- wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Linux Mint "Uma and Vera"idle problem..
by John 15 Jan '23

15 Jan '23

Hi Folks, My installation of Linux mint Vera 21.1 has a very annoying habit of going into "idle" mode after 10 minutes. Makes watching a movie or listening to music a less than enjoyable task. I have on past installations of Mint sought answers, including running a couple of lengthy bash scripts I found in the forums to no avail. AFAIK my screensaver and power management setting are OK. the problem seems widespread through all the applications I have tried so far Rythmbox Celluloid VLC and Netflix Any help will be appreciated.. Cheers John..

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Native Americans Ask Apache Foundation To Change Name
by Peter Reutemann 12 Jan '23

12 Jan '23

'Natives in Tech, a US-based non-profit organization, has called upon the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) to change its name, out of respect for indigenous American peoples and to live up to its own code of conduct. The Register reports: In a blog post, Natives in Tech members Adam Recvlohe, Holly Grimm, and Desiree Kane have accused the ASF of appropriating Indigenous culture for branding purposes. Citing ASF founding member Brian Behlendorf's description in the documentary "Trillions and Trillions Served" of how he wanted something more romantic than a tech term like "spider" and came up with "Apache" after seeing a documentary about Geronimo, the group said: "This frankly outdated spaghetti-Western 'romantic' presentation of a living and vibrant community as dead and gone in order to build a technology company 'for the greater good' is as ignorant as it is offensive." And the aggrieved trio challenged the ASF to make good on its code of conduct commitment to "be careful in the words that [they] choose" by choosing a new name. The group took issue with what they said was the suggestion that the Apache tribe exists only in a past historical context, citing eight federally recognized Native American tribes that bear the name. In a statement emailed to The Register, an ASF spokesperson said, "We hear the concerns from the Native American people and are listening. As a non-profit run by volunteers, changes will need time to be carefully weighed with members, the board, and our legal team. Our members are exploring alternative ways to address it, but we don't have anything to share at this time."' -- source: https://apache.slashdot.org/story/23/01/11/2159256 Changing all the URLs, library names etc (and how that affects everyone downstream) sounds like a massive undertaking... Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Hackers discover that vulnerabilities are rife in the auto industry
by Peter Reutemann 12 Jan '23

12 Jan '23

'If you purchased a new car in the past few years, chances are good that it contains at least one embedded modem, which it uses to offer some connected services. The benefits, we've been told, are numerous and include convenience features like interior preheating on a cold morning, diagnostics that warn of failures before they happen, and safety features like teen driver monitoring. In some regions, connected cars are even mandatory, as in the European Union's eCall system. But if these systems sound like a potential security nightmare, that's because they often are. Ars has been covering car hacks for more than a decade now, but the problem really cemented itself in the public consciousness in 2015 with the infamous Jeep hacking incident, when a pair of researchers proved they could remotely disable a Jeep Cherokee while it was being driven, via an exploit in the SUV's infotainment system. Since then, security flaws have been found in some cars' Wi-Fi networks, NFC keys and Bluetooth, and in third-party telematics systems. Toward the end of 2022, a researcher named Sam Curry tested the security of various automakers and telematics systems and discovered security holes and vulnerabilities seemingly wherever he looked. Curry decided to explore the potential holes in the auto industry's digital infrastructure when he was visiting the University of Maryland last fall after playing around with an electric scooter's app and discovering that he could turn on the horns and headlights across the entire fleet. After reporting the vulnerability to the scooter company, Curry and his colleagues turned their attention to larger vehicles. [...] The researchers found extensive problems with 16 OEMs, telematics services like LoJack, new digital license plates, and even Sirius XM radio.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/01/hackers-discover-that-vulnerabilities-… -- blog: https://samcurry.net/web-hackers-vs-the-auto-industry/ Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Messenger billed as better than Signal is riddled with vulnerabilities
by Peter Reutemann 11 Jan '23

