March 2021 - wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

List Of IPTV Resources
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 22 Sep '24

22 Sep '24

This user <https://github.com/iptv-org> just popped up in my GitHub feed. One repo <https://github.com/iptv-org/iptv> claims to be a list of links to over 8000 streaming TV channels from nations all over the world, while the other is a list of tools*, providers and other resources. Do be aware it’s a bit of a mixed bag: yes, there are legitimate channels (no encryption so far that I have noticed), but also some dubious-looking links. *Oddly, FFmpeg and youtube-dl aren’t in the list.

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Outlawing Dark Patterns
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 05 Nov '22

05 Nov '22

“Dark patterns” is a term coined to describe user interfaces designed to manipulate people into giving up time, money or personal data that they didn’t intend to. A common example is the obstacle course you often have to go through to cancel a subscription to something online. Another example is the use of countdown timers to rush buyers into hasty decisions. They may not be out-and-out deceptive, but they do come close. Now, the US states of California and Washington are looking to pass laws to restrict this practice. <https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/lawmakers-take-aim-at-insidious…>

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Apple’s Windows 10
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 19 Jul '22

19 Jul '22

Fred Brooks predicted long ago that complex pieces of software would eventually reach the point of irreducible entropy, where any attempt to fix a bug would simply introduce a new one. Microsoft’s Windows 10 seems to be about there, and it’s now clear that Apple’s macOS 10.15 “Catalina” has also joined that elite group <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/27/apple_catalina_update/>: The first spin of Catalina, officially released in October 2019, was a mess. ... The biggest issue was that all kinds of apps simply stopped working. ... Peripherals like mice, keyboards and printers stopped working. Email went missing; iCloud backups failed; users were constantly harassed by login requests; updates didn’t update ... ... So came for the first update to its new system one week after the main launch which fixed some, but not all, of the issues. ... Version two came in December 2019 and fixed some of those issues, but not all. ... More bug fixes came with version three in January 2020, but the OS seemed to have finally stabilized; something that was then spectacularly undone with version .4. ... Then we had the “supplemental update” to version 10.15.4, which fixed some, but not all, of the problems – most significantly the problem with Finder and transferring large files. And, amazingly, appeared to undo the good work that had been done with website security and broke SSH for some users. But now, with version point-five this week, that problem appears to have been sorted and, of course, your battery might last longer too.

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More On The NZ Reserve Bank Breach
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 15 Sep '21

15 Sep '21

Seems hackers broke into a secure file-sharing service called Accellion, based in California. The RBNZ was using that to exchange documents with the likes of banks and insurance companies. <https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/123911764/reserve-bank-reveals-more-detail…>

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How Facebook Architects Around Silent Data Corruption
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 04 Jun '21

04 Jun '21

Seems like Facebook’s computation facilities have become so massive that it is starting to see intermittent errors in places you wouldn’t expect <https://www.nextplatform.com/2021/03/01/facebook-architects-around-silent-d…>: Engineers found that many of the cascading errors are the result of CPUs in production but not always due to the “soft errors” of radiation or synthetic fault injection. Rather, they find these can happen randomly on CPUs in repeatable ways. Although ECC is useful, this is focused on problems in SRAM but other elements are susceptible. The Facebook engineering team that reported on these problems finds that CPU silent data corruptions are actually orders of magnitude higher than soft-errors due to a lack of error correction in other blocks. The article mentions examples like a computation of 2×3 sometimes returning an answer other than 6, or a file size intermittently (and incorrectly) being computed as zero, leading to the file data not being copied. Such occurrences may be extremely rare, but when you are doing things on the scale that Facebook does, they start to become all too common. Facebook has published a paper (linked in the report) on their research into the problem. They have worked out some techniques to try to mitigate these issues, but of course they come at a cost.

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IPv4 Parsing Flaw In NPM Netmask Could Affect 270,000 Apps
by Peter Reutemann 01 Apr '21

