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Security, Openwashing, Proprietary Software and Back Doors

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Security
  • Reproducible Builds in July 2020

    Welcome to the July 2020 report from the Reproducible Builds project.

    In these monthly reports, we round-up the things that we have been up to over the past month. As a brief refresher, the motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced from the original free software source code to the pre-compiled binaries we install on our systems. (If you’re interested in contributing to the project, please visit our main website.)

  • Have I Been Pwned — which tells you if passwords were breached — is going open source

    While not all password checkup tools actually use Hunt’s database (a just-announced LastPass feature calls on one hosted by Enzoic instead), many of them are apparently based on the same “k-Anonymity” API that Cloudflare engineering manager Junade Ali originally designed to support Have I Been Pwned’s tool.

  • Facebook’s new open-source Pysa security tool detects [cr]ackable code

    Pysa is designed exclusively to analyze code written in Python. That limits the scenarios where the tool can be applied, but it could be still useful for other companies because Python is the world’s second most widely used programming language as of earlier this year. It’s especially popular in artificial intelligence development and is also the language in which most of the code for Instagram is written.

    Facebook has applied Pysa to the Instagram code base to great effect. According to the company, the tool was responsible for spotting 44% of the server-side security issues that it detected in the photo sharing service during the first half of 2020. Some 49 of the flaws Pysa caught were determined to be “severe” vulnerabilities.

    Under the hood, the tool works by employing a technique known as static code analysis. It sifts through Facebook developers’ raw code files without the delay of running them to quickly generate security assessments.

  • [Cr]ackers can still steal wads of cash from ATMs. Here's the vulnerabilities that could let them in.

    “You’re literally trusting this machine to hold thousands of dollars, but it’s running [Windows operating system] CE 6.0? It is just a computer, on a network, running an older operating system,” Keown said, noting that the latest release for CE 6.0 was over a decade ago in 2009. “This is still a problem. Let’s focus some effort here and see if we can’t move the needle in the right direction.”

  • Canon Admits Ransomware Attack in Employee Note, Report

    The consumer-electronics giant has suffered partial outages across its U.S. website and internal systems reportedly, thanks to the Maze gang.

  • Windows, Gates and a firewall: Microsoft's delicate castle in China

    Microsoft arrived in China in 1992 and opened its largest research and development centre outside the United States. It now employs around 6,200 people in China.

  • All you need to hijack a Mac is an old Office document and a .zip file

    The exploit uses a rigged Office document, saved in an archaic format (.slk), to trick the target machine into allowing Office to activate macros without consent and without notifying the user.

    The attack then takes advantage of two further vulnerabilities in order to seize control of the machine. By including a dollar sign at the start of the filename, [an attacker] can break free of the restrictive Office sandbox, while compressing the file within a .zip folder bypasses macOS controls that prevent downloaded items from accessing user files.

  • Apple’s Chinese business could be devastated by Trump’s WeChat ban

    Apple has a significant Chinese customer base, and nearly all of its critical manufacturing and assembly partners are based there. Trump’s ban might not only force Apple to remove WeChat from its App Store — which would destroy Apple’s Chinese smartphone business — it could existentially change how Apple is able to build and sell new products in the future.

  • It's Time To Stop Talking and Take Action Against the Beasts that Want to Control Us

    I know I have not been active on this BLOG the past year. No reasons. Anyway, I'm back at it. This time, I have a specific focus on Big Tech. The way I see it, the root of the problem is not the tech companies themselves, it starts with the software we use. This includes Adobe, Intuit, Microsoft. I call them AIM. They are the worst offenders in there attempts to control the free world.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

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.