11 Jan '23

'Academic researchers have discovered serious vulnerabilities in the core of Threema, an instant messenger that its Switzerland-based developer says provides a level of security and privacy “no other chat service” can offer. Despite the unusually strong claims and two independent security audits Threema has received, the researchers said the flaws completely undermine assurances of confidentiality and authentication that are the cornerstone of any program sold as providing end-to-end encryption, typically abbreviated as E2EE. Threema has more than 10 million users, which include the Swiss government, the Swiss army, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and other politicians in that country. Threema developers advertise it as a more secure alternative to Meta’s WhatsApp messenger. It’s among the top Android apps for a fee-based category in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Canada, and Australia. The app uses a custom-designed encryption protocol in contravention of established cryptographic norms. Researchers from the Zurich-based ETH research university reported on Monday that they found seven vulnerabilities in Threema that seriously call into question the true level of security the app has offered over the years. Two of the vulnerabilities require no special access to a Threema server or app to cryptographically impersonate a user. Three vulnerabilities require an attacker to gain access to a Threema server. The remaining two can be exploited when an attacker gains access to an unlocked phone, such as at a border crossing.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/01/messenger-billed-as-… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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The Fairphone 2 Will Hit End-of-Life After 7 Years of Updates
by Peter Reutemann 11 Jan '23

11 Jan '23

'Ars Technica: It can be done. Android manufacturers can actually support a phone for a sizable amount of time. Fairphone has announced the end of life for the Fairphone 2, which will be March 2023. That phone was released in October 2015, so that's almost seven-and-a-half years of updates. Fairphone is a very small Dutch company with nowhere near as many resources as Google, Samsung, BBK, and the other Big-Tech juggernauts, yet it managed to outlast them with its support program. The whole goal of the company is sustainability, with easily repairable phones, available spare parts, and long update promises. The Fairphone 4 has a five-year hardware warranty and six years of updates, and the company's reputation says it can provide that. Sadly, the phones only ship in the UK and Europe. The Fairphone 2 only promised "three to five years" of updates, and it blew that out of the water. The Fairphone 2 features the Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 SoC, a chip that Qualcomm ended support for with Android 6.0. In what is probably an Android ecosystem first, that lack of chipset support didn't stop Fairphone, which teamed up with LineageOS and today ships Android 10 on the 7-year-old device. That's not the newest OS in the world, but it passes all of Google's Android compatibility tests. I'm sure there are newer amateur releases in the Android ROM community, but Fairphone's Android 10 build is up to the standard of an official release, as opposed to the "tell me what doesn't work" standard of many amateur ROM releases. Fairphone doesn't say why support is ending in March, but if it's staying on Android 10, it was going to have to kill support sometime this year. Google only supports security patches for the last four versions of Android, so even Google will be shutting down Android 10 support soon.' -- source: https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/23/01/10/2148222 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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ChatGPT is enabling script kiddies to write functional malware
by Peter Reutemann 10 Jan '23

10 Jan '23

'Since its beta launch in November, AI chatbot ChatGPT has been used for a wide range of tasks, including writing poetry, technical papers, novels, and essays and planning parties and learning about new topics. Now we can add malware development and the pursuit of other types of cybercrime to the list. Researchers at security firm Check Point Research reported Friday that within a few weeks of ChatGPT going live, participants in cybercrime forums—some with little or no coding experience—were using it to write software and emails that could be used for espionage, ransomware, malicious spam, and other malicious tasks. “It’s still too early to decide whether or not ChatGPT capabilities will become the new favorite tool for participants in the Dark Web,” company researchers wrote. “However, the cybercriminal community has already shown significant interest and are jumping into this latest trend to generate malicious code.” Last month, one forum participant posted what they claimed was the first script they had written and credited the AI chatbot with providing a “nice [helping] hand to finish the script with a nice scope.” The Python code combined various cryptographic functions, including code signing, encryption, and decryption. One part of the script generated a key using elliptic curve cryptography and the curve ed25519 for signing files. Another part used a hard-coded password to encrypt system files using the Blowfish and Twofish algorithms. A third used RSA keys and digital signatures, message signing, and the blake2 hash function to compare various files. The result was a script that could be used to (1) decrypt a single file and append a message authentication code (MAC) to the end of the file and (2) encrypt a hardcoded path and decrypt a list of files that it receives as an argument. Not bad for someone with limited technical skill.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/01/chatgpt-is-enabling-… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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New Linux Malware Downloader for Compromised Servers Spotted in the Wild
by Peter Reutemann 10 Jan '23

