- wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Something Is Jamming Our Remote Car Locks ...
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 13 Jan '22

13 Jan '22

This is such a weird story <https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/hamilton-customers-unable-to-lock-cars-after-…>, and right in our neighbourhood, too: Customers at a Hamilton shopping complex were mysteriously unable to lock their cars on the weekend after a rather bizarre fault in the centre's system. ... On January 11, The Base Shopping Centre confirmed the issue on social media. "We have received reports of an issue that interfered with vehicle remote locking over the weekend. "This has been linked to an incident off-site which was out of our control and is being addressed. No malicious or intentional signal blocking activity was involved." The next day: "An external electrical event had caused a fault to onsite equipment resulting in the interference - this equipment has now been reset and checked by authorities. ..." No mention of what exactly the “system” or “equipment” was, or the “event” was about ... Were any readers of this list there at the time?

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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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Second Ransomware Family Exploiting Log4j Spotted In US, Europe
by Peter Reutemann 23 Dec '21

23 Dec '21

'Researchers say a second family of ransomware has been growing in usage for attack attempts that exploit the critical vulnerability in Apache Log4j, including in the U.S. and Europe. VentureBeat reports: A number of researchers, including at cybersecurity giant Sophos, have now said they've observed the attempted deployment of a ransomware family known as TellYouThePass. Researchers have described TellYouThePass as an older and largely inactive ransomware family -- which has been revived following the discovery of the vulnerability in the widely used Log4j logging software. TellYouThePass is the second family of ransomware that's been observed to exploit the vulnerability in Log4j, known as Log4Shell, joining the Khonsari ransomware, according to researchers. While previous reports indicated that TellYouThePass was mainly being directed against targets in China, researchers at Sophos told VentureBeat that they've observed the attempted delivery of TellYouThePass ransomware both inside and outside of China -- including in the U.S. and Europe. "Systems in China were targeted, as well as some hosted in Amazon and Google cloud services in the U.S. and at several sites in Europe," said Sean Gallagher, a senior threat researcher at Sophos Labs, in an email to VentureBeat on Tuesday. Sophos detected attempts to deliver TellYouThePass payloads by utilizing the Log4j vulnerability on December 17 and December 18, Gallagher said. TellYouThePass has versions that run on either Linux or Windows, "and has a history of exploiting high-profile vulnerabilities like EternalBlue," said Andrew Brandt, a threat researcher at Sophos, in an email. The Linux version is capable of stealing Secure Socket Shell (SSH) keys and can perform lateral movement, Brandt said. Sophos initially disclosed its detection of TellYouThePass ransomware in a December 20 blog post. The first report of TellYouThePass ransomware exploiting the Log4j vulnerability appears to have come from the head of Chinese cybersecurity group KnownSec 404 Team on December 12. The attempted deployment of TellYouThePass in conjunction with Log4Shell was subsequently confirmed by additional researchers, according to researcher community Curated Intelligence. In a blog post Tuesday, Curated Intelligence said its members can now confirm that TellYouThePass has been seen exploiting the vulnerability "in the wild to target both Windows and Linux systems." TellYouThePass had most recently been observed in July 2020, Curated Intelligence said. It joins Khonsari, a new family of ransomware identified in connection with exploits of the Log4j vulnerability. ' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/21/12/22/2255231 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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Patch fixing critical Log4J 0-day has its own vulnerability that’s under exploit
by Peter Reutemann 20 Dec '21

20 Dec '21

'Last Thursday, the world learned of an in-the-wild exploitation of a critical code-execution zero-day in Log4J, a logging utility used by just about every cloud service and enterprise network on the planet. Open source developers quickly released an update that patched the flaw and urged all users to install it immediately. Now, researchers are reporting that there are at least two vulnerabilities in the patch, released as Log4J 2.15.0, and that attackers are actively exploiting one or both of them against real-world targets who have already applied the update. The researchers are urging organizations to install a new patch, released as version 2.16.0, as soon as possible to fix the vulnerability, which is tracked as CVE-2021-45046. ' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/12/patch-fixing-critica… 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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This USB 'Kill Cord' Can Instantly Wipe Your Laptop if Snatched or Stolen
by Peter Reutemann 18 Dec '21

18 Dec '21

'Journalists, activists, and human rights defenders face a constant battle to keep files safe from a growing set of digital threats and surveillance. But physical attacks can be challenging to defend against, whether an opportunist snatch-and-grab thief or an oppressive government kicking down someone's door. This week, a project called BusKill launched a custom USB magnetic breakaway cable that acts as a "dead man's switch," locking a computer if someone physically snatches it and severs the magnetic connectors. BusKill has been in the works for more than two years as a do-it-yourself project. Anyone with the hardware could compile the source code, but it only worked on Linux and components quickly sold out. After a crowdsourcing effort, the cable is now available to buy starting at $59 and has an accompanying app that works on macOS, Windows, and Linux, allowing the person using the cable to easily arm and disarm the cable with a touch of a button.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/12/17/1530254 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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Pop!_OS 21.10 Review
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 17 Dec '21

