topics in hopes of gaining clicks when people search through Twitter.

And while hacked Twitter accounts are still rare, they're a much more effective way to reach victims, according to Rik Ferguson, a researcher with Trend Micro. "If you can take over an account that has a couple of thousand follower then you can get a much better return on your investment"

The Trojan link posted by Guy Kawasaki has been followed by more than 1,600 people, according to Gary Warner, director of research incomputer forensics with the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

If a Windows user actually falls for the scam and downloads the Trojan linked by Kawasaki, the software will change his DNS (domain name system) server to one that is controlled by the hackers. That gives them away to steal more information, such as Twitter passwords or even online banking credentials, Warner said. "You're going to be using a DNS server that's controlled by criminals who can point you to whatever Web site you want and you'll believe it's the site you typed into your browser."

Mac users download a similar program, which also points them to a malicious DNS server, a McAfee spokesman said.

Kawasaki didn't respond to messages left by the IDG News Service asking him about the incident, but he did leave a Twitter messagelate Tuesday afternoon, "Don't know how that Leighton Meester sex tape tweet got into my stream here. Sorry all. Sad thing is that I don't even know who she is!" he wrote. Although Kawasaki admitted he hadn't posted the link, he also did not remove it from his Twitter page.

Courtsey: Yahoo Tech News