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CrowPi 2 Raspberry-π-Based Laptop Incl Development Board
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 11 Aug '20

11 Aug '20

Review <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0WGyY7njWQ> of a laptop-styled unit built around a Raspberry π 4. Lift off the (wireless) keyboard, to reveal a built-in development board with a whole bunch of extra components on it for you to play with. Also comes with a few sensors that you can connect to conduct various experiments, plus two game controllers and a remote control. Oh, and some cardboard cut-out-and-fold Minecraft blocks.

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Boeing 747 Navigation Databases Updated Via 3½” Floppy Drives
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 11 Aug '20

11 Aug '20

A group of security hackers took advantage of British Airways’ decommissioning of its Boeing 747 fleet to have a nose round inside one before the scrap dealers moved in <https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/10/boeing_747_floppy_drive_updates_walk…>. The navigation database has to be updated every 28 days. This is done by bringing along a 3½” floppy disk with the new info and putting it into an onboard drive. On the bright side, there really seemed to be a good separation between the customer-accessible in-flight entertainment systems and those used to manage critical aircraft systems.

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Snapdragon chip flaws put >1 billion Android phones at risk of data theft
by Peter Reutemann 10 Aug '20

10 Aug '20

'A billion or more Android devices are vulnerable to hacks that can turn them into spying tools by exploiting more than 400 vulnerabilities in Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chip, researchers reported this week. The vulnerabilities can be exploited when a target downloads a video or other content that’s rendered by the chip. Targets can also be attacked by installing malicious apps that require no permissions at all. >From there, attackers can monitor locations and listen to nearby audio in real time and exfiltrate photos and videos. Exploits also make it possible to render the phone completely unresponsive. Infections can be hidden from the operating system in a way that makes disinfecting difficult. Snapdragon is what’s known as a system on a chip that provides a host of components, such as a CPU and a graphics processor. One of the functions, known as digital signal processing, or DSP, tackles a variety of tasks, including charging abilities and video, audio, augmented reality, and other multimedia functions. Phone makers can also use DSPs to run dedicated apps that enable custom features.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/08/snapdragon-chip-flaw… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Researcher Discovers New 'HTTP Request Smuggling Attack' Variants
by Peter Reutemann 10 Aug '20

10 Aug '20

'Some scary new variants of "HTTP request smuggling" have been discovered by Amit Klein, VP of security research at SafeBreach, reports Security Week: Specifically, an HTTP request smuggling attack, which can be launched remotely over the internet, can allow a hacker to bypass security controls, gain access to sensitive data, and compromise other users of the targeted app. While the attack method has been known for more than a decade, it still hasn't been fully mitigated. Klein has managed to identify five new attack variants and he has released proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits. He demonstrated his findings using the Abyss X1 web server from Aprelium and the Squid caching and forwarding HTTP web proxy. The developers of Abyss and Squid have been notified of the vulnerabilities exploited by Klein during his research, and they have released patches and mitigations. One of the attacks bypasses the OWASP ModSecurity Core Rule Set (CRS), which provides generic attack detection rules for ModSecurity or other web application firewalls. OWASP has also released fixes after being notified. Klein told SecurityWeek ahead of his talk on HTTP request smuggling at the Black Hat conference that an attacker needs to find combinations of web servers and proxy servers with "matching" vulnerabilities in order to launch an attack, which makes it difficult to determine exactly how many servers are impacted. However, an attacker can simply try to launch an attack to determine if a system is vulnerable. "The attack is not demanding resource-wise, so there's no downside to simply trying it," Klein said. In his research, he demonstrated a web cache poisoning attack, in which the attacker forces the proxy server to cache the content of one URL for a request of a different URL. He says attacks can be launched en-masse through a proxy server against multiple different web servers or against multiple proxy servers... While there haven't been any reports of HTTP request smuggling being used in the wild, Klein has pointed out that attacks may have been launched but were not detected by the target.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/20/08/09/0047219 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Linus Torvalds: Linux 5.8 "One of our Biggest Releases of All Time"
by Peter Reutemann 10 Aug '20

10 Aug '20

'This week saw the release Linux 5.8, which Linus Torvalds called "one of our biggest releases of all time," reports TechRepublic: The new version of the Linux kernel brings a number of updates to Linux 5.7 spanning security, core components, drivers, memory management, networking and improvements to the kernel's design, amongst others. This includes updates for Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization platform, Intel Tiger Lake Thunderbolt support, improvements to Microsoft's exFAT file system, and support for newer Intel and ARM chips. Torvalds said the kernel had received over 15,000 merge requests and that around 20% of all the files in the kernel source repository had been modified. "That's really a fairly big percentage, and while some of it is scripted, on the whole it's really just the same pattern: 5.8 has simply seen a lot of development," Torvalds said. Translated into numbers, Linux 5.8 includes over 800,000 new lines and over 14,000 changed files. It also received one of the biggest number of merge requests during its merge window — over 14,000 non-merge commits and more than 15,000 including merges, according to Torvalds. "5.8 looks big. Really big," he added.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/20/08/09/2046232 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Infographic: Ubuntu from 2004 to 20.04 LTS
by Peter Reutemann 09 Aug '20

