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Google's Unfair Performance Advantage in Chrome
by Peter Reutemann 10 Jul '21

10 Jul '21

'Google Chrome for Android has a feature that gives Google Search an unfair advantage over its competition. Sure, it's the default search engine and that's a huge hurdle to overcome for any competitor. However, Chrome also reserves a performance-boosting feature for Google Search exclusively. I recently poked around in the Chromium project source code; the open-source foundation for Google's Chrome web browser. The Chromium project is co-developed by Google, and other corporate and individual contributors. The project is managed and controlled by Google, however. I was looking for something else when I stumbled upon a feature called PreconnectToSearch. When enabled, the feature preemptively opens and maintains a connection to the default search engine. The preconnection feature resolves the domain name, and negotiates and sets up a secure connection to the server. All these things take time and they must happen before the search engine can receive the users' search queries. Preempting these steps can save a dozen seconds on a slow network connection or half a second on a fast connection. This optimization can yield a nice performance boost for Google's customers. Assuming the connection only requires a trivial amount of processing power and network bandwidth, of course. Setting up the connection early can be wasteful or slow down the loading of other pages if the user isn't going to search the web. There's just one small catch: Chromium checks the default search engine setting, and only enables the feature when it's set to Google Search. This preferential treatment means no other search engine can compete with Google Search on the time it takes to load search results. Every competitor must wait until the user has started to type a search query before Chrome will establish a connection.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/07/09/2056209 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Firefox Extends Privacy and Security of Canadian Internet Users With By-default DNS-over-HTTPS Rollout in Canada
by Peter Reutemann 09 Jul '21

09 Jul '21

'In a few weeks, Firefox will start the by-default rollout of DNS over HTTPS (or DoH for short) to its Canadian users in partnership with local DoH provider CIRA, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority. >From a report: DoH will first become a default for 1% of Canadian Firefox users on July 20 and will gradually reach 100% of Canadian Firefox users in late September 2021 -- thereby further increasing their security and privacy online. This follows the by-default rollout of DoH to US users in February 2020. As part of the rollout, CIRA joins Mozilla's Trusted Recursive Resolver (TRR) Program and becomes the first internet registration authority and the first Canadian organization to provide Canadian Firefox users with private and secure encrypted Domain Name System (DNS) services.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/07/08/1732203 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Kaspersky Password Manager Fixes Flaw That Generated Easily Bruteforced Passwords
by Peter Reutemann 09 Jul '21

09 Jul '21

'ZDNet reports: Suppose you are in the business of generating passwords, it would probably be a good idea to use an additional source of entropy other than the current time, but for a long time, that's all Kaspersky Password Manager (KPM) used. In a blog post to cap off an almost two year saga, Ledger Donjon head of security research Jean-Baptiste Bedrune showed KPM was doing just that. "Kaspersky Password Manager used a complex method to generate its passwords. This method aimed to create passwords hard to break for standard password crackers. However, such method lowers the strength of the generated passwords against dedicated tools," Bedrune wrote. One of the techniques used by KPM was to make letters that are not often used appear more frequently, which Bedrune said was probably an attempt to trick password cracking tools. "Their password cracking method relies on the fact that there are probably 'e' and 'a' in a password created by a human than 'x' or 'j', or that the bigrams 'th' and 'he' will appear much more often than 'qx' or 'zr'," he said. "Passwords generated by KPM will be, on average, far in the list of candidate passwords tested by these tools. If an attacker tries to crack a list of passwords generated by KPM, he will probably wait quite a long time until the first one is found. This is quite clever." The flip side was that if an attacker could deduce that KPM was used, then the bias in the password generator started to work against it. "If an attacker knows a person uses KPM, he will be able to break his password much more easily than a fully random password. Our recommendation is, however, to generate random passwords long enough to be too strong to be broken by a tool." The big mistake made by KPM though was using the current system time in seconds as the seed into a Mersenne Twister pseudorandom number generator. "It means every instance of Kaspersky Password Manager in the world will generate the exact same password at a given second," Bedrune said. Because the program has an animation that takes longer than a second when a password is created, Bedrune said it could be why this issue was not discovered. "The consequences are obviously bad: every password could be bruteforced," he said. Bedrune added due to sites often showing account creation time, that would leave KPM users vulnerable to a bruteforce attack of around 100 possible passwords. "Kaspersky was informed of the vulnerability in June 2019, and released the fix version in October that same year," adds ZDNet. "In October 2020, users were notified that some passwords would need to be generated, with Kaspersky publishing its security advisory on 27 April 2021." "All public versions of Kaspersky Password Manager liable to this issue now have a new logic of password generation and a passwords update alert for cases when a generated password is probably not strong enough," the security company said.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/21/07/08/2116252 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Endian Wars: Linus Has Spoken
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 06 Jul '21

06 Jul '21

The Rust language continues to make progress for use in the Linux kernel <https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/05/rust_for_linux_kernel_project/>. The article ends with a comment from Linus Torvalds about the old “endian wars” which have been a feature of the computing landscape since byte addressability became common: should the bytes of a number be arranged in big-endian order (most significant end at the lowest address) or little-endian (least significant end at the lowest address)? In the latest patches, Ojeda proposed to use big-endian order for long symbols in the kernel symbol table, needed because Rust symbols "can become quite long due to namespacing introduced by modules, types, traits, generics." Torvalds responded: "Why is this in big-endian order? Let's just try to kill big-endian data, it's disgusting and should just die already... networking has legacy reasons from the bad old days when byte order wars were still a thing, but those days are gone." Having used both kinds of computer architectures over the years, I agree. Little-endian ordering is more mathematically consistent.