10 Jan '23

'"A new Linux malware downloader created using SHC (Shell Script Compiler) has been spotted in the wild," reports the site Bleeping Computer, "infecting systems with Monero cryptocurrency miners and DDoS IRC bots... "The analysts say the attacks likely rely on brute-forcing weak administrator account credentials over SSH on Linux servers.... " According to ASEC researchers, who discovered the attack, the SHC loader was uploaded to VirusTotal by Korean users, with attacks generally focused on Linux systems in the same country.... When the SHC malware downloader is executed, it will fetch multiple other malware payloads and install them on the device. One of the payloads is an XMRig miner that is downloaded as a TAR archive from a remote URL and extracted to "/usr/local/games/" and executed.... The second payload retrieved, dropped, and loaded by the SHC malware downloader is a Perl-based DDoS IRC bot. The malware connects to the designated IRC server using configuration data and goes through a username-based verification process. If successful, the malware awaits commands from the IRC server, including DDoS-related actions such as TCP Flood, UDP Flood, and HTTP Flood, port scanning, Nmap scanning, sendmail commands, process killing, log cleaning, and more. ASEC warns that attacks like these are typically caused by using weak passwords on exposed Linux servers. ' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/01/07/0427247 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Raspberry Pi Launches Higher Resolution Camera Module, Now With Autofocus
by Peter Reutemann 10 Jan '23

10 Jan '23

'Raspberry Pi is launching a new camera module for use with its diminutive DIY computers -- the Camera Module 3. Its upgraded Sony IMX708 sensor is higher resolution, but perhaps more important is that the new module supports high dynamic range photography and autofocus. Alongside it, Raspberry Pi is also releasing a new camera board for use with M12-mount lenses. From a report: Combined, the new features mean the Camera Module 3 should be able to take more detailed photographs (especially in low light), and can focus on objects as little as 5cm away. The autofocus uses a Phase Detection Autofocus (PDAF) system, with Contrast Detection Autofocus used as a backup. In contrast, previous versions of the camera module had fixed-focus lenses, which Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton writes were "optimized to focus at infinity" and could only take a "reasonably sharp image" of objects around a meter away. The new module's sensor has a resolution of 11.9 megapixels (compared to 8.1 megapixels for the last version), and has a higher horizontal resolution that should allow it to film HD video. HDR support means the Camera Module 3 can take several exposures of the same scene, and combine them so that both darker and lighter parts of an image are properly exposed (at the expense of some resolution) -- a trick commonly performed by just about every smartphone. Prices start at $25 for the Camera Module 3 with a standard field-of-view, while the ultra-wide angle version with a 102-degree field of view is $35.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/01/09/1647247 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Google wants RISC-V to be a “tier-1” Android architecture
by Peter Reutemann 04 Jan '23

04 Jan '23

'Over the holiday break, the footage from the recent "RISC-V Summit" was posted for the world to see, and would you believe that Google showed up to profess its love for the up-and-coming CPU architecture? We've been trying to nail down how the Android team feels about RISC-V (reduced instruction set computer) for a while. We last heard a comment from the team six months ago, where our Google I/O question about RISC-V was answered only with "we're watching, but it would be a big change for us." Some external RISC-V porting projects exist, and various RISC-V commits have been landing in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), but since anyone can submit code to AOSP, it has been hard to make any bold proclamations about RISC-V's Android status. Google's keynote at the RISC-V Summit was all about bold proclamations, though. Lars Bergstrom, Android's director of engineering, wants RISC-V to be seen as a "tier-1 platform" in Android, which would put it on par with Arm. That's a big change from just six months ago. Bergstrom says getting optimized Android builds on RISC-V will take "a lot of work" and outlined a roadmap that will take "a few years" to come to fruition, but AOSP started to land official RISC-V patches back in September. The build system is up and running, and anyone can grab the latest "riscv64" branch whenever they want—and yes, in line with its recent Arm work, Google wants RISC-V on Android to be 64-bit only. For now, the most you can get is a command line, and Bergstrom's slide promised "initial emulator support by the start of 2023, with Android RunTime (ART) support for Java workloads following during Q1."' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/google-announces-official-android-s… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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X11 Server Development Pace Hits a Two Decade Low
by Peter Reutemann 04 Jan '23

