The conference materials for BlackHat USA 09 are now online here. Only a few talks have their videos online (Dan Kaminsky’s and Mark Dowd’s) but pretty much all the papers and accompanying slides are available in PDF format. Can’t wait to get through some of these papers and increase my paranoia even more! 
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The Debian project announced a new 24 month release cycle for distribution releases a few days ago. Even greater news this will be going into effect this fall with a new release expected next Spring:
The Debian project has decided to adopt a new policy of time-based development freezes for future releases, on a two-year cycle. Freezes will from now on happen in the December of every odd year, which means that releases will from now on happen sometime in the first half of every even year. To that effect the next freeze will happen in December 2009, with a release expected in spring 2010. The project chose December as a suitable freeze date since spring releases proved successful for the releases of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (codenamed
Etch) and Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (Lenny).
This is great news for me. I have long been a fan of Debian on my servers but have found the slower release cycle much more difficult to deal with on my desktop since the packages become out of date fairly fast, even in their testing branch.
Some recent security-related news:
This week we have the a new distro with its first stable release, a bunch of familiar faces from the past few weeks, and a new beta from a major OS that came out of Berkeley…
The Official Google Blog has announced that Google plans to release an operating system based around the Chrome browser. They intend for it to be an open-source lightweight OS that targets netbooks at first and the source code will become available later this year with a consumer release planned for the 2nd half of 2010.
Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.
There’s no official word as to what the underlying operating system will be, but I feel it’s safe to assume that it will be a variant of a current Linux distro or the Linux-based Android (they do discuss how Android and Chrome OS will be separate but that doesn’t mean they won’t share pieces ).
Thanks for joining us for a holiday weekend edition of our weekly distribution roundup!