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Hotel Chain Switches To Chrome OS To Recover From Ransomware Attack
by Peter Reutemann 13 Jan '22

13 Jan '22

'A Scandinavian hotel chain that fell victim to a ransomware attack last month said it took a novel approach to recover from the incident by switching all affected systems to Chrome OS. The Record reports: Nordic Choice Hotels, which operates 200 hotels across Northern Europe, fell victim to a ransomware attack on December 2, when hackers encrypted some of its internal systems using the Conti ransomware strain. The attack prevented staff from accessing guest reservation data and from issuing key cards to newly arriving guests, as one of the hotel's guests told The Record in an interview last month. But in a press release today, Nordic Choice said that instead of contacting the hackers and negotiating a ransom for the decryption key that would have unlocked the infected devices, the hotel chose to migrate its entire PC fleet from Windows to Chrome OS. "[I]n less than 24 hours, the first hotel was operating in the Chrome OS ecosystem from Google. And in the following two days, 2000 computers were converted all over the company consisting of 212 hotels in five different countries," the hotel chain explained. Kari Anna Fiskvik, VP Technology at Nordic Choice Hotels, said the hotel had already run a pilot program to test the tool before the attack as a way to save money by reusing old computers with a less-demanding OS. "So when we suddenly had to deal with the cyberattack, the decision to go all in and fasttrack the project was made in seconds," Fiskvik said. Nordic Choice said it plans to migrate another 2,000 computers to Chrome OS, on top of the 2,000 it migrated during the attack. The hotel chain said they expect to save $6.7 million by converting old computers to Chrome OS instead of buying new hardware.' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/22/01/11/227251 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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Mozilla Is Going To Track Facebook Tracking You
by Peter Reutemann 13 Jan '22

13 Jan '22

'Gizmodo reports: Researchers at Mozilla announced this week the launch of its "Facebook Pixel Hunt" study, which seeks to track the company's immense web-wide tracking network and investigate the intel it's collecting on users. As the name suggests, this study is focused on a piece of tracking tech known as the "Facebook pixel." Chances are, you've visited a site that uses it; these tiny pieces of tech are buried in literally millions of sites across the web, from online stores to news outlets to... well, you name it. In exchange for onboarding a free pixel on their site, these sites can then track their own visitors and microtarget ads with the same sort of precision you'd expect from a data-hungry company like Facebook. In exchange for giving these sites the power to track every pageview, purchase, search query, and much, much more, Facebook (naturally) requires that this data be shared with it, too. In cases where the website visitor has an account on some Facebook platform, this offsite data just gets glombed onto whatever Facebook already knows about that person. If they don't have a Facebook account, then the company collects that data anyway, and uses it to create a "shadow profile" of that particular person. These are the sorts of shadowy practices that Mozilla's team wants to research with this study -- and you can help them do it if you're a Firefox user. Mozilla teamed up with reporters from the Markup to gather details about Facebook tracking using a free-to-download browser extension, Mozilla Rally, that will hoover up data sent out by Facebook's pixels as you browse across the web. Aside from that data, the extension also keeps track of the time spent on different web pages, the URLs that the browser visits, and more. Mozilla was quick to note in its announcement that the only data being exported from the extension will be de-identified, and not shared with any third parties besides the Markup's reporters.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/01/11/2257237 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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Chrome Will Limit Access To Private Networks, Citing Security Reasons
by Peter Reutemann 13 Jan '22

13 Jan '22

'Google says that its Chrome browser will soon block internet websites from querying and interacting with devices and servers located inside local private networks, citing security reasons and past abuse from malware operations. From a report: The change will take place through the implementation of a new W3C specification called Private Network Access (PNA) that will be rolled out in the first half of the year. The new PNA specification adds a mechanism inside the Chrome browser through which internet sites can ask systems inside local networks for permission before establishing a connection. If local devices, such as servers or routers fail to respond, internet websites will be blocked from connecting.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/22/01/12/2012211 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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Firefox 96 Yields Less Load On The Main Thread, WebP Encoder For Canvas
by Peter Reutemann 12 Jan '22

12 Jan '22

'Firefox 96.0 is officially shipping today as the first update of 2022 for this open-source web browser. From a report: Firefox 96.0 has "significantly" reduced the amount of load placed on the browser's main thread and there is also "significant" improvements in noise suppression and auto-gain-control and improvements in echo cancellation. In addition to that performance work, there are also WebRTC improvements, an improved cookie policy to reduce the likelihood of Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks, video quality degradation fixes, and other fixes. Over on developer.mozilla.org are some of the web developer changes with Firefox 96 including CSS color value function hwb() support for specifying the hue/whiteness/blackness, support for the CSS color-scheme property, the Web Locks API is enabled by default, image encoder support for WebP for exporting HTML5 canvas elements, and other additions.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/01/11/1639243 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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Chip Shortage Has Canon Telling Customers How To Defeat Its DRM
by Peter Reutemann 11 Jan '22