04 Jan '23

'Michael Larabel writes via Phoronix: While Mesa's development has been very vibrant this year, the X.Org Server development pace has continued pulling back greatly from its late 00's and early 10's highs. This year saw just 156 commits to the xserver Git master branch, down from 331 last year and well off the highs of 2,114 as the most ever back in 2008. This jives with the downward pace over the past decade of the number of new commits continuing to slide. But it's not just on a commit basis but in overall code churn, 2022 was another low for the X.Org Server. With the 156 commits this year, there were just 3,618 lines of new code added and 888 lines removed.... Compared to last year with its 331 commits seeing 31.4k new lines and 179k lines removed. The X.Org Server development this year on a commit basis hasn't been as low since 2003 when there were just 125 commits under their old development model and even back then meant there was +865k lines /680k lines removed across that span of commits. There hasn't been so little code churn to the X Server since 2002. [...] This year saw commits from just 32 different email addresses, down from 48 in prior years and that number of different authors hasn't been so low since 2003 when there were just 10 recorded. Olivier Fourdan of Red Hat was the most prolific committer to the X.Org Server this year with nearly a quarter of the commits. Following Olivier was Jeremy Huddleston Sequoia, Peter Hutterer, Michel DÃnzer, Alan Coopersmith, and Sultan Alsawaf. ' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/01/03/2248209 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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HandBrake video transcoder adds official AV1 codec support in latest release
by Peter Reutemann 03 Jan '23

03 Jan '23

'Hardware and software support for the royalty-free AV1 video codec has been steadily building over the last couple years. Hardware-accelerated encoding and decoding is becoming standard in more GPUs, phone SoCs, and other hardware, while streaming video services like YouTube and Netflix have begun serving AV1-encoded video to devices that support it. Open-source software projects are beginning to follow suit, too. The Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) package has been expanding its AV1 capabilities in recent releases, and now the HandBrake video transcoding app has added AV1 support as well. Version 1.6.0, released yesterday, has added support for encoding AV1 video using both CPU-based SVT-AV1 software encoding as well as via Intel's AV1-capable QuickSync video encoder included in its Arc GPUs.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/handbrake-video-transcoder-adds-off… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Ellen Ullman: “The Dumbing Down Of Programming”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 24 Dec '22

24 Dec '22

Found this two-part article from Salon magazine of 1998 <https://www.salon.com/1998/05/12/feature_321/>, <https://www.salon.com/1998/05/13/feature_320/>. Choice quotes: My intention had been to buy an upgrade to Windows NT Server, which was a completely sensible thing for me to be doing. ... But somehow I left the store carrying a box of Linux from a company called Slackware. ... In six clicks of a wizard, the Microsoft C++ AppWizard steps me through the creation of an application skeleton. ... Of course, I could look at the code that the Wizard has generated. ... But everything in the environment urges me not to. ... In this programming world, the writing of my code has moved away from being the central task to become a set of appendages to the entire Microsoft system structure. I'm a scrivener here, a filler-in of forms, a setter of properties. ... I once worked on a project in which a software product originally written for UNIX was being redesigned and implemented on Windows NT. Most of the programming team consisted of programmers who had great facility with Windows, Microsoft Visual C++ and the Foundation Classes. In no time at all, it seemed, they had generated many screenfuls of windows and toolbars and dialogs, all with connections to networks and data sources, thousands and thousands of lines of code. But when the inevitable difficulties of debugging came, they seemed at sea. In the face of the usual weird and unexplainable outcomes, they stood a bit agog. It was left to the UNIX-trained programmers to fix things. ... In an ideal world, I would not have to choose between the extreme polarities of dialog box and source code. My dream system interface would allow me to start hesitantly, unschooled. Then, as I used the facility that distinguishes me from the machine -- the still-mysterious capacity to learn, the ability to do something the second time in a way quite different from the first -- I could descend a level to a smarter, quicker kind of "talk." I would want the interface to scale with me, to follow me as my interest deepened or waned.