01 Apr '21

'The Security Ledger: Independent security researchers analyzing the widely used open source component netmask have discovered security vulnerabilities that could leave more than a quarter million open source applications vulnerable to attack, according to a report released Monday, The Security Ledger reports. According to a report by the site Sick Codes, the flaws open applications that rely on netmask to a wide range of malicious attacks including Server Side Request Forgeries (SSRF) and Remote- and Local File Includes (RFI, LFI) that could enable attackers to ferry malicious code into a protected network, or siphon sensitive data out of one. Even worse, the flaws appear to stretch far beyond a single open source module, affecting a wide range of open source development languages, researchers say. Netmask is a widely used package that allows developers to evaluate whether a IP address attempting to access an application was inside or outside of a given IPv4 range. Based on an IP address submitted to netmask, the module will return true or false about whether or not the submitted IP address is in the defined "block." According to the researcher using the handle "Sick Codes," the researchers discovered that netmask had a big blind spot. Specifically: it evaluates certain IP addresses incorrectly: improperly validating so-called "octal strings" rendering IPv4 addresses that contain certain octal strings as integers. For example, the IP4 address 0177.0.0.1 should be evaluated by netmask as the private IP address 127.0.0.1, as the octal string "0177" translates to the integer "127." However, netmask evaluates it as a public IPv4 address: 177.0.0.1, simply stripping off the leading zero and reading the remaining parts of the octal string as an integer. The implications for modules that are using the vulnerable version of netmask are serious. According to Sick Codes, remote attackers can use SSRF attacks to upload malicious files from the public Internet without setting off alarms, because applications relying on netmask would treat a properly configured external IP address as an internal address. Similarly, attackers could also disguise remote IP addresses local addresses, enabling remote file inclusion (RFI) attacks that could permit web shells or malicious programs to be placed on target networks. But researchers say much more is to come. The problems identified in netmask are not unique to that module. Researchers have noted previously that textual representation of IPv4 addresses were never standardized, leading to disparities in how different but equivalent versions of IPv4 addresses (for example: octal strings) are rendered and interpreted by different applications and platforms.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/21/03/31/0046249 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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How to achieve smart home nirvana (or, home automation without subscription)
by Peter Reutemann 01 Apr '21

01 Apr '21

'What comes to mind when you think of a smart home? Wi-Fi enabled light bulbs, video doorbells, cloud-connected robot vacuums, or smart fridges perhaps? Brands like Google/Nest or everything enabled with Amazon’s Alexa? While often providing some genuine convenience, these devices are also usually designed to invite and lock users into manufacturers' ecosystems. Create a cool piece of hardware, you’ll make one sale. Create a cool piece of hardware that extracts recurring monthly service fees for cloud storage or to unlock extra functionality, and you’ll have sales for life. Compounding our collective frustration, these ecosystems are often incompatible with each other and require multiple different apps for control. Not only are subscriptions and upselling part of the game, the underlying business models for these products are built around planned obsolescence and mining user data. Luckily, aspirational smart home folks in 2021 have at least one viable alternative: Home Assistant. This piece of open source software is the proverbial ring “that in the darkness binds them.” It is the glue for smart home gear spanning all sorts of manufacturers, from behemoths like Google to minnows like Shelly. It’s a project that has set out to change all of the smart home pitfalls listed above by putting local control, privacy, and interoperability first.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/03/how-to-achieve-smart… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Ubiquiti Massively Downplayed a 'Catastrophic' Security Breach To Minimize Impact On Stock Price, Alleges Whistleblower
by Peter Reutemann 31 Mar '21

31 Mar '21

'In January, Ubiquiti Networks sent out a notification to its customers informing them of a security breach and asking all users to change their account passwords and turn on two-factor authentication. "We recently became aware of unauthorized access to certain of our information technology systems hosted by a third party cloud provider," Ubiquiti said at the time. Now, according to Krebs on Security, a whistleblower "alleges Ubiquiti massively downplayed a 'catastrophic' incident to minimize the hit to its stock price, and that the third-party cloud provider claim was a fabrication." From the report: "It was catastrophically worse than reported, and legal silenced and overruled efforts to decisively protect customers," [the source] wrote in a letter to the European Data Protection Supervisor. "The breach was massive, customer data was at risk, access to customers' devices deployed in corporations and homes around the world was at risk." According to [the source], the hackers obtained full read/write access to Ubiquiti databases at Amazon Web Services (AWS), which was the alleged "third party" involved in the breach. Ubiquiti's breach disclosure, he wrote, was "downplayed and purposefully written to imply that a 3rd party cloud vendor was at risk and that Ubiquiti was merely a casualty of that, instead of the target of the attack." In reality, [the source] said, the attackers had gained administrative access to Ubiquiti's servers at Amazon's cloud service, which secures the underlying server hardware and software but requires the cloud tenant (client) to secure access to any data stored there. "They were able to get cryptographic secrets for single sign-on cookies and remote access, full source code control contents, and signing keys exfiltration," [the source] said. [The source] says the attacker(s) had access to privileged credentials that were previously stored in the LastPass account of a Ubiquiti IT employee, and gained root administrator access to all Ubiquiti AWS accounts, including all S3 data buckets, all application logs, all databases, all user database credentials, and secrets required to forge single sign-on (SSO) cookies. Such access could have allowed the intruders to remotely authenticate to countless Ubiquiti cloud-based devices around the world. According to its website, Ubiquiti has shipped more than 85 million devices that play a key role in networking infrastructure in over 200 countries and territories worldwide. Instead of asking customers to change their passwords when they next log on, [the source] says Ubiquiti should've immediately invalidated all of its customer's credentials and forced a reset on all accounts, mainly because the intruders already had credentials needed to remotely access customer IoT systems.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/21/03/30/2057237 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Red Hat withdraws from the Free Software Foundation after Stallman’s return
by Peter Reutemann 30 Mar '21

