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Company That Routes Billions of Text Messages Quietly Discloses It Was Hacked
by Peter Reutemann 05 Oct '21

05 Oct '21

'A company that is a critical part of the global telecommunications infrastructure used by AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and several others around the world such as Vodafone and China Mobile, quietly disclosed that hackers were inside its systems for years, impacting more than 200 of its clients and potentially millions of cellphone users worldwide. From a report: The company, Syniverse, revealed in a filing dated September 27 with the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission that an unknown "individual or organization gained unauthorized access to databases within its network on several occasions, and that login information allowing access to or from its Electronic Data Transfer (EDT) environment was compromised for approximately 235 of its customers." A former Syniverse employee who worked on the EDT systems told Motherboard that those systems have information on all types of call records. [...] The company wrote that it discovered the breach in May 2021, but that the hack began in May of 2016.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/10/04/1827246 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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Linus Torvalds On Community, Rust and Linux's Longevity
by Peter Reutemann 04 Oct '21

04 Oct '21

'This week saw the annual check-in with Linux creator Linus Torvalds at the Open Source Summit North America, this year held in Seattle (as well as virtually). Torvalds took the stage for the event's traditional half-hour of questions from Dirk Hohndel, an early Linux contributor (now also the chief open source officer and vice president at VMware) in an afternoon keynote session.... And the theme of community seemed to keep coming up — notably about what that community has ultimately taught Linus Torvalds. (For example, while Torvalds said he'd originally planned on naming the operating system Freax, "I am eternally grateful for two other people for having more taste than I did.") But even then Linux was a project that "I probably would've left behind," Torvalds remembered, "if it was only up to me." Torvalds credits the larger community for its interest (and patches) "that just kept the motivation going. And here we are 30 years later, and it's still what keeps the motivation going. Because as far as I'm concerned, it's been done for 29 of those 30 years, and every single feature ever since has been about things that other people needed or wanted or were interested in." Torvalds also says "I'm very proud of the fact that there's actually a fair number of people still involved with the kernel that came in in 1991 — I mean, literally 30 years ago.... I think that's a testament to how good the community, on the whole, has been, and how much fun it's been." And Torvalds says you can see that sense of fun in discussions about writing some Linux kernel modules using Rust. "From a technical angle, does that make sense?" Torvalds asked. "Who knows. That's not the point. The point is for a project to stay interesting — and to stay fun — you have to play with it.... "Probably next year, we'll start seeing some first intrepid modules being written in Rust, and maybe being integrated in the mainline kernel." "I really love C," Torvalds said at one point. "I think C is a great language, and C is, to me, is really a way to control the hardware at a fairly low level..." Yet Torvalds also saw Hohndel's analogy that it can be like juggling chainsaws. As a long-time watcher of C, Torvalds knows that C's subtle type interactions "are not always logical" and "are pitfalls for pretty much anybody. And they're easy to overlook, and in the kernel that's not always a good thing." Torvalds called Rust "the first language I saw which looked like this might actually be a solution"' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/21/10/02/004213 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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Millions Experience Browser Problems After Long-Anticipated Expiration of 'Let's Encrypt' Certificate
by Peter Reutemann 04 Oct '21

04 Oct '21

'"The expiration of a key digital encryption service on Thursday sent major tech companies nationwide scrambling to deal with internet outages that affected millions of online users," reports the Washington Examiner. The expiring certificate was issued by Let's Encrypt — though ZDNet notes there's been lots of warnings about its pending expiration: Digital Shadows senior cyber threat analyst Sean Nikkel told ZDNet that Let's Encrypt put everyone on notice back in May about the expiration of the Root CA Thursday and offered alternatives and workarounds to ensure that devices would not be affected during the changeover. They have also kept a running forum thread open on this issue with fairly quick responses, Nikkel added. Thursday night the Washington Examiner describes what happened when the big day arrived: Tech giants — such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Cisco, as well as many smaller tech companies — were still battling with an endless array of issues by the end of the night... At least 2 million people have seen an error message on their phones, computers, or smart gadgets in the past 24 hours detailing some internet connectivity problems due to the certificate issue, according to Scott Helme, an internet security researcher and well-known cybersecurity expert. "So many people have been affected, even if it's only the inconvenience of not being able to visit certain websites or some of their apps not working," Helme said. "This issue has been going on for many hours, and some companies are only just getting around to fixing it, even big companies with a lot of resources. It's clearly not going smoothly," he added. There was an expectation before the certificate expired, Helme said, that the problem would be limited to gadgets and devices bought before 2017 that use the Let's Encrypt digital certificate and haven't updated their software. However, many users faced issues on Thursday despite having the most cutting-edge devices and software on hand. Dozens of major tech products and services have been significantly affected by the certificate expiration, such as cloud computing services for Amazon, Google, and Microsoft; IT and cloud security services for Cisco; sellers unable to log in on Shopify; games on RocketLeague; and workflows on Monday.com. Security researcher Scott Helme also told ZDNet he'd also confirmed issues at many other companies, including Guardian Firewall, Auth0, QuickBooks, and Heroku — but there might be many more beyond that: "For the affected companies, it's not like everything is down, but they're certainly having service issues and have incidents open with staff working to resolve. In many ways, I've been talking about this for over a year since it last happened, but it's a difficult problem to identify. it's like looking for something that could cause a fire: it's really obvious when you can see the smoke...!" Digital certificates expert Tim Callan added that the popularity of DevOps-friendly architectures like containerization, virtualization and cloud has greatly increased the number of certificates the enterprise needs while radically decreasing their average lifespan. "That means many more expiration events, much more administration time required, and greatly increased risk of a failed renewal," he said. ' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/21/10/02/2318202 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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FSF Announces 'JShelter' Browser Privacy Extension to Block Fingerprinting, Tracking, and Malware
by Peter Reutemann 04 Oct '21