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Visual Effects Society 2021 Studio Platform Report
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 23 Dec '22

23 Dec '22

Came across this interesting survey report <https://drive.google.com/file/d/15b-4GMTSEE9tyqeQdBfy_LZnxQIdp38Y/view> (Google Drive link to a downloadable PDF file), linked from this opinion piece <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/it-might-be-time-for-apple-to-throw…>. The report was released early this year from the Visual Effects Society Technology Committee, and looks at how companies working in the VFX industry are using different computing platforms. Interesting fact: three-fifths of the workstations at these companies run Linux, and this share looks to increase in the future. There is a mix of distros, but the largest share are running CentOS. This seems to be dictated by the vendors of the proprietary apps, who will only support certain distros and not others. And of course this leads to worries like where do they go after the end of CentOS. By the way, the “VFX Reference Platform” is a set of baseline technical specs which gets updated every year <https://vfxplatform.com/>, hence designations like “CY2021”. Some interesting comments are recorded in the report: Windows continues to be seen as “working out of the box”, yet the comments describe many ongoing headaches with managing Windows systems, including technical limitations like “character limits, limitations of Active Directory management”. Sometimes it looks like the users can be part of the problem: All our artists refuse to work with Linux and we chose to keep on Windows for their comfort. But sometimes it's hard to manage. (Not a peep about the famous brand loyalty of Mac users?) Seems like there is a definite long-term preference for greater Linux adoption, with pleas like Support for Enterprise Software (Video and Chat Platforms) on Linux. Support for realtime tech (NVIDIA, Epic) on Linux. and We could have only Linux if it was not for Adobe After Effects and a couple of other Adobe Creative Cloud Apps.

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Microsoft discovers Windows/Linux botnet used in DDoS attacks
by Peter Reutemann 16 Dec '22

16 Dec '22

'Microsoft researchers have discovered a hybrid Windows-Linux botnet that uses a highly efficient technique to take down Minecraft servers and performs distributed denial-of-service attacks on other platforms. Dubbed MCCrash, the botnet infects Windows machines and devices running various distributions of Linux for use in DDoS attacks. Among the commands the botnet software accepts is one called ATTACK_MCCRASH. This command populates the user name in a Minecraft server login page with ${env:random payload of specific size:-a}. The string exhausts the resources of the server and makes it crash. “The usage of the env variable triggers the use of Log4j 2 library, which causes abnormal consumption of system resources (not related to Log4Shell vulnerability), demonstrating a specific and highly efficient DDoS method,” Microsoft researchers wrote. “A wide range of Minecraft server versions can be affected.”' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/12/microsoft-discovers-… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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AGM next month
by Peter Reutemann 15 Dec '22

15 Dec '22

Hi everyone Our AGM (Annual General Meeting) is scheduled for next month on January 23rd with the following agenda: • President's Report • Treasurer's Report • Election of 2023 Committee • Retirement of WLUG servers • General business • Consumption of pizza (if not online) Details: https://www.meetup.com/waikatolinuxusersgroup/events/290343641/ Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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You Can Hook Your MIDI Keyboard Up To a Website With Firefox 108
by Peter Reutemann 15 Dec '22

15 Dec '22

'A new feature in Firefox version 108 that may please musicians is the improved support for the Web MIDI API. "The MIDI standard is very close to a remarkable 40 years old, and Web MIDI does just what the name implies: it allows web apps to send and receive MIDI signals to and from musical instruments," reports The Register. "In principle this will allow sequencer apps to be implemented in Javascript." From the report: Amusingly, the last time The Reg mentioned Web MIDI, it was because Apple was taking it off Safari users, allegedly because of security concerns. Firefox 108 addresses that with a new security mechanism for preventing, and optionally permitting, apps inside browser tabs to access hardware resources -- in this instance, your MIDI ports. No, this does not mean that you can listen to CANYON.MID directly within Firefox. .MID files are not the same as General MIDI. But if you are nostalgic for that for some reason, help is at hand. ' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/12/14/2133258 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Ask Slashdot: What Should Mozilla Do To Boost Firefox's Market Share?
by Peter Reutemann 15 Dec '22

