The OpenAFS Release Team is pleased to announce that the first 1.8.3 release candidate, 1.8.3pre1, is now available.

In a 2018 article by technical writer and blogger Jim Porell entitled "Porting an Enterprise App to System z – my experience. Part 2 of 4: The Good," Sine Nomine Associates and Neale Ferguson were applauded for their help with information on Linux and System z. Ferguson, in particular, acted as a mentor for the author, pointing him to useful downloads and libraries.

In a recent article for TechCrunch.com, Mike Volpi discusses the vital role of Open Source in the software universe, especially with the purchase of Red Hat by IBM. The article, "How open-source software took over the world," was published in early January 2019.

CEO E. Margarete Ziemer announced this week that Sine Nomine Associates has donated $10,000 to the OpenAFS Foundation. The Foundation reported that this was the largest donation it has received that was not a workshop sponsorship.

SNA Principle Engineer Neale Ferguson has posted copies of the presentations from the September 2018 Hillgang gathering in Washington D.C.

The Register reports that maverick microcomputer engineer and founder of CompuPro Bill Godbout was a victim of California's swift-moving Camp Wildfire. Godbout was 79.

On October 17, 2018 Slashdot posted news that an authentication bypass in Libssh leaves servers open for hacking. 'Ars Technica reported: "a four-year-old bug in the Secure Shell implementation known as libssh that makes it trivial for just about anyone to gain unfettered administrative control of a vulnerable server."'

OpenAFS 1.8.2 and 1.6.23 are the next releases in the current and old stable series of releases for UNIX/Linux systems. Previous versions contained a severe vulnerability when the in-tree backup system is used, and additional vulnerabilities of moderate severity, which are fixed in these releases.