17 Dec '21

This review <https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/16/pop_os_2110_new_system76/> of the new version of the Ubuntu variant from System76 mentions a lot of trouble getting it to play nicely with other installed OSes on the same machine. One key difference is that it doesn’t boot with GRUB. Instead, it is EFI-only, and requires your kernel and initial RAM disk to live inside the “EFI System Partition” (ESP), where they can be found by systemd-boot. This typically requires the ESP to be enlarged beyond its initial size. And, depending on the tools you use, that can be problematic. This EFI-only boot procedure can also complicate coexistence with other OS installations on a multiboot system. But, interestingly, not Microsoft Windows, at least according to one of the reader comments. Indeed, a well-known issue where installing Windows on an MBR-based system destroys your ability to boot other OSes goes away with EFI-only booting. Seems Windows is well-enough behaved to only replace its own EFI state, leaving that for other OSes alone.

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AGM next month
by Peter Reutemann 17 Dec '21

17 Dec '21

Hi everyone We have our Annual General Meeting (AGM) coming up on January 24th with the following (preliminary) agenda: - President's Report - Treasurer's Report - Election of 2022 Committee - General business - Consumption of pizza Details: https://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/282720630/ BTW Meeting venue (or whether to be held online due to COVID) will be confirmed closer to the date. 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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Google Is Building a New AR Device and OS
by Peter Reutemann 15 Dec '21

15 Dec '21

'According to job listings on LinkedIn, Google appears to be working on an augmented reality device and operating system to pair with it. Ars Technica reports: On LinkedIn, operating system engineering director Mark Lucovsky announced that he has joined Google. He previously headed up mixed reality operating system work for Meta, and before that he was one of the key architects of Windows NT at Microsoft. "My role is to lead the Operating System team for Augmented Reality at Google," he wrote. He also posted a link to some job listings at Google that give the impression Google is getting just as serious about AR as Apple or Meta. As 9to5Google discovered, one of the listings ("Senior Software Developer, Embedded, Augmented Reality OS") described Google's objective in clear terms: "Our team is building the software components that control and manage the hardware on our Augmented Reality (AR) products. These are the software components that run on the AR devices and are the closest to the hardware. As Google adds products to the AR portfolio, the OS Foundations team is the very first software team to work with new hardware." Other job listings say new hires will be working on an "innovative AR device." And one specifies that Google is "focused on making immersive computing accessible to billions of people through mobile devices." The roles are largely in the United States, but some are located in Waterloo, Ontario -- the HQ of Canadian smart glasses maker North, which Google acquired in 2020.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/12/14/2233208 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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Android 12 Go Edition Brings New Speed, Battery, Privacy Features To Lower-end Phones
by Peter Reutemann 15 Dec '21

15 Dec '21

'Google's Pixel 6 line may have served as Android 12's big debut for higher-end phones, but Android 12 (Go edition) plans to bring many of the enhancements and features of Android 12 to lower-end phones, too. Google on Tuesday unveiled a host of new features for the Go edition that are set to roll out to devices in 2022. From a report: Google says that in addition to speed enhancements that'll help apps launch up to 30% faster, Android 12 (Go edition) will include a feature that'll save battery life and storage by automatically "hibernating apps that haven't been used for extended periods of time." And with the Files Go app, you'll be able to recover files within 30 days of deletion. Android 12 (Go edition) will also help you easily translate any content, listen to the news and share apps with nearby devices offline to save data, Google says. The company said Android Go has amassed 200 million users.' -- source: https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/21/12/14/1848213 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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Log4Shell Vuln Rated 10 Out Of 10
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 14 Dec '21

14 Dec '21

The Log4Shell vulnerability has been given the highest possible CVE severity rating <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/12/the-log4shell-zeroda…>. It’s a really, really stupid bug in a logging framework called Log4J, which is used by an incredible variety of Java-based applications, including Minecraft. Log messages are generated according to customizable format templates that the admin can specify. These templates allow the creation of a range of different messages, including all kinds of useful information which can aid in debugging, performance monitoring, usage statistics gathering etc. But one thing you should never, ever do is, having substituted some text from some random source (e.g. user input), go back and scan that text for format substitution codes. But that is what the buggy code does.

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VPOTUS Getting Flak For Her Bluetooth Aversion
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 14 Dec '21

14 Dec '21

Seems US Vice President Kamala Harris is copping a fair amount of ridicule after saying she prefers wired headphones to wireless Bluetooth ones, for security reasons <https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/13/in_brief_security/>. She’s just listening to her security advisors, folks. And their advice makes sense.

