Microsoft
How I Switched from Windows 10 to Linux Mint?
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 14th of January 2021 05:35:09 PM Filed under


This article explains the reasons and process to switch from Windows 10 to the latest Linux Mint version, which is Linux Mint 20 Ulyana.
I was using Microsoft Windows for almost 10 years. As of January 2020, Microsoft has terminated the support for windows. I had the option to use windows 7 by paying for Windows 7 Extended Security Updates or upgrade to Windows 10 for free. But I was not interested to upgrade from Windows 7 to 10. Now, I have decided to move to the Linux based operating systems rather than Microsoft Windows.
The first question that arose in my mind is which Linux Distro will fulfill my needs in terms of professional and personal use. Some of the Linux distros are fine for professional use, but not meant for personal use like Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Therefore, I was keen on finding the best distro that can be used for professional, as well as personal use, and great community support.
Community support is an important aspect to consider when you are selecting any distro. The reason is that if you face any problem while installing any software applications or doing some configuration, then you can post your problem on the community website, and anyone can give the solution.
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Microsoft Teams, Office 365 and OneDrive suffer outage – UK users unable to work from home
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Wednesday 13th of January 2021 11:33:19 AM Filed under
Office 365 services such as Microsoft Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint have all reportedly been hit with issues today.
Independent outage monitor Down Detector has recorded a spike in Office 365, Microsoft Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint down reports.
The heaviest hit services are Microsoft Teams and SharePoint, which so far have registered hundreds of down reports.
Out of those affected, some 70 percent of Microsoft Teams users said they were experiencing server connection problems.
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Microsoft Failures and the GitHub Trap
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 11th of January 2021 03:28:45 PM Filed under
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Pupils in Scotland struggle to get online amid Microsoft issue
Pupils across Scotland have been experiencing problems accessing Microsoft Teams as the majority move to home learning.
A number of schools, pupils and parents have reported the technology running slowly or not at all.
It is one of the main platforms being used for remote learning with schools shut until at least the beginning of February.
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Create an Uptime Monitor for Your Websites With 'Upptime' Tool and GitHub [No Server Needed] [Ed: Debdut Chakraborty is propping up Microsoft's proprietary software monopoly; we should advise people to delete GitHub, not embrace "Extensions" and "Hooks"... otherwise we help Microsoft merely attack Free software with vendor lock-in and yet worse things.]
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An Introduction to InnerSource[Ed: FOSSlife Team (LPI) is propping up a Microsoft-connected attack on FOSS]
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Microsoft Kills Another Microsoft Product, Profits From Mass Incarceration Instead
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 6th of January 2021 11:18:00 AM Filed under
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Microsoft will shut down Minecraft Earth in June
At its core, Minecraft Earth was a game based upon exploration and discovery. During the early days of lockdown, my kids and I would wander around the neighborhood, looking for animals, ores, and dungeons to explore. But Microsoft said that the “current global situation” prevented the free movement and collaborative play that allowed Minecraft Earth to survive.
As a result, Minecraft Earth will be turned off in June. “On June 30, we will discontinue all content and service support for the game,” Microsoft said in a blog post. “This means that we will stop all development, and after that date, you will be unable to download or play Minecraft Earth anymore. On July 1, we will delete any Minecraft Earth player data unrelated to Character Creator and Minecoin entitlements.”
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What went wrong with software for prisons
Microsoft and its partner Tribridge, a tech company that specialises in business applications and cloud solutions, Microsoft built the IDOC a searchable web-based solution called Offender 360 to centralise databases in the cloud and upgrade its prison management capabilities.
Then-Governor Patrick Quinn said at the time, Microsoft’s “cutting-edge technology will give Illinois one of the most advanced criminal justice information systems in the country.”
[...]
For Microsoft, this was years in the making. In a 2016 blog post, “Digital Technology and the Prison of the Future”, Microsoft envisioned prisons monitored with CCTV, drones and IoT devices, including “finger, face, and eye recognition to identify inmates” as well as RFID tagging and tracking bands.