04 Oct '21

'This week the Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced JShelter, "an anti-malware Web browser extension to mitigate potential threats from JavaScript, including fingerprinting, tracking, and data collection." The browser add-on — supported by NLnet Foundation's Next Generation Internet (NGI) Zero Privacy & Trust Enhancing Technologies fund — is currently "in development and the first release is available." This browser add-on will limit the potential for JavaScript programs to do harmful actions by restricting default behavior and adding a layer of control... Accessing cookies, performing fingerprinting to track users across multiple sites, revealing the local network address, or capturing the user's input before they submit a form are some examples of JavaScript's capabilities that can be used in harmful ways. JShelter adds a safety layer that allows the user to choose if a certain action should be forbidden on a site, or if it should be allowed with restrictions, such as reducing the accuracy of geolocation to the city area. This layer can also aid as a countermeasure against attacks targeting the browser, operating system, or hardware levels... [The extension] will ask — globally or per site — if specific native functions provided by the JavaScript engine and the Document Object Model (DOM) are allowed by the user. It will also link to an explanatory page for each function, to raise awareness of related threats. Depending on the function being addressed, the user will have the option to allow it, block it, or have it return a custom value... "Our browsers have become perhaps the most critical of tools we depend on, and yet the browser environment is far from healthy," says Michiel Leenaars, director of strategy at NLnet Foundation and coordinator of NGI Zero. "Dominant corporate behavior from a small amount of actors has been aggressively reshaping the evolution of the Web, and that is starting to wreak havoc. Despite an enormous systemic dependency, we as users have very little control over what browsers allow and share — leading to significant risk as the most powerful tools in the shed are essentially left unprotected for every casual Web site to abuse. JShelter is a great initiative to help empower us all, to help us gain better understanding and to better safeguard ourselves from obvious and otherwise unavoidable harm." The effort is part of a larger, multi-year campaign from FSF on JavaScript on the Web started in 2013, which among others includes the development of GNU LibreJS and outreach to users and developers about nonfree software inside the browser. The GNU LibreJS extension detects JavaScript web labels and assists users with running only JavaScript distributed under a free software license, according to their ethical convictions and individual preferences. "JShelter will help protect users from critical threats now, and contribute significantly to progress on the necessary longer-term cultural shift of moving away from nonfree JavaScript," said Ruben Rodriguez, former FSF chief technology officer. "This is a project I've been looking forward to for years, tired of dealing with all kinds of potential antifeatures in the browsers I use and distribute, and having to figure out some countermeasure for them with configuration changes, patches or extensions. Being able to wrap the JavaScript engine in a layer of protection is a game changer."' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/10/03/0150251 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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Let's Encrypt's Root Certificate is expiring!
by Peter Reutemann 01 Oct '21

01 Oct '21

'On 30th September 2021, the root certificate that Let's Encrypt are currently using, the IdentTrust DST Root CA X3 certificate, will expire. You may or may not need to do anything about this Root CA expiring, but I'm betting a few things will probably break on that day so here's what you need to know!' -- source: https://scotthelme.co.uk/lets-encrypt-old-root-expiration/ 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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People Will Pay For Privacy, And Take Rewards To Give It Up
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 01 Oct '21

01 Oct '21

British consumer magazine “Which?” has published the results of a survey <https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/30/which_data_survey/> which found that people would pay companies like Google and Facebook an average of £1.09 a month to avoid collection of their personal data and its use for targeted advertising. On the other hand, while a quarter of people were happy to receive targeted advertising to begin with, that proportion went up quite substantially if a basic reward like an Amazon voucher were offered.

