10 Top Open Source Projects That Emerged Last Year!

Open source technology reached newer heights in 2013. CodeKill Group brings ten greatest open source projects that made news in the year gone by. 

The sixth annual Black Duck Open Source Rookies of the Year awards have shortlisted the ten leading open source projects which commenced in 2013. This year's contenders range from cloud computing, software virtualization, privacy, social media, and the Internet of things. The selection has been done based on the statistics from Black Duck’s Ohloh site, which is the leading open source software directory.

1.Appium – This is an open source test automation framework that can be used with native as well as hybrid mobile apps. It runs iOS and Android apps through the WebDriver JSON wire protocol. With mobile apps becoming core to our operating infrastructure, agile development methodologies need automated testing for delivery. Appium had initially begun as a tool for SauceLabs to assist customers in building a scalable, automated test environment and now has taken on a life of its own with a rapidly expanding, diverse developer community.

2.Docker – This has created the kind of excitement which is rare for a rookie open source project. Its aim is to enable the easy creation of lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers via any application. Docker was begun by a small, commercial firm called dotCloud, but the project has grown roots and turned the heads of the big names, which include Red Hat and Google.

3.Exercism – This is a collaborative educational tool for people learning programming languages. It was initiated by Katrina Owen, an instructor who works at a small technical school in Colorado. It was started as an effort to assist students learn more collaboratively.

4.Ghost – This is solely for publishing content on the Web. It's completely customizable and completely open source. It permits you to write and post your own blog, offering the tools that make it easy and fun to do.

5.InfluxDB – This is a time-series, events, and metrics database which is written in Go without external dependencies. It is created for distribution and scale horizontally, but it can be handy even if you're running it on a single box. It also comes with a SQL-like query language created to be used with time series and analytics.

6.OpenDaylight – Its aim is to offer a fully functional SDN platform which can be used directly without the need for other components. It's aimed at making an open, standards-based SDN controller platform which is ideal for deployment in a range of production network environments.
7.OpenIoT – This started as a research project which is partly funded by the European Commission with the aim of enabling a new range of open, large-scale, intelligent Internet of things applications with the use of a cloud computing delivery model.

8.Serverspec – This offers a simple approach to testing your server configurations without any configuration management tools. By using this, you can write RSpec tests for checking your servers' configuration.

9.Tox – This project is a secure instant messaging and video chat application aimed at replacing AIM, Skype, etc. It is aimed to be a user-friendly, all-in-one communication platform for text, audio, and video chatting, and is committed to complete privacy backed by "leading class" encryption.

10.XPrivacy – This is created for preventing applications from leaking sensitive data. It can limit the categories of data that an application can make use of by feeding an app fake data or no data at all. Many data categories can be restricted, which include contacts and locations.  

9 Linux Terminal Emulators That You Can Use

A terminal emulator is one that emulates a video terminal within a separate display architecture.

Default terminals aren't always up to the mark. You can dislike anything from the features to the look and feel of a terminal. Many users often want to add a little more zing to the terminal that they are working on. For this purpose, terminal emulators come in handy. Here are nine such emulators that add a lot more to the command line.

1. Guake: This emulator is based on the Yakuake Terminal emulator from the KDE desktop environment. Interestingly, this terminal’s design is inspired by first person shooter computer games like Quake. Fedora, Debian, ArchLinux and Ubuntu have this as part of their default repositories.

2. Terminator: This is a cross platform terminal emulator, which has some very useful features. It is also available in the default repositories of well known Linux distributions like Ubuntu and others. It was released under GPL.

3. Yakuake: As mentioned before, this terminal emulator is what inspired the Guake emulator. It is based on the KDE Konsole technology and comes as an app for the KDE environment. It does face some conflicts with a GNOME desktop, but runs perfectly smoothly on KDE.

4. ROXTerm: This terminal provides a wide range of features for Linux power users. Interestingly, it wasn’t originally meant to be so. Rather, it was created to be a lightweight alternative for the GNOME terminal.

5. Eterm: This is a colour terminal emulator, which is perhaps the lightest one available. It is meant to be a replacement for the xterm emulator and is quite fast.

