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Security: Class Action Lawsuit Against Microsoft, New Patches, KDE FUD/Hype, Local Password Managers Assessed

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Security
  • Class Action Lawsuits Hopes To Hold GitHub Responsible For Hosting Data From Capital One Breach

    Weird legal theory, but one that could possibly to be stretched to target some of the $7.5 billion Microsoft paid to acquire GitHub. But it takes a lot of novel legal arguments to hold a third party responsible for content posted by a user, even if the content contained a ton of sensitive personal info.

    The lawsuit [PDF] alleges GitHub knew about the contents of this posting since the middle of April, but did not remove it until the middle of July after being notified of its contents by another GitHub user. The theory the law firm is pushing is that GitHub was obligated to scan uploads for "sensitive info" and proactively remove third-party content. The lawsuit argues GitHub is more obligated than most because (gasp!) it encourages hacking and hackers.

  • Security updates for Monday

    Security updates have been issued by Debian (fusiondirectory, gosa, kconfig, kernel, pango1.0, and python-django), Fedora (aubio, icedtea-web, java-1.8.0-openjdk, kernel, kernel-headers, kernel-tools, libslirp, openqa, os-autoinst, and upx), Gentoo (JasPer, libvncserver, and redis), Mageia (cyrus-imapd and php), Oracle (kernel), Red Hat (chromium-browser, cockpit-ovirt, Red Hat Virtualization, and rhvm-appliance), SUSE (ImageMagick, libvirt, python, and wireshark), and Ubuntu (poppler).

  • KDE Linux Desktops Could Get Hacked Without Even Opening Malicious Files [Ed: Hacker News misleading. You actually do need to open a malicious file from an untrusted source. This is similar to the macros issue and to a lesser degree JavaScript.]

    If you are running a KDE desktop environment on your Linux operating system, you need to be extra careful and avoid downloading any ".desktop" or ".directory" file for a while.

    A cybersecurity researcher has disclosed an unpatched zero-day vulnerability in the KDE software framework that could allow maliciously crafted .desktop and .directory files to silently run arbitrary code on a user's computer—without even requiring the victim to actually open it.

  • Recognizing basic security flaws in local password managers

    If you want to use a password manager (as you probably should), there are literally hundreds of them to choose from. And there are lots of reviews, weighing in features, usability and all other relevant factors to help you make an informed decision. Actually, almost all of them, with one factor suspiciously absent: security. How do you know whether you can trust the application with data as sensitive as your passwords?

    Unfortunately, it’s really hard to see security or lack thereof. In fact, even tech publications struggle with this. They will talk about two-factor authentication support, even when discussing a local password manager where it is of very limited use. Or worse yet, they will fire up a debugger to check whether they can see any passwords in memory, completely disregarding the fact that somebody with debug rights can also install a simple key logger (meaning: game over for any password manager).

    Judging security of a password manager is a very complex task, something that only experts in the field are capable of. The trouble: these experts usually work for competing products and badmouthing competition would make a bad impression. Luckily, this still leaves me. Actually, I’m not quite an expert, I merely know more than most. And I also work on competition, a password manager called PfP: Pain-free Passwords which I develop as a hobby. But today we’ll just ignore this.

    So I want to go with you through some basic flaws which you might encounter in a local password manager. That’s a password manager where all data is stored on your computer rather than being uploaded to some server, a rather convenient feature if you want to take a quick look. Some technical understanding is required, but hopefully you will be able to apply the tricks shown here, particularly if you plan to write about a password manager.

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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.