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Android Will Now Scan Sideloaded Apps For Malware At Install Time
by Peter Reutemann 19 Oct '23

19 Oct '23

'Ron Amadeo reports via Ars Technica: To help combat the surge of sideloaded malware, Google Play can now pop up a malware scanner at install time if it decides the app you're trying to sideload is interesting. Google Play's malware system, called "Google Play Protect," has always been able to check sideloaded apps for malware, but it used faster techniques like a definition file, and this happened quietly in the background. This new technique will delay your app installation with a full-screen "scanning" interface while Google runs a deep scan of the app code. Google's blog post says this is "real-time scanning at the code-level to combat novel malicious apps" and that Google Play Protect can "recommend a real-time app scan when installing apps that have never been scanned before to help detect emerging threats." The scan will involve sending bits and pieces of the app to Google for analysis. Google says: "Scanning will extract important signals from the app and send them to the Play Protect backend infrastructure for a code-level evaluation. Once the real-time analysis is complete, users will get a result letting them know if the app looks safe to install or if the scan determined the app is potentially harmful. This enhancement will help better protect users against malicious polymorphic apps that leverage various methods, such as AI, to be altered to avoid detection." [...] Google is first rolling this feature out in India -- a country that topped the malware distribution charts in that 2018 report -- with the company saying the feature "will expand to all regions in the coming months."' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/23/10/18/2148248 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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AlmaLinux Stays Red Hat Enterprise Linux Compatible Without Red Hat Code
by Peter Reutemann 19 Oct '23

19 Oct '23

'AlmaLinux is creating a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) without any Red Hat code. Instead, AlmaLinux OS will aim to be Application Binary Interface (ABI) compatible and use the CentOS Stream source code that Red Hat continues to offer. Additional code is pulled from Red Hat Universal Base Images, and upstream Linux code. Benny Vasquez, chairperson of the AlmaLinux OF Foundation, explained how all this works at the open-source community convention All Things Open. ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols reports: The hardest part is Red Hat's Linux kernel updates because, added Vasquez, "you can't get those kernel updates without violating Red Hat's licensing agreements." Therefore, she continued, "What we do is we pull the security patches from various other sources, and, if nothing else, we can find them when Oracle releases them." Vasquez did note one blessing from this change in production: "AlmaLinux, no longer bound to Red Hat's releases, has been able to release upstream security fixes faster than Red Hat. "For example, the AMD microcode exploits were patched before Red Hat because they took a little bit of extra time to get out the door. We then pulled in, tested, and out the door about a week ahead of them." The overall goal remains to maintain RHEL compatibility. "Any breaking changes between RHEL and AlmaLinux, any application that stops working, is a bug and must be fixed." That's not to say AlmaLinux will be simply an excellent RHEL clone going forward. It plans to add features of its own. For instance, Red Hat users who want programs not bundled in RHEL often turn to Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL). These typically are programs included in Fedora Linux. Besides supporting EPEL software, AlmaLinux has its own extra software package -- called Synergy -- which holds programs that the AlmaLinux community wants but are not available in either EPEL or RHEL. If one such program is subsequently added to EPEL or RHEL, AlmaLinux drops it from Synergy to prevent confusion and duplication of effort. This has not been an easy road for AlmaLinux. Even a 1% code difference is a lot to write and maintain. For example, when AlmaLinux tried to patch CentOS Stream code to fix a problem, Red Hat was downright grumpy about AlmaLinux's attempt to fix a security hole. Vasquez acknowledged it was tough sledding at first, but noted: "The good news is that they have been improving the process, and things will look a little bit smoother." AlmaLinux, she noted, is also not so much worried as aware that Red Hat may throw a monkey wrench into their efforts. Vasquez added: "Internally, we're working on stopgap things we'd need to do to anticipate Red Hat changing everything terribly." She doesn't think Red Hat will do it, but "we want to be as prepared as possible."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/10/18/2253222 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Qualcomm Announces First-ever Mass-market RISC-V Android SoC
by Peter Reutemann 18 Oct '23