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Social Media Companies Can’t Be Trusted To Police Themselves -- Who Knew?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 29 Sep '21

29 Sep '21

>From a hearing at the US House of Representatives <https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/29/facebook_research_congress/> which received submissions from academics trying to study Facebook’s effect on its users in the face of active hostility from the company: “Tobacco companies don't get to decide who does research on smoking and the idea that social media companies get to decide who studies them is perverse.” -- Laura Edelson

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With HTTPS Everywhere, EFF Begins Plans to Eventually Deprecate 'HTTPS Everywhere' Extension
by Peter Reutemann 27 Sep '21

27 Sep '21

'The Record reports: The Electronic Frontier Foundation said it is preparing to retire the famous HTTPS Everywhere browser extension after HTTPS adoption has picked up and after several web browsers have introduced HTTPS-only modes." "After the end of this year, the extension will be in 'maintenance mode' for 2022," said Alexis Hancock, Director of Engineering at the EFF. Maintenance mode means the extension will receive minor bug fixes next year but no new features or further development. No official end-of-life date has been decided, a date after which no updates will be provided for the extension whatsoever. Launched in June 2010, the HTTPS Everywhere browser extension is one of the most successful browser extensions ever released. The extension worked by automatically switching web connections from HTTP to HTTPS if websites had an HTTPS option available. At the time it was released, it helped upgrade site connections to HTTPS when users clicked on HTTP links or typed domains in their browser without specifying the "https://" prefix. The extension reached cult status among privacy advocates and was integrated into the Tor Browser and, after that, in many other privacy-conscious browsers. But since 2010, HTTPS is not a fringe technology anymore. Currently, around 86.6% of all internet sites support HTTPS connections. Browser makers such as Chrome and Mozilla previously reported that HTTPS traffic usually accounts for 90% to 95% of their daily connections. >From EFF's announcement: The goal of HTTPS Everywhere was always to become redundant. That would mean we'd achieved our larger goal: a world where HTTPS is so broadly available and accessible that users no longer need an extra browser extension to get it. Now that world is closer than ever, with mainstream browsers offering native support for an HTTPS-only mode. With these simple settings available, EFF is preparing to deprecate the HTTPS Everywhere web extension as we look to new frontiers of secure protocols like SSL/TLS... We know many different kinds of users have this tool installed, and want to give our partners and users the needed time to transition. The announcement also promises to inform users of browser-native HTTPS-only options before the day when the extension reaches its final sunsetting — and ends with instructions for how to activate the native HTTPS-only features in Firefox, Chrome, Edge, and Safari, "and celebrate with us that HTTPS is truly everywhere for users."' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/21/09/27/008226 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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Linus Torvalds Recognizes Linux's 'True' 30th Anniversary Date
by Peter Reutemann 26 Sep '21

26 Sep '21

'While it's been argued that Linux has four different "birthdays," last Friday saw the 30th anniversary of Linux's very, very first release — version 0.01. That special first release "was never publicly announced, and I only emailed a handful of people in private about the upload," Torvalds remembered on the Linux kernel mailing list. He no longer has copies of those announcement emails, "so there's no real record of that. The only record of the date is in the Linux-0.01 tar-file itself, I suspect." "Alas, the dates in that tar-file are for the last modification dates, not the actual creation of the tar-file," Torvalds wrote, "but it does seem to have happened around 7:30pm (Finnish time), so the exact anniversary was technically a couple of hours ago." So when the exact moment arrived for its 30th anniversary, Torvalds couldn't resist sharing the moment on the Linux kernel mailing list. "Just thought I'd mention it, since while unannounced, in many ways this is the true 30th anniversary date of the actual code."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/21/09/25/0333233 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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meeting tomorrow
by Peter Reutemann 26 Sep '21

26 Sep '21

Hi everyone Apologies for the late reminder, things have been a bit hectic at my end... We have a "virtual" meeting tomorrow: "Peter Reutemann will demo Syncthing (https://syncthing.net/) a continuous file synchronization program. It synchronizes files between two or more computers in real time, respecting your privacy. Runs on Linux, Windows, Mac and Android among other platforms." Details: https://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/274861089/ Meeting link will be available to people that RSVP on meetup.com. 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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