Why so many distros ship GNOME by default, a retro OS on modern hardware, Mint’s update woes, your feedback, and more.
This week on Destination Linux, we’re going to discuss firewalls. Specifically, what the heck are they? Do you need to set one up? Does your distro have a default firewall and our favorite firewall software. Google is now a privacy ally…or at least that’s what they’re marketing. Later in the show, we’re going to discuss 0 A.D. and Steam Link enhancements for Linux. Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux. So whether you’re brand new to Linux and open source or a guru of sudo. This is the podcast for you.
I normally don't post episodes of the Sunday Morning Linux Review on my channel, but I've decided to post the latest episode to let people know about it that aren't already subscribed. Presented as audio only.
While dmenu is a great way to launch your programs, dmenu is much more than just a run launcher. You can have shell commands output to dmenu. This makes dmenu a fantastic tool to incorporate into your shell scripts.
Intel engineers have been working on a tool called kcpuid for showing the raw CPU features/capabilities of a processor under Linux. This utility will be part of the kernel source tree and is queued up now in tip's x86/misc branch, thereby making it material for Linux 5.13 barring any issues coming up.
Users/administrators can generally rely on /proc/cpuinfo for quickly finding out CPU features of a given system. But the reported CPU information can be a bit misleading as some information can get left out due to kernel boot-time / command-line options that may disable some feature flags. Meanwhile other user-space utilities exist for reading CPU features but they are not necessarily up-to-date for the latest CPUs, among other potential issues.
Intel is reportedly commencing the development of the rumored 14th Generation Luna Lake processors. Rumors have it that the company's rolling out of chips' first support through the latest Linux patches hints at its potential launch window.
The term "Intel Luna Lake" processor was spotted by Coelacanth's Dream via Videocardz on a page showing a patch that introduced support for the unannounced CPU. The patch notes are for the Intel Ethernet Driver e1000e, which is a 1 Gbps NIC for Linux systems. Based on the patch notes, support for Intel Meteor Lake CPU was added last October 2020.
In the immediate future, Intel will be rolling out its Rocket Lake processors, comprised of 11th Gen Core desktop CPUs. Then a little bit further down the road, we will get to see how Intel's hybrid design works out, with the eventual introduction of Alder Lake. What about after that? We've seen references to a Meteor Lake platform, and now another reference to Lunar Lake, which is likely destined for a 2023 or 2024 launch.
If you are keeping count, Lunar Lake would logically land within Intel's 14th Gen Core processor plans. That is assuming (A) Lunar Lake is real, and (B) Intel does not shake things up with something else in between, and/or get funky with its Gen labels. Now that Pat Gelsinger has taken the reins as Intel CEO, it is anyone's guess what the future might hold.
PDF stands for Portable Document Format. It is widely used for exchanging electronic documents. Documents, forms, and web pages encoded in PDF can be correctly displayed on any device, including smartphones and tablets.
PDF files are most reliable and secure way to share the documents with others over email because they cannot be manipulated easily. They can can be edited however, to some extent when necessary using pdf editors. But most of the time we only read the pdf documents.
By default all Linux distributions come with a PDF viewer but not with a PDF editor.
In this tutorial, we will show you some of the best PDF editors that can be used to edit contents, split and merge pdf documents in Linux.
This article will list useful hex editor applications available for Linux. Hex editors allow you to modify pre-compiled binary files whose source code is typically not available to change. They work by browsing binary data present in a file and then presenting the data in hexadecimal notation to users. Hex editors can also show partial or full ASCII data depending on the contents of the file.
These hex editors allow you to change hexadecimal values, thereby allowing users to modify file behavior even if they don’t have access to source code. However, the data represented by a hex editor is not exactly human readable. Reading and interpreting hexadecimal values to infer program logic and behavior is not an easy task by any means and it takes considerable efforts to find values and make even the smallest of change. A hex editor is one of the first tools used while reverse engineering a file.
I have been an Ubuntu user for as long as I remember. I distrohopped a little but keep on coming back to Ubuntu. But recently, I have started using openSUSE to try something non-Debian.
As I keep exploring openSUSE, I keep on stumbling upon things that are slightly different in SUSE-worse and I plan to cover them in tutorials on It’s FOSS.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install XWiki on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, XWiki is a free and open-source, Java-based advanced wiki software platform. It runs on servlet containers like JBoss, Tomcat, Jetty, etc. It also uses a database such as MySQL or PostgreSQL to store its information.
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 through the step-by-step installation of the XWiki on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
Developed by Apache software foundation, CouchDB is a database management system that stores data in JSON documents. We can access our data using the HTTP protocol. Similarly, we can manipulate the data with JavaScript.
Being a popular server-side scripting language, PHP is used in the creation of dynamic websites, content management systems, and many famous frameworks such as Laravel, WordPress, etc which are developed in PHP. As of preparing this post, the latest stable release of PHP is 8.2.
Developed by Valve Corporation, steam is a multi-platform application for playing games. There are 30,000+ games available on Steam. Using Steam, you can meet and interact with new people.
It can be installed on Linux Mint 20 from the Software Manager utility, from the terminal using the apt command, and from the steam official website.