30 Mar '21

'Last week, Richard M. Stallman—father of the GNU Public License that underpins Linux and a significant part of the user-facing software that initially accompanied the Linux kernel—returned to the board of the Free Software Foundation after a two-year hiatus due to his own highly controversial remarks about his perception of Jeffrey Epstein's victims as "entirely willing." As a result of RMS' reinstatement, Red Hat—the Raleigh, North Carolina-based open source software giant that produces Red Hat Enterprise Linux—has publicly withdrawn funding and support from the Free Software Foundation: Red Hat was appalled to learn that [Stallman] had rejoined the FSF board of directors. As a result, we are immediately suspending all Red Hat funding of the FSF and any FSF-hosted events.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/red-hat-withdraws-from-the-stallman… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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PHP's Git Server Hacked To Add Backdoors To PHP Source Code
by Peter Reutemann 30 Mar '21

30 Mar '21

'Late Sunday night, on March 28, 2021, Nikita Popov, a core PHP committer, released a statement indicating that two malicious commits had been pushed to the php-src Git repository. These commits were pushed to create a backdoor that would have effectively allowed attackers to achieve remote code execution through PHP and an HTTP header. "The incident is alarming considering PHP remains the server-side programming language to power over 79% of the websites on the Internet," adds BleepingComputer. "In the malicious commits [1, 2] the attackers published a mysterious change upstream, 'fix typo' under the pretense this was a minor typographical correction. However, taking a look at the added line 370 where zend_eval_string function is called, the code actually plants a backdoor for obtaining easy Remote Code Execution (RCE) on a website running this hijacked version of PHP." According to Popov, the first commit was detected a couple hours after it was made, and the changes were reverted right away. "Although a complete investigation of the incident is ongoing, according to PHP maintainers, this malicious activity stemmed from the compromised git.php.net server, rather than compromise of an individual's Git account," reports BleepingComputer. "As a precaution following this incident, PHP maintainers have decided to migrate the official PHP source code repository to GitHub."' -- source: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/21/03/29/2111200 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Fairphone suggests Qualcomm is the biggest barrier to long-term Android support
by Peter Reutemann 29 Mar '21

29 Mar '21

'Fairphone—the sustainable, modular smartphone company—is still shipping updates to the 5-year-old Fairphone 2. The company won't win any awards for speed, but the phone—which launched in 2015 with Android 5—is now being updated to Android 9.0. The most interesting part of this news is a video from Fairphone detailing the update process the company went through, which offers more transparency than we normally get from a smartphone manufacturer. To hear Fairphone tell the story of Android updates, the biggest barrier to longer-term support is—surprise!—Qualcomm. Fairphone wants consumers to keep their phones for longer, creating less e-waste and carbon emissions via modular replacement parts that are easily upgradeable and repairable. A big challenge for designing a long-lasting phone like this is software support. Even if Fairphone wanted to support a phone forever, Android software updates do not work that way, and major OS updates normally rely on a relay race of companies that all need to hand-off a build of Android before it reaches your phone.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/the-fairphone-2-hits-five-years-of-… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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UNIX's Founders Created Another OS at Bell Labs: 'Plan 9'
by Peter Reutemann 29 Mar '21

29 Mar '21

'The team behind UNIX also built another operating system at Bell Labs, writes the corporate CTO and president of Nokia Bell Labs: Starting in the late 1980s, a group led by Rob Pike and UNIX co-creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie developed "Plan 9". Their motivation was two-fold: to build an operating system that would fit an increasingly distributed world, and to do so in a clean and elegant manner. The plan was not to build directly on the Unix foundation but to implement a new design from scratch. The result was named Plan 9 from Bell Labs — the name an inside joke inspired by the cult B-movie "Plan 9 from Outer Space." Plan 9 is built around a radically different model from that of conventional operating systems. The OS is structured as a collection of loosely coupled services, which may be hosted on different machines. Another key concept in its design is that of a per-process name space: services can be mapped on to local names fixed by convention, so that programs using those services need not change if the current services are replaced by others providing the same functionality. Despite the groundbreaking innovations in Plan 9, the operating system did not take off — at least not enough to justify Bell Labs continued investment in Plan 9 development. But Plan 9's innovations found their way into many commercial OSes: the concept of making OS services available via the file system is now pervasive in Linux; Plan 9's minimalist windowing system design has been replicated many times; the UTF-8 character encoding used universally today in browsers was invented for, and first implemented in, Plan 9; and the design of Plan 9 anticipated today's microservice architectures by more than a decade...! Starting this week, Plan 9 will have a new home in the space it helped define: cyberspace. We are transferring the copyright in Plan 9 software to the Plan 9 Foundation for all future development, allowing them to carry on the good work that Bell Labs and many other Plan 9 enthusiasts have undertaken over the past couple of decades. Indeed, there is an active community of people who have been working on Plan 9 and who are interested in the future evolution of this groundbreaking operating system. That community is organizing itself bottom-up into the new Plan 9 Foundation, which is making the OS code publicly available under a suitable open-source software license. We at Nokia and Bell Labs are huge advocates for the power of open-source communities for such pioneering systems that have the potential to benefit the global software development community. Who knows, perhaps Plan 9 will become a part of the emerging distributed cloud infrastructure that will underpin the coming industrial revolution?' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/03/28/192227 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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New Android malware with full range of spying capabilities has been found
by Peter Reutemann 29 Mar '21

