Month: July 2021

Enlarge / OpenZFS added distributed RAID topologies to its toolkit with today's 2.1.0 release. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Friday afternoon, the OpenZFS project released version 2.1.0 of our perennial favorite "it's complicated but it's worth it" filesystem. The new release is compatible with FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE and up, and Linux kernels 3.10-5.13. This release offers several general performance improvements, as well as a few entirely new features—mostly targeting enterprise and other extremely advanced use cases.

Today, we're going to focus on arguably the biggest feature OpenZFS 2.1.0 adds—the dRAID vdev topology. dRAID has been under active development since at least 2015, and reached beta status when merged into OpenZFS master in November 2020. Since then, it's been heavily tested in several major OpenZFS development shops—meaning today's release is "new" to production status, not "new" as in untested.

Distributed RAID (dRAID) overview

If you already thought ZFS topology was a complex topic, get ready to have your mind blown. Distributed RAID (dRAID) is an entirely new vdev topology we first encountered in a presentation at the 2016 OpenZFS Dev Summit.

Enlarge (credit: Mateusz Slodkowski/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Google has given the boot to nine Android apps downloaded more than 5.8 million times from the company's Play marketplace after researchers said these apps used a sneaky way to steal users' Facebook login credentials.

In a bid to win users’ trust and lower their guard, the apps provided fully functioning services for photo editing and framing, exercise and training, horoscopes, and removal of junk files from Android devices, according to a post published by security firm Dr. Web. All of the identified apps offered users an option to disable in-app ads by logging into their Facebook accounts. Users who chose the option saw a genuine Facebook login form containing fields for entering usernames and passwords.

Then, as Dr. Web researchers wrote:

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

The nation's largest phone companies have met a federal deadline to deploy a new anti-robocall technology, but unwanted calls and scams will continue to be an annoying problem for Americans for the foreseeable future.

Federal Communications Commission Acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel announced Wednesday that "the largest voice service providers are now using STIR/SHAKEN caller ID authentication standards in their IP networks, in accordance with the [June 30] deadline set by the FCC. This widespread implementation helps protect consumers against malicious spoofed robocalls and helps law enforcement track bad actors."

STIR/SHAKEN was deployed by large mobile carriers AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and US Cellular. In March, the FCC denied petitions for a deadline extension from Verizon and US Cellular, saying that "the petitioners have failed to meet the high standard of 'undue hardship.'" The Verizon petition was limited to a small portion of its fiber-based home phone network.