18 Oct '23

'The Android ecosystem is hurtling toward a RISC-V future. From a report: The puzzle pieces for the up-and-coming CPU architecture started falling into place this past year when Google announced official RISC-V support in Android and plans to make it a "tier 1 platform" on equal footing with Arm. With the OS support underway, what we need now is hardware, and Qualcomm is stepping up to announce the first-ever mass-market RISC-V Android SoC. It doesn't have a name yet, but Qualcomm says it's developing a "RISC-V Snapdragon Wear" chip in collaboration with Google. The company says it plans to "commercialize the RISC-V based wearables solution globally including the US." For Google and Qualcomm, this chip represents everyone's first swing at a commercial RISC-V Android project, and as far as we can tell, it's the first announced mass-market RISC-V Android chip ever. Qualcomm says the groundwork it and Google lay out "will help pave the way for more products within the Android ecosystem to take advantage of custom CPUs that are low power and high performance." RISC-V represents a big threat to the Arm CPU architecture that currently dominates all mobile devices. RISC-V architecture is open source, which can make it cheaper and more flexible than Arm. If companies want to design their own chips, they can do that without paying a licensing fee to Arm. Since the architecture is open source, it's possible to create a fully open source chip. If you're a chip-design firm, you can make your own proprietary chip designs and license them, making you a competitor to Arm's chip-design business. RISC-V is also a way to sidestep all of the various problems with Arm.' -- source: https://slashdot.org/story/23/10/17/1927210 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Rust-Based 'Resources' is a New, Modern System Monitor for Linux
by Peter Reutemann 17 Oct '23

17 Oct '23

'OMG! Ubuntu: The System Monitor app Ubuntu comes with does an okay job of letting you monitor system resources and oversee running processes — but it does look dated... [T]he app's graphs and charts are tiny, compact, and lack the glanceability and granular-detail that similar tools on other systems offer. Thankfully, there are plenty of ace System Monitor alternatives available on Linux, with the Rust-based Resources being the latest tool to the join the club. And it's a real looker... Resources shows real-time graphs showing the utilisation of core system components... You can also see a [sortable and searchable] list of running apps and processes, which are separated in this app. It's also possible to select a refresh interval "from very slow/slow/normal/fast/very fast (though tempting to select, 'very fast' can increase CPU usage)." And selecting an app or process "activates a big red button you can click to 'end' the app/process (a submenu has options to kill, halt, or continue the app/process instead)..." "If you don't like the 'Windows-iness' of Mission Center — which you may have briefly spotted it in my Ubuntu 23.10 release video — then Resources is a solid alternative."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/10/15/2121237 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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GNU's 40th Anniversary: the FSF's Meeting with Old and New Friends
by Peter Reutemann 16 Oct '23

16 Oct '23

'Devin Ulibarri, the Free Software Foundation's outreach and communications coordinator, writes up an event he describes as meeting with some old and new friends: On Sunday, October 1, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) hosted a hackday to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the GNU Project. Folks came from both near and far to join in the festivities at FSF headquarters, Boston, MA... Sadi moma bela loza, the Bulgarian melody from which The Free Software Song is set, could be heard faintly playing in a nearby room, its distinctive odd-metered tune performed by a fully-liberated X200... All in all, the event succeeded in our goal of welcoming both long-time members as well as introducing new people to free software and our cause. A few college students from local universities, for example, were able to ask questions seeking to better understand free software licenses and GNU Project history. We received multiple requests from attendees to host similar events again in the near future. And one parent, whose son played NetHack at the event, reported that, the following morning, his son asked to go to the FSF office after school to play it again. When playing he mastered the "vi" movement keys immediately. We hope they serve him well...! Happy hacking and please stay tuned for more FSF-hosted events, including LibrePlanet 2024!' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/10/15/0132244 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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T2 Linux Discovers (Now Patched) AMD Zen 4 Invalid Opcode Speculation Bug
by Peter Reutemann 16 Oct '23