29 Mar '21

'Researchers have discovered a new advanced piece of Android malware that finds sensitive information stored on infected devices and sends it to attacker-controlled servers. The app disguises itself as a system update that must be downloaded from a third-party store, researchers from security firm Zimperium said on Friday. In fact, it’s a remote-access trojan that receives and executes commands from a command-and-control server. It provides a full-featured spying platform that performs a wide range of malicious activities. Zimperium listed the following capabilities: - Stealing instant messenger messages - Stealing instant messenger database files (if root is available) - Inspecting the default browser’s bookmarks and searches - Inspecting the bookmark and search history from Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Samsung Internet Browser - Searching for files with specific extensions (including .pdf, .doc, .docx, and .xls, .xlsx) - Inspecting the clipboard data - Inspecting the content of the notifications - Recording audio - Recording phone calls - Periodically take pictures (either through the front or back cameras) - Listing of the installed applications - Stealing images and videos - Monitoring the GPS location - Stealing SMS messages - Stealing phone contacts - Stealing call logs - Exfiltrating device information (e.g., installed applications, device name, storage stats) - Concealing its presence by hiding the icon from the device’s drawer/menu' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/new-android-malware-with-full-range… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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cURL's 20th Anniversary Celebrated With 3D-Printed 'GitHub Steel' Contribution Graph
by Peter Reutemann 29 Mar '21

29 Mar '21

'This week Swedish developer Daniel Stenberg posted a remarkable reflection on the 20th anniversary of his command-line data tool, cURL: curl was adopted in Red Hat Linux in late 1998, became a Debian package in May 1999, shipped in Mac OS X 10.1 in August 2001. Today, it is also shipped by default in Windows 10 and in iOS and Android devices. Not to mention the game consoles, Nintendo Switch, Xbox and Sony PS5. Amusingly, libcurl is used by the two major mobile OSes but not provided as an API by them, so lots of apps, including many extremely large volume apps bundle their own libcurl build: YouTube, Skype, Instagram, Spotify, Google Photos, Netflix etc. Meaning that most smartphone users today have many separate curl installations in their phones. Further, libcurl is used by some of the most played computer games of all times: GTA V, Fortnite, PUBG mobile, Red Dead Redemption 2 etc. libcurl powers media players and set-top boxes such as Roku, Apple TV by maybe half a billion TVs. curl and libcurl ships in virtually every Internet server and is the default transfer engine in PHP, which is found in almost 80% of the world's almost two billion websites. Cars are Internet-connected now. libcurl is used in virtually every modern car these days to transfer data to and from the vehicles. Then add media players, kitchen and medical devices, printers, smart watches and lots of "smart"; IoT things. Practically speaking, just about every Internet-connected device in existence runs curl. I'm convinced I'm not exaggerating when I claim that curl exists in over ten billion installations world-wide... Those 300 lines of code in late 1996 have grown to 172,000 lines in March 2021. Stenberg attributes cURL's success to persistence. "We hold out. We endure and keep polishing. We're here for the long run. It took me two years (counting from the precursors) to reach 300 downloads. It took another ten or so until it was really widely available and used." But he adds that 22 different CPU architectures and 86 different operating systems are now known to have run curl. In a later blog post titled "GitHub Steel," Stenberg also reveals that GitHub gave him a 3D-printed steel version of his 2020 GitHub contribution matrix — accompanied by a friendly note. "Please accept this small gift as a token of appreciation on behalf of all of us here at GitHub, and everyone who benefits from your work."' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/03/28/0143206 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Attackers Breach 21,000 Microsoft Exchange Servers, Install Malware Implicating Brian Krebs
by Peter Reutemann 29 Mar '21

