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Can a Fork Save Cutefish OS (or Its Desktop)?
by Peter Reutemann 18 Jul '22

18 Jul '22

'In April ZDNet called its beta "the cutest Linux distro you'll ever use," praising the polished "incredible elegance" of Debian-based Cutefish OS, with its uncluttered, MacOS-like "Cutefish DE" desktop. But now CutefishOS.com times out, with at least one Reddit user complaining "their email is not responding" and seeking contributors for a fork. But meanwhile, the technology site DebugPoint.com shares another update: It looks like the OpenMandriva project is already continuing with the development of the Cutefish DE (not the OS) for its own OS. For more details, visit the Matrix discussion page. Besides, it's worth mentioning that Arch Linux already have the Cutefish desktop packages in the community repo. You can even install it as a standalone desktop environment in Arch Linux with easy steps. As you can see, it is easier to maintain the desktop environment to continue its development because the structure is already out there. I have tested and reviewed hundreds of distros for years, and Cutefish OS is the promising one with its stunning desktop environment. It was written from the ground up with QML and C++ and took advantage of KWin. It would have been an attractive desktop as a separate component and could have been another great option besides KDE Plasma or GNOME. Many open-source projects are born and die every year, and it's unfortunate to see the situation of Cutefish OS. I hope an official fork comes up soon, and we all can contribute to it.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/22/07/17/0143210 It's been a while to see another desktop environment in action. Anyone keen presenting Cutefish DE next Monday? Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Google says you can now turn these 400 Macs, PCs into reliable Chromebooks
by Peter Reutemann 18 Jul '22

18 Jul '22

'Google today announced in a blog post that ChromeOS Flex, a version of its Chromebook operating system suitable for most hardware, has moved from early access to general availability. It also said it certified "over 400" devices, including systems from Apple, Dell, and HP, to run the OS smoothly and stably. Google announced ChromeOS Flex in February, building upon its 2020 acquisition of CloudReady (CloudReady becomes ChromeOS Flex now that the latter is stable). Cloud OS Flex is downloadable to a USB drive for free, allowing you to install it on a Mac or Windows PC. The most obvious use for ChromeOS Flex is to bring new life to a dated machine that may be too old to get software updates for its native OS. Our ChromeOS Flex beta review found the OS to be an interesting alternative for people content with doing most of their computing in a browser and for getting a budget-level Chromebook experience from an 8-to 9-year-old system.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/07/google-says-you-can-now-turn-these-… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Android 13 marches toward release with final beta version
by Peter Reutemann 18 Jul '22

18 Jul '22

'Google is quickly marching toward the next release of Android. The company announced the "final" Android 13 beta yesterday, beta 4, with word that an official release is "coming in the weeks ahead." After the massive overhaul of Android 12, Android 13 seems to be a smaller release focusing on various improvements and tablet features. A lot of Android 13 is building on the work from Android 12 and the tablet-focused mini-release, Android 12L. There are more Material You color options and more tweaks to the new notification media player. The tablet interface has a new app-drawer button for the taskbar and split-screen drag-and-drop support for notifications. You get more control over apps with a foreground app task manager and a new permission that requires apps to ask for notification access. Under the hood there is some serious virtualization power and support for Bluetooth LE Audio. There's even finally a standard QR Code reader now.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/07/android-13-marches-toward-release-w… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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techradar: "I've started using Mozilla Firefox and now I can never go back to Google Chrome"
by Peter Reutemann 18 Jul '22

18 Jul '22

'The year is 2008 and I had been using Mozilla Firefox for two years after my painful but inevitable breakup with Internet Explorer. But, out of school and professional necessity, I had to make the switch to Google Chrome. For the most part, it worked out for me. It had features that Firefox at the time didn’t, like being able to sync and access tabs from other devices or saving all my bookmarks under a single profile that I could transfer to other PCs. Then over the years, Google became more invasive. It, like many other major corporations, started tracking and compiling data and creating detailed profiles that it could sell to marketing firms. Lucrative business for them, but a nail in the coffin for internet privacy. The other nail is the fact that Chrome’s market share has absolutely skyrocketed during this period of time. Back in 2008 when I first made the switch, Google and Mozilla weren’t too far apart but now, thanks to most other browsers using some form of Chromium to power them, the gap might as well be an ocean. But I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t have to be that way. I finally switched back to Mozilla Firefox in 2019 and found it to be an incredible browser that had every feature Chrome had and more.' -- source: https://www.techradar.com/in/features/ive-started-using-mozilla-firefox-and… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Microsoft Screws Up Linux
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 17 Jul '22

