- wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

New ultra-stealthy Linux backdoor isn’t your everyday malware discovery
by Peter Reutemann 10 Jun '22

10 Jun '22

'Researchers have unearthed a discovery that doesn’t occur all that often in the realm of malware: a mature, never-before-seen Linux backdoor that uses novel evasion techniques to conceal its presence on infected servers, in some cases even with a forensic investigation. On Thursday, researchers from Intezer and The BlackBerry Threat Research & Intelligence Team said that the previously undetected backdoor combines high levels of access with the ability to scrub any sign of infection from the file system, system processes, and network traffic. Dubbed Symbiote, it targets financial institutions in Brazil and was first detected in November.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/06/novel-techniques-in-… 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/

1 0

Who Needs Modern Emacs?
by Peter Reutemann 08 Jun '22

08 Jun '22

'Every now and again I come across some discussion on making Emacs "modern". The argument always go more or less like this - Emacs doesn't look and behave like and the world will end if we don't copy something "crucial" from it. [...] If you ask me -- there's pretty much nothing we can do that would suddenly make Emacs as popular as VS Code. But you know what -- that's perfectly fine. After all there are plenty of "modern" editors that are even less popular than Emacs, so clearly being "modern" doesn't make you popular. And there's also our "arch-nemesis" vim, that's supposedly as "dated" as Emacs, but is extremely popular.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/22/06/07/1942258 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/

2 1

Apple Will Allow Linux VMs To Run Intel Apps With Rosetta In macOS Ventura
by Peter Reutemann 08 Jun '22

08 Jun '22

'Ars Technica: One of the few things that Intel Macs can do that Apple Silicon Macs can't is run operating systems written for Intel or AMD processors inside of virtual machines. Most notably, this has meant that there is currently no legal way to run Windows on an Apple Silicon Mac. Apple Silicon Macs can, however, run operating systems written for Arm processors inside of virtual machines, including other versions of macOS and Arm-compatible versions of Linux. And those Linux VMs are getting a new feature in macOS Ventura: the ability to run apps written for x86 processors using Rosetta, the same binary translation technology that allows Apple Silicon Macs to run apps written for Intel Macs. Apple's documentation will walk you through the requirements for using Rosetta within a Linux guest operating system -- it requires creating a shared directory that both macOS and Linux can access and running some terminal commands in Linux to get it set up. But once you do those steps, you'll be able to enjoy the wider app compatibility that comes with being able to run x86 code as well as Arm code. Some developers, including Hector Martin of the Asahi Linux project and Twitter user @never_released, have already found that these steps can also enable Rosetta on non-Apple ARM CPUs as long as they're modern enough to support at least version 8.2 of the Arm instruction set. As Martin points out, this isn't strictly legal because of macOS's licensing restrictions, and there are some relatively minor Apple-specific hardware features needed to unlock Rosetta's full capabilities.' -- source: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/22/06/07/208222 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/

1 0

HTTP/3 Is Officially An IETF Spec
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 07 Jun '22

07 Jun '22

QUIC is now officially HTTP/3, as described in RFC 9114 <https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/07/http3_rfc_9114_published/>. Not everybody is keen on it: there still seem to be some concerns over privacy, as well as over the claimed performance boost. Actually, a previous spec (RFC9000) had “Proposed Standard” status over a year ago, but it wasn’t (officially) being referred to as “HTTP/3” back then.

1 0

LastPass No Longer Requires a Password To Access Your Vault
by Peter Reutemann 07 Jun '22

07 Jun '22

'LastPass says they're now the first password manager with a passwordless sign-in feature. Engadget reports: Grant permission through the LastPass Authenticator mobile app and you can update account info on the web without entering your master password. The approach relies on FIDO-compliant password-free technology. The feature is available to both personal and business users. LastPass is also promising options beyond the Authenticator app in the future, such as relying on biometric scans or hardware security keys. ' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/22/06/06/2111206 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/

1 0

GNOME Shell is Being Ported to Phones
by Peter Reutemann 05 Jun '22

05 Jun '22

'"As part of the design process for what ended up becoming GNOME 40 the design team worked on a number of experimental concepts," reports a blog post at Gnome.org's shell-dev blog, "a few of which were aimed at better support for tablets and other smaller devices." "Ever since then, some of us have been thinking about what it would take to fully port GNOME Shell to a phone form factor." It's an intriguing question because post-GNOME 40, there's not that much missing for GNOME Shell to work on phones, even if not perfectly.... On top of that, many of the things we're currently working towards for desktop are also relevant for mobile, including quick settings, the notifications redesign, and an improved on-screen keyboard. Given all of this synergy, we felt this is a great moment to actually give mobile GNOME Shell a try. Thanks to the Prototype Fund, a grant program supporting public interest software by the German Ministry of Education (BMBF), we've been working on mobile support for GNOME Shell for the past few months. We're not expecting to complete every aspect of making GNOME Shell a daily driveable phone shell as part of this grant project. That would be a much larger effort because it would mean tackling things like calls on the lock screen, PIN code unlock, emergency calls, a flashlight quick toggle, and other small quality-of-life features. However, we think the basics of navigating the shell, launching apps, searching, using the on-screen keyboard, etc. are doable in the context of this project, at least at a prototype stage. Of course, making a detailed roadmap for this kind of effort is hard and we will keep adjusting it as things progress and become more concrete... There's a lot of work ahead, but going forward progress will be faster and more visible because it will be work on the actual UI, rather than on internal APIs. Now that some of the basics are in place we're also excited to do more testing and development on actual phone hardware, which is especially important for tweaking things like the on-screen keyboard. Their blog post includes a video showing "what this currently looks like on laptops" and then one showing it running "on actual phone hardware." And someone has also posted a video on Twitter showing it running on a OnePlus 6 smartphone.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/22/06/04/228254 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/

