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Security: Updates, AMD, Intel, IBM/Power, Blender 3D, CES and More

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Security
  • Security updates for Friday
  • AMD processors: Not as safe as you might have thought

    In a posting. Mark Papermaster, AMD's CTO, admitted Google Project Zero (GPZ) Variant 1 (Bounds Check Bypass or Spectre) is applicable to AMD processors. But, Papermaster wrote, "We believe this threat can be contained with an operating system (OS) patch and we have been working with OS providers to address this issue."

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  • AMD CPUs Are Potentially Vulnerable To Spectre / Variant 2

    Last week in light of the Spectre disclosure. AMD believed they were at "near zero risk" to Variant Two / Branch Target Injection. But now the company confirmed last night that's not the case: they are at least potentially vulnerable.

  • AMD Confirms Its Chips Are Affected By Spectre Flaw, Starts Pushing Security Patches
  • Intel Releases Linux CPU Microcodes To fix Meltdown & Spectre Bugs

    On January 8th Intel released new Linux Processor microcode data files that can be used to mitigate the Spectre and and Meltdown vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs. Using microcode files, an operating system can fix known bugs in Intel CPU without having to perform a BIOS update on the computer.

  • Power Systems And The Spectre And Meltdown Threats

    Speculative execution is something that has been part of modern processors for well over a decade, and while it is hard to quantify how much of a performance benefit this collection of techniques have delivered, it is obviously significant enough that all CPUs, including IBM Power and System z chips, have them. And that, as the new Spectre and Meltdown security holes that were announced by Google on January 3 show, turns out to be a big problem.

    Without getting too deep into the technical details, there are many different ways to implement speculative execution, which is used to keep the many instruction pipelines and layers of cache in a processor busy doing what is hoped will be useful work. So much of what a computer does is an IF-THEN-ELSE kind of branch, and being able to pre-calculate the answers to multiple possible branches in an instruction stream is more efficient than following each path independently and calculating the answers in series. The speculative part of the execution involves using statistics to analyze patterns in data and instructions underneath an application and guessing which branches and data will be needed. If you guess right a lot of the time, then the CPU does a lot more work than it might otherwise. There are no modern processors (except for the PowerPC A2 chips used in the BlueGene/Q supercomputers from IBM) that we can find that don’t have speculative execution in some form or another, and there is no easy way to quantify how much of a performance boost it gives.

  • Blender 3D open source platform plagued with arbitrary code vulnerabilities

    Cisco Talos researchers identified multiple unpatched vulnerabilities in the Blender Open Source 3D creation suite that could allow an attacker to run arbitrary code.

  • Technologies That Secure the Home, WiFi and More Debut at CES 2018
  • What is the Future of Wi-Fi?
  • Spectre and Meltdown Attacks Against Microprocessors

    This is bad, but expect it more and more. Several trends are converging in a way that makes our current system of patching security vulnerabilities harder to implement.

  • Four Tips for a More Secure Website

    Security is a hot topic in web development with great reason. Every few months a major website is cracked and millions of user records are leaked. Many times the cause of a breach is from a simple vulnerability that has been overlooked. Here are a few tips to give you a quick overview of standard techniques for making your websites more secure. Note: I do not guarantee a secure website if you follow these suggestions, there are many facets to security that I don’t even touch in this article. This write-up is for increasing awareness about techniques used to correct some common vulnerabilities that appear in web applications.

  • What is DevSecOps? Developing more secure applications

    The simple premise of DevSecOps is that everyone in the software development life cycle is responsible for security, in essence bringing operations and development together with security functions. DevSecOps aims to embed security in every part of the development process. It is about trying to automate core security tasks by embedding security controls and processes early in the DevOps workflow (rather than being bolted on at the end). For example, this could be the case when migrating to microservices, building out a CI/CD pipeline, compliance automation or simply testing cloud infrastructure.

More in Tux Machines

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After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.