Games: Return to Castle Monkey Ball, Mutropolis, Ballsy! World Cup 2020

• Return to Castle Monkey Ball might be the weirdest mashup ever | GamingOnLinux

  Combining elements of the Wolfenstein 3D classic first-person shooter with the rolling gameplay of Super Monkey Ball, what could go wrong? Return to Castle Monkey Ball is quite hilarious. Pointed out by a reader earlier this week, it's a web game you can play on itch.io right in your browser so there's no downloading and the idea actually works quite well. Amusingly so and it's pretty challenging too. The idea here is that you're rolling your way through some cramped hallways, while soldiers are trying their best to shoot you. Smash into them to hurt them, keep rolling and collect bananas to boost your score and hopefully make it out alive. Probably one of the most unique mashups I've seen lately.

• Sci-fi adventure taking place on an abandoned Earth, Mutropolis launching Feb 18 | GamingOnLinux

  Ready for a new adventure? Set in the far future on an abandoned planet Earth, Mutropolis is now confirmed to be launching on February 18. "It is the year 5000, and the greatest achievements in human history are forgotten. The pyramids, the Mona Lisa, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air – forgotten. Forgotten by everyone except Henry Dijon and his ragtag team of archaeologists. They left Mars to dig up lost treasures on the wild and inhospitable Planet Earth. Life is sweet, until Henry’s professor is kidnapped, and thing start to get... weird."

• Ballsy! World Cup 2020 is a wonderful throwback to Sensible Soccer | GamingOnLinux

  Remember the classic Sensible World of Soccer or the original Sensible Soccer? Classics from the 90s and Ballsy! World Cup 2020 is a wonderful take on it. Note: key provided by the developer. I have seriously fond memories of SWOS, playing endless hours on the Amiga a long time ago. Ballsy really does feel like it both mechanically and visually although naturally it's more modern and looks a lot cleaner. After originally releasing in October 2020, the developer decided to port it in December 2020 to Linux. "Tired of these sluggish, scripted modern football games? Still like some physics momentum in your retro footy game? Search no longer! Ballsy! offers that fluent feel for flowing football fans. The European football, that is, so, not handegg. Though truth be told, the term 'soccer' was actually invented by the English, so it doesn't deserve all the hate it gets."

The first postmarketOS service pack release brings major PinePhone improvements

PostmarketOS is a smartphone operating system that grew out of a dream of providing a 10-year lifecycle to smartphones. So it’s probably not a surprise that the developers focus on stability, with major new releases coming to the stable channel every six months. But with the rapid pace of development in the Linux smartphone space since the release of the PinePhone, the postmarketOS team has added occasional “service pack” updates to the roadmap, and the first one is now available.

Security Leftovers

• Go read this report about the US military endangering passenger jets by blocking GPS

  The military is carrying out the testing, ironically, to help develop technology to counteract GPS jamming. To be fair, it’s an understandable goal, as the article details the troubles that pilots face when a technology they heavily rely on goes away. But when that happens, the pilot at least has visual cues and other instruments. The article also goes into how, instead of completely cutting out the pilot’s GPS signal, the testing can end up feeding the pilot incorrect information, leading to thinking they’re somewhere they’re not.

  Each tangent the article goes on reveals worrying new details, like how pilots are warned that testing may be happening, often leading to smooth flights and a “Chicken Little” situation where pilots have heard false warnings so many times that they’re not prepared for when it actually happens. There are also hints that the problem may be happening more often than even the Federal Aviation Administration realized.

• Powershell Dropping a REvil Ransomware

  This is a classic bypass for logging and AV detection[3]. Then, a second RunSpace is started: [...]

• World Economic Forum pegs cybersecurity failure as a major global risk [iophk: Windows TCO]

  Against such sophisticated threats, the vast majority of defenders don’t stand a chance, Clements added. “It’s often shocking to the security professionals tasked with protecting an organization and its data just how easy it is to bypass or defeat security controls like antivirus or how fast attackers can crack passwords,” he said.

• Department of Defense appoints John Sherman as acting CIO

  The Department of Defense (DoD) has replaced outgoing CIO Dana Deasy with deputy CIO John Sherman, who will head up the DoD's cloud strategy until a long-term replacement is in place.

  Sherman, who’s served as the deputy CIO at the DoD since June 2020, steps into the role Deasy left as America welcomed the Biden administration. Before that, Sherman was the intelligence community CIO, where he began in 2017 coordinating IT modernization across 17 agencies. From 2014 to 2017, he was the Deputy Director of the CIA's Open Source Enterprise (OSE). In his role, Sherman enhanced the CIA's open-source intelligence (OSINT) initiative.

  He’s also served at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) and was the Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Military Issues on the National Intelligence Council.

• Thanks for the data, suckers: How information insecurity endangers Russian Railways passengers and risks prison for the company’s I.T. workers

  On January 13, a hacker dubbed “LMonoceros” posted proof that he broke into the private network of Russian Railways (RZD) and accessed surveillance from cameras at train stations, on railway platforms, along rail tracks, and inside company offices. RZD employees contacted the hacker and together they patched the weakness in the network. This isn’t the first time Russian Railways has had problems with information security: In the past year and a half, the personal information of 700,000 employees and 1.3 million passengers has leaked, and the Wi-Fi aboard highspeed Sapsan trains was hacked in just 20 minutes. Meduza explains how RZD security problems threaten company employees.

• What is a Distributed Denial of Service Attack? | TheITstuff

  What is a Distributed Denial of Service Attack? also termed DDos Attack. The question is very common among computer or programming students who are learning about hacking techniques. This question is also asked by willing to be a white hat hacker one day. If you have the same question as well, let’s understand what this is. Disclaimer – I will be simplifying the DDoS process massively in this article just to give you an outline of the DDoS attacks. In reality, the DDoS attacks can be extremely complicated. After every DDoS attack, a team of engineers sit together and check logs of all network devices to figure out how the attack happened.

Android Leftovers

• Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra review: the new king of Android phones

• Mozilla will make it easier to install extensions in Firefox 85 for Android

• Oppo A9 2020 Android 11 beta build now slated for Q2 2021, says support

• Verizon’s Visible begins supporting 5G on Android, starting w/ Galaxy S20 series