29 Mar '21

'Security researcher Brian Krebs wants you to know... "New data suggests someone has compromised more than 21,000 Microsoft Exchange Server email systems worldwide and infected them with malware that invokes both KrebsOnSecurity and Yours Truly by name. Let's just get this out of the way right now: It wasn't me." The Shadowserver Foundation, a nonprofit that helps network owners identify and fix security threats, says it has found 21,248 different Exchange servers which appear to be compromised by a backdoor and communicating with [a domain that begins with brian . krebsonsecurity... Not a safe domain.] Shadowserver has been tracking wave after wave of attacks targeting flaws in Exchange that Microsoft addressed earlier this month in an emergency patch release. The group looks for attacks on Exchange systems using a combination of active Internet scans and "honeypots" — systems left vulnerable to attack so that defenders can study what attackers are doing to the devices and how. David Watson, a longtime member and director of the Shadowserver Foundation Europe, says his group has been keeping a close eye on hundreds of unique variants of backdoors (a.k.a. "web shells") that various cybercrime groups worldwide have been using to commandeer any unpatched Exchange servers. These backdoors give an attacker complete, remote control over the Exchange server (including any of the server's emails)... Shadowserver's honeypots saw multiple hosts with the Babydraco backdoor doing the same thing: Running a Microsoft Powershell script that fetches the file "krebsonsecurity.exe"... Oddly, none of the several dozen antivirus tools available to scan the file at Virustotal.com currently detect it as malicious. The Krebsonsecurity file also installs a root certificate, modifies the system registry, and tells Windows Defender not to scan the file. Watson said the Krebsonsecurity file will attempt to open up an encrypted connection between the Exchange server and the above-mentioned IP address, and send a small amount of traffic to it each minute. Shadowserver found more than 21,000 Exchange Server systems that had the Babydraco backdoor installed. But Watson said they don't know how many of those systems also ran the secondary download from the rogue Krebsonsecurity domain. "Despite the abuse, this is potentially a good opportunity to highlight how vulnerable/compromised MS Exchange servers are being exploited in the wild right now, and hopefully help get the message out to victims that they need to sign up our free daily network reports," Watson said.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/21/03/28/1924206 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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'Open Source Initiative' Stops Collaboration With FSF Over Richard Stallman's Return
by Peter Reutemann 28 Mar '21

28 Mar '21

'The Open Source Initiative's board of directors recently issued the following statement: Richard M. Stallman recently announced that he will be returning to the board of directors of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), a statement that the FSF has not denied. We believe it is inappropriate for Stallman to hold any leadership position in the free and open source software community. If we do not speak out against this, our silence may be misinterpreted as support. The Open Source Initiative calls upon the Free Software Foundation to hold Stallman responsible for past behavior, remove him from the organization's leadership and work to address the harm he caused to all those he has excluded: those he considers less worthy, and those he has hurt with his words and actions. We will not participate in any events that include Richard M. Stallman and we cannot collaborate with the Free Software Foundation until Stallman is removed from the organization's leadership. Free and open source software will not be accessible to all until it is safe for everyone to participate, and we therefore call upon our peers in the broader software community to join us in making these commitments. Another perspective turns up in the "This Week in Programming" column: YouTuber Brodie Roberston offers his take on the return of RMS, saying "Like it or not, Richard Stallman is the face of free software. When you think about the free software movement, he is the one person that comes to mind." He then goes on to argue that the FSF is essentially the "ideological arm" of Stallman himself and that he is essentially irreplaceable not only because of his thoughts around free software but his passion for it, before going on to list the things that are "part of his charm."' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/03/27/0347246 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Open Collective Launches Funds that Financially Support Open-Source Communities
by Peter Reutemann 28 Mar '21

28 Mar '21

'"Introducing Funds for Open Source!" reads a blog post on the site for Open Collective. Back in 2018 TechCrunch called them "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." But while they're currently serving 2500+ projects, now SD Times reports that Open Collective "is trying to make working full-time for an open-source project an alternative to a career developing for a for-profit company." It believes the steps to achieve this goal include eliminating friction between projects, the communities that support them, and the corporations that depend on them. It is introducing Funds to its open funding management platform to make it easier for companies to invest in open-source projects by making a one-time payment to a Fund, which then redistributes the money to different projects and contributors, rather than paying those projects individually... According to Open Collective, more and more companies are now becoming aware of the need to compensate developers for their work on open-source projects and are willing to fund them. There are a few reasons for this, such as developers taking pride in working at a company that supports open source, access to creators, building a positive reputation within the community, ensuring their own open-source dependencies are being properly maintained, and ensuring open-source projects can scale with their needs.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/03/27/2136248 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Fwd: Re: [ANNOUNCE] WireGuard for FreeBSD in development for 13.y – and a note of how we got here
by Eric Light 27 Mar '21