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Microsoft Spin and Blame-Passing After Major Breach
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 1st of January 2021 05:12:46 PM Filed under
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Microsoft says [crackers] viewed source code as part of SolarWinds attack
Microsoft made the announcement as part of its investigation into findings last week, first reported by The Washington Post, that Russian [attackers] responsible for one of the biggest cyber incidents in U.S. history had compromised Microsoft cloud customers as part of the attack on IT company SolarWinds.
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Microsoft Says Suspected Russian [Atackers] Viewed Source Code
Microsoft had previously said it, too, had received a malicious update of software from information technology provider SolarWinds Corp. that was used to breach government agencies and companies around the world. The details of the campaign are still largely unknown, including how many organizations were victimized and what was taken by the [crackers]. Bloomberg News reported in December that investigators have determined at least 200 organizations were attacked as part of the campaign.
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SolarWinds [Crackers] Accessed Microsoft Source Code, Microsoft Says
Source code, the underlying set of instructions that run a piece of software or operating system, is typically among a technology company's most closely guarded secrets, and Microsoft has historically been particularly careful about protecting it.
It is not clear how much or what parts of Microsoft's source code repositories the [attackers] were able to access, but the disclosure suggests that the [attackers] who used software company SolarWinds as a springboard to break into sensitive U.S. government networks also had an interest in discovering the inner workings of Microsoft products as well.
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SolarWinds [attackers] accessed Microsoft source code, the company says
It is not clear how much or what parts of Microsoft's source code repositories the [crackers] were able to access, but the disclosure suggests that the [attackers] who used software company SolarWinds as a springboard to break into sensitive U.S. government networks also had an interest in discovering the inner workings of Microsoft products as well.
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SolarWinds [crackers] accessed Microsoft source code, the company says
Three people briefed on the matter said Microsoft had known for days that the source code had been accessed. A Microsoft spokesman said security employees had been working “around the clock” and that “when there is actionable information to share, they have published and shared it.”
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Joey Hess: Withdrawing github-backup
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 30th of December 2020 01:27:56 AM Filed under

If the farce of youtube-dl being removed from github, thus losing access to all its issues and pull requests, taught us anything, it's that having that happen does not make many people reconsider their dependence on github.
[...]
That seems like something it might be worth building some software to manage. But it's also just another case of Github's mass bending reality around it; the average Github user doesn't care about this and still gets archived; the average self-hosting git user may care about this slightly more, but most won't get archived, even if that software did get built.
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Proprietary Software Failures and Security Leftovers
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 23rd of December 2020 04:25:59 AM Filed under

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Microsoft rushes out fix for critical Windows 10 bug
A new critical bug appears to have emerged in Windows 10, which is crashing some computers when they run the chkdsk command.
It appears that this bug is affecting Windows 10 running the latest update (December 2020), which was released by Microsoft to fix numerous problems. Instead, as Windows Latest reports, some users have found that when they run the Check Disk tool (also known as chkdsk), their PCs crash, and the dreaded Blue Screen of Death appears.
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Microsoft Azure breach left thousands of customer records exposed
Thanks to questionable security practises by an app developer, more than half a million sensitive documents of its customers were exposed on the Internet. The documents were housed in an unprotected Microsoft Azure blob storage and could be viewed by anyone with the direct address of the files, without any kind of authentication.
Azure Blob storage is a feature of Microsoft Azure that allows users to store large amounts of unstructured data on Microsoft's data storage platform.
The unsecured blob was managed by Surrey-based app developer Probase and according to The Register, it contained 587,000 files, ranging from backed-up emails to letters, spreadsheets, screenshots, and more.
