Why You Still Don’t Need Antivirus Software on Linux in 2020

There’s a division of opinion when it comes to the question; does Linux need antivirus? Well, the short answer is no. Some say viruses for Linux are rare; others say Linux’s security system is secure and much safer than other operating Windows. So, is Linux really secure? While no single operating system is entirely secure, Linux is known to be much more reliable than Windows or any operating system. The reason behind this is not the security of Linux itself but the minority of viruses and malware that exist for the operating system. Viruses and malware are incredibly rare in Linux. They do exist though the likelihood of getting a virus on your Linux OS is very low. Linux based operating systems also have additional security patches that are updated regularly to keep it safer. The userbase of Linux is tiny when compared to Windows. While Operating systems like Windows and Mac house all kinds of users, Linux is inclined more towards advanced users. In the end, It all comes down to the caution taken by the user. Can you get viruses on Linux? Yes, before you assume anything, viruses and malware can affect any operating system. No operating system is 100% safe, and it’s a fool errand to look for one. Like Windows and Mac OS, you can get viruses on Linux. However rare they are, they still exist. On the official page of Ubuntu, a Linux based OS, it is said that Ubuntu is highly secure. A lot of people installed Ubuntu for the sole purpose of having a dependable OS when it comes to the security of their data and sensitive details.

today's leftovers

• Matthew Garrett: What usage restrictions can we place in a free software license?

  Growing awareness of the wider social and political impact of software development has led to efforts to write licenses that prevent software being used to engage in acts that are seen as socially harmful, with the Hippocratic License being perhaps the most discussed example (although the JSON license's requirement that the software be used for good, not evil, is arguably an earlier version of the theme). The problem with these licenses is that they're pretty much universally considered to fall outside the definition of free software or open source licenses due to their restrictions on use, and there's a whole bunch of people who have very strong feelings that this is a very important thing. There's also the more fundamental underlying point that it's hard to write a license like this where everyone agrees on whether a specific thing is bad or not (eg, while many people working on a project may feel that it's reasonable to prohibit the software being used to support drone strikes, others may feel that the project shouldn't have a position on the use of the software to support drone strikes and some may even feel that some people should be the victims of drone strikes). This is, it turns out, all quite complicated. But there is something that many (but not all) people in the free software community agree on - certain restrictions are legitimate if they ultimately provide more freedom. Traditionally this was limited to restrictions on distribution (eg, the GPL requires that your recipient be able to obtain corresponding source code, and for GPLv3 must also be able to obtain the necessary signing keys to be able to replace it in covered devices), but more recently there's been some restrictions that don't require distribution. The best known is probably the clause in the Affero GPL (or AGPL) that requires that users interacting with covered code over a network be able to download the source code, but the Cryptographic Autonomy License (recently approved as an Open Source license) goes further and requires that users be able to obtain their data in order to self-host an equivalent instance.

• Install Metabase on Ubuntu 18.04 with Nginx and SSL – Google Cloud

• OpenBSD Foundation 2019 campaign wrapup

  Our target for 2019 was CDN$300K. Our community's continued generosity combined with our corporate donors exceeded that nicely. In addition we received the largest single donation in our history, CDN$380K from Smartisan. The return of Google was another welcome event. Altogether 2019 was our most successful campaign to date, yielding CDN$692K in total.

• have fun with free software – truly Open Source Karaoke „SingStar“ style Performous on GNU Linux

  An open-source karaoke, band and dancing game where one or more players perform a song and the game scores their performances. Supports songs in UltraStar, Frets on Fire and StepMania formats. Microphones and instruments from SingStar, Guitar Hero and Rock Band as well as some dance pads are autodetected.

• Reintroducing Telegram: privately funded private chat with open source apps

  I started to write an article about the latest update for Telegram, when I realized I might only be speaking to a select few in-the-know users. Far fewer than I think should be interested, anyway. Telegram is a private chat system with end-to-end encryption support and cross-platform functionality. It’s privately funded by a guy named Pavel Durov, whose only goal seems to be “fast and secure messaging that is also 100% free.”

• Daniel Silverstone: Subplot volunteers? (Acceptance testing tool)

  Subplot is a tool for capturing and automatically verifying the acceptance criteria for a software project or a system, in a way that's understood by all stakeholders. In a software project there are always more than one stakeholder. Even in a project one writes for oneself, there are two stakeholders: oneself, and that malicious cretin oneself-in-the-future. More importantly, though, there are typically stakeholders such as end users, sysadmins, clients, software architects, developers, and testers. They all need to understand what the software should do, and when it's in an acceptable state to be put into use: in other words, what the acceptance criteria are. Crucially, all stakeholders should understand the acceptance criteria the same way, and also how to verify they are met. In an ideal situation, all verification is automated, and happens very frequently. There are various tools for this, from generic documentation tooling (word processors, text editors, markup languages, etc) to test automation (Cucumber, Selenium, etc). On the one hand, documenting acceptance criteria in a way that all stakeholders understand is crucial: otherwise the end users are at risk of getting something that's not useful to help them, and the project is a waste of everyone's time and money. On the other hand, automating the verification of how acceptance criteria is met is also crucial: otherwise it's done manually, which is slow, costly, and error prone, which increases the risk of project failure. Subplot aims to solve this by an approach that combines documentation tooling with automated verification.

