backups – Jupiter Broadcasting

Talk about a Happy New Year. The reason: it turns out we’re not dead. In fact, we’re more alive than ever, thanks to a rescue by readers—specifically, by the hackers who run Private Internet Access.

This is exactly what we had hoped for in recent years, but hardly expected. Really and truly, I waited to put up our farewell post until all hope was lost. But hey, it turns out you don’t have to believe in miracles to experience one, because that’s exactly what happened here.

Second, they’re eager to support us in building Linux Journal 2.0 around the substantial core of devoted readers we had through the many years of Linux Journal 1.x. And, this means we need to hear from you!

Google’s experimental Fuchsia OS can now run on the Pixelbook

Google’s in-development operating system, Fuchsia, has a new development device: The Google Pixelbook. Google’s $1,000 laptop usually runs Chrome OS, but with the latest Fuchsia builds, you can swap out the browser-based OS for Google’s experimental operating system.

Fuchsia is still incredibly difficult to get running. Along with the Pixelbook, Fuchsia only supports two other obscure pieces of hardware: an Acer Switch Alpha 12 laptop and old Intel NUCs from 2015.

The extreme difficulty in getting Fuchsia to run reinforces the fact that Fuchsia is currently a secret, deep-in-development operating system that Google isn’t really ready to talk about or encourage people to try just yet.

TING

Ting – mobile that makes sense

‘Kernel memory leaking’ Intel processor design flaw forces Linux, Windows redesign

A fundamental design flaw in Intel’s processor chips has forced a significant redesign of the Linux and Windows kernels to defang the chip-level security bug.

Crucially, these updates to both Linux and Windows will incur a performance hit on Intel products. The effects are still being benchmarked, however we’re looking at a ballpark figure of five to 30 per cent slow down, depending on the task and the processor model.

Details of the vulnerability within Intel’s silicon are under wraps: an embargo on the specifics is due to lift early this month, perhaps in time for Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday next week. Indeed, patches for the Linux kernel are available for all to see but comments in the source code have been redacted to obfuscate the issue.

AMD processors are not subject to the types of attacks that the kernel page table isolation feature protects against.

The mysterious case of the Linux Page Table…

DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean: SSD Cloud Server, VPS Server, Simple Cloud Hosting

An introduction to Joplin, an open source Evernote alternative

Joplin is an open source cross-platform note-taking and to-do application. It can handle a large number of notes, organized into notebooks, and can synchronize them across multiple devices.The notes can be edited in Markdown, either from within the app or with your own text editor, and each application has an option to render Markdown with formatting, images, URLs, and more.

As such, its synchronization is designed without any hard dependency to any particular service. Most of the synchronization process is done at an abstract level, and access to external services, such as OneDrive or Dropbox, is done via lightweight drivers.

Joplin was designed as a replacement for Evernote, so it can import complete Evernote notebooks, as well as notes, tags, resources (attached files), and note metadata (such as author, geolocation, etc.) via ENEX files.

Valve: Linux Catbot VAC ban claims were hoaxed by hackers to ‘sow distrust among anti-cheat systems’

initially wrote that Valve was banning Linux users with Linux usernames that included the word ‘catbot’, but Valve has said those claims were a “tactic employed by cheaters to try and sow discord and distrust among anticheat systems”.

“Linux historically hasn’t been a problem for cheating–the base rate of cheating is significantly lower on Linux than it is on Windows. Unfortunately, a ‘healthy’ community of cheaters grew up around catbot on linux and their impact on TF became large enough that they simply could no longer be ignored. Those banned users are very annoyed that VAC has dropped the hammer on them.”

Linux Academy

Linux Academy | Linux and AWS Online Training

2017 Best Practices

Bad predictions and plans for maintenance

All the Annoying Tech Chores You Need to Do When You Have Time

Like your car, or your kitchen, your tech devices will run best when they’re maintained properly—and that means finding time to do all those low-level maintenance tasks that aren’t much fun, but can keep everything stable and smooth, and avoid problems in the future.

Update your Software
Go through old files and free up some space
Monitor for problems
Get Organized
Update router and other firmware
Move to the cloud?

Linux resolutions for 2018

It’s always a good idea to start a new year with renewed intentions to be even better users and administrators of our Linux systems.

Automate the boring stuff
Learn a new language
Try a new OS
Focus on Security
Restore those backups!
Document, Document, Document
Most importantly, have some fun!