Shell Scripting executes commands to perform some useful functions and is designed to run in the shell. Shell scripts are quite handy to perform operations like file manipulation, automating tasks to avoid time consumption; you can even create your commands.
Shell is an interface between the user and operating system that lets users interact with the operating system and perform various tasks using commands. Shell takes input from the user through the terminal, interacts with the kernel, processes it, and gives the output.
User management is much needed and must-know technique for a Linux server administrator. A Linux administrator often needs to create and grant different privileges and permissions to different users. This post will perform a couple of tasks like creating and deleting the user on the CentOS 8 Operating system.
As you know, the creation and deletion of a user is an administrative type of task, and for performing such tasks, you must log in as a root user or execute all the commands with the sudo privileges. Let’s start and see how to add or create a user in the CentOS 8 system.
Shopt is a built-in command in Unix-like operating systems, such as macOS and Linux distributions. The “shopt” command provides control over many settings that are used to tweak the operations in a Bash shell.
This article shows you how to work with the “shopt” command in Linux. Since this command is built-in, it is not required to install this command to use it. The number of options available for the “shopt” command varies from version to version; older versions will have fewer commands compared to newer versions.
Some options in Bash are enabled or disabled by default, but these options can temporarily be tweaked, once you restart the shell, these options will be reverted. However, it is also possible to permanently change these options if you are interested in keeping a tweaked version of the shell.
Today I am going to show you how to install MongoDB, create a database admin account and enforce basic security.
Why MongoDB when Slackware already has MariaDB? Well, the two are not comparable. MariaDB is a SQL database server, whereas MongoDB is a “NoSQL” database server, aka “Not only SQL“, and its queries – just like its object storage format – are in JSON. The two types of databases have entirely different usage targets.
MongoDB is a ‘general-purpose, document-based database server‘. It has use-cases where it is more powerful than the traditional row/column model of a relational database management system. NoSQL databases, in particular MongoDB, are preferred over RDBMS in Cloud services, Big Data environments and for high-volume web based data processing services. These are typically environments where flexibility is required to handle big amounts of unstructured data and constantly varying schemas. A distributed cluster of MongoDB servers excels at “map-reduce“, the framework invented by Google for condensing large volumes of data into useful aggregated results – the very paradigm that catapulted Google Search into the number one position of search engines shortly after the turn of the millennium.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Telegram on Linux Mint 20.1.
Today we are looking at how to install Badlion on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
Please take note that you need the full account of Minecraft to use the application.
These days high availability and database clustering are very important for highly loaded production applications. If your server is down for a fraction of time, you are losing customers and money. Therefore making a database environment highly available has typically one of the highest priorities. Set up a highly available cluster is not easier for any developers and system administrators.
GIMP is a free and reasonably good alternative to Photoshop. The app’s UI isn’t the best or the most modern but it has all the tools that you’d find in Photoshop.
GIMP has the same tools as Photoshop but many of its tools work differently and the workflow is different. Despite having the same tools, there is a noticeable difference between the two apps.
Similar to many tools utilized by system administrators, the Linux screen command is another great tool that helps with productivity. screen can be seen as an alternative to Tmux, but it has many other useful options outside of just saving screen space. screen allows you to create multiple sessions of terminals/interactive shells. In this tutorial I will give you a quick rundown of screen and present several use cases of the command.
Certain versions of Microsoft Excel for Mac counted days from 1 January 1904, while other Excel versions numbered their days from 1 January 1900. Microsoft calls these "the 1904 date system" and "the 1900 date system", and says there are problems you may encounter when you use workbooks that use different date systems.
I wrote about one of those problems in a 2017 post for The Linux Rain blog. If you compile a spreadsheet using a mix of "1900" and "1904" dates, you might have the same record represented twice, with dates exactly 4 years and 1 day apart (1462 days). These pseudo-duplicates are "Excel date twins".
The first twins I found (by accident) were in the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) and had been imported from the Tasmanian Natural Values Atlas (TNVA). From the ALA they went to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Both records say that I observed the peripatus species Ooperipatellus cryptus at a certain spot in Tasmania. One record says I did it on 3 February 1976, the other on 2 February 1972. The second date is an Excel date twin and impossible: I first came to Australia in January 1973.
At the beginning of March I updated the world set in Gentoo Testing (~amd64) running the KDE suite (Plasma, Frameworks and Applications) on my secondary laptop, an eleven-year-old Compal NBLB2. It has a first-generation Core i7 CPU and the maximum amount of RAM that can be installed in that model (8 GB).
Why is that phone so special? My wife asked me. I was exited like a child with my shiny new toy: the PinePhone KDE Community Edition.
So how do you explain the history of failing efforts to get ‘real’ Linux on a smartphone in 5 minutes? How do you explain the difficulties of developing an operating system for the always changing ARM ecosystem?
I tried: It’s not normal that you can install an Operating System on a phone. Normally you have 2 choices: you buy an Android phone or you buy an Apple iOS phone. In both cases, the phone hardware (read: boot loader) is locked down. So you can’t change the Operating System. At least not easily (because you can root some Android phones).