15 Dec '22

'Mozilla's Firefox once commanded a large chunk of the browser market share, but now it stands under a pitiful 5 percent. Google money removes need to compete from a management POV as they'll get paid either way but they're still leaving money on the table. What should Mozilla do to help Firefox regain its lost market share? Not so long ago Internet Explorer was only used to download Firefox when geeks reloaded Windows machines for others. Today, Edge, however pathetic, still outranks Firefox. Were FF not arguably the best available browser for Linux, share would be even less. Were you the king for a day what would you do to make Firefox great again? If you dropped or deprecated Firefox what shooed you off? This is not about Firefox being good or bad but about regaining casually discarded market share. ' -- source: https://ask.slashdot.org/story/22/12/14/1626235 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Z-Wave Alliance Says Z-Wave Source Code Project Is Complete, Now Open And Widely Available To Members
by Peter Reutemann 15 Dec '22

15 Dec '22

'The Z-Wave Alliance, the Standards Development Organization (SDO) dedicated to advancing the smart home and Z-Wave technology, today announced the completion of the Z-Wave Source Code project, which has been published and made available on GitHub to Alliance members. From a report: The Z-Wave Source Code Project opens development of Z-Wave and enables members to contribute code to shape the future of the protocol under the supervision of the new OS Work Group (OSWG). The goal of the project is to provide a rich development environment that contains the relevant source code and sample applications to those seeking to play a direct role in the advancement of the Z-Wave standard. The quality and interoperability of products utilizing Z-Wave Source Code will also be enforced by a new mandatory Silicon & Stack Certification program. Full Z-Wave certification will continue to test and certify for Z-Wave S2 security, network connectivity, range, battery life, and interoperability including backwards and forwards compatibility. "The Z-Wave Alliance is deeply committed to the global smart home market," said Mitch Klein, Executive Director of the Z-Wave Alliance. "This year the smart home conversations have focused largely on Matter. Shiny and new, and with big brands supporting the initiative, Matter is bringing a lot of attention to the smart home. This makes it easy to overlook Z-Wave as the most established, trusted, and secure smart home protocol, that also happens to have the largest certified interoperable ecosystem in the market. We firmly expect that Z-Wave will play a key role in connecting devices and delivering the experience users really want."' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/22/12/14/1712247 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Windows Driver-Signing Doesn’t Work
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 14 Dec '22

14 Dec '22

Having Microsoft verify third-party drivers with a digital signature, so that Windows will block the loading of unsigned drivers, seemed like a good idea when it came in with Windows Vista. Enforcing quality control would remove a big source of crashes, as well as security loopholes. But it seems the execution falls somewhat short <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/10/no-fix-in-sight-for-…>. The system for revoking signatures for old, obsolete drivers that are discovered to have security vulnerabilities in them doesn’t seem to work very well, allowing miscreants to exploit this old code to gain control of Windows systems. This has been dubbed a “Bring Your Own Vulnerable Device/Driver” (BYOVD) attack. Microsoft’s own Vice President of “OS Security and Enterprise” continues to claim that “Windows has everything you need to block” buggy signed drivers. Yet the article’s author was unable to get the mechanism to work. And Microsoft itself appeared to have no interest in helping to fix that. It seems to me, one thing missing from the mechanism is a time limit on signature validity. By contrast, when you get SSL/TLS certs for your website, they are only valid for some fixed interval (e.g. a year for certs from traditional certificate authorities, 90 days for ones from Let’s Encrypt). This means that clients using such certificates do not need to maintain an ever-growing list of revoked ones to check against, since ones that are past their expiry date can be rejected anyway. If the cert for a Windows driver has expired, but the driver itself is still valid, Microsoft should be able to simply renew the certificate. But I guess if Microsoft’s servers are struggling just to distribute certificate revocations, having to push out renewals as well will likely just make things worse.