17 Jul '22

Remember that version 1.0 of WSL (“Windows Services for Linux”) tried to emulate Linux APIs on top of the Windows kernel, but that turned out to be impossible to get right. (Why not? Windows kernel not functional enough?) So WSL 2.0 abandoned this approach, to bring in a true-blue Linux kernel running under a cut-down version of Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization system. Problem solved, right? You’d think having an actual Linux kernel would be sufficient to implement actual Linux APIs. And so Microsoft can offer regular Linux distros like Ubuntu to run on Windows, under WSL. But it turns out WSL actually relies on a specially-patched Microsoft version of the Linux kernel. So you can’t just take any old Linux distro and install it. Which is why you only have the option of distros specially packaged for the Microsoft Store. Furthermore, this special WSL kernel has some bugs in it that a regular Linux kernel does not. I discovered this while browsing through the open-issues list for libffi <https://github.com/libffi/libffi>. This library offers a “foreign-function interface”, which high-level languages can use to call functions written in C. For example, this library is the basis of Python’s ever-handy ctypes module. Look at this issue <https://github.com/libffi/libffi/issues/552>, where the script for building libffi fails under WSL. One participant has narrowed the problem down to this: The following shell script which performs the issued part in a generated configure file is as follows: #!/bin/bash exec 5>>my.log { touch my.log mkdir -p workdir cd workdir test -f ../my.log && mv ../my.log . stat my.log } On a Linux system single partition, the stat call will show expected data. In a WSL environment on an NTFS mount, the call will fail. The only real subtlety is that the enclosing block has a file open for writing that the code inside the block is moving to a different directory. But all this has perfectly-defined behaviour according to the POSIX spec. This applies even if the destination directory is on a separate filesystem, so that the “mv” command has to turn the rename into a copy-then-delete. I tried that script on my genuine Linux system, with and without “workdir” being a separate filesystem. I even tried formatting the separate filesystem as an NTFS volume. The code worked fine in all cases. So what’s going wrong? It could be the age-old Windows bugbear, where you cannot access a file that has already been opened somewhere else, because it is “locked”. Somehow Microsoft has transplanted this limitation into its own version of the Linux kernel. This may be a “feature” under Windows, but it is no longer conforming to POSIX filesystem semantics!

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Network Un-Neutrality Coming To Europe?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 14 Jul '22

14 Jul '22

Seems some ISPs are lobbying the European Commission to allow them to charge fees to companies such as Google, Meta and Netflix for providing their content to the ISPs’ paying customers <https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/07/eu-lawmakers-slam-idea-of-forci…>. Because the ISPs aren’t already charging their customers enough? They claim that the big content providers are somehow getting a “free ride” (even though they have to pay for their own Internet connections)? Our previous discussion about the consequences of such policies: <https://list.waikato.ac.nz/hyperkitty/list/wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz/thread…> (Seems the list archive was moved to a different system at some point, invalidating all previous archive links.)

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X.Org Server Hit By New Local Privilege Escalation, Remote Code Execution Vulnerabilities
by Peter Reutemann 13 Jul '22

13 Jul '22

'Getting things started for this "Patch Tuesday" are the disclosure of two new X.Org Server vulnerabilities. Phoronix reports: These issues affecting out-of-bounds accesses with the X.Org Server can lead to local privilege elevation on systems where the X.Org Server is running privileged and remote code execution for SSH X forwarding sessions. CVE-2022-2319 and CVE-2022-2320 were made public this morning and both deal with the X.Org Server's Xkb keyboard extension not properly validating input that could lead to out-of-bounds memory writes. Fixes for these XKB vulnerabilities have been patched in X.Org Server Git and xorg-server 21.1.4 point release is expected soon with these fixes. Both vulnerabilities were discovered by Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative. ' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/22/07/12/2012211 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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New Working Speculative Execution Attack Sends Intel and AMD Scrambling
by Peter Reutemann 13 Jul '22