09 Aug '20

'Today, the first point release of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS went live! To celebrate, we wanted to share how Ubuntu has evolved since the first release in 2004 to where we are today with 20.04. Thanks to those in the community and our users for your contributions and joining us on this journey. Upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS now!' -- source: https://ubuntu.com/blog/infographic-ubuntu-from-2004-to-20-04-lts Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Scientists Rename Human Genes To Stop Microsoft Excel From Misreading Them as Dates
by Peter Reutemann 08 Aug '20

08 Aug '20

'There are tens of thousands of genes in the human genome: minuscule twists of DNA and RNA that combine to express all of the traits and characteristics that make each of us unique. Each gene is given a name and alphanumeric code, known as a symbol, which scientists use to coordinate research. But over the past year or so, some 27 human genes have been renamed, all because Microsoft Excel kept misreading their symbols as dates. From a report: The problem isn't as unexpected as it first sounds. Excel is a behemoth in the spreadsheet world and is regularly used by scientists to track their work and even conduct clinical trials. But its default settings were designed with more mundane applications in mind, so when a user inputs a gene's alphanumeric symbol into a spreadsheet, like MARCH1 -- short for "Membrane Associated Ring-CH-Type Finger 1" -- Excel converts that into a date: 1-Mar. This is extremely frustrating, even dangerous, corrupting data that scientists have to sort through by hand to restore. It's also surprisingly widespread and affects even peer-reviewed scientific work. One study from 2016 examined genetic data shared alongside 3,597 published papers and found that roughly one-fifth had been affected by Excel errors.' -- source: https://science.slashdot.org/story/20/08/06/147226 This auto-interpreting and getting things wrong has always annoyed me about Excel and other spreadsheet applications. Not sure whether there ever was an option to turn off this "auto-detect of content type"... Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Yet Another Spreadsheet Screwup
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 08 Aug '20

08 Aug '20

The British Army had to retract a bunch of notifications about promotions incorrectly sent out <https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/07/army_promotion_excel_snafu/>. I suspect the phrase “incorrectly sorted” means they forgot to select all the right columns before doing a sort of the rows, leading to a scrambling of the data. This kind of thing is all too common.

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The Next Step In SSD Evolution: NVMe Zoned Namespaces Explained
by Peter Reutemann 07 Aug '20

07 Aug '20

'In June we saw an update to the NVMe standard. The update defines a software interface to assist in actually reading and writing to the drives in a way to which SSDs and NAND flash actually works. Instead of emulating the traditional block device model that SSDs inherited from hard drives and earlier storage technologies, the new NVMe Zoned Namespaces optional feature allows SSDs to implement a different storage abstraction over flash memory. This is quite similar to the extensions SAS and SATA have added to accommodate Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) hard drives, with a few extras for SSDs. 'Zoned' SSDs with this new feature can offer better performance than regular SSDs, with less overprovisioning and less DRAM. The downside is that applications and operating systems have to be updated to support zoned storage, but that work is well underway. The NVMe Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) specification has been ratified and published as a Technical Proposal. It builds on top of the current NVMe 1.4a specification, in preparation for NVMe 2.0. The upcoming NVMe 2.0 specification will incorporate all the approved Technical Proposals, but also reorganize that same functionality into multiple smaller component documents: a base specification (one for each command set of block, zoned, key-value, and potentially more in the future), and separate specifications for each transport protocol (PCIe, RDMA, TCP). The standardization of Zoned Namespaces clears the way for broader commercialization and adoption of this technology, which so far has been held back by vendor-specific zoned storage interfaces and very limited hardware choices. [...]' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/20/08/06/1916230 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Can Killing Cookies Save Journalism?
by Peter Reutemann 07 Aug '20

07 Aug '20

'In May 2018, as the European Union’s landmark privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation, went into effect, the main Dutch public broadcaster set in motion a grand experiment. The leadership at Nederlandse Publieke Omroep—essentially the BBC of the Netherlands—interpreted the law strictly, deciding that visitors to any of its websites would now be prompted to opt in or out of cookies, the tracking technology that enables personalized ads based on someone’s browsing history. And, unlike with most companies, who assume that anyone who skips past a privacy notice is OK with tracking, any NPO visitor who clicked past the obtrusive consent screen without making a choice would be opted out by default. The results weren’t terribly surprising: 90 percent of users opted out. Here is where the ad tech industry would have predicted calamity. A study performed by Google last year, for example, concluded that disabling cookies reduced publisher revenue by more than 50 percent. (Research by an independent team of economists, however, pegged the cookie premium at only 4 percent. Needless to say, there were methodological differences.) If the Google study was right, then NPO should have been heading for financial disaster. The opposite turned out to be true. Instead, the company found that ads served to users who opted out of cookies were bringing in as much or more money as ads served to users who opted in. The results were so strong that as of January 2020, NPO simply got rid of advertising cookies altogether. And rather than decline, its digital revenue is dramatically up, even after the economic shock of the coronavirus pandemic.' -- source: https://www.wired.com/story/can-killing-cookies-save-journalism/ Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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