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Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (kernel and thunderbird), Debian (openjdk-8 and webkit2gtk), Fedora (gdm, mingw-openjpeg2, and openjpeg2), Mageia (compat-openssl10, golang-googlecode-net, mbedtls, openssl, and virtualbox), openSUSE (ovmf and xen), Red Hat (kernel, mariadb-connector-c, mariadb:10.3, postgresql:10, and postgresql:9.6), and SUSE (ardana-cassandra, ardana-mq, ardana-osconfig, ardana-tempest, crowbar-core, crowbar-openstack, grafana, influxdb, openstack-cinder, openstack-heat, openstack-heat-gbp, openstack-heat-templates, openstack-horizon-plugin-gbp-ui, openstack-ironic-python-agent, openstack-manila, openstack-neutron, openstack-neutron-gbp, openstack-neutron-vpnaas, openstack-nova, python-Jinja2, python-pysaml2, python-pytest, python-urllib3, release-notes-suse-openstack-cloud, spark, ceph, crowbar-core, crowbar-openstack, grafana, influxdb, openstack-heat-templates, openstack-nova, python-Jinja2, firefox, java-1_7_0-ibm, java-1_7_1-ibm, PackageKit, and thunderbird).
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But, what about root passwords?
If you’ve walked long enough into your enterprise identity management journey you might reach this question: How will root passwords be managed? Having centralized user and group IDs, your access policies—Host Based Access Control (HBAC) and Role Based Access Control (RBAC)—in Red Hat Identity Management (IdM) or any similar solution might still leave root passwords unmanaged.
[...]
While there is a resemblance in some of these examples and the public cloud’s approach in having no root password set, and shifting the privileged access to users other than root, there is one big difference. Many physical and virtual provisioning workflows for on-prem will include setting up a default root password for a variety of reasons, but those reasons are beyond the scope of this blog post.
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Kali Linux: The Last 12 Months (2019/2020) & Looking forwards (2021)
As the end of the year is coming up (some may say not quickly enough), we want to take a few minutes and recap on our roadmap 2019/2020 post.
At a higher level, the last 12 months of Kali Linux (outside of the normal release items – e.g. packages updates), Kali has had various refreshes, switches and additional new features added.
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Josh Bressers: Episode 248 – Door 23: How to report 1000 security flaws
Josh and Kurt talk about how to file 1000 security flaws. One is easy, scale is hard.
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The State of Safety Certification of Platforms
A lot has been written about safety “certification” of platforms. As the number of applications involving human safety increases in markets such as avionics, automotive, industrial, etc., the importance of the functional safety certification of software that controls key functions has never been greater. There are several standards that govern the safety certification of software like DO-178, SEAL, ISO26262, and IEC61508. It is the best known and perhaps the most rigorous is the DO-178 standard that is governed by the FAA for commercial avionics software. A look “under-the-hood” into the process of safety certification reveals many interesting facts.
As the leader of an engineering team that is working on certifying code for deployment on big programs like the Joint Strike Fighter, I thought it would be interesting to share the next level of what is involved. Let me start with a datapoint. The average time to get a single line of source certified to DO-178 DAL A Standard (used for the most critical system functions in aircraft and helicopters) may take 2-3 hours. So, that means that every 2,000 lines of code takes one year to certify. How many applications these days have as little as 2,000 lines of code?
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Proprietary Software and Security Problems
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 21st of December 2020 09:28:31 AM Filed under

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Windows 10 20H2 Update Reportedly Damages SSD File Systems If You Run ChkDsk
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Russia could cut off U.S. food and water supply in next cyberattack, Romney says
Russia acted with impunity when it hacked U.S. government servers in a global cyber-espionage campaign and could do far more damage next time — like cutting off the nation’s water and electricity supply, GOP Sen. Mitt Romney said Sunday.
Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the Utah senator said the massive cyberattack discovered earlier this week, which officials say could be the biggest hack on the American government ever, must be met with a vigorous response and without delay.