11 Jan '22

'Ars Technica: For years, printers have been encumbered with digital rights management systems that prevent users from buying third-party ink and toner cartridges. Printer companies have claimed that their chip-enabled cartridges can "enhance the quality and performance" of their equipment, provide the "best consumer experience," and "protect [the printers] from counterfeit and third-party ink cartridges." Left unsaid is the fact that requiring first-party cartridges also ensures a recurring revenue stream. It's an old business model -- Gillette sold its razor handles cheaply to sell more razors, for example -- and it's one that printer companies have enthusiastically embraced. Lexmark, HP, Canon, Brother, and others all effectively require users to purchase first-party ink and toner. To enforce the use of first-party cartridges, manufacturers typically embed chips inside the consumables for the printers to "authenticate." But when chips are in short supply, like today, manufacturers can find themselves in a bind. So Canon is now telling German customers how to defeat its printers' warnings about third-party cartridges. "Due to the worldwide continuing shortage of semiconductor components, Canon is currently facing challenges in procuring certain electronic components that are used in our consumables for our multifunction printers (MFP)," a Canon support website says in German. "In order to ensure a continuous and reliable supply of consumables, we have decided to supply consumables without a semiconductor component until the normal supply takes place again." [...] The software on these printers comes with a relatively simple way to defeat the chip checks. Depending on the model, when an error message occurs after inserting toner, users can press either "I Agree," "Close," or "OK." When users press that button, the world does not end. Rather, Canon says users may find that their toner cartridge doesn't give them a low-toner warning before running empty. "Although there are no negative effects on print quality when consumables are used without electronic components, certain additional functions, such as the detection of the toner level, may be impaired," Canon's support site says.' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/22/01/10/1959243 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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Is Antivirus Software More Trouble Than It’s Worth?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 11 Jan '22

11 Jan '22

<https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/10/opinion_column_consumer_av/>: Game knows game. Thus it came as little surprise that Norton's consumer security software not only sprouted a cryptominer that slurps your computer's life essence and skims a cut, but that it's hard to turn it off. ... Now? Even the meanest computer has hardware and software architectures that can be, and often are, configured for very high resilience against classic virus attacks. The observant may have noted that data security has not been solved – but the attacks aren't the sort of thing that resident consumer AV software can do much about. Endpoint protection managed in the cloud, whether explicit anti-malware services or OS-led protection as seamless as Chrome OS or through aggressive online patching, is as good as it's going to get. Keep up to date, and third-party security software you have to manage has no right to your system at all. Obvious question: how long before proprietary “OS-managed” or “cloud-managed” antimalware starts resorting to the same sharp practices as the consumer-grade stuff? Just consider how often Microsoft has tricked or strong-armed users into installing things they may not want, and made it hard to remove them ...

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Source Of The Famous “Now You Have Two Problems” Quote
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 11 Jan '22

11 Jan '22

Lots of us have come across this: Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I'll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems. -- usually attributed to Jamie Zawinski The form of this joke is also versatile enough to adapt to dumping on other things that the speaker might not like, e.g. “Some people, when confronted with a memory-management programming problem, think ‘I know, I’ll use a garbage-collected language.’ Now they have two problems.” Some time back, a guy named Jeffrey Friedl published a book called “Mastering Regular Expressions”, and the Slashdot discussion† got flooded with posts quoting this at him. So he took the trouble to track down the precise provenance of the quote, and how it had spread. His report is here <http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247>. While his original blog post was put up in 2006, the last update is from the end of 2020. Some reader comments are interesting, too. By the way, something I didn’t know before, is that Jamie Zawinski really, really hates Perl. Or at least he used to. †I told you it was some time back.

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Linux Mint Sells Out for Mozilla Money
by Peter Reutemann 11 Jan '22

11 Jan '22

'Brian Fagioli, reporting for BetaNews: The developers of the Ubuntu-based operating system have agreed to accept an undisclosed amount of money from Mozilla in exchange for making significant changes to Linux Mint. This includes removal of modifications to Firefox and a big change for search. The devs share the upcoming changes to Firefox in Linux Mint 19 and higher. The default start page no longer points to https://www.linuxmint.com/start/ The default search engines no longer include Linux Mint search partners (Yahoo, DuckDuckGo...) but Mozilla search partners (Google, Amazon, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ebay...) The default configuration switches from Mint defaults to Mozilla defaults. Firefox no longer includes code changes or patches from Linux Mint, Debian or Ubuntu.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/22/01/10/1930243 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Microsoft Invents The “Year 2022” Bug
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 04 Jan '22

04 Jan '22

Microsoft released a new version of Exchange Server at the start of the new year, which promptly caused everybody’s on-premises servers to crash. The reason? The version number. There is apparently code somewhere in the bowels of the software that interprets that number as a signed 32-bit integer, computed as the (year - 2000) × 100 million + additional digits for the month and day etc. Spot the problem with that? The largest representable such integer is 2147483647, so the top two digits can’t be greater than 21. So it can’t actually represent the correct version number for any version released after 2021. Why does the code do that? Who knows... Microsoft’s fix? Change the version number to restrict the top two digits to 21, and increment the lower digits instead, beyond their usual range (e.g. so the release date becomes effectively something like “33 December 2021”). They released a PowerShell script to automate the fix, but it might not work properly, so there is an option for a manual fix as well. <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/01/exchange-server-bug-…>

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Developer creates ‘Quite OK Image Format’ – but it performs better than just OK
by Peter Reutemann 27 Dec '21

27 Dec '21

'A developer named Dominic Szablewski has given the world a new file format with a splendid name: the Quite OK Image Format (QOI). The file format might be better than that. Szablewski explained that he decided the world needed a new image format because the likes of PNG, JPEG, MPEG, MOV and MP4 “burst with complexity at the seams.” “Every tiny aspect screams ‘design by consortium’,” he added, going on to lament the fact that most common codecs are old, closed, and “require huge libraries, are compute hungry and difficult to work with.” Szablewski thought he could do better and appears to have achieved that objective by cooking up some code, floating it on GitHub, and paying attention to the 500-plus comments it generated. While Szablewski admits that QOI will not compress images as well as an optimized PNG encoder, he claims it “losslessy compresses images to a similar size of PNG, while offering 20x-50x faster encoding and 3x-4x faster decoding.”' -- source: https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/21/quite_ok_image_format/ Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/.

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