6. Rxvt: This is another replacement terminal for xterm. While it is not as light as Eterm, it still doesn’t take up much of the system’s resources.

7. Aterm: This Linux terminal emulator is based on the rxvt emulator. This terminal comes with attractive visual effects an has perform the basic functionalities that we see in terminals.

8. Wterm: This terminal emulator is also based on the Rxvt emulator. It has added features like background images, transparency and reverse transparency. It can be customised to a large extent.

9. TermKit: This is a graphic oriented terminal emulator, which has been created using WebKit.

19 Free Resources That Will Make You A Pro Git User!

Source code management and version control are important activities for any programmer. Git is the king of these activities. 

When it comes to working on a code as a team, Git is the pick of the lot. This version control and source code management tool is used by almost any programmer worth his salt. Learning about Git is almost considered to be an imperative for a programmer. So, here are a few ebooks and cheatsheets that will help you do it like a pro.

Free Ebooks

1. Pro Git

2. Pro Git Reedited

3. Git Immersion

4. Git internals

5. Git Magic

6. Git Pocket Guide

7. Git Reference

8. Version Control by Example (Mercurial, Subversion, Verasity)

9. Git Succinctly, Syncfusion

10. Git Workflows

11. Think Like (a) Git: A Guide for the Perplexed

12. Git In The Trenches

13. Conversational Git

14. Git From The Bottom Up

Cheatsheets

1. GIT Cheatsheet

2. Tower

3. Git Reference

4. Atllasian

5. Git cheatsheet from SalesForce 

Nine Greatest Hackers Of 2013

Code Kill Group takes a look at 2013’s hacking hall of shame members which include Anonymous and the Blackhole cybercrime gang apart from state-sponsored groups. 

Last year saw a series of hacks that were committed across the countries. These were carried out by groups who are well known for other hacking events As cited on informationweek.com, let’s take a look at nine hallmark hacking events of 2013 below- 1.Anonymous hacking collective - The group commenced the year with a legal bang by backing a White House "We the People" petition which argued that DDoS a/tt//acks must be protected as a form of free speech, for using it to protest injustice. Then the group’s Operation Last Resort meant hacking the US Sentencing Commission website establishing sentencing policies and practices for the federal courts in order to include a game of Asteroids for protesting federal prosecutors having threatened Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz with a 35-year prison sentence for downloading millions of documents from the JSTOR archive, which drove Swartz to commit suicide. Anonymous earned great praise in October for its Operation Maryville that highlighted the case of two Missouri girls, ages 13 and 14, who were both allegedly raped last year with the prosecutors dropping charges against one of the girl's alleged attackers. 2.Stratfor hacker Jeremy Hammond - Jeremy Hammond hacked into the private intelligence contractor Strategic Forecasting in the latter part of 2011 and posted the stolen files to a server which now appears to have belonged to the FBI. The stolen information was distributed by him to WikiLeaks, that published it as part of its Global Intelligence Files program. Hammond was indicted in 2012 and in May 2013, he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to engage in computer hacking. Once Hammond had pleaded guilty and Judge Loretta Preska sentenced him in November, his supporters launched a letter-writing campaign in pursuit of leniency, arguing in part that Hammond had been entrapped by the former LulzSec leader Sabu, who'd become an FBI informant six months before Hammond hacked Stratfor, and who was being monitored around the clock by handlers at the bureau. 3.Ex-LulzSec leader Sabu - Sabu whose real name is Hector Xavier Monsegur, the former Anonymous participant and ex-leader of LulzSec, was quietly arrested by the FBI on June 7, 2011. Monsegur who instantly turned into an informant has been assisting the bureau ever since. The assistance included collecting evidence and in certain cases entrapping members of Anonymous and LulzSec, and also assisting the FBI in identifying system vulnerabilities and exploits. Hammond stated that "What the United States could not accomplish legally, it used Sabu, and by extension, me and my co-defendants, to accomplish illegally." 4.Chinese APT1 attack crew - The alert was sounded in February when the security firm Mandiant published a report into a group operating from China known as APT1 which it stated had used spear phishing attacks to compromise 141 businesses in 20 different industries. Instead of being contract or state-sponsored hackers, Mandiant stated, APT1 was actually part of the People's Liberation Army Unit 61398, which it characterized as an elite military hacking unit. 5.Syrian Electronic Army - The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) is another band of state-affiliated attackers. This is allied with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. It serves as an online propaganda wing for Assad, it has hacked many sites in 2013 which range from National Public Radio and Reuters to the BBC and the Onion for protesting perceived reporting accuracies or slights against Assad. 6.Blackhole founder Paunch - The case of 27-year-old Paunch known as Dmitry Fedotov in news reports was arrested by police in the Russian city of Togliatti in October, along with 12 of his alleged cohorts. They are charged with building and operating -- and in Paunch's case, masterminding -- the well-known Blackhole crimeware toolkit that first came in the summer of 2010. 7.US bank DDoS attackers - The series of DDoS attacks against US financial institutions was started in September 2012 by a group known as Cyber Fighters of Izz ad-Din al-Qassam. The attacks have gone on with the group announcing the fourth wave of attacks in July 2013. Ending 2013, the attacks against Wall Street websites are continuing, which has earned the hacking group an accolade of sorts. 8.Federal Bureau of Investigation - The FBI's cracking of the Tor onion-routing system this summer, as a portion of a year-long investigation into a child pornography distribution ring. The Tor network is beloved by privacy aficionados and activists as it can be utilized for hiding not only data flowing over the Internet, but also who's communicating with whom. Also, Tor's hidden services marked by a dot-onion (.onion) domain name can make a website reachable only via the Tor network. 9.National Security Agency –As per documents leaked by Snowden, the agency's Tailored Access Operations division utilized malware for hacking into 50,000 PCs for surveillance purposes by 2012. As per the documents, the agency's Special Source Operations division has been hacking into Internet backbones as part of the digital dragnet. The surveillance operation was built for recording huge quantities of information flowing across the Internet.