The post Invest In Popcorn | LINUX Unplugged 230 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Spy Tapes | TechSNAP 340

chris — Thu, 12 Oct 2017 16:33:13 +0000

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Show Notes:

The Ethics of Running a Data Breach Search Service

HIBP – have i been pwned?

Is the NSA Doing More Harm Than Good in Not Disclosing Exploits?

Post a boarding pass on Facebook, get your account stolen

How Israel Caught Russian Hackers Scouring the World for U.S. Secrets

See also Israel hacked Kaspersky, then tipped the NSA that its tools had been breached

Feedback

Round Up:

The post Spy Tapes | TechSNAP 340 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Laying Internet Pipe | TechSNAP 339

chris — Thu, 05 Oct 2017 14:43:57 +0000

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Show Notes:

Google Will Survive SESTA. Your Startup Might Not.

Requires unreliastic levels of censorship by platforms; not even the big players will be able to comply 100%
Proponents consider startups to be outliers, which “will be successfully prosecuted, civilly and criminally under this law”.
Proponents are overstating the effectiveness of filtering
Proposed standards actually discourage platforms from filtering

Companies Look to an Old Technology to Protect Against New Threats

Tape is an old techology. It is also highly reliable and stable
Tape sales are increasing
Yep, backup to NAS is great, but do you have different versions of your data?

CBS’s Showtime caught mining crypto-coins in viewers’ web browsers

This isn’t about CBS. It’s about the potential for abuse by website owners
Code unlikely to be official sanctioned / added by CBS; mure more likely it was a malicious third party or insider.
The email address associated with the mining account is personal, not corporate
Ethical issues for content providers to figure out

Feedback

Round Up:

The post Laying Internet Pipe | TechSNAP 339 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Patch Your S3it | TechSNAP 338

chris — Tue, 26 Sep 2017 23:40:04 +0000

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Show Notes:

Distrustful U.S. allies force spy agency to back down in encryption fight

Some ISO delegates said much of their skepticism stemmed from the 2000s, when NSA experts invented a component for encryption called Dual Elliptic Curve and got it adopted as a global standard.
In 2007, mathematicians in private industry showed that Dual EC could hide a back door, theoretically enabling the NSA to eavesdrop without detection. After the Snowden leaks, Reuters reported that the U.S. government had paid security company RSA $10 million to include Dual EC in a software development kit that was used by programmers around the world.

Viacom exposes crown jewels to world+dog in AWS S3 bucket blunder

Researchers found a wide-open, public-facing misconfigured AWS S3 bucket containing pretty much everything a hacker would need to take down the company’s IT systems.
“The contents of the repository appear to be nothing less than either the primary or backup configuration of Viacom’s IT infrastructure,” Vickery revealed today.
The Amazon-hosted bucket could be accessed by any netizen stumbling upon it, and contained the passwords and manifests for Viacom’s servers, as well as the access key and private key for the corporation’s AWS account. Some of the data was encrypted using GPG, but that wouldn’t be an issue because the bucket also contained the necessary decryption keys.

Equifax sends customers to wrong website, not theirs, for help

The credit management company Equifax has been sending customers to a fake “phishing” website for weeks, potentially causing them to hand over their personal data and full financial information to hackers.
After the data breach was revealed earlier this month, Equifax established the domain www.equifaxsecurity2017.com to handle incoming customer questions and complaints. This website is not connected to Equifax’s main website.
On Wednesday, a user reached out to Equifax on Twitter asking for assistance. The responding tweet sent the user to www.securityequifax2017.com, which is an impostor site designed to look like the Equifax splash page.

FinFisher government spy tool found hiding as WhatsApp and Skype

This week (21 September), experts from cybersecurity firm Eset claimed that new FinFisher variants had been discovered in seven countries, two of which were being targeted by “man in the middle” (MitM) attacks at an ISP level – packaging real downloads with spyware.
When a target of surveillance was downloading the software, they would be silently redirected to a version infected with FinFisher, research found.
When downloaded, the software would install as normal – but Eset found it would also be covertly bundled with the surveillance tool.

Feedback

Stored passwords & Amazon Fire Stick

+Hey Dan. What is a good and inexpensive tape backup drive for LTO tapes? What works for you best? Thx!

Round Up:

Apache Struts Vulnerability: More Than 3,000 Organizations At Risk Of Breach

Facebook re-licenses React under MIT license after developer backlash

The post Patch Your S3it | TechSNAP 338 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.