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Term Of The Week: “Electronic Suppression Software”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 13 Dec '22

13 Dec '22

What is “Electronic Suppression Software” (ESS)? It’s the computer equivalent of the old accounting scam of keeping two sets of books -- the one where you record the real profits of the business, and the one you show to the tax department <https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/ird-warns-businesses-of-severe-conseque…>. This software seems to work at retail point-of-sale (tills). There have been some international raids lately on those suspected of supplying or using such tools.

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Xnspy Stalkerware Spied on Thousands of iPhones and Android Devices
by Peter Reutemann 13 Dec '22

13 Dec '22

'A little-known phone monitoring app called Xnspy has stolen data from tens of thousands of iPhones and Android devices, the majority whose owners are unaware that their data has been compromised. From a report: Xnspy is one of many so-called stalkerware apps sold under the guise of allowing a parent to monitor their child's activities, but are explicitly marketed for spying on a spouse or domestic partner's devices without their permission. Its website boasts, "to catch a cheating spouse, you need Xnspy on your side," and, "Xnspy makes reporting and data extraction simple for you." Stalkerware apps, also known as spouseware, are surreptitiously planted by someone with physical access to a person's phone, bypassing the on-device security protections, and are designed to stay hidden from home screens, which makes them difficult to detect. Once installed, these apps will silently and continually upload the contents of a person's phone, including their call records, text messages, photos, browsing history and precise location data, allowing the person who planted the app near-complete access to their victim's data. But new findings show many stalkerware apps are riddled with security flaws and are exposing the data stolen from victims' phones. Xnspy is no different.' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/22/12/12/1658208 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Raspberry Pi Inventory Improving, Could Reach Pre-Pandemic Levels In 2023
by Peter Reutemann 13 Dec '22

13 Dec '22

'According to CEO Eben Upton, "hundreds of thousands" of Raspberry Pi Zero, 3A+, and 4 models should show up next year. Ars Technica reports: In a "Supply chain update" blog post ("It's good news!"), CEO Eben Upton wrote that Raspberry Pi has "set aside a little over a hundred thousand units, split across Zero W, 3A+, and the 2GB and 4GB variants of Raspberry Pi 4, for single-unit sales." During the pandemic-spurred component shortage, most of the Pis produced every month were going to businesses, leaving those in need of one or two for a project refreshing rpilocator and cursing their timing. Zeros will start showing up first, then 3A+, then different models of 4. Upton acknowledged this reality (and even linked the locator) and asked that people buy only from approved resellers and consider the Pico and Pico W lines for projects that might fit, as those lines remain strong. As of this morning, a few 3A+ and CM4 models showed an optimistic green on the rpilocator spreadsheet. Raspberry Pi will continue to serve its commercial and industrial customers, Upton wrote, but will "make sure that inventory-building behavior which would otherwise prolong the shortage for everybody else can't take place." Meanwhile, Raspberry Pi will increase the percentage of boards designated for single-unit sales. With that change and future chip allocations, Upton expects that by the end of the third quarter of 2023, things will be back to how they were before the Great Pi Shortage, with "hundreds of thousands of units available at any given time." ' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/22/12/12/2242236 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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OSnews Decries 'The Mass Extinction of Unix Workstations'
by Peter Reutemann 12 Dec '22