5 Things About Upcoming Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella

Microsoft is waiting for its next CEO to come on board. If rumours hold any truth, Satya Nadella is the man, who will take the reins of the Redmond giant after Steve Ballmer  

Online reports claim that Satya Nadella will soon become the CEO of Microsoft. Nadella, who has invested over 20 years in Microsoft, has been a quiet figure in tech circles. He could go from setting up Microsoft’s cloud computing infrastructure to CEO before too long. We are sure that you are curious to know about the next CEO of Microsoft. Look no further. Here are five things about the man you must know.

1.The India connection – He was born in 1967 in Hyderabad. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Engineering in Electronics and Communication from the Manipal University in India. He, then, went to US to continue his education and got his Master of Science degree from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

2. Initial years in Silicon Valley – Before his job at Microsoft, Nadella worked as a technology staff member with Sun Microsoystems. In 1992, he changed his job and joined Microsoft as a Program Manager in the Windows Developer Relations group. He rose quickly at Microsoft and became the Senior VP of Research and Development for the company’s online services. Nadella also became VP of the Microsoft Business solution group.

3. The cloud guy - Nadella was associated with Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, and assisted in growing the product, while he was still with the team. Nadella was key for assisting Microsoft’s technologies, its database, Windows server and developer tools to the cloud.

4. Magic touch - Nadella’s role as the President of Microsoft’s Server and Tools business is what has awarded him the position of CEO of the company. As president, Nadella got in place of Bob Muglia and assisted the company change business and tech from “client-server software to cloud infrastructure and services.” At the moment, Nadella leads Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise group, working towards creating and running computing programmes, developer tools and cloud services.

5.The binding agent - Nadella and his team can deliver work on delivering “Cloud OS”, Microsoft’s next-gen backend platform that powers all of Microsoft’s Internet scale cloud services, as well as Office 365, Bing, SkyDrive, Xbox Live, Skype and Dynamics. The platform can also offer products to businesses, including Windows Azure, Windows Server, SQL Server, Visual Studio and System Center.