13 Jul '22

'Some microprocessors from Intel and AMD are vulnerable to a newly discovered speculative execution attack that can covertly leak password data and other sensitive material, sending both chipmakers scrambling once again to contain what is proving to be a stubbornly persistent vulnerability. Ars Technica reports: Researchers from ETH Zurich have named their attack Retbleed because it exploits a software defense known as retpoline, which was introduced in 2018 to mitigate the harmful effects of speculative execution attacks. Speculative execution attacks, also known as Spectre, exploit the fact that when modern CPUs encounter a direct or indirect instruction branch, they predict the address for the next instruction they're about to receive and automatically execute it before the prediction is confirmed. Spectre works by tricking the CPU into executing an instruction that accesses sensitive data in memory that would normally be off-limits to a low-privileged application. Retbleed then extracts the data after the operation is canceled. [...] The ETH Zurich researchers have conclusively shown that retpoline is insufficient for preventing speculative execution attacks. Their Retbleed proof-of-concept works against Intel CPUs with the Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake microarchitectures and AMD Zen 1, Zen 1+, and Zen 2 microarchitectures. In response to the research, both Intel and AMD advised customers to adopt new mitigations that the researchers said will add as much as 28 percent more overhead to operations. [...] Both Intel and AMD have responded with advisories. Intel has confirmed that the vulnerability exists on Skylake-generation processors that don't have a protection known as enhanced Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (eIBRS) in place. "Intel has worked with the Linux community and VMM vendors to provide customers with software mitigation guidance which should be available on or around today's public disclosure date," Intel wrote in a blog post. "Note that Windows systems are not affected given that these systems use Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) by default which is also the mitigation being made available to Linux users. Intel is not aware of this issue being exploited outside of a controlled lab environment." AMD, meanwhile, has also published guidance. "As part of its ongoing work to identify and respond to new potential security vulnerabilities, AMD is recommending software suppliers consider taking additional steps to help guard against Spectre-like attacks," a spokesman wrote in an email. The company has also published a whitepaper. [Research Kaveh Razavi added:] "Retbleed is more than just a retpoline bypass on Intel, specially on AMD machines. AMD is in fact going to release a white paper introducing Branch Type Confusion based on Retbleed. Essentially, Retbleed is making AMD CPUs confuse return instructions with indirect branches. This makes exploitation of returns very trivial on AMD CPUs." The mitigations will come at a cost that the researchers measured to be between 12 percent and 28 percent more computational overhead. Organizations that rely on affected CPUs should carefully read the publications from the researchers, Intel, and AMD and be sure to follow the mitigation guidance.' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/22/07/12/2052224 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Lenovo are now shipping (some) laptops that only boot Windows by default
by Eliot Blennerhassett 13 Jul '22

13 Jul '22

"Starting in 2022 for Secured-core PCs it is a Microsoft requirement for the 3rd Party Certificate to be disabled by default. The apparent secured-core requirement for 2022 is that the second of these CAs should not be trusted by default. As a result, drivers or bootloaders signed with this certificate will not run on these systems. This means that, out of the box, these systems will not boot anything other than Windows[1]." https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/60248.html ... are we surprised? -- Eliot

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Two-Factor Authentication Doesn’t Help Against Phishing Attacks
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 13 Jul '22

13 Jul '22

This article <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/07/microsoft-details-ph…> points out that using a second authentication factor cannot really guard against “man-in-the-middle” attacks. If the fake site is passing on your credentials to carry out a logon to the real site, then it can also pass on any extra authentication factors that are coming through alternative channels: One of the few visually suspicious elements in the scam is the domain name used in the proxy site landing page. Still, given the opaqueness of most organization-specific login pages, even the sketchy domain name might not be a dead giveaway. Too often, it seems, this use of obscure login URLs neuters the effectiveness of the only real clue that the user might have to a phishing attack. My own insurance company is doing this sort of thing. They send me a renewal reminder e-mail, and all the links in it go through some online Adobe-run service for tracking the clicks. (Why can it not go through their own domain name, at least?) I told them about it last year and again this year: this year I finally got a response asking me to send them the offending message, which I did.

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