27 Mar '21

Further to the list conversations about Wireguard and FreeBSD, it looks like things have become much, much worse. Conversation between Jason Donenfeld (Wireguard) and Scott Long (Netgate) below - ew. As LDO mentioned, Netgate don't seem to be particularly friendly members of the open source community :-/ E -------------------------------------------- Q: Why is this email five sentences or less? A: http://five.sentenc.es ----- Original message ----- From: "Jason A. Donenfeld" <Jason(a)zx2c4.com> To: wireguard(a)lists.zx2c4.com, Scott Long <scottl(a)netgate.com> Cc: secteam(a)FreeBSD.org, cperciva(a)FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCE] WireGuard for FreeBSD in development for 13.y – and a note of how we got here Date: Tuesday, 16 March 2021 14:18 Hi Scott, It's certainly disappointing to receive your email like that. I see that you're really upset, and I think we have a shared interest in deescalating this. You've mentioned the desire to talk about this in public, so I'm responding in the announcement thread to you, as this seems like the appropriate venue for discussion. I've also CC'd the FreeBSD Security Officer. I've responded to your email and its threats in line mailing-list style below: On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 6:08 PM Scott Long <scottl(a)netgate.com> wrote: > What you and Kyle did was tell the world that there are a number of > zero-day exploits in the code. You gave us no details until after the > fact, gave us no time to mitigate, correct, and publish before your > announcement and Kyle's code drop, and used the opportunity to > bash the code, and by extension us, for your own self-gain. I have no idea how you possibly have arrived at this here. FreeBSD 13 is currently at RC2 or RC3, if I recall correctly. Our whole motivation for working on this so tirelessly and with so much energy and devotion over the week was to get things fixed up before 13 was actually released. I dropped everything else I was working on to focus on this. I'm actually with my folks in Colorado and should be spending more time with them but the idea of FreeBSD 13 shipping with all those bugs seemed like a really important thing to address. Here's what we did, step by step: 1. We made a clone of the freebsd git repo where we could all push changes to master, to git.zx2c4.com like everything else. 2. We took turns taking big passes at the codebase, reading it, auditing it, fixing things. We did a lot of syncing and comparison with the OpenBSD code base. For example, in one step, we reordered the functions to match the flow of OpenBSD so we could see it more easily side by side. 3. We kept pushing commits like this in that manner. 4. We didn't know where we'd end up, but after a few days of this, the number of changes we had accumulated and fishy business we had observed was massive. 5. When we thought we reached a good resting point -- and when it became clear that our rapid fire changes were becoming too numerous -- we squashed that down to a summary commit, and Kyle committed it. 6. Seeing that the crypto needed to be re-accelerated, I published a call for help here -- https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2021-March/057076.html 7. I published wireguard-tools with the improved wg(8) command here -- https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2021-March/006493.html 8. I sent a summary of everything to the mailing list here -- https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2021-March/006494.html I also made sure to email a FreeBSD Security Officer, Colin, to keep him posted about the state of this, so he was kept apprised. Again, the whole idea was: two weeks until release! If I suggest the code is just disabled, people will be really upset, so instead we'll try to fix as much as fast as possible before the release. And actually, really focused sprints like that are fun and stimulating. We were all really enjoying writing code until the torrents of anger started coming from you about our efforts. (And I also learned that this isn't the first time you guys tried to intimidate an open source project -- see this summary of the opnSense defamatory website Netgate created -- https://opnsense.org/opnsense-com/ .) And in the process, too, I've tried to be in contact with you and Jim and let you know what our intentions are and to diffuse tensions. I spent time on a video call trying to describe to you some of the security things we found, in case it wasn't possible for you to use the new code right away. I've also made it abundantly clear to you how much I want to work WITH Netgate. When that Reddit thread cropped up, I offered to you multiple times to send a message to it telling people that we've spoken and it looks like you have a good plan and every things going to be okay, but you didn't respond to my offer. On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 6:08 PM Scott Long <scottl(a)netgate.com> wrote: > None > of these actions reflect good-faith collaboration, and your statements > that you think that our work is "really cool" ring hollow. Maybe you > and Kyle are really naive and thought that this was how people > normally collaborate in the security and business worlds, and that > everyone would rush to praise you and shower you with contracts > and funding. And hey, maybe that’ll happen, you certainly have > made a splash. That of course, comes at our expense, and it’s > likely to be a pretty damaging one. Now with the Ars article, I’m > starting to wonder if this was a coordinated smear campaign. > Normally we don’t get this kind of attention. It’s going to be painful > to navigate our way out. I'm not sure how to address these types of... theories. I certainly AM acting in good faith. I can't possibly see how it benefits anybody to have WireGuard and Netgate at odds with one another. You guys make a neat product based on open source software, and I think it's great you're planning to add WireGuard to it. My interest is in making sure the underlying operating system -- FreeBSD 13 -- does that well. (Or, I think you mentioned to me this morning that you're actually planning to base it on FreeBSD 12 for some time, but same idea for the backport you're working on, I guess.) And there's no "smear campaign" -- that's outrageous. I have no idea how that would help anybody at all. I should point out, again to you, how grateful I am that Netgate got the initial work on this started. Had you guys not gotten if_wg rolling, it's not clear to me that it'd exist in the first place. >From your end, it's very disappointing that you're (below) planning to attack security researchers and kernel programmers who took the time to rewrite code to make it better, hustling to get it in before FreeBSD 13 is released. On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 6:08 PM Scott Long <scottl(a)netgate.com> wrote: > I’ll be writing an article tonight outlining the mistakes that we made > and what we will be doing to correct it. I’ll also be highlighting that > this incident has been a textbook example of the wrong way for > people to collaborate in the security community, and that extreme > caution should be taken in any future dealings with you. Your > actions are self serving and in bad faith, and your words are > hollow and untrustworthy. I don’t care if you disagree or don’t see > it this way, this is the effect that you’ve had. It makes sense to communicate with your customers about things with your upcoming products if you feel it's necessary. But threatening that you're going to highlight "that extreme caution should be taken in any future dealings with you" sounds to me like a threat of some intense slander. And again, attacking security researchers and kernel programmers who took time to rewrite code to make it better before a release deadline... That's ...wow. I wish you would not go on the attack like that. Instead, it seems like we can both be glad that we're on the path to having better code! And that there's a team of people volunteering to do this and enjoying writing that code. We're all working together to make things better. We worked really super hard on fixing up this code base. It was a LOT of work. And I would like to keep working on it and feeling good about it. So I'm just disappointed that somehow this has devolved for you into making threats like that. On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 6:08 PM Scott Long <scottl(a)netgate.com> wrote: > I’ve also spoken with the FreeBSD Security Officer, and we’ve > agreed that wireguard will be removed from all branches of FreeBSD > until further notice. I’ve also informed Kyle of this. I do not support > its reintroduction into FreeBSD, whether in the src tree or in the > ports tree, at this time. As for pfSense, we are conducting an > audit and will decide on the best course of action for our customers > and our company. I actually think that's a great idea. I was under the impression initially that removing it would be a total non-starter and would just make people upset, hence this hurried mad dash to turn things around. But having an opportunity to take it out of tree and develop it slowly and carefully, like we did for Linux and OpenBSD, sounds a lot better. This also meshes well with what we had planned to do, which I mentioned in the announcement email this morning -- have this available as an out of tree module that people can try out. Then, after we've got it really solid, reintroduce it in the normal FreeBSD ways of doing that. (I'm not so familiar with that latter process, but I trust that Kyle & folks know that part well.) On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 6:08 PM Scott Long <scottl(a)netgate.com> wrote: > > Scott So, that's where we are. You're upset and making threats to slander security researchers and kernel programmers. That's really disappointing. All I can do is ask you: please don't? We have much more to gain by supporting each other than being in conflict. I just want to make sure FreeBSD 13 (or 14) gets a great WireGuard implementation. And you want to make sure your customers get great products. I see no reason why these are conflicting goals. I hope this can deescalate, and we can work together on this. I'm confident that our goals are ultimately aligned very well. Regards, Jason