• Ulrike Uhlig: Reasons for job burnout and what motivates people in their job

  Often, burnout is conceived as a weakness of the person experiencing it: "they can't work under stress", "they lack organizational skills", "they are currently going through grief or a break up, that's why they can't keep up" — you've heard it all before, right?

• Hard disk reliability study - 2005-2020

  In other words, practically, if I keep two copies of any which data, the likelihood of data loss is 2.5% over a decade, or 0.06% for three disks. So this kind of confirms my backup strategy from a while back, and also shows that it is important for you to keep multiple copies of important files, if you want them to outlast your hardware. Conclusion There you go. I hope you find this 15-year-long study valuable. Of course, any techie like me could do it. All techies hoard hardware like mad, and I'm sure most of Dedoimedo readers have a bunch of computers and tons of hard disks strewn about, so it's just the matter of compiling the right data. And I'm sure every such compilation would be compelling. A compelling compiling, hi hi. If you have any comments or suggestions about my findings, I'd love to hear them. Again, I don't have a massive data center, so I can't do an accurate comparative study between vendors, disks sizes and alike, so do take my results with a pinch of cardamom. But I believe my numbers are quite indicative for home usage scenarios, so if you're mulling how to handle your data down the long trouser leg of time, you have some indication of where to start, and how to hedge your odds. Take care.

• How 1500 bytes became the MTU of the internet

  On the face of it 1500 is a weird number, we would normally expect a lot of constants in computing to be based around mathematical constants, like powers of 2. 1500, however fits none of those.

  So where did 1500 come from, and why are we still using it?

• Is it Possible to Identify DNS over HTTPs Without Decrypting TLS?

  Whenever I talk about DNS over HTTPS (DoH), the question comes up if it is possible to fingerprint DoH traffic without decrypting it. The idea is that something about DoH packets is different enough to identify them.

  [...]

  At this point, I would call the experiment a "proof of concept." It is not a conclusive experiment. I only collected a few minutes of traffic and went maybe to a dozen different sites. All tests were performed on a Mac using Firefox 71 and Cloudflare as a resolver. I may get around to do more testing during the day and will update this post accordingly.

• More DNS over HTTPS: Become One With the Packet. Be the Query. See the Query

  Two days ago, I wrote about how to profile traffic to recognize DNS over HTTPS. This is kind of a problem for DNS over HTTPS. If you can see it, you may be able to block it. On Twitter, a few chimed in to provide feedback about recognizing DNS over HTTPS. I checked a couple of other clients, and well, didn't have a ton of time so this is still very preliminary:

  [..]

  But to come back to the initial observation: The DoH traffic had specific packet sizes it preferred. So I was looking at this since it didn't seem random, meaning it leaked information.

• ‘This Is Disastrous’: How the Vinyl Industry Is Responding to the Apollo Masters Fire

  The day that everyone in the vinyl-manufacturing world has been worried about for years finally arrived. Earlier this month, Apollo Masters Corp., one of the two places in the world that produce the lacquer discs needed to assemble master plates for pressing records, burned down. The blaze reportedly took 82 firefighters and three hours to extinguish. No one was harmed, but the fire obliterated the Banning, California, facility responsible for, by most estimates, 70 to 85 percent of the lacquer plates used in vinyl production. There is now just one such factory in the world capable of producing that crucial item, MDC in Japan, leaving the global supply of vinyl in peril.

  “We’ve all been worried about this, we’ve had meetings about it within the industry,” says Cash Carter, chief operating officer at Kindercore Vinyl Pressing in Athens, Georgia. “We’ve gotten together with all the other pressing plants, lacquer cutters, everybody, and been like, ‘What happens if MDC or Apollo goes away? We’re all fucked.’ We were dreading that day, but not thinking it would actually happen — that before anything disastrous happened, someone would come in and fix what needed to be fixed.… Now, is the sky falling? No. But this is disastrous. I think there are going to be pressing plants that close because of this.… We’ve been saying we need to fix this for years. Now, we actually need to fix this.”

• How Kubernetes Became The Standard For Compute Resources

Audiocasts/Shows: Choose Linux, BSD Now and TLLTS

• Linux Console + Boutique Distros | Choose Linux 29

  A confusing experience in Distrohoppers which raises deeper questions about the value and viability of smaller distros.

• iocage in Jail | BSD Now 338

  Distrowatch reviews FuryBSD, LLDB on i386 for NetBSD, wpa_supplicant as lower-class citizen, KDE on FreeBSD updates, Travel Grant for BSDCan open, ZFS dataset for testing iocage within a jail, and more.

• The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 845

  service now woes, raspberry pi 4, power strips, and more