Programming Leftovers

• Open Source Software Leader the Eclipse Foundation Launches the Adoptium Working Group for Multi-Vendor Delivery of Java Runtimes for Enterprises

• AWS's Shane Miller to head the newly created Rust Foundation

  Miller, who leads the Rust Platform team for AWS, has been a software engineer for almost 30 years. At AWS, Miller has been a leader in open-source strategic initiatives and software engineering and delivery. Miller's Rust Platform team includes Rust language and compiler maintainers and contributors and developers on the Tokio runtime for writing reliable asynchronous applications with Rust. Under Miller's leadership, the AWS Rust team is crafting optimizations and tools for the features that engineers will use to build and operate services which take full advantage of Rust's performance and safety.

• Inkscape compiled in OpenEmbedded

  Cross-compiling can be a challenge with some packages, and some of the big ones, such as SeaMonkey, LibreOffice and Inkscape, I have compiled in a running EasyOS (with the "devx" SFS loaded). I have previously compiled LibreOffice in OE, see the Pyro series. But it was a lot of work.

• Felix Häcker: New Shortwave release

  Ten months later, after 14.330 added and 8.634 deleted lines, Shortwave 2.0 is available! It sports new features, and comes with the well known improvements, and bugfixes as always. [...] Shortwave has always been designed to handle any screen size from the beginning. In version 2.0 we have been able to improve this even further. There is now a compact mini player for desktop screens. This still offers access to the most important functions in a tiny window.

• 5 signs you're a groff programmer

  I first discovered Unix systems in the early 1990s, when I was an undergraduate at university. I liked it so much that I replaced the MS-DOS system on my home computer with the Linux operating system. One thing that Linux didn't have in the early to mid-1990s was a word processor. A standard office application on other desktop operating systems, a word processor lets you edit text easily. I often used a word processor on DOS to write my papers for class. I wouldn't find a Linux-native word processor until the late 1990s. Until then, word processing was one of the rare reasons I maintained dual-boot on my first computer, so I could occasionally boot back into DOS to write papers. Then I discovered that Linux provided kind of a word processor. GNU troff, better known as groff, is a modern implementation of a classic text processing system called troff, short for "typesetter roff," which is an improved version of the nroff system. And nroff was meant to be a new implementation of the original roff (which stood for "run off," as in to "run off" a document).

Security Leftovers

• ClamAV 0.103.2 Is Released With Security Fixes For Four Vulnerabilities

  The free software anti-virus scanner ClamAV has, ironically, made a security release fixing four vulnerabilities. Two of them could cause it to crash, one could cause it to enter a endless loop and a Windows-specific vulnerability could lead to privilege escalation. ClamAV has 8,532,858 virus signatures it can scan for in its database.

• Why the U.S. Shouldn’t Play Games With Cyberwarfare as Its Power Declines

  In the SolarWinds hack, a backdoor in one of the components was downloaded to the systems of 18,000 organizations, including the U.S. Treasury and Commerce departments, the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department.

  In the Microsoft Exchange Server hack, an estimated 250,000 machinesworldwide might have been affected by a vulnerability that allowed hackers to control the machines and even infect other systems in the internal network of the targeted companies. Four major vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server were reported to Microsoft in early January. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until early March that Microsoft released patches, according to ZDNet. These vulnerabilities were used by the hackers during the period that Microsoft had either not released the patches, or companies had not upgraded their systems and installed the patches.

 

• LinkedIn denies data leak after two-thirds user base is compromised

                   

                     

  Personal data of 500 million LinkedIn users, two thirds of its user base, has been scraped and is for sale online, according to a report from Cyber News.

                     

  The data up for sale on a popular hacker platform includes account IDs, full names, email addresses, workplace information and links to social media accounts of users hosted on the platform.

                   

• Linkedin data leak: Major breach exposes 500 million users on Microsoft platform [details]

                       

                         

  While people are yet to digest the huge Facebook data leak of 533 million users (including 6.1 million Indians), Microsoft-owned professional networking platform LinkedIn is now facing a massive data leak of 500 million users that is allegedly being sold online.

                         

  An archive with data purportedly scraped from 500 million LinkedIn profiles has been put for sale on a popular [cracker] forum, with another 2 million records leaked as a proof-of-concept sample by people behind the [crack].

Elephant and Its Ivory

LIVES at risk. This is a travesty. REPUBLIC OF NAMIBIA'S MINISTRY OF ENVIRONMENT, FORESTRY AND TOURISM: "We should manage elephants based on science and not emotions." By auctioning/selling off 170 live elephants? Give us a break. Oftentimes, animals were to make a sacrifice over humans because they are just "animals", so they can't speak to us, and can't protest. We're asked to assume they're just the least important, therefore we can eradicate (or "cull") them -- as simple as that. How I wish the the Animal Kingdom will become a force and burn this kind of society just to make a statement -- and then, maybe, humans will truly realise the value of animal rights. Shame on those African countries which don't give a shit about all those people who tirelessly devoted their time and life to protecting the wild animals, and specifically the elephants. Animals can't speak, but they can see you and they can feel you; just look into and gaze at their eyes, doesn't that give you a goosebumps? Burn. █