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WSL start up script
by Matthew Skiffington 26 Mar '21

26 Mar '21

For heathens like me that use the windows linux subsystem (wsl): https://askubuntu.com/questions/978977/windows-subsystem-for-linux-display-… Cheers, Matthew

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Alan Turing On UK £50 Note
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 26 Mar '21

26 Mar '21

The Bank Of England has shown off the upcoming £50 note featuring computing pioneer Alan Turing <https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/25/turing_50_quid/>. The rhyming slang for this denomination is apparently “bullseyes”, but the linked page gives no explanation of the derivation ...

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OpenSSL fixes high-severity flaw that allows hackers to crash servers
by Peter Reutemann 26 Mar '21

26 Mar '21

'On Thursday, OpenSSL maintainers disclosed and patched a vulnerability that causes servers to crash when they receive a maliciously crafted request from an unauthenticated end user. CVE-2021-3449, as the denial-of-server vulnerability is tracked, is the result of a null pointer dereference bug. Cryptographic engineer Filippo Valsorda, said on Twitter that the flaw could probably have been discovered earlier than now. “Anyway, sounds like you can crash most OpenSSL servers on the Internet today,” he added.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/openssl-fixes-high-severity-flaw-th… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Linus Torvalds On Where Rust Will Fit Into Linux
by Peter Reutemann 25 Mar '21