1 0

Freeing Up of Hundreds of Millions of IPv4 Addresses Mooted
by Peter Reutemann 03 Jun '22

03 Jun '22

'Work is afoot to free up several internet protocol version 4 (IPv4) address ranges which have been unroutable as reserved, invalid or used for loopback networks since the 1980s. Reader Bismillah shares a report: Seth Schoen, who co-founded the free transport layer security digital certificate provider Let's Encrypt is working on an IPv4 clean-up project that would take address currently not routed on the public Internet, and make them generally usable. Presenting on the IPv4 Unicast Extensions Project at the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT), Schoen said decisions taken during the 1980s to keep several IPv4 address ranges as "special", has led to a substantial amount of numbering resources going to waste. This "even though the reasons behind the those decisions has not been borne out," Schoen said. Taking the 240/4, 0/8, 127/8, 225/8-232/8 ranges, and making them available as ordinary unicast numbering resources for networks would add some 419 million IPv4 addresses. Due to the rapid growth of the Internet, the number of 32-bit IPv4 addresses has become scarce, with some regional registries being unable to allocate additional blocks to networks. The scarcity has caused IPv4 address hoarding, high prices for sub-allocations and even fraud to get more space.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/22/05/31/1958213 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/

4 5

Have an old iPad lying around? You might be able to make it run Linux soon
by Peter Reutemann 03 Jun '22

03 Jun '22

'If you have a 2013- or 2014-era iPad sitting around unused because it's not getting updates from Apple anymore and has stopped running the apps you need, some developers are working on an alternative software solution for you. Developer Konrad Dybcio and a Linux enthusiast going by "quaack723" have collaborated to get Linux kernel version 5.18 booting on an old iPad Air 2, a major feat for a device that was designed to never run any operating system other than Apple's. The project appears to use an Alpine Linux-based distribution called "postmarketOS," a relatively small but actively developed distribution made primarily for Android devices. Dybcio used a "checkm8" hashtag in his initial tweet about the project, strongly implying that they used the "Checkm8" bootrom exploit published back in 2019 to access the hardware. For now, the developers only have Linux running on some older iPad hardware using A7 and A8-based chips—this includes the iPad Air, iPad Air 2, and a few generations of iPad mini. But subsequent tweets imply that it will be possible to get Linux up and running on any device with an A7 or A8 in it, including the iPhone 5S and the original HomePod.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/06/developers-get-linux-up-and-running… 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/

1 0

AROS One x86 v1.7 and MorphOS 3.17 PPC Released
by Peter Reutemann 02 Jun '22

02 Jun '22

'Version 1.7 of AROS One for x86 has just been released and it's a distro of the "AROS Research Operating System," originally "Amiga Research Operating System." It's a standalone, free and open-source multi-media centric operating system that's designed to be portable, flexible, efficient and lightweight and can be seen dual booting with Windows 10 on an Acer laptop here. The most popular AROS specific community portal is AROS Exec. Parts of AROS were used to create the commercial PowerPC based Amiga-like operating system MorphOS, which has recently seen a new release as well, version 3.17. The most popular MorphOS specific community portal is MorphZone.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/22/06/01/218219 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/

1 0

Improving Your Relationship With Social Media May Call For A Targeted Approach
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 02 Jun '22

02 Jun '22

Results of a self-experiment <https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2022/06/01/improving-your-relationship-with-s…> conducted by participants in a social networks course to find ways to improve their relationship with social media. The students split into three groups, each trying a different strategy, with the details left up to them, grouped into targeted limitation of participation in social media, targeted increase (yes, really), or elimination of participation altogether. Targeted increase involved actual posting and interaction with others on particular networks, rather than mere “doom-scrolling”. Two out of the three groups saw clear increases in well-being, and reduction in stress and loneliness. Limitation in use also improved sleep patterns. The strategy that seemed least effective was elimination: seems either limitation in use or more active participation will lead to benefits, not walking away altogether. Of course everybody is different, and as always, more research is needed. But maybe there are some ideas there you can try for yourself.

1 0