Google gets caught red handed, we find lots of goodies in the new Linux kernel & we have three great new app picks this week.

But the meat of the show is Lynis a tool to audit your Linux box, create reports & teach you how to better secure your system.

Plus we officially lay the groundwork for the Gentoo Challenge.

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Show Notes:

Follow Up / Catch Up

An update on the Android problem [LWN.net]

Android has been a great boon to the kernel community, having brought a
great deal of growth in both the user and the development communities. But
Android has also been a problem in that devices running it ship with
kernels containing large amounts (often millions of lines) of out-of-tree
code. That fragments the development community and makes it impossible to
run mainline kernels on this hardware.

The problematic side of Android was discussed at the 2017 Maintainer Summit; the picture that resulted is
surprisingly optimistic.

Google collects Android users’ locations even when location services are disabled

Even devices that had been reset to factory default settings and apps, with location services disabled, were observed by Quartz sending nearby cell-tower addresses to Google. Devices with a cellular data or WiFi connection appear to send the data to Google each time they come within range of a new cell tower. When Android devices are connected to a WiFi network, they will send the tower addresses to Google even if they don’t have SIM cards installed.

Intel Does an Audit of ME, finds some Problems

As a result, Intel has identified several security vulnerabilities that could potentially place impacted platforms at risk. Systems using ME Firmware versions 11.0/11.5/11.6/11.7/11.10/11.20, SPS Firmware version 4.0, and TXE version 3.0 are impacted.

Linux Academy

Linux 4.14 arrives and Linus says it should have fewer 0-days

Said robot is an automated vulnerability-checker that scours kernel code for issues. With version 4.14 slated to be the next kernel version to receive Long Term Support, and that support now running for six years instead of two, a more secure release will be widely welcome._

If there is any failure during the build stage, 0-Day will bisect the failure to the first code patch that introduces the failure. That patch author is then notified with the failure information and the steps to reproduce the problem. This allows developers to reproduce the problem in their local environments and to verify their fixes.

bcache destroys filesystems

Using bcache can destroy the filesystem. Mine was gone after 3rd non sucesfull try to mount the rootfs. It was not possible to recover any file.

Google Code Archive – Long-term storage for Google Code Project Hosting.

VidCutter 5.0 Released With Improved UI, Frame Accurate Cutting

If you want split video, trim video, or join video clips into a single montage then Vidcutter is ideal. The app lets you perform these tasks, as well as many more, quickly and easily.

VidCutter is a Qt5 application that uses the open-source FFMpeg media engine.

Parlatype

Parlatype is a minimal audio player for manual speech transcription, written for the GNOME desktop environment. It plays audio sources to transcribe them in your favourite text application.

DigitalOcean

Audit your Linux box with Lynis

Lynis is an open source security auditing tool. Used by system administrators, security professionals, and auditors, to evaluate the security defenses of their Linux and Unix-based systems. It runs on the host itself, so it performs more extensive security scans than vulnerability scanners.

TING

Kicking off the Gentoo Challenge. For REAL.

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