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n-dimensional image tool powers up Python
by Matthew Skiffington 08 Dec '21

08 Dec '21

>From the nature science briefing: A free, open-source and extensible image viewer for arbitrarily complex (‘ <https://nature.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2c6057c528fdc6f73fa196d9d…> *n* <https://nature.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2c6057c528fdc6f73fa196d9d…>-dimensional’) data <https://nature.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2c6057c528fdc6f73fa196d9d…> fills a gap in the Python scientific ecosystem. napari — whose name refers to a Pacific island village midway between the developers’ bases in San Francisco and Melbourne — features a simple graphical interface with a built-in Python console. Early adopters are using it to streamline everything from visualizing atmospheric jet streams to identifying cells in tissue. Nature | 4 min read <https://nature.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2c6057c528fdc6f73fa196d9d…> Cheers,Matthew *Doctoral Researcher, TAIAO project <https://taiao.ai/>**, University of Waikato* *Machine Learning Laboratory, FG.2.01LinkedIn <https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-skiffington>*

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A Mysterious Threat Actor is Running Hundreds of Malicious Tor Relays
by Peter Reutemann 07 Dec '21

07 Dec '21

'Since at least 2017, a mysterious threat actor has run thousands of malicious servers in entry, middle, and exit positions of the Tor network in what a security researcher has described as an attempt to deanonymize Tor users. The Record: Tracked as KAX17, the threat actor ran at its peak more than 900 malicious servers part of the Tor network, which typically tends to hover around a daily total of up to 9,000-10,000. Some of these servers work as entry points (guards), others as middle relays, and others as exit points from the Tor network. Their role is to encrypt and anonymize user traffic as it enters and leaves the Tor network, creating a giant mesh of proxy servers that bounce connections between each other and provide the much-needed privacy that Tor users come for. Servers added to the Tor network typically must have contact information included in their setup, such as an email address, so Tor network administrators and law enforcement can contact server operators in the case of a misconfiguration or file an abuse report. However, despite this rule, servers with no contact information are often added to the Tor network, which is not strictly policed, mainly to ensure there's always a sufficiently large number of nodes to bounce and hide user traffic.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/21/12/06/1941209 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's Anti-DRM Campaign Plans Bad-Review Protest Against Disney+
by Peter Reutemann 07 Dec '21

07 Dec '21

'For their fifteenth International Day Against DRM this Friday, the Free Software Foundation's "Defective by Design" campaign is "calling on you to help us send a message to purveyors of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM)". And this year they're targeting Disney+ The ongoing pandemic has only tightened the stranglehold streaming services have as some of the most dominant forms of entertainment media, and Disney+ is among the worst of them. After years of aggressive lobbying to extend the length of copyright, based on their perceived need to keep a certain rat from entering the public domain, they've now set their sights on "protecting" their various franchises in a different way: by shackling them with digital restrictions. If Disney's stated mission is to keep "inspiring hope and sparking the curiosity of all ages", using DRM to limit that curiosity remains the wrong move. This year, we'll be using one of Disney's own means of spreading their "service" and the DRM bundled with it: their mobile app. If you're an existing user of the Google Play (Android) or Apple App Stores, you can support the International Day Against DRM by voicing your objection to Disney's subjugation of their users. Streaming services like Netflix and Peacock have the same issues, but by targeting a newer one with such massive investment and capital behind it, we can make sure that we're heard. Disney+ is new: that gives it time to change. Disney+ is placed near the top of the most frequently downloaded apps on both the Google Play and Apple App Stores. We invite you to write a well-thought objection to Disney's use of DRM, with a fitting review. It is the perfect way to let the corporation, and other users intending to use its services know Disney's grievous mistake in using DRM to restrict customers who already want to view their many films and television shows. It will give you a chance to give them the exact rating that any service that treats its users so poorly: a single star. DRM isn't the only problem with the Disney+ app. It's also nonfree software. If you're not already an Android or iOS user, we don't recommend starting an account just to participate in this action. You can also choose to send an email to Disney executives following our template. They're urging supporters to also share the actions they've taken on social media using the tag #DayAgainstDRM. (And there's also an IRC channel "to discuss and share strategies for anti-DRM activism," with more anti-DRM actions still to come. "While some aspects of the struggle have changed, the core principles remain the same: users should not be forced to surrender their digital autonomy in exchange for media."' -- source: https://slashdot.org/story/21/12/04/187207 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/

1 0

Firefox 95 Will Include RLBox Sandboxing for Added Security
by Peter Reutemann 07 Dec '21

07 Dec '21

'Mozilla has announced through its Mozilla Hacks blog that it plans to ship a 'novel sandboxing technology' called RLBox with Firefox 95 which it has been developing alongside researchers from the University of California San Diego and the University of Texas. From a report: It said RLBox makes it easier to isolate subcomponents of the browser efficiently and gives Mozilla more options than traditional sandboxing granted it. Mozilla said this new method of sandboxing, which uses WebAssembly to isolate potentially-buggy code, builds on a prototype that was shipped in Firefox 74 and Firefox 75 to Linux and Mac users respectively. With Firefox 95, RLBox will be deployed on all supported Firefox platforms including desktop and mobile to isolate three different modules: Graphite, Hunspell, and Ogg. With Firefox 96, two more modules, Expat and Woff2, will also be isolated.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/12/06/1558251 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/

1 0

Blender 3.0 Is Out
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 04 Dec '21

04 Dec '21

A new major release of Blender, the 3D modelling/animation/sculpting/rendering software, finally hit stable earlier today. The version numbering is now taking bigger jumps. This is a far cry from the old days, when, for example, major new features would come out with only small version number changes (e.g. the Cycles ray-traced renderer appearing in 2.61, geometry nodes in 2.92 etc). My only worry is that the file format only has a single digit for the major version number. What happens after 9.99? Get it from <https://www.blender.org/>. Release notes are at <https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/3.0>.

