June 2018 - wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

What's Up With ProtonMail Outages?
by Peter Reutemann 28 Jun '18

28 Jun '18

Since we talked about ProtonMail in the past... 'ProtonMail, a secure email service provider used by more than two million users and references of which has been made in shows like Mr. Robot, has been facing outages for the last two days as it fights numerous DDoS attacks. "The attacks went on for several hours, although the outages were far more brief, usually several minutes at a time with the longest outage on the order of 10 minutes," a ProtonMail spokesperson told BleepingComputer, adding that it has tracked the attack to a group that claims to have ties to Russia. But things are more complicated than that, and it appears ProtonMail users, who are already annoyed at the frequent outages over the last few days, are up for more such downtimes in the coming days. BleepingComputer: But in reality, the DDoS attacks have no ties to Russia, weren't even planned to in the first place, and the group behind the attacks denounced being Russian, to begin with. Responsible for the attacks is a hacker group named Apophis Squad. In a private conversation with Bleeping Computer today, one of the group's members detailed yesterday's chain of events. The Apophis member says they targeted ProtonMail at random while testing a beta version of a DDoS booter service the group is developing and preparing to launch. The group didn't cite any reason outside "testing" for the initial and uncalled for attack on ProtonMail, which they later revealed to have been a 200 Gbps SSDP flood, according to one of their tweets. "After we sent the first attack, we downed it for 60 seconds," an Apophis Squad member told us. He said the group didn't intend to harass ProtonMail all day yesterday or today but decided to do so after ProtonMail's CTO, Bart Butler, responded to one of their tweets calling the group "clowns." This was a questionable response on the part of the ProtonMail CTO, as it set the hackers against his company even more. "So we then downed them for a few hours," the Apophis Squad said. Subsequent attacks included a whopping TCP-SYN flood estimated at 500 Gbps, as claimed by the group.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/18/06/28/159252 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Every Android Device Launched Since 2012 Impacted By RAMpage Vulnerability
by Peter Reutemann 28 Jun '18

28 Jun '18

'Almost all Android devices released since 2012 are vulnerable to RAMpage bug, an international team of academics has revealed today. >From a report: The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-9442, is a variation of the Rowhammer attack. Rowhammer is a hardware bug in modern memory cards. A few years back researchers discovered that when someone would send repeated write/read requests to the same row of memory cells, the write/read operations would create an electrical field that would alter data stored on nearby memory. In the following years, researchers discovered that Rowhammer-like attacks affected personal computers, virtual machines, and Android devices. Through further researcher, they also found they could execute Rowhammer attacks via JavaScript code, GPU cards, and network packets.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/18/06/28/160220 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Google Doubles Down on Linux and Open Source
by Peter Reutemann 28 Jun '18

28 Jun '18

'Google couldn't exist without Linux and open-source software. While you may not think of Google as a Linux company in the same way as you do Canonical, Red Hat, or SUSE, it wouldn't be the search and advertising giant it is today without Linux. So, it makes sense that Google is moving up from its Silver membership in The Linux Foundation, to the Platinum level. With this jump in status, Google gets a seat on the Foundation's board of directors. This position will be filled by Sarah Novotny, the head of open source strategy for Google Cloud Platform. Earlier this week, Chinese tech giant Tencent joined the Linux Foundation as a platinum member.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/06/27/1926211 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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BBC Releases Computer History Archive
by Peter Reutemann 28 Jun '18

28 Jun '18

'A slice of computing history has been made public, giving people the opportunity to delve into an archive that inspired a generation of coders. The Computer Literacy Project led to the introduction of the BBC Micro alongside programs which introduced viewers to the principles of computing. It included interviews with innovators such as Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak. The BBC hopes the 1980s archive will encourage today's youngsters to become involved in computing. With the release of the archive, viewers can now search and browse all of the programmes from the project. The archive includes 267 programs, and 166 BBC Micro programs that were used on-screen.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/06/27/2037216 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Finally, It's the Year of the Linux... Supercomputer
by Peter Reutemann 27 Jun '18

27 Jun '18

'From ZDNet: "The latest TOP500 Supercomputer list is out. What's not surprising is that Linux runs on every last one of the world's fastest supercomputers. Linux has dominated supercomputing for years. But, Linux only took over supercomputing lock, stock, and barrel in November 2017. That was the first time all of the TOP500 machines were running Linux. Before that IBM AIX, a Unix variant, was hanging on for dear life low on the list." An interesting architectural note: "GPUs, not CPUs, now power most of supercomputers' speed."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/18/06/27/152216 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Anonymizing Printed Documents
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 27 Jun '18

27 Jun '18

It’s been known for a while that many printer vendors add extra hard-to-detect dots to their printouts to make a pattern that can be used to identify the source of the document later. Now a research group <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/27/german_researchers_defeat_printer_t…> has found a way to stymie this process by adding extra dots that fit the patterns, but confuse the identification system. They even have source code on GitHub.

