Tor and Mozilla/Firefox

• United Nations Whisteblower Says The Tor Anonymity Network Is Great For Human Rights Work

  US military subsidiaries such as the NSA, who use Tor for open source intelligence gathering, are not the only ones who need a secure traffic analysis resistant anonymity network like Tor. UN human rights lawyer Emma Reilly says it is "great" when working with human rights defenders. [...] We feel for her, she is not the only one who was forced to learn Pascal in her youth. We also feel for all the victims of the UN Human Rights Council who has been handing over names of human rights activists from the day it formed in March 2006. China is not only having a very negative impact on human rights activists who contact the UN for help, China is also committing grave crimes against pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong (香港). [...] The free software tool OnionShare is a very user-friendly program that lets you share files and setup chat-rooms over the Tor network in case you need to communicate with human rights activists or other endangered people in a secure fashion. You can follow human rights lawyer Emma Reilly on Twitter if you want to learn more about her important human rights work. She does not appear to have a fediverse social media account in case Twitter de-platforms her on behest of the Chinese regime.

• How one woman fired up her online business during the pandemic

  Sophia Keys started her ceramics business, Apricity Ceramics, five years ago. But it wasn’t until a global pandemic forced everyone to sign on at home and Screen Time Report Scaries became a thing that her business really took off. She had never been active on social media, but decided to create relaxing videos of pottery throwing as a type of craft-ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response videos that provide relaxation with a sedative, tingling sensation for some) early in the pandemic. These videos gained traction and Keys started building a community. A couple months into the pandemic, when she had more finished pieces than she knew what to do with, she posted about the sale on her Instagram page. She sold out. She now has over 21K followers and her ceramics sell out in hours. Amidst the chaos of 2020, here’s how Sophia expanded her woman-owned online business, found her own confidence on social media, and built a community around her handmade products.

• Mozilla Performance Blog: Performance Sheriff Newsletter (February 2021)

  In February there were 201 alerts generated, resulting in 29 regression bugs being filed on average 4 days after the regressing change landed. Welcome to the February 2021 edition of the performance sheriffing newsletter. Here you’ll find the usual summary of our sheriffing efficiency metrics, followed by some analysis on the data footprint of our performance metrics. If you’re interested (and if you have access) you can view the full dashboard.

Games: Assassin’s Greed, Yorg, Wanted Raccoon and More

• Assassin’s Greed

  I don’t think any sane person is going to disagree with the quote, “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” For those unaware, that quote came from British politician Baron Acton in 1887. That’s one of the few sayings man has uttered that stands against the test of time. Keep in mind, Acton coined this phrase from politicians who said something similar even earlier than his time; Acton’s phrase just seems to be the most popular, since it reads like modern English. Now, I’m not trying to get into politics; we’re a gaming web site, after all. But sadly, after a number of events have occurred — for the gaming industry in particular — within the past couple of years, I feel like even us Linux gamers get the short end of the stick. True, we always had the short end of the stick, up until Valve stepped in and basically saved our bacon around 2012-2013. But as far as native Linux games are concerned, and as advanced as Proton gets, competition that has arisen lately can either be a plus for us, or, as I bring out here, competition can be more so of a nuisance than it is anything else. [...] Yeah, some were probably expecting me to point the gun at Microsoft first. I’m not a total Microsoft hater, as I do appreciate some of their work, like some of the code they’ve contributed to the Linux kernel. But I seem to hear it all the time. Microsoft bought this company. [...] Microsoft joined the Linux foundation late 2016. Supposedly, they’re a high-paying “Platinum Member.” I don’t know if their claim, “We love Linux,” is actually true. If anything, they consider Linux as a threat, as long as they’re not making revenue via this platform. They haven’t made any official drivers for Linux as far as their Xbox controllers are concerned. Microsoft is invested in Linux at least when it comes to their whole Azure cloud services, a competitor to AWS and Google Cloud, and they have made it easier to develop for Linux within Windows with the WSL module developed in partnership with Ubuntu. Microsoft tried to make their own locked garden during the Windows 8 era with the Windows Store and trying to force everyone to put their applications through there. Fortunately, they failed miserably, thanks in no small part to Valve creating SteamOS. But it doesn’t mean Microsoft won’t stop trying.

• FOSS racer Yorg has a new release with improved gamepad support | GamingOnLinux

  Top-down open-source racing? Yorg is a little bit like some of the classic Micro Machines games and while rough around the edges as it's in development it's showing promise as another FOSS game. With fast arcade racing along with some amusing physics, Yorg is already a lot of fun with multiple tracks, vehicles and different drivers to pick from. You can play against AI, local multiplayer and experimental online multiplayer. There's weapons too, so you can blow everyone up.

