Today’s topics include Google’s disclosure of flaws in Avast, Comodo and Malwarebytes products; Canonical’s launch of Ubuntu Linux on tablets for computing convergence; Intel’s gains in employee diversity efforts; and CoreOS’ launch of Docker Rival Rkt 1.0.
The Google Project Zero security research effort publicly disclosed multiple security flaws in products from big antivirus vendors, including Avast, Comodo and Malwarebytes.
Google is targeting security vendors that have forked the open-source Chromium Web browser to build their own secure browsers. Charles Zinkowski, director of corporate communications at Comodo, assured users that the software is always being updated, patched, fixed and improved.
Canonical, the lead sponsor of Ubuntu Linux, is on a mission to create a converged platform where a single operating system is able to power a desktop, a mobile phone and now a tablet.
The company launched the BQ Aquarius M10 Ubuntu Edition tablet, which it says is the first tablet running Ubuntu Linux. With the new BQ Aquarius M10 tablet, users will get the benefits of a touch-screen interface as well as optional capabilities to extend a desktop Ubuntu experience to tablets.
Last year, Intel promised to spend $300 million over five years to increase the diversity of its workforce. The goal was to achieve full representation of women and underrepresented minorities at all levels of the company by 2020. According to Intel’s 2015 Diversity Report, the percentage of women within the company increased to 24.8 percent by the end of last year.
The percentage of underrepresented minorities—including African Americans, Native Americans and Hispanics—grew to 12.4 percent by the end of 2015.
CoreOS released rkt 1.0, providing container users with an alternative runtime to Docker. While rkt is a competitor to the Docker runtime, users will still be able to run application containers that have been built with Docker tools.
CoreOS says rkt will provide improved performance and security controls, as well as integration with CoreOS’ larger platform effort Tectonic, which is the CoreOS commercial Kubernetes platform.