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OpenBSD Chief De Raadt Says No Easy Fix For New Intel CPU Bug 'TLBleed'
by Peter Reutemann 26 Jun '18

26 Jun '18

'Recompiling is unlikely to be a catch-all solution for a recently unveiled Intel CPU vulnerability known as TLBleed, the details of which were leaked on Friday, the head of the OpenBSD project Theo de Raadt says. iTWire reports: The details of TLBleed, which gets its name from the fact that the flaw targets the translation lookaside buffer, a CPU cache, were leaked to the British tech site, The Register; the side-channel vulnerability can be theoretically exploited to extract encryption keys and private information from programs. Former NSA hacker Jake Williams said on Twitter that a fix would probably need changes to the core operating system and were likely to involve "a ton of work to mitigate (mostly app recompile)." But de Raadt was not so sanguine. "There are people saying you can change the kernel's process scheduler," he told iTWire on Monday. "(It's) not so easy." He said that Williams was lacking all the details and not thinking it through. "They actually have sufficient detail to think it through: the article says the TLB is shared between hyperthreading CPUs, and it is unsafe to share between two different contexts. Basically you can measure evictions against your own mappings, which indicates the other process is touching memory (you can determine the aliasing factors)." De Raadt said he was still not prepared to say more, saying: "Please wait for the paper [which is due in August]."' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/18/06/25/2219217 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Likely NSA Data-Collection Facilities
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 26 Jun '18

26 Jun '18

Further to the mention last night of secret facilities operated by AT&T in the US where the NSA has access, this article <https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/meet-the-8-spooky-att-buildings…> reports on a list of eight likely places as detailed by The Intercept <https://theintercept.com/2018/06/25/att-internet-nsa-spy-hubs/>. While the NSA is not technically allowed to spy on wholly “domestic” communications, there seem to be no limits on any “incidental collection” as a result of targetting some foreign communication. That means they can grab the contents of entire mailboxes just for the sake of one message. Then keep the lot for whatever use they like.

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How Should Open Source Development Be Subsidized?
by Peter Reutemann 24 Jun '18

24 Jun '18

'"Open source maintainers are exhausted and rarely paid," writes TechCrunch's editorial manager. "A new generation wants to change the economics." An anonymous reader quotes their report: [Patreon] is increasingly being used by notable open source contributors as a way to connect with fans and sustain their work... For those who hit it big, the revenues can be outsized. Evan You, who created the popular JavaScript frontend library Vue.js, has reached $15,206 in monthly earnings ($182,472 a year) from 231 patrons... While Patreon is one direct approach for generating revenues from users, another one is to offer dual licenses, one free and one commercial... Companies care about proper licensing, and that becomes the leverage to gain revenue while still maintaining the openness and spirit of open source software... Tidelift is designed to offer assurances "around areas like security, licensing, and maintenance of software," CEO Donald Fischer explained... In addition, Tidelift handles the mundane tasks of setting up open source for commercialization such as handling licensing issues... Open Collective wants to open source the monetization of open source itself. Open Collective is a non-profit platform that provides tools to "collectives" to receive money while also offering mechanisms to allow the members of those collectives to spend their money in a democratic and transparent way. TechCrunch warns that "It's not just that people are free riding, it's often that they don't even realize it. Software engineers can easily forget just how much craftsmanship has gone into the open source code that powers the most basic of applications... "If you work at a for-profit company, take the lead in finding a way to support the code that allows you to do your job so efficiently. The decentralization and volunteer spirit of the open source community needs exactly the same kind of decentralized spirit in every financial contributor. Sustainability is each of our jobs, every day."' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/06/23/2113222 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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The Birth Of PDF
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 21 Jun '18

21 Jun '18

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/21/how_a_tax_form_kludge_gave_us_25_ye…>: [In 1985] ... both Apple and Adobe wanted to show off the LaserWriter's abilities with some sample files. Warnock thought it would be great to have the printer producing something complex but familiar so he personally hand-programmed an IRS tax form in PostScript. ... all those boxes and form fields required Warnock to code in lots of subroutines and utilities. The page took 2 minutes 45 seconds to print. Jobs was horrified at how slow that was. ... His new version of the IRS tax form printed on the LaserWriter in 22 seconds. In other words, by abandoning all the programming-language constructs (subroutines, conditionals, looping etc) in PostScript and just writing out a straight sequence of imaging commands, the code ran a lot faster, even if it was bigger. The article mentions the release of PDF 2.0, which is now being managed by ISO. Unfortunately, unlike Adobe, ISO do not make their specs available for free.

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