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Firefox downloads PDF files to home directory when viewing
by Peter Reutemann 12 Apr '22

12 Apr '22

Hi everyone One annoying new feature that showed up in Firefox recently is that it downloads PDF files to my home directory rather then /tmp when I'm only viewing them. The following thread discusses this: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1370409 All you have to do is go to the configuration ("about:config" in URL bar) and change the following option to "false: browser.download.improvements_to_download_panel 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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The End Of Byte Magazine
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 12 Apr '22

12 Apr '22

I’ve been browsing through a few more of those old issues of Byte magazine, up to its shutdown in 1998. In the final, July, issue, among the items promised as “coming up in August”, was a “software lab report” on “free Unixes”: “We test Linux and FreeBSD to see how they measure up against their commercial cousins as servers and development platforms”. Presumably as per the typical magazine publishing pipeline, that report had already been done and written up by that point; I wonder if it ever got published anywhere ... Linux had been getting a few small mentions in the prior issues, along with other free software such as Perl for website development. Though the writers kept referring to these as “freeware” ... Also in that issue was a mention of an unusual new PC design, called the “Rock City”, from a company called the Panda Project. It was the shape of a cube, balanced on one corner (where the stand was attached). Hunting around, I found a short item, with one small, intriguing-looking picture, here <https://www.fatsofa.com/rockcity.html>. The actual company website is of course long gone; I tried looking for copies at archive.org, but while the text of the website back to 1998 is there, the pictures are not.

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Raspberry Pi OS Ditches Longtime User Account For Security Reasons
by Peter Reutemann 09 Apr '22

09 Apr '22

'Ars Technica: Since its launch, the Raspberry Pi OS (and most operating systems based on it) has shipped with a default "pi" user account, making it simpler to boot up a Pi and start working without needing to hook up the device to a monitor or go through a multi-step setup process. But as of today, that's changing -- new installs of the Raspberry Pi OS are shedding that default user account for both security and regulatory reasons. Raspberry Pi Foundation software engineer Simon Long explains the thinking in this blog post. "[The "pi" user account] could potentially make a brute-force attack slightly easier, and in response to this, some countries are now introducing legislation to forbid any Internet-connected device from having default login credentials," he writes. This move will improve the Pi operating system's security. Before, even if you assigned a good password to the "pi" account, attackers could still assume with a reasonable degree of certainty that most Raspberry Pi boards were using the "pi" username. Many Pi OS-based operating systems also ship with the default "pi" user account enabled and are completely passwordless, requiring extra steps to assign the account a password in the first place. The flip side is that the change could break some software and scripts, particularly those that are hard-coded to use the "pi" user account and home folder. "[T]he Raspberry Pi OS now boots into a dedicated setup mode the first time you start it up instead of running the setup wizard as an app in the normal desktop environment," adds Ars. "And that setup wizard now prompts you to create a username and password rather than simply assigning a password to the default 'pi' user account. To aid with setup, the wizard can now pair Bluetooth keyboards and mice without requiring you to plug in a USB accessory first." The new version of the Pi OS also includes experimental support for the Wayland display server protocol, but Long says most people should ignore it for now since it's explicitly labeled as "experimental."' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/22/04/08/2032252 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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Fedora Plans To Drop Support For Legacy BIOS Systems
by Peter Reutemann 08 Apr '22

08 Apr '22

'The Fedora 37 development team is considering dropping support for non-UEFI BIOS. Linuxiac reports: The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, or UEFI, is a modern method of handling the boot process. UEFI is similar to Legacy; however, the boot data is stored in a .efi file rather than the firmware. In the case of Fedora, while the change may take some time, the new Fedora x86_64 installations will no longer work on non-UEFI platforms. On x86_64 architectures, Fedora 37 will mark legacy BIOS installation as deprecated in favor of UEFI. While systems already using Legacy BIOS to boot will continue to be supported, new Legacy BIOS installations on these architectures will be impossible. ' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/22/04/07/2049257 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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Chinese Hackers Abuse VLC Media Player To Launch Malware Loader
by Peter Reutemann 08 Apr '22

