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Submission + - OpenBSD 7.4 has been released (openbsd.org)

Submitted by Noryungi
Noryungi writes: As announced officially on the official site OpenBSD 7.4 has been officially released. The 55th release of this BSD operating system, known for being security oriented brings a lot of new things, including dynamic tracer, pfsync improvements, loads of security goodies and virtualization improvements. Grab your copy today!

Comment Re:Anyone using OpenBSD in production? (Score 1) 135

by Noryungi (#63439256) Attached to: OpenBSD 7.3 Released

In production, pretty much anything that has to run reliably and without a hitch for years.

Firewalls, routers, DNS server, Email server, all of these running CARP to cluster these functions and prevent service interruption. SSH boxes as well

On OpenBSD, you don't have 'apt', you have 'pkg_add' for applications (pkg_add -i vim to install vim, for instance) 'syspatch' to apply security patches and 'sysupgrade' to upgrade from one version to the next. I have just used sysupgrade to upgrade machines from 7.2 to 7.3 - super smooth.

Everything that you do with OpenBSD, you can do with Linux, including having a hardened security installation - it just comes 'out of the box' with all the security bells and whistles, and the whole system is of a very high quality, very well put together, very well documented. Try it, you may like it.

Comment Re:wut (Score 4, Informative) 135

by Noryungi (#63439226) Attached to: OpenBSD 7.3 Released

Let me put it this way: if you take a look at some mailing lists like OSS, where people discuss things they actually know, you will note OpenBSD is one of the OS they go back to constantly.

And the refrain is: "Oh yeah, OpenBSD disabled this, or corrected this, or implemented this 3 years ago".

Maybe you don't like OpenBSD programmers or BDFL for their abrasive personalities, but they are way ahead of Linux in many ways.
NASA

NASA Ditching 'Insensitive' Nicknames for Cosmic Objects (cnet.com) 184

Posted by EditorDavid from the wishing-on-a-star dept.
NASA is "reconsidering how we talk about space," reports CNET: NASA gave two examples of cosmic objects it'll no longer use nicknames for. Planetary nebula NGC 2392 has been called the "Eskimo Nebula." "'Eskimo' is widely viewed as a colonial term with a racist history, imposed on the indigenous people of Arctic regions," NASA explained. NASA already added a note to a 2008 image release showing NGC 2392 that explains the decision to retire the nickname.

The agency will also use only the official designations of NGC 4567 and NGC 4568 to refer to a pair of spiral galaxies that were known as the "Siamese Twins Galaxy."

This reexamination of cosmic names is ongoing.
CNN explains NASA's rationale: "Nicknames are often more approachable and public-friendly than official names for cosmic objects, such as Barnard 33, whose nickname 'the Horsehead Nebula' invokes its appearance," NASA said in a release this week. "But often seemingly innocuous nicknames can be harmful and detract from the science...."

The space agency says it "will use only the official, International Astronomical Union designations in cases where nicknames are inappropriate."

Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, DC, said, "Science is for everyone, and every facet of our work needs to reflect that value."
Medicine

Can You Get Covid-19 Again? It's Very Unlikely, Experts Say 55

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: The anecdotes are alarming. A woman in Los Angeles seemed to recover from Covid-19, but weeks later took a turn for the worse and tested positive again. A New Jersey doctor claimed several patients healed from one bout only to become reinfected with the coronavirus. And another doctor said a second round of illness was a reality for some people, and was much more severe. These recent accounts tap into people's deepest anxieties that they are destined to succumb to Covid-19 over and over, feeling progressively sicker, and will never emerge from this nightmarish pandemic. And these stories fuel fears that we won't be able to reach herd immunity -- the ultimate destination where the virus can no longer find enough victims to pose a deadly threat.

But the anecdotes are just that -- stories without evidence of reinfections, according to nearly a dozen experts who study viruses. "I haven't heard of a case where it's been truly unambiguously demonstrated," said Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Other experts were even more reassuring. While little is definitively known about the coronavirus, just seven months into the pandemic, the new virus is behaving like most others, they said, lending credence to the belief that herd immunity can be achieved with a vaccine. It may be possible for the coronavirus to strike the same person twice, but it's highly unlikely that it would do so in such a short window or to make people sicker the second time, they said. What's more likely is that some people have a drawn-out course of infection, with the virus taking a slow toll weeks to months after their initial exposure. People infected with the coronavirus typically produce immune molecules called antibodies. Several teams have recently reported that the levels of these antibodies decline in two to three months, causing some consternation. But a drop in antibodies is perfectly normal after an acute infection subsides, said Dr. Michael Mina, an immunologist at Harvard University.

Comment Re:still around eh? (Score 3, Interesting) 49

Less than 1% of Linux users? Care to back that assertion with solid numbers?

Slackware is still a very popular distribution, and I know a few companies use it for stable infrastructure services (DNS, Proxy/Reverse proxies, Firewalls, etc). It is a very stable and regularly updated distributions.

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