12 Dec '22

'Anyone remember the high-end commercial UNIX workstations from a few decades ago — like from companies like IBM, DEC, SGI, and Sun Microsystems? Today OSnews looked back — but also explored what happens when you try to buy one today> : As x86 became ever more powerful and versatile, and with the rise of Linux as a capable UNIX replacement and the adoption of the NT-based versions of Windows, the days of the UNIX workstations were numbered. A few years into the new millennium, virtually all traditional UNIX vendors had ended production of their workstations and in some cases even their associated architectures, with a lacklustre collective effort to move over to Intel's Itanium — which didn't exactly go anywhere and is now nothing more than a sour footnote in computing history. Approaching roughly 2010, all the UNIX workstations had disappeared.... and by now, they're all pretty much dead (save for Solaris). Users and industries moved on to x86 on the hardware side, and Linux, Windows, and in some cases, Mac OS X on the software side.... Over the past few years, I have come to learn that If you want to get into buying, using, and learning from UNIX workstations today, you'll run into various problems which can roughly be filed into three main categories: hardware availability, operating system availability, and third party software availability. Their article details their own attempts to buy one over the years, ultimately concluding the experience "left me bitter and frustrated that so much knowledge — in the form of documentation, software, tutorials, drivers, and so on — is disappearing before our very eyes." Shortsightedness and disinterest in their own heritage by corporations, big and small, is destroying entire swaths of software, and as more years pass by, it will get ever harder to get any of these things back up and running.... As for all the third-party software — well, I'm afraid it's too late for that already. Chasing down the rightsholders is already an incredibly difficult task, and even if you do find them, they are probably not interested in helping you, and even if by some miracle they are, they most likely no longer even have the ability to generate the required licenses or release versions with the licensing ripped out. Stuff like Pro/ENGINEER and SoftWindows for UNIX are most likely gone forever.... Software is dying off at an alarming rate, and I fear there's no turning the tide of this mass extinction. The article also wonders why companies like HPE don't just "dump some ISO files" onto an FTP server, along with patch depots and documentation. "This stuff has no commercial value, they're not losing any sales, and it will barely affect their bottom line.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/22/12/12/0116206 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Linux Kernel Fixes Longstanding Bug in Its Handling of Floppy Disks
by Peter Reutemann 12 Dec '22

12 Dec '22

'"Linux kernel 6.2 should contain fixes for some problems handling floppy disks," reports the Register, "a move which shows that someone somewhere is still using them." This isn't the only such fix in recent years. As a series of articles on Phoronix details, there has been a slow but steady flow of fixes for the kernel's handling of floppy drives since at least kernel 5.17, as The Register mentioned when it came out.... Back in July 2016, SUSE kernel developer Jiri Kosina submitted a patch. The problem arose because this change broke something else and later got reverted, and so the problem hung around. In July last year, he sent in a new patch that fixed it again for the 5.12 kernel, and was later back-ported to 5.10, an LTS version, and again into kernel 5.15 — another an LTS version, and the one you're running today if you're on the current Ubuntu LTS release, or something built from it such as Linux Mint 21.... Now, in December 2022, a new patch for the forthcoming kernel 6.2 fixes a memory leak that dates back to 5.11 or before.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/22/12/11/0711207 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Google Reports Decline In Android Memory Safety Vulnerabilities As Rust Usage Grows
by Peter Reutemann 10 Dec '22

10 Dec '22

'Last year, Google announced Android Open Source Project (AOSP) support for Rust, and today the company provided an update, while highlighting the decline in memory safety vulnerabilities. 9to5Google reports: Google says the "number of memory safety vulnerabilities have dropped considerably over the past few years/releases."; Specifically, the number of annual memory safety vulnerabilities fell from 223 to 85 between 2019 and 2022. They are now 35% of Android's total vulnerabilities versus 76% four years ago. In fact, "2022 is the first year where memory safety vulnerabilities do not represent a majority of Android's vulnerabilities." That count is for "vulnerabilities reported in the Android security bulletin, which includes critical/high severity vulnerabilities reported through our vulnerability rewards program (VRP) and vulnerabilities reported internally." During that period, the amount of new memory-unsafe code entering Android has decreased: "Android 13 is the first Android release where a majority of new code added to the release is in a memory safe language. " Rust makes up 21% of all new native code in Android 13, including the Ultra-wideband (UWB) stack, DNS-over-HTTP3, Keystore2, Android's Virtualization framework (AVF), and "various other components and their open source dependencies." Google considers it significant that there have been "zero memory safety vulnerabilities discovered in Android's Rust code" so far across Android 12 and 13. Google's blog post today also talks about non-memory-safety vulnerabilities, and its future plans: "... We're implementing userspace HALs in Rust. We're adding support for Rust in Trusted Applications. We've migrated VM firmware in the Android Virtualization Framework to Rust. With support for Rust landing in Linux 6.1 we're excited to bring memory-safety to the kernel, starting with kernel drivers.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/22/12/01/2124259 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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