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Microsoft Caught Up in SolarWinds Spy Effort, Joining Federal Agencies
Adversaries were able to use SolarWinds’ Orion network management platform to infect users with a stealth backdoor called “Sunburst” or “Solorigate,” that opened the way for lateral movement to other parts of a network. It was pushed out via trojanized product updates to almost 18,000 organizations around the globe, starting nine months ago. Once embedded, the attackers have been able to pick and choose which organizations to further penetrate.
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Trump Downplays SolarWinds Hack, Pompeo Blames Russia
President Donald Trump played down the SolarWinds breach and shifted blame to China in his first public remarks on a cyberattack that’s crippled numerous federal agencies.
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US 'has evidence Russia breached its nuclear networks' in massive cyber attack [iophk: Windows TCO]
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Proprietary Software and Security Issues
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 19th of December 2020 09:08:35 AM Filed under


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Google Blames Gmail, YouTube Outage on Error in User ID System
Google diagnosed a widespread outage that knocked out major services earlier this week, such as Gmail and YouTube, as a mistake with its system for identifying people online.
Alphabet Inc.’s Google has several tools that enable it to verify and track logged-in users. In October, the company began moving those tools to a new file storage system, and in the process misreported portions of the data, according to a Friday post. That caused several of its services to go down for 47 minutes Monday morning, a rare technical misstep.
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Windows 10 updates cause CorsairVBusDriver BSOD crash loop
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Microsoft has delivered a partial fix for this nagging Windows 10 bug
Microsoft has released a partial fix for a known issue affecting Windows 10 devices with certain audio drivers for Conexant and Synaptics devices. The issue has been under investigation since May this year.
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Attackers in compromised US system at least since mid-2019: report
Malicious attackers, who were exposed as having hit a number of government and private sector entities through software made by Texas firm SolarWinds, appear to have gained access to that firm's network as early as mid-2019, Yahoo! News claims.
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Suspected Russian [attack]: Was it an epic cyber attack or spy operation?
But for many current and former American officials, that’s not the right way to look at it. By [cracking] into dozens of corporations and government agencies, they say, the [crackers] have pulled off a stunning and distressing feat of espionage. But they note that it’s just the sort of cyber spying that the American National Security Agency attempts on a regular basis against Russia, China and any number of foreign adversaries.
It might constitute an attack if the intruders destroyed data, for example, or used their access to do damage in the physical world, say, by shutting down power grids. But breaking into unclassified government and corporate networks? Reading other people’s emails? That’s spying.
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Exploiting a stack-based buffer overflow in practice
In my previous post, I detailed a fun method of obtaining root access on the Zyxel VMG8825-T50 router, which required physical access to the device and authenticated access to the web interface.
In this post, I will detail the exploitation of a vulnerability that could potentially result in unauthenticated RCE as root, given LAN access only. This vulnerability was also found on the VMG8825-T50 router, but it turns out to be present in multiple other Zyxel devices.
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The Latest Microsoft Surveillance Scandal
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 8th of December 2020 04:00:41 AM Filed under
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How to Get Install Docker On Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
Docker is an Open source technology that allows you to install an run application on several containers (machine) without Interfering with the host or other containers technology is similar to Virtualization, but it is more portable and easy to use.
What is the type of Docker are available?
There is two types of Docker are available Docker CE (Community Edition) and Docker EE (Enterprise Edition).
| today's howtos
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Contributing to KDE is easier than you think – Bug triaging
Today, 2021-01-28, is the Plasma Beta Review Day for Plasma 5.21, that is to say, Plasma 5.20.90. Right now it’s a bit after 2 a.m., so after this I’m going to bed so I can be present later.
This month I’ve mostly been enjoying my post-job vacation as last year I was bordering burnout. As such I didn’t help much.
Before bed I’ll be providing a few things I’ve learned about triaging, though. While this blog post isn’t specifically about the Beta Review Day, this should make the general bug triaging process clearer for you, making it quite timely.
| Audiocasts/Shows: Coder Radio, TLLTS, and FLOSS Weekly
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