Events: GNOME, LF, and Linux App Summit (LAS)

• Felipe Borges: Save the date: GNOME LATAM 2021, March 27th

  I’m happy to spread the word that a GNOME event in Spanish and Portuguese is taking place this month, on the 27th of March. It will be a free virtual event with talks and panels where everybody is welcome.

• Cloud Foundry Summit 2021: Call For Papers Open

  The Summit will allow European attendees to participate, as well, with sessions tailored to the virtual format. The Cloud Foundry Foundation will join forces with the community-elected program committee to curate a program that fosters collaboration among attendees and offers interactive platform education.

• The Linux App Summit (LAS) returns in May, applications open for talks until March 15 | GamingOnLinux

  Planned to happen online again during May 13-15, the Linux App Summit (LAS) is set to return giving you a chance to listen to talks about the future of application design, development and more for Linux. Last year had some pretty interesting talks, like Linux game porter and FNA developer Ethan Lee giving a presentation on how games get built and packages plus Collabora gave an overview of their work with Valve.

CoreELEC 19.0 “Matrix” Linux Distro Released for Amlogic Hardware Based on Kodi 19

As its codename suggests, CoreELEC 19.0 “Matrix” is the first release of this LibreELEC fork to be based on the recently released Kodi 19.0 “Matrix” open-source home theater software, which introduces numerous new featiures and improvements for those who want to make their own media center PC or HTPC. Based on the CoreELEC 9.2.6 Amlogic-NG release, the CoreELEC 19.0 series becomes the active development branch, supporting only Amlogic-NG devices like LaFrite, LePotato, ODROID-C4, ODROID-HC4, and ODROID-N2.

Mozilla Leftovers

• A Better Terminal for Mozilla Build [Ed: Mozilla is moving in a bad direction that serves Windows, not standards or the open Web or software freedom]

  If you’re working with mozilla-central on Windows and followed the official documentation, there’s a good chance the MozillaBuild shell is running in the default cmd.exe console. If you’ve spent any amount of time in this console you’ve also likely noticed it leaves a bit to be desired. Standard terminal features such as tabs, splits and themes are missing. More importantly, it doesn’t render unicode characters (at least out of the box).

• Mozilla Open Policy & Advocacy Blog: India’s new intermediary liability and digital media regulations will harm the open internet

  Last week, in a sudden move that will have disastrous consequences for the open internet, the Indian government notified a new regime for intermediary liability and digital media regulation. Intermediary liability (or “safe harbor”) protections have been fundamental to growth and innovation on the internet as an open and secure medium of communication and commerce. By expanding the “due diligence” obligations that intermediaries will have to follow to avail safe harbor, these rules will harm end to end encryption, substantially increase surveillance, promote automated filtering and prompt a fragmentation of the internet that would harm users while failing to empower Indians. While many of the most onerous provisions only apply to “significant social media intermediaries” (a new classification scheme), the ripple effects of these provisions will have a devastating impact on freedom of expression, privacy and security.

• Karl Dubost: Capping User Agent String - followup meeting [Ed: Hopefully enough people understand the degree to which use agents in a Web browser are leveraged for fingerprinting/tracking/surveillance/abuse]

  A couple of weeks ago, I mentionned the steps which have been taken about capping the User Agent String on macOS 11 for Web compatibility issues. Since then, Mozilla and Google organized a meeting to discuss the status and the issues related to this effort. We invited Apple but probably too late to find someone who could participate to the meeting (my bad). The minutes of the meeting are publicly accessible.

Security Leftovers

• Is Your Browser Extension a Botnet Backdoor?

  A company that rents out access to more than 10 million Web browsers so that clients can hide their true Internet addresses has built its network by paying browser extension makers to quietly include its code in their creations. This story examines the lopsided economics of extension development, and why installing an extension can be such a risky proposition.

• Security updates for Tuesday [LWN.net]

  Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (bind, intel-ucode, ipmitool, isync, openssl, python, python-cryptography, python-httplib2, salt, tar, and thrift), Fedora (ansible, salt, webkit2gtk3, and wpa_supplicant), Oracle (bind), Red Hat (bind, kernel, and kpatch-patch), Scientific Linux (bind), SUSE (firefox, gnome-autoar, java-1_8_0-ibm, java-1_8_0-openjdk, nodejs10, open-iscsi, perl-XML-Twig, python-cryptography, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (bind9).

• Malicious NPM packages target Amazon, Slack with new dependency attacks [Ed: Microsoft delivering malware again, but the media (actually a Microsoft propaganda site in this case) does not mention Microsoft (similar to this)]

  Last month, BleepingComputer reported that security researcher Alex Birsan earned bug bounties from 35 companies by utilizing a new flaw in open-source development tools.

• Working Spectre exploits for Windows and Linux devices uncovered

  A security researcher has discovered several working Spectre exploits that were uploaded to the VirusTotal database last month. Spectre, along with Meltdown, are two extremely severe hardware vulnerabilities that affect Intel, IBM POWER, and some ARM-based processors. While Intel has since implemented hardware mitigations for the vulnerability in newer processors, older ones have to rely on software fixes that come with a performance penalty, which prevents its blanket use. This means that there’s still a large number of systems that are vulnerable to the recently discovered exploits by security researcher Julien Voisin.