08 Apr '22

'Security researchers have uncovered a long-running malicious campaign from hackers associated with the Chinese government who are using VLC Media Player to launch a custom malware loader. BleepingComputer reports: The campaign appears to serve espionage purposes and has targeted various entities involved in government, legal, and religious activities, as well as non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on at least three continents. This activity has been attributed to a threat actor tracked as Cicada (a.k.a. menuPass, Stone Panda, Potassium, APT10, Red Apollo) that has been active for more than 15 years, since at least 2006. Brigid O Gorman of Symantec Threat Hunter Team told BleepingComputer that the attacker uses a clean version of VLC with a malicious DLL file in the same path as the media player's export functions. The technique is known as DLL side-loading and it is widely used by threat actors to load malware into legitimate processes to hide the malicious activity. Apart from the custom loader, which O Gorman said Symantec does not have a name but has been seen in previous attacks attributed to Cicada/APT10, the adversary also deployed a WinVNC server to gain remote control over victim systems. The attacker also executed the Sodamaster backdoor on compromised networks, a tool believed to be used exclusively by the Cicada threat group since at least 2020. Sodamaster runs in the system memory (fileless) and is equipped to evade detection by looking in the registry for clues of a sandbox environment or by delaying its execution. The malware can also collect details about the system, search for running processes, and download and execute various payloads from the command and control server. [...] The attackers' dwell time on the networks of some of the discovered victims lasted for as long as nine months, the researchers note in a report today. ' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/22/04/06/2144218 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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disable "Pocket" in Firefox
by Peter Reutemann 08 Apr '22

08 Apr '22

Hi everyone If you find that "Pocket" in Firefox is getting in your way or you simply don't want to use it, just do the following to disable it: - in the URL bar, type about:config (and click on "show all") - and toggle "extensions.pocket.enabled" to "false" >From here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/disable-or-re-enable-pocket-for-firefox 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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Zyxel patches critical vulnerability that can allow Firewall and VPN hijacks
by Peter Reutemann 05 Apr '22

05 Apr '22

'Hardware manufacturer Zyxel has issued patches for a highly critical security flaw that gives malicious hackers the ability to take control of a wide range of firewalls and VPN products the company sells to businesses. The flaw is an authentication bypass vulnerability that stems from a lack of a proper access-control mechanism in the CGI (common gateway interface) of affected devices, the company said. Access control refers to a set of policies that rely on passwords and other forms of authentication to ensure resources or data are available only to authorized people. The vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2022-0342. “The flaw could allow an attacker to bypass the authentication and obtain administrative access of the device,” Zyxel said in an advisory. The severity rating is 9.8 out of a possible 10.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/04/zyxel-patches-critic… 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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'Infinite Mac' Project Lets You Boot Up Mac OS In Your Browser
by Peter Reutemann 03 Apr '22

03 Apr '22

'Ars Technica: What makes the ["Infinite Mac"] project unique isn't necessarily the fact that it's browser-based; it has been possible to run old DOS, Windows, and Mac OS versions in browser windows for quite a while now. Instead, it's the creative solutions that developer Mihai Parparita has come up with to enable persistent storage, fast download speeds, reduced processor usage, and file transfers between the classic Mac and whatever host system you're running it on. Parparita details some of his work in this blog post. Beginning with a late 2017 browser-based port of the Basilisk II emulator, Parparita wanted to install old apps to more faithfully re-create the experience of using an old Mac, but he wanted to do it without requiring huge downloads or running as a separate program as the Macintosh.js project does. To solve the download problem, Parparita compressed the disk image and broke it up into 256K chunks that are downloaded on demand rather than up front. "Along with some old fashioned web optimizations, this makes the emulator show the Mac's boot screen in a second and be fully booted in 3 seconds, even with a cold HTTP cache," Parparita wrote. CPU usage was another issue. Old operating systems and processors didn't really distinguish between active and idle processor states -- your computer was either on or off. So when you emulate these old systems, they'll ramp one of your CPU cores to 100% whether you're actually using the emulator or not. Parparita used existing Basilisk II features to reduce CPU usage, only requiring full performance when "there was user input or a screen refresh was required." Infinite Mac won't run later releases of classic Mac OS (including 8.5, 8.6, and 9) because those releases ran exclusively on PowerPC Macs, dropping support for the old Motorola 68000-based processors. Emulators like QEMU are capable of emulating PowerPC Macs, but (at least as far as I am aware) there are no easy browser-based implementations that exist. Not yet, anyway.' -- source: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/22/04/01/2032251 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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StarFive VisionFive RISC-V Single Board Computer
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 29 Mar '22

29 Mar '22

A few videos have appeared on YouTube in the last few days about this VisionFive board. Instead of an ARM chip, it uses a RISC-V CPU, but of course it runs Linux. It’s quite clearly gunning for the Raspberry π market, both in its configuration and pricewise, though I don’t think it’s as powerful as a π 4. StarFive Technology have a few quite technical-looking videos on their channel, seemingly going into details like how the OS boots. I’ll see if I can find a decent hands-on review.

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Mozilla To Offer MDN Premium Tier
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 28 Mar '22

28 Mar '22

The Mozilla Developer Network <https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web> is a really good resource if you’re doing any kind of web development. I’ve found all kinds of well-explained technical detail there that is simply missing from other sources (*cough* w3schools *cough*). Now Mozilla is trying to get some money from it. They’re not taking anything away from existing access, they are merely offering extra personalization features on a paid basis <https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/24/mozillas_mdn_subscription/>.

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