1 0

Regulators Flocking To Block Nvidia’s ARM Acquisition
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 04 Dec '21

04 Dec '21

The US FTC has joined in <https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/12/ftc-sues-nvidia-to-preserve-arm…> the growing list of Government regulators from various countries looking askance at Nvidia’s plans to buy ARM. I like their description of ARM as being the “Switzerland” of semiconductors. Also found this interesting fact mentioned: Last year, companies sold 25 billion ARM chips, an increase of more than four-fold since 2010. That’s nearly four chips for every person on the planet. Per year.

2 1

JupyterHub 2.0 Is Out
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 03 Dec '21

03 Dec '21

Just saw this report <https://devclass.com/2021/12/02/jupyterhub-2/> on the new release of JupyterHub. This is the version of Jupyter designed to support multiuser deployments with proper access control. The new version supports role-based access control with delegation of admin responsibilities, so you can have group admins with control over their particular users but no privileges outside of that. For those new to Jupyter: <https://jupyter.org>.

1 0

70 Years Ago, LEO
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 01 Dec '21

01 Dec '21

Seventy years ago, in 1951, the world’s first computer built for business use was put into production <https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/30/leo_70/>. It was called “LEO”, short for “Lyons Electronic Office”. The J Lyons company ran a string of teashops across the UK, and an ongoing problem that the shop managers (and central office) faced was how to accurately predict the supplies needed for the next day’s business, given that much of it (cakes etc) was highly perishable, and so had to be manufactured on a few hours’ notice. This “bakery valuation” was a statistical problem, based on crunching a lot of raw data, looking at past demand, seasonal variations etc, and it was still a novel concept that a computer turned out to be better than humans at doing the necessary calculations. The computer turned out to be so useful that the UK Ministry of Supply hired it to get some ballistic calculations done. Later it also did other jobs at the company, like payroll. Actually, a lot of this (except the payroll) sounds to me very much like number-crunching, which would surely have been considered more of a “scientific” than a “business” computing application. Remember, there was this dichotomy between “scientific” and “business” computing use back then, that continued right into about the 1970s. This division existed in hardware (e.g. decimal arithmetic for “business” use, binary for “scientific”) and software (COBOL being the preferred programming language for “business” use, things like FORTRAN and ALGOL for “scientific”). The teashop company spun off the computer business as a separate operation in 1954, which went on to bring out the LEO II and LEO III machines before being acquired by English Electric, which in turn later merged with ICT to create ICL. According to the article linked above, the last LEO machine was decommissioned in 1981, and the last Lyons teashop closed that same year. I first learned about LEO and the Lyons teashops some decades ago, from a book called “Early British Computers”, by Simon Lavington, published in 1980.

1 0

Raspberry Pi Trading Could Go Public This Spring
by Peter Reutemann 30 Nov '21

30 Nov '21

'"According to a report in The Telegraph, Raspberry Pi Trading, the arm responsible for the creation of the Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi Pico and the new Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W could soon be listed with a value of more than £370m ($493m)," reports Tom's Hardware: Raspberry Pi Trading has hired advisors from two investment banks, Stifel and Liberum to advise on floating the company in spring 2022. The news comes just a few months after Raspberry Pi received a £45m ($60m) investment from Lansdowne Partners and the Ezrah Charitable Trust which was used to fund the development of new products as demand increased during the global pandemic. A source close to The Telegraph has valued Raspberry Pi at a premium of $500m... "Obviously, the $45m we raised in September takes away some of the urgency around figuring out how we fund the future. On the other hand, we have great plans for what we are going to do over the next five years." Eben Upton, talking to The Telegraph.' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/21/11/28/2328201 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/

2 1

Google Play apps downloaded 300,000 times stole bank credentials
by Peter Reutemann 30 Nov '21

30 Nov '21

'Researchers said they’ve discovered a batch of apps downloaded from Google Play more than 300,000 times before the apps were revealed to be banking trojans that surreptitiously siphoned user passwords and two-factor authentication codes, logged keystrokes, and took screenshots. The apps—posing as QR scanners, PDF scanners, and cryptocurrency wallets—belonged to four separate Android malware families that were distributed over four months. They used several tricks to sidestep restrictions that Google has devised in an attempt to rein in the unending distribution of fraudulent apps in its official marketplace. Those limitations include restricting the use of accessibility services for sight-impaired users to prevent the automatic installation of apps without user consent.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/11/google-play-apps-dow… 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/

1 0

Nvidia's DLSS Has Come To Linux Gaming
by Peter Reutemann 29 Nov '21

29 Nov '21

'Years after its failed Steam Machines, Valve is slowly but surely improving the state of Linux gaming. From a report: The company's upcoming Steam Deck handheld runs atop Linux, and its Proton compatibility layer lets it -- and other computers -- play Windows games as well. Now, Valve has officially added support for Nvidia's DLSS machine learning temporal upscaling technique to Proton, potentially bringing big FPS boosts and less flicker in games that support the technology. Proton 6.3-8 is the first stable release to include support for DLSS, after the feature previously hit experimental builds in October, though it appears you'll still need to set PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1 and dxgi.nvapiHack = False to turn it on. DLSS won't come to the AMD-powered Steam Deck, of course, since it requires proprietary Nvidia machine learning silicon, but we recently learned the Steam Deck will support AMDâ(TM)s arguably much less capable FSR.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/21/11/27/0325250 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/