• Wanted Raccoon is an upcoming comedy game in the spirit of Goat Simulator

  Remember the craziness of Goat Simulator? Wanted Raccoon has a familiar theme of animals going wild and it's entering Early Access on March 19 with Linux support. A game that seems like a big gimmick but apparently there's a little more to it. The developer mentions an actual storyline and some sort of research system. You can ride skateboards, fight people, upgrade skills, and of course - steal food. Everything a good Raccoon does right? There's also something about a kidnapped family. Hero Raccoon to the rescue?

• Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer - Part 2: Selecting a Graphics Card

  Linux graphics support is still remarkably similar to how it was 20 years ago, even with all the progress that has been made in the years since. The Mesa 3D graphics library had its origins all the way back in 1995, and through the Utah GLX project attracted the attention of industry luminaries such as id Software’s John Carmack and vendors such as ATI, Intel, Matrox, S3, and 3dfx. By the turn of the millennium all of them had at least some support in Mesa. Nvidia went a different route, one which continues to set them apart to this day. Rather than choosing to cooperate with Mesa they instead ported their Windows drivers over to Linux directly, maintaining their own proprietary binary blob separate from the main Linux kernel. This driver model was also later adopted by ATI when they switched focus to their own proprietary “fglrx” driver, although this was largely reversed again after AMD acquired the company in 2006. By the time of Red Hat Linux 9 the Direct Rendering Infrastructure or DRI was firmly in place in Mesa and offered 3D support for a wide number of cards. This included the ATI 3D Rage Pro Turbo, which was the AGP card I had selected to test the machine. While a solid 2D performer it offered lacklustre 3D graphics even for the time of its release, and was intended more as an OEM graphics solution than for gaming. That makes them easy to find, but also not worth a lot.

10 Best Compression Tools for Linux

File compression is an integral part of system administration. Finding the best compression method requires significant determination. Luckily, there are many robust compression tools for Linux that make backing up system data easier. Here, we present ten of the best Linux compression tools that can be useful to enterprises and users in this regard. [...] A plethora of reliable Linux compression tools makes it easy to archive and back up essential data. You can choose from many lossless compressors with high compression ratios such as LZ4, lzop, and bzip2. On the other hand, tools like Zstandard and plzip allow for more advanced compression workflows.

Security Leftovers

• Security updates for Monday

  Security updates have been issued by Debian (activemq, libcaca, libupnp, mqtt-client, and xcftools), Fedora (ceph, mupdf, nagios, python-PyMuPDF, and zathura-pdf-mupdf), Mageia (cups, kernel, pngcheck, and python-pygments), openSUSE (bind, chromium, gnome-autoar, kernel, mbedtls, nodejs8, and thunderbird), and Red Hat (nodejs:10, nodejs:12, nodejs:14, screen, and virt:8.2 and virt-devel:8.2). 

  

• Server Security Tips – Secure Your Server with These Best Practices

  Servers play a vital role in organizations. Their primary function is to provide both data and computational services. Because of the critical role they play, servers hold confidential organizational data and information. Information is like gold nowadays, and hackers are gold miners. An insecure server is vulnerable to all sorts of security threats and data breaches.

     

• Multiple Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities Could Allow Privilege Escalation

  Fortunately, before any active exploitation, Popov fixed these bugs for the users. Popov has confirmed merging of these patches with the mainline kernel version 5.11-rc7. Also, the fixes have been “backported into the stable affected trees”. As Positive Technologies elaborated, this isn’t the first time Popov found and patched a vulnerability. Earlier, he has also caught and fixed two Linux, bugs CVE-2017-2636 and CVE-2019-18683, as well in 2017 and 2020 respectively.

• Understanding Samsung Knox Vault: Protecting the data that matters most

  Eight years ago, Samsung set out on a mission to build the most trusted and secure mobile devices in the world. With the introduction of our Samsung Knox platform at MWC in 2013, we put in place the key elements of hardware-based security that would help defend Samsung mobile devices and our customers’ data against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. Samsung Knox has since evolved into more than a built-in security platform, now encompassing a full suite of mobile management tools for enterprise IT administrators. But our mobile product planners, developers and security engineers have remained laser-focused on answering the primary question: how do we remain a step ahead of hackers and keep our users safe at all times? [...] In the first days of Android, the main focus was building a more open and flexible mobile operating system. Security was state-of-the-art for the time, inherited from the world of Unix and mainframe computers. But from the start, it became clear that smartphones were different; they were the most personal computers anyone had ever built.