Daily Tech Briefing: June 4, 2014

Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference keynote included the introduction to a platform called HomeKit, designed for controlling the home. The platform works with brands such as Philips, Honeywell, Kwikset and Neatamo, and allows users to lock or unlock their doors, adjust their lighting, control their thermostats and more.

Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, added that HomeKit also integrates with Siri, so users will be able to give a command like “get ready for bed” and HomeKit will do things like turn off the lights and set the alarm.

Samsung has introduced the first commercially available smartphone running Tizen, an open-source mobile platform that the company helped develop. The phone, known as the Samsung Z, was introduced at the opening day of the Tizen Developer Conference in San Francisco.

However, it is unlikely that the phone will be made available in U.S. markets, at least in its present iteration. It will be released in Russia during the third quarter of this year before it expands to other markets.

Red Hat has announced that Matthew Miller will be the new leader of its Fedora community Linux project, replacing Robyn Bergeron. Miller’s first involvement with the Fedora project dates back to the Fedora Legacy project, which ran from 2004 until 2006 to support older Red Hat Linux distributions.

In more recent years, Miller first proposed the idea of “Fedora.next,” a new approach for building Fedora that is being implemented for the Fedora 21 release later this year. Miller told eWEEK that he hopes his active participation in the Fedora community for years makes him a good choice to become the Fedora Project Leader.

The U.S. Department of Justice has announced that it has cooperated with international law enforcement groups and private companies to target the Gameover Zeus botnet and the Cryptolocker ransomware the botnet distributed.

The Gameover Zeus Trojan infiltrates computer systems and puts them under control of a criminal group based out of Russia and Ukraine. The botnet has caused more than $100 million in damages and compromised an estimated 500,000 to 1 million computers.