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Kaseya VSA Software Compromised By Ransomware
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 06 Jul '21

06 Jul '21

Kaseya VSA is a piece of software widely used around the world (and in NZ) to manage IT resources in small-to-medium businesses. Now it appears <https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/446162/new-zealand-may-be-caught-up-in-…> this software has been subverted as a weapon, likely by the notorious Russia-based “REvil” gang, to hold data to ransom across a range of organizations worldwide. This evening’s TV1 news mentions a Cambridge school <https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/cambridge-school-among-business…> among other victims in NZ.

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Open Source Audio Editor Audacity Has Become 'Spyware'
by Peter Reutemann 06 Jul '21

06 Jul '21

'Anyone deciding to download the free and open-source audio editor Audacity is being warned that the software may now be classified as spyware due to recent updates to its privacy policy. From a report: Audacity has been around for over 21 years and classes as the world's most popular audio editing software. On April 30, the Muse Group acquired Audacity with the promise that the software would "remain forever free and open source." However, as FOSS Post reports, last week the Audacity privacy policy page was updated and introduced a number of personal data collection clauses. The data collected includes OS version and name, user country based on IP address, the CPU being used, data related to Audacity error codes and crash reports, and finally "Data necessary for law enforcement, litigation and authorities' requests (if any)." The personal data collected can be shared with Muse Group employees, auditors, advisors, legal representatives and "similar agents," potential company buyers, and "any competent law enforcement body, regulatory, government agency, court or other third party where we believe disclosure is necessary (i) as a matter of applicable law or regulation, or (ii) to exercise, establish or defend our legal rights."' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/21/07/05/2155212 How long before a fork occurs that will strip out these bits? Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Infinidash: The Most Amazing Amazon Web Services Product ... That Never Was
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 05 Jul '21

05 Jul '21

It all started with one person wondering how long it would take after merely mentioning the name of some hypothetical new AWS-based product before it started appearing in job ads. So he made up a product name, put out a tweet, and waited. It took just three days <https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/05/infinidash/>. I had a look at the linked job ad, and it still contains the sentence “Infinidash is at the core of everything we do”, with absolutely no hint that it might be tongue-in-cheek. This is just a continuation of the long-standing phenomenon among HR departments and employment agencies putting out job ads requiring something like “5+ years experience in Technology X”, when Technology X has only been around for a few months.

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Microsoft To Add Support for Linux GUI Apps on Windows 10 Later This Year
by Peter Reutemann 03 Jul '21

03 Jul '21

'Microsoft is making the promised support for Linux graphical user interface (GUI) apps on Windows 10 available to customers as of the next Windows 10 release, officials said on May 25. Microsoft officials made the announcement on Day 1 of its virtual Build 2021 developers conference. From a report: During his Day 1 keynote, CEO Satya Nadella basically acknowledged there will be another event "soon" about the next Windows. He said: ""And soon we will share one of the most significant updates of Windows of the past decade." He said he has been self-hosting it over the past several months and called it "the next generation of Windows." Microsoft released a preview of Linux GUI apps on the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) in April, 2021. This capability is meant to allow developers to run their preferred Linux tools, utilities and apps directly on Windows 10. With GUI app support, users can now run GUI apps for testing, development and daily use without having to set up a virtual machine.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/21/05/25/1639238 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Google Is Working On an HTTPS-Only Mode For Chrome
by Peter Reutemann 01 Jul '21

01 Jul '21

'Following in the footsteps of browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome is also in line to receive an HTTPS-Only Mode that will upgrade all unencrypted HTTP connections to encrypted HTTPS alternatives, where possible. Currently, the new Chrome HTTPS-Only Mode is still under development in Chrome Canary distributions. Work is being done to add specific settings in the browser's interface, and no actual HTTP-to-HTTPS functionality is currently present. The feature is expected to be ready for Chrome 93, set to be released later this fall.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/06/30/1734234 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Tim Berners-Lee Sells Web Source Code NFT for $5.4 Million
by Peter Reutemann 01 Jul '21

01 Jul '21

'The original source code for the world wide web has been sold as a non-fungible token, making $5.4m. From a report: NFTs are certificates of ownership for digital assets, which often do not have a physical representation. They do not necessarily include copyright control -- and critics say they are get-rich-quick schemes that are bad for the environment. World-wide-web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee sold the NFT to an unidentified buyer, through auction house Sotheby's. The highest bid stood at $3.5m for most of the last day of the auction -- but there were a flurry of bids in the closing 15 minutes. The auction began on 23 June, with an opening bid of $1,000.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/06/30/1846213 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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