16 Oct '23

'T2 SDE is not just a Linux distribution, but "a flexible Open Source System Development Environment or Distribution Build Kit," according to a 2022 announcement of its support for 25 CPU architectures, variants, and C libraries. ("Others might even name it Meta Distribution. T2 allows the creation of custom distributions with state of the art technology, up-to-date packages and integrated support for cross compilation.") And while working on it, Berlin-based T2 Linux developer René Rebe (long-time Slashdot reader ReneR) discovered random illegal instruction speculation on AMD Ryzen 7000-Series and Epyc Zen 4 CPU. ReneR writes: Merged to Linux 6.6 Git is a fix for the bug now known at AMD as Erratum 1485. The discovery was possible through continued high CPU load cross-compiling the T2 Linux distribution with support for all CPU architectures from ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, RISC-V to x86 (and more) for 33 build variants. With sustained high CPU load and various instruction sequences being compiled, pseudo random illegal instruction errors were observed and subsequently analyzed. ExactCODE Research GmbH CTO René Rebe is thrilled that working with AMD engineers lead to a timely mitigation to increase system stability of the still new and highest performance Zen4 platform. "I found real-world code that might be similar or actually trigger the same bugs in the CPU that are also used for all the Spectre Meltdown and other side-channel security vulnerability mitigations," Rebe says in a video announcement on YouTube. It took Rebe a tremendous amount of research, and he says now that "all the excessive work changed my mind. Mitigations equals considered harmful... If you want stable, reliable computational results — no, you can't do this. Because as Spectre Meltdown and all the other security issues have proven, the CPUs are nowadays as complex as complex software systems..."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/10/14/2151247 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Report Finds Few Open Source Projects are Actively Maintained
by Peter Reutemann 16 Oct '23

16 Oct '23

'"A recent analysis accounting for nearly 1.2 million open source software projects primarily across four major ecosystems found that only about 11% of projects were actively maintained," reports InfoWorld: In its 9th Annual State of the Software Supply Chain report, published October 3, software supply chain management company Sonatype assessed 1,176,407 projects and reported an 18% decline this year in actively maintained projects. Just 11% of projects — 118,028 — were receiving active maintenance. The report also found some new projects, unmaintained in 2022, now being maintained. The four ecosystems included JavaScript, via NPM; Java, via the Maven project management tool; Python, via the PyPI package index; and .NET, through the NuGet gallery. Some Go projects also were included. According to the report, 18.6% of Java and JavaScript projects that were being maintained in 2022 are no longer being maintained today. Other interesting findings: - Nearly 10% reported security breaches due to open source vulnerabilities in the past 12 months. - Use of AI and machine learning software components within corporate environments surged 135% over the last year.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/10/15/0225241 Don't fully agree with that... Just because a project isn't pushing out releases, doesn't mean that it is dead. I have a bunch of small libraries that haven't received any updates for years (and therefore new releases), because there was no need for it (i.e., I didn't find any bugs). It almost seems that if you follow the "do one thing and do it well" philosophy, then you can end up in that "dead project" category... Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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USB Over IP
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 15 Oct '23

15 Oct '23

Came across this video <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RAR1lo_Yc0> a few days ago, giving an example of the use of USB over IP. This lets you access a device physically connected to one machine from an entirely different machine. The presenter is an SDR (Software-Defined Radio) enthusiast. He has his SDR dongles attached to a machine in his garage, where they can be connected to antennas that give good reception. But he prefers to access the radio channels from the comfort of his living room. USB/IP is a platform-independent protocol, not restricted to Linux. Note also that the protocol has no authentication or encryption capability; so it’s best run only over a network (either physical or virtual) that you trust. The ever-dependable ArchLinux Wiki has an intro page <https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/USB/IP> with further useful links.

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MariaDB Financial Trouble
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 14 Oct '23

14 Oct '23

MariaDB, the company, is abandoning its SkySQL cloud product and distributed Xpand backend to try to cut costs <https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/13/mariadb_restructure/>. This after putting a lot of effort into promoting those products. One big customer that’s going to be impacted is Samsung, which has been relying on Xpand to support “tens of billions of transactions per day” by its customers to manage their user and device profiles.

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Yet Another Excel Screwup
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 13 Oct '23

13 Oct '23

How many ways can you use Microsoft Excel wrong in just one job? Let me count the ways <https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/12/excel_anesthetist_recruitment_blunde…> ... * A ranking column in the Wales region’s spreadsheet somehow got misinterpreted as an interview score. Since there were fewer candidates in that region than the minimum acceptable interview score, all candidates from there were deemed “unappointable”. * This scoring issue could have affected applicants across the country, since replacements would have been needed for the Welsh positions that became vacant. * To add to the difficulties, different regions used different conventions in their spreadsheet layout. Some tried to use VLOOKUP to guard against manual copy-paste errors (give them some credit there), but not everyone did. This kind of thing just added to the headaches in the merging process, which took several days of manual work. * After discovering their mistake, the recruitment office then tried to notify the wrongly-rejected candidates about the problem, and offer them jobs anyway. Unfortunately, due to a bug in the messaging system (OK, this wasn’t an Excel problem), the message went out to more candidates than intended. * All of this comedy of errors was kept quiet, until someone made a Freedom-Of-Information request.

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