25 Mar '21

'ZDNet article, written by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: Linux is the poster-child for the C language. But times change. The Rust language has been slowly gathering support for use as a system language in Linux. For example, at the 2020 Linux Plumbers Conference, developers gave serious thought to using the Rust language for new Linux inline code. So, where is it today? I asked Linux's creator, Linus Torvalds, and the Linux stable kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman for their thoughts. [...] What does Torvalds make of all this? He's in "the 'wait and see' camp -- I'm interested in the project, but I think it's driven by people who are very excited about Rust, and I want to see how it actually then ends up working in practice." "Personally," Torvalds is "in no way "pushing" for Rust, [but] I'm open to it considering the promised advantages and avoiding some safety pitfalls, but I also know that sometimes promises don't pan out." Torvalds thinks "Rust's primary first target seems to be drivers, simply because that's where you find just a lot of different possible targets, and you have these individual parts of the kernel that are fairly small and independent. That may not be a very interesting target to some people, but it's the obvious one." Another point is taking on drivers first for "any initial trials to drivers is simply the architecture side," said Torvalds. "Lots of drivers are only relevant on a couple of target architectures, so the whole issue with Rust code not being supported on some architectures is less of an issue." Kroah-Hartman agrees that "drivers are probably the first place for an attempt like this as they are the 'end leafs' of the tree of dependencies in the kernel source. They depend on core kernel functionality, but nothing depends on them." Torvalds knows some people don't like the idea of Rust in userspace at all. "People complain[ing] about "Rustification" in userspace isn't a great sign for any future kernel use, but hey, we'll see. The kernel is different from userspace projects -- more difficult in some respects (we use a lot of very odd header files that pushes the boundary of what can be called "C"), but easier in many other respects (mainly in the sense that the kernel is fairly self-contained, and then doesn't rely on other projects for the final binary)." From where Kroah-Hartman sits, "it will all come down to how well the interaction between the kernel core structures and lifetime rules that are written in C can be mapped into Rust structures and lifetime rules for drivers in Rust to be able to use them properly. That's going to take a lot of careful work by the developers wanting to hook this all up and I wish them the best of luck."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/21/03/24/2115238 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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GNOME 40 Released
by Peter Reutemann 25 Mar '21

25 Mar '21

'The GNOME 40 desktop update has been released with a bunch of new improvements. Phoronix summarizes the major changes: GNOME 40 is out with the GTK4 toolkit in tow, many improvements and alterations to the GNOME Shell including major changes to the dash and workspaces, Mutter has continued refining its Wayland support, Mutter also added a native headless back-end for testing, atomic mode-setting is now supported, input handling is now done in a separate thread, and a wide variety of other improvements. And, yes, there is also the big shift in GNOME's versioning practices moving forward while still sticking to the same six month release regiment. ' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/03/24/1957215 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Free software advocates seek removal of Richard Stallman and entire FSF board
by Peter Reutemann 24 Mar '21

24 Mar '21

'Richard Stallman's return to the Free Software Foundation's board of directors has drawn condemnation from many people in the free software community. An open letter signed by hundreds of people today called for Stallman to be removed again and for the FSF's entire board to resign. The open letter said: "Richard M. Stallman, frequently known as RMS, has been a dangerous force in the free software community for a long time. He has shown himself to be misogynist, ableist, and transphobic, among other serious accusations of impropriety. These sorts of beliefs have no place in the free software, digital rights, and tech communities. With his recent reinstatement to the Board of Directors of the Free Software Foundation, we call for the entire Board of the FSF to step down and for RMS to be removed from all leadership positions." Letter signers include Neil McGovern, GNOME Foundation executive director and former Debian Project Leader; Deb Nicholson, general manager of the Open Source Initiative; Matthew Garrett, a former member of the FSF board of directors; seven of the eight members of the X.org Foundation board of directors; Elana Hashman of the Debian Technical Committee, Open Source Initiative, and Kubernetes project; Molly de Blanc of the Debian Project and GNOME Foundation; and more than 300 others. That number has been rising quickly today: the open letter contains instructions for signing it.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/03/free-software-advocates-seek-re… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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WiMAX Is Dead
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 23 Mar '21

23 Mar '21

Linux hardware guru Greg Kroah-Hartman is inching closer to dumping all support for WiMAX from the Linux kernel <https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/22/wimax_linux/>. If you’ve never heard of it, you’re not missing anything. I remember reading about it in the earliest days of wireless networking: while Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11) was about wireless connectivity with mobile endpoints, WiMAX (IEEE 802.16) was designed for connecting between fixed stations. Clearly Wi-Fi can also be used with the latter, though maybe there were some obscure technical reasons why WiMAX was a better fit in the stationary situation. In the early days of Wi-Fi, creative users found ways to transmit it over long distances using high-gain antennas constructed from such low-tech components as Pringles cans. I suspect that Wi-Fi gear, being such a big seller to consumers, was always much cheaper than WiMAX, which is why the latter was never able to gain a foothold.

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