1 0

AWS Embraces Fedora Linux for Its Cloud-Based 'Amazon Linux'
by Peter Reutemann 29 Nov '21

29 Nov '21

'ZDNet reports: By and large, the public cloud runs on Linux. Most users, even Microsoft Azure customers, run Linux on the cloud. In the case of market giant Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud provider will let you run many Linux distros or their own homebrew Linux, Amazon Linux. Now, AWS has released an early version of its next distro, Amazon Linux 3, which is based on Red Hat's community Linux, Fedora. AWS has long tried to incorporate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) compatibility into Amazon Linux, but this latest release takes that to new heights. By using Fedora as its upstream, the new Amazon distro, also called AL2022, is a stable distribution. It's gone through extensive testing to offer package stability, and it also includes all available security updates.... TechRadar adds some more details: The distro has had two major releases till now; the first in 2010, and the second in 2017. However, with the third AL2022 release the service is committing to a two year release cycle, with each release supported for a period of five years... AWS argues that the two year major release cycle, with updates shipped quarterly via minor releases, will help keep the software current, while the five year support commitment for each major release will give customers the stability they need to manage long project lifecycles. ' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/21/11/27/0328223 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/

1 0

Addressing 'Bus Factor', PHP Gets a Foundation
by Peter Reutemann 29 Nov '21

29 Nov '21

'How many members of your team are so irreplaceable that if they were hit by a bus, your project would grind to a halt? For PHP, that number is: two. (According to a post by PHP contributor Joe Watkins earlier this year that's now being cited in Mike Melanson's "This Week in Programming" column.) "Maybe as few as two people would have to wake up this morning and decide they want to do something different with their lives in order for the PHP project to lack the expertise and resources to move it forward in its current form, and at current pace," Watkins wrote at the time, naming Dmitry Stogov and Nikita Popov as those two. Well, last week, Nikita Popov was thankfully not hit by a bus, but he did decide to move on from his role with PHP to instead focus his activities on LLVM. Also thankfully, Watkins' article earlier this year opened some eyes to the situation at hand and, as he writes in a follow-up article this week, JetBrains (Popov's employer) reached out to him at the time regarding starting a PHP Foundation. This week, with Popov's departure, the PHP Foundation was officially launched with the goal of funding part/full-time developers to work on the PHP core in 2022. At launch, the PHP Foundation will count 10 companies — Automattic, Laravel, Acquia, Zend, Private Packagist, Symfony, Craft CMS, Tideways, PrestaShop, and JetBrains — among its backers, with an expectation to raise $300,000 per year, and with JetBrains contributing $100,000 annually. Alongside that, the foundation is being launched using foundation-as-a-service provider Open Collective, and just under 700 contributors have already raised more than $40,000 for the foundation. One of the key benefits to creating a foundation, rather than sticking with the status quo, goes beyond increasing the bus factor — it diversifies the influences on PHP. Watkins points out that, for much of the history of PHP, Zend, the employer of Dmitry Stogov, has been a primary financial backer, and as such has had some amount of influence on the language's direction. Similarly, JetBrains had increased influence during its time employing Popov on PHP."To say they have not influenced the direction of the language as a whole would just not be true...." While Watkins says that everything has been above board and gone through standard processes to ensure so, influence is nonetheless indisputable, and that "The Foundation represents a new way to push the language forward..." The current RFC process, JetBrains writes, "will not change, and language decisions will always be left to the PHP Internals community." And in addition, Watkins adds, "It provides us the mechanism by which to raise the bus factor, so that we never face the problems we face today, and have faced in the past."' -- source: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/21/11/27/0225217 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/

1 0

Computation-Intensive Research And The Quest For Scientific Reproducibility
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 26 Nov '21

26 Nov '21

The fruits of scientific research are supposed to be open to all. A key part of this is the need for reproducibility -- the idea that somebody else can repeat the same experiments and analysis and (hopefully) come to the same conclusions. It has long been a common expectation that researchers will make their raw data available to others for this purpose, but nowadays even that is likely no longer enough. The analysis of the data usually requires some particular piece of computer software, even if this was just some in-house scripting done on top of a commonly-available toolkit or package. Two different reports on this subject have come out recently, this one <https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/25/research_software_inquiry/> from the UK and this <https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/11/keeping-science-reproducible-in-a-w…> with examples from the US and elsewhere. The latter goes into a lot more detail, including good news (the rise of publicly-available data sets which get heavily used for many different analyses), and bad: From 2017 through 2019, Tsuyoshi Miyakawa, the editor-in-chief of the journal Molecular Brain, replied to 41 article submissions by requesting that the authors provide their complete source data for review, as per the stated policy of the journal. Only one author did so. ... Based on his efforts to replicate papers from other statisticians, Thomas Lumley, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, says of the phrase data available upon request: "When people put it in their papers, what they typically mean is 'data not available.'" As for making code available, that has its own challenges: often the scripts/programs are hastily thrown together, and the creators may be embarrassed to have others see it in this state. Or it’s not likely to work properly anyway, outside of the original systems where it was developed. The good news is, bodies that fund the research and the journals that publish the results are becoming more aware of such issues, and increasingly trying to ensure that procedures for dealing with them are built into the projects from the beginning.

3 2

Bye-Bye MIPS
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 26 Nov '21

26 Nov '21

You know a CPU architecture is really dead when the Linux kernel drops support for it. I just learned that MIPS64 has joined this club as of the 5.15 kernel, according to <https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/25/alpine_3_15/> (presumably “MIPS32” vanished some time before?). Even the company formerly known as “MIPS” is now rebranding (at least its parent) as “Wave”, and is going to base its future products on the RISC-V architecture instead.

1 0

Mozilla Is Ending Support For Its Firefox Password Manager Sync App
by Peter Reutemann 24 Nov '21

24 Nov '21

'Mozilla announced last week via a support article that its Firefox Lockwise password manager app will reach end-of-life on December 13th. The final release versions are 1.8.1 (iOS) and 4.0.3 (Android) and will no longer be available to download or reinstall after that date. The Verge reports: What started in 2018 as a small experimental mobile app called Lockbox ended up bringing a way to access saved passwords and perform autofills on iOS, Android, and desktop devices to a small but enthusiastic following of Firefox fans. The app was also later adapted as a Firefox extension. It seemed like it was apt to stick around for the long run. The support article recommends that users continue accessing passwords using the native Firefox browsers on desktop and mobile. In an added note on the support site, Mozilla suggests that later in December, the Firefox iOS app will gain the ability to manage Firefox passwords systemwide. The note alludes to Mozilla adopting the features of Lockwise and eventually integrating them into the Firefox browser apps natively on all platforms. ' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/11/23/2157244 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/

1 0

Trying To Reclaim The Word “Crypto”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 24 Nov '21

24 Nov '21

For decades, the word “crypto” has been synonymous with “cryptography”. But increasingly now, some are using it to mean “cryptocurrency” instead. Naturally this is annoying some who have been working in the crypto field for years, and they are demanding that this new (mis)usage be stopped. What do you think? <https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/23/crypto_graphy_or_currency/>

2 2

Attackers Don't Bother Brute-forcing Long Passwords, Microsoft Engineer Says
by Peter Reutemann 23 Nov '21

23 Nov '21

'According to data collected by Microsoft's network of honeypot servers, most brute-force attackers primarily attempt to guess short passwords, with very few attacks targeting credentials that are either long or contain complex characters. From a report: "I analysed the credentials entered from over -- million brute force attacks against SSH. This is around 30 days of data in Microsoft's sensor network," said Ross Bevington, a security researcher at Microsoft. "77% of attempts used a password between 1 and 7 characters. A password over 10 characters was only seen in 6% of cases," said Bevington, who works as Head of Deception at Microsoft, a position in which he's tasked with creating legitimate-looking honeypot systems in order to study attacker trends.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/21/11/22/2036243 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/

3 2

GoDaddy Security Breach Exposes WordPress Users' Data
by Peter Reutemann 23 Nov '21

23 Nov '21

'Web hosting company GoDaddy said on Monday email addresses of up to 1.2 million active and inactive Managed WordPress customers had been exposed in an unauthorized third-party access. From a report: The company said the incident was discovered on Sept. 6 and the third-party accessed the system using a compromised password.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/21/11/22/1523234 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/

1 0

A German State is Switching Its 25,000 Computers From Windows to Linux
by Peter Reutemann 22 Nov '21

22 Nov '21

'The north-German state of Schleswig-Holstein plans to switch to open source software..." reports Mike Saunders from LibreOffice. "By the end of 2026, Microsoft Office is to be replaced by LibreOffice on all 25,000 computers used by civil servants and employees (including teachers), and the Windows operating system is to be replaced by GNU/Linux." The tech site Foss Force writes: This seems to be a done deal, as the steps for the transition from proprietary to open have already been codified by the Schleswig-Holstein state parliament, and explained in plain language in an interview with Jan Philipp Albrecht, the state's digital minister, that was published in c't, a German language computer magazine (Google Translate version here). In the interview, Albrecht said that part of the transition to open source is already in the works, and pointed out that 90% of state administration conferencing is conducted using the open source video conferencing platform Jitsi. "We have been testing LibreOffice in our IT department for two years, and our experience is clear: it works," he said. "This also applies, for example, when editing Microsoft Word documents with comments... No Linux distribution has been chosen yet to use as a standard, although Albrecht said they're currently looking at five distributions that suit their purposes.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/21/11/21/0231218 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/

1 0

Thousands of Firefox Users Accidentally Commit Login Cookies On GitHub
by Peter Reutemann 19 Nov '21

19 Nov '21

'Thousands of Firefox cookie databases containing sensitive data are available on request from GitHub repositories, data potentially usable for hijacking authenticated sessions. The Register reports: These cookies.sqlite databases normally reside in the Firefox profiles folder. They're used to store cookies between browsing sessions. And they're findable by searching GitHub with specific query parameters, what's known as a search "dork." Aidan Marlin, a security engineer at London-based rail travel service Trainline, alerted The Register to the public availability of these files after reporting his findings through HackerOne and being told by a GitHub representative that "credentials exposed by our users are not in scope for our Bug Bounty program." Marlin then asked whether he could make his findings public and was told he's free to do so. "I'm frustrated that GitHub isn't taking its users' security and privacy seriously," Marlin told The Register in an email. "The least it could do is prevent results coming up for this GitHub dork. If the individuals who uploaded these cookie databases were made aware of what they'd done, they'd s*** their pants." Marlin acknowledges that affected GitHub users deserve some blame for failing to prevent their cookies.sqlite databases from being included when they committed code and pushed it to their public repositories. "But there are nearly 4.5k hits for this dork, so I think GitHub has a duty of care as well," he said, adding that he's alerted the UK Information Commissioner's Office because personal information is at stake. Marlin speculates that the oversight is a consequence of committing code from one's Linux home directory. "I imagine in most of the cases, the individuals aren't aware that they've uploaded their cookie databases," he explained. "A common reason users do this is for a common environment across multiple machines."' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/11/18/2227206 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/

1 0

Linux Has a Serious Security Problem That Once Again Enables DNS Cache Poisoning
by Peter Reutemann 18 Nov '21

18 Nov '21

'As much as 38 percent of the Internet's domain name lookup servers are vulnerable to a new attack that allows hackers to send victims to maliciously spoofed addresses masquerading as legitimate domains, like bankofamerica.com or gmail.com. The exploit, unveiled in research presented today, revives the DNS cache-poisoning attack that researcher Dan Kaminsky disclosed in 2008. He showed that, by masquerading as an authoritative DNS server and using it to flood a DNS resolver with fake lookup results for a trusted domain, an attacker could poison the resolver cache with the spoofed IP address. >From then on, anyone relying on the same resolver would be diverted to the same imposter site. The sleight of hand worked because DNS at the time relied on a transaction ID to prove the IP number returned came from an authoritative server rather than an imposter server attempting to send people to a malicious site. The transaction number had only 16 bits, which meant that there were only 65,536 possible transaction IDs. Kaminsky realized that hackers could exploit the lack of entropy by bombarding a DNS resolver with off-path responses that included each possible ID. Once the resolver received a response with the correct ID, the server would accept the malicious IP and store the result in cache so that everyone else using the same resolver -- which typically belongs to a corporation, organization, or ISP -- would also be sent to the same malicious server.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/21/11/17/1856235 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/

2 1

meeting next Monday
by Peter Reutemann 18 Nov '21

18 Nov '21

Hi everyone We have a WLUG meeting next week on Monday: 'For the last meeting of the year, let's have general get-together. Ian Stewart will demo the latest Ubuntu 21.10 and Peter Reutemann will try to show what you can use the frp fast reverse proxy for (https://github.com/fatedier/frp) And of course, general Linux related troubleshooting and questions answered.' -- source: https://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/274861098/ This is once again an online event, so make sure to RSVP on meetup to get the link (you only need a browser). 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/

1 0

Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 17 Nov '21

17 Nov '21

Somebody did a nice chart a while back <https://gist.github.com/hellerbarde/2843375> of the time it takes to perform many common data transfer operations on contemporary hardware. And note the multi-part figure, where the basic unit in each block is a bit more than an order of magnitude greater than the one in the previous block. And if the figure isn’t dramatic enough, a commenter has said “let’s multiply all the numbers by a billion” (just to bring them into more human-comprehensible scales), and then liken them to common things that people do, from making a cup of coffee, all the way up to completing a bachelor’s degree.

2 5

Scientists Send Data Using Nuclear Radiation
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 16 Nov '21

16 Nov '21

A research group has used fast neutrons <https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/15/wireless_information_transfer_with_f…> as a communication channel, to send legible data between a transmitter and a receiver. Their proof of concept is very low-bandwidth and requires a lot of complicated equipment, but at least it does show (safety issues aside) that it is theoretically possible. The issue with high-energy subatomic particles is, how do you turn them on and off at will -- i.e. modulate the intensity of the beam to convey information? This group used some kind of shutter system (“neutron chopper”) in conjunction with some quantity of radioactive californium-252 as their neutron source. But they mention that someone else has come up with a device that is basically a particle accelerator on a chip, able to produce a stream of neutrons from non-radioactive starting components on demand.

1 0

Microsoft Fixes An Issue
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 16 Nov '21

16 Nov '21

The latest Windows 11 update <https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/15/windows_11_insiders_bug_fixes/> gets ever closer to perfection. I like this one: We fixed an issue that prevents your device from starting up, and it becomes unresponsive because of licensing API calls. Because what would that good old “enrichment of the user experience” be like without licensing API calls ... The writer’s verdict on the new OS sounds more like damning with faint praise: We have been running Windows 11 for daily work since official release and are happy to report that it is usable and stable in our experience so far, though useful improvements over its predecessor are hard to identify.

1 0

DDR4 memory protections are broken wide open by new Rowhammer technique
by Peter Reutemann 16 Nov '21

16 Nov '21

'Rowhammer exploits that allow unprivileged attackers to change or corrupt data stored in vulnerable memory chips are now possible on virtually all DDR4 modules due to a new approach that neuters defenses chip manufacturers added to make their wares more resistant to such attacks. Rowhammer attacks work by accessing—or hammering—physical rows inside vulnerable chips millions of times per second in ways that cause bits in neighboring rows to flip, meaning 1s turn to 0s and vice versa. Researchers have shown the attacks can be used to give untrusted applications nearly unfettered system privileges, bypass security sandboxes designed to keep malicious code from accessing sensitive operating system resources, and root or infect Android devices, among other things. All previous Rowhammer attacks have hammered rows with uniform patterns, such as single-sided, double-sided, or n-sided. In all three cases, these “aggressor” rows—meaning those that cause bitflips in nearby “victim” rows—are accessed the same number of times. Research published on Monday presented a new Rowhammer technique. It uses non-uniform patterns that access two or more aggressor rows with different frequencies. The result: all 40 of the randomly selected DIMMs in a test pool experienced bitflips, up from 13 out of 42 chips tested in previous work from the same researchers.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/11/ddr4-memory-is-even-more-susceptibl… 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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topics for next month?
by Peter Reutemann 15 Nov '21

15 Nov '21

Hi everyone Next month will be the last meeting for the year and I'm once again looking for presenters. I can give a short introduction/show'n'tell of frp (fast reverse proxy) and what it can be used for: https://github.com/fatedier/frp Who else is willing to talk about something? It doesn't have to be admin-type stuff at all, but instead useful applications that you use/have come across. If you have something, even just for 5-10 min, please reply in this thread or contact me off-list. Have a great and safe weekend! 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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Ask Slashdot: Why Is Firefox Losing Users?
by Peter Reutemann 05 Nov '21

05 Nov '21

'This weekend finds some long-time Slashdot readers debating why research shows Firefox losing market share. Long-time Slashdot reader chiguy shares one theory: "Firefox keeps losing users, according to this rant, because it arrogantly refuses to listen to its users." Slashdot reader BAReFO0t countered that that can't be the reason, "because Google does that too." (They blame Chrome's "feature" addition treadmill, where "they keep adding stupid kitchen sinks for the sole and only purpose to make others unable to keep up.") Long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00K thinks that "All those totally unnecessary UI changes are what REALLY annoys users. Not only the immediately visible things in the header but also the renaming of items in the menus just bugs people." But long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo argues that "the most popular browser, Chrome, has all those things. In fact all the browsers that are more popular than Firefox do, so the idea that those are unpopular and driving people away doesn't really hold up... Firefox's decline is mostly due to Chrome just being really good, and [Firefox] not having a decent mobile version." I'm still a loyal Firefox user. (Although the thing that annoyed me was when Firefox suddenly changed the keyboard shortcut for copying a link from CNTRL-A to CNTRL-L.) The "rant" at ItsFoss argues that Firefox's original sin was in 2009 when it decided to move tabs to the top of the browser, and when favorite features could no longer be re-enabled in Firefox's about:config file. But that's what I like about Firefox -- at it's best, it's ultimately customizable, with any feature you want easily enabled in what's essentially an incredibly detailed "preferences" menu. Maybe other browsers are just better at attracting new users through purely mechanical advantages like default placement on popular systems? Long-time Slashdot reader zenlessyank is also a long-time Firefox user -- "Been using it since Netscape" -- and countered all the doubters with a comment headlined "Firefox rocks!" "Doesn't matter to me how many other users there are or aren't I will still use it as long as it stays updated." But what are your thoughts? Feel free to share your own opinions and experiences with Firefox in the comments.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/09/12/181257 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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The Booming Underground Market for Bots That Steal Your 2FA Codes
by Peter Reutemann 04 Nov '21

04 Nov '21

'The bots convincingly and effortlessly help hackers break into Coinbase, Amazon, PayPal, and bank accounts. From a report: The call came from PayPal's fraud prevention system. Someone had tried to use my PayPal account to spend $58.82, according to the automated voice on the line. PayPal needed to verify my identity to block the transfer. "In order to secure your account, please enter the code we have sent your mobile device now," the voice said. PayPal sometimes texts users a code in order to protect their account. After entering a string of six digits, the voice said, "Thank you, your account has been secured and this request has been blocked. Don't worry if any payment has been charged to your account: we will refund it within 24 to 48 hours. Your reference ID is 1549926. You may now hang up," the voice said. But this call was actually from a hacker. The fraudster used a type of bot that drastically streamlines the process for hackers to trick victims into giving up their multi-factor authentication codes or one-time passwords (OTPs) for all sorts of services, letting them log in or authorize cash transfers. Various bots target Apple Pay, PayPal, Amazon, Coinbase, and a wide range of specific banks. Whereas fooling victims into handing over a login or verification code previously would often involve the hacker directly conversely with the victim, perhaps pretending to be the victim's bank in a phone call, these increasingly traded bots dramatically lower the barrier of entry for bypassing multi-factor authentication.' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/21/11/03/1842245 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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