When I talk about the Fedora Project, I’m talking about you: the community. The Linux distribution we make is great, but the community is the key. When people say “Fedora” without a qualifier, I’d like them to think “Fedora Project”, not the bits we produce. What’s more, we make more than just one thing — EPEL, for example, plus artwork, documentation, websites, and tools which aren’t tightly tied to the OS itself.
Over the years, we haven’t done a great job of drawing this distinction. Now, let’s be more intentional with our language.
I recently asked the Fedora Magazine editors to start using “Fedora Linux” in places where we mean the operating system. For example: “Using mycoolpackage on Fedora Linux” instead of “Using mycoolpackage on Fedora”. The Fedora Program Manager has updated the schedules and the Change proposal template to use “Fedora Linux” where appropriate. And for Fedora Linux 35, I submitted a Change proposal to set the NAME to “Fedora Linux” in /etc/os-release.
In today’s world of serverless functions and microservices, events are everywhere. The problem is that they are described differently depending on the producer technology you use.
Without a common standard, the burden is on developers to constantly relearn how to consume events. Not having a standard also makes it more difficult for authors of libraries and tooling to deliver event data across environments like SDKs. Recently, a new project was created to help with this effort.
CloudEvents is a specification for describing event data in common formats to provide interoperability across services, platforms, and systems. In fact, Red Hat OpenShift Serverless Functions uses CloudEvents. For more information about this new developer feature, see Create your first serverless function with Red Hat OpenShift Serverless Functions.
In a previous article, I showed how easy it was to deploy a Node.js application during development to Red Hat OpenShift using the Nodeshift command-line interface (CLI). In this article, we will take a look at using Nodeshift to deploy Node.js applications to vanilla Kubernetes—specifically, with Minikube.
With Red Hat OpenShift 4, Red Hat completely re-architected how developers install, upgrade, and manage OpenShift to develop applications on Kubernetes. Under the hood, the installation process uses the OpenShift installer to automate container host provisioning using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) CoreOS. It is then easy to initialize the cluster and set up the cloud domain name system (DNS), load balancer, storage, and so on.
Initially, the fully automated OpenShift installation option (called installer-provisioned infrastructure) was available only for public and private clouds. In OpenShift 4.5, the installer was updated to support installer-provisioned infrastructure on VMware vSphere.
This article is for enterprise IT users and developers who run their workloads on vSphere. I will show you how to bring up your OpenShift clusters in 30 minutes without the pain of needing to do manual tasks each time.
Initially unveiled last month, the new Ubuntu Installer for the Ubuntu Desktop flavor will have a more modern design that leverages Google’s Flutter UI SDK, which Canonical announced last week that will be their default choice for building future Ubuntu apps.
At that point in time, only a screenshot was shown of the new Ubuntu Installer, teasing us with a whole new look of the “Try or Install” page, which also featured a “Repair Installation” option that isn’t available in the current Ubiquity installer.
In Ubuntu, most programs and operating systems can be installed through the ISO file. The ISO file format is a live identical image of the specific operating environment that contains all required installation files. Another name used for ISO files is a disc image. So, an ISO file is a perfect duplicate of the content of an optical disc, such as DVD and CD images. An ISO file is a package that consists of installation directories in an ISO format. Users can create a backup of their current installation in an ISO file format. The ISO file can also be used as an external drive, or you can make a bootable USB. if you have an ISO file, then you can create the installation disc by burning the image to a CD or USB.
This article shows you how to create an ISO file from a currently installed Ubuntu 20.04 system. You can create an ISO file from the current installation of Ubuntu 20.04 using any of the following methods.
An essential part of using any operating system is to check for security updates from time to time. It can be difficult to keep track of security updates all the time. One of the easiest ways to keep your Ubuntu system secure is by upgrading your software packages. New versions add the latest features available, and system security is increased by updating programs frequently.
This guide shows you how to install security updates in Ubuntu 20.04, which will be performed by upgrading security packages.
C is an excellent procedural programming language for beginners who want to learn how to program. Many applications, including databases and operating systems, use this general-purpose programming language for development.
The C language is popular among new learners because it is not only easy to use but also helps programmers to better understand the internal architecture of the computer. C is the first step into the programming world, and after learning the C programming language, it will not be as difficult to learn other programming languages. Moreover, the C language is portable, as programs written in this language can be transferred to various platforms without requiring any changes to the code.
This article shows you how to use the C programming language in Ubuntu 20.04 (LTS) and 20.10.
The build-essentials packages are meta-packages that are necessary for compiling software. They include the GNU debugger, g++/GNU compiler collection, and some more tools and libraries that are required to compile a program. For example, if you need to work on a C/C++ compiler, you need to install essential meta-packages on your system before starting the C compiler installation. When installing the build-essential packages, some other packages such as G++, dpkg-dev, GCC and make, etc. also install on your system. Above, we have described what the build-essential packages are. In the rest of the article, we will explain how to install and use build-essentials on Ubuntu systems. All terminal commands we have executed on Ubuntu 20.04 system in this article. Let’s dive into the depths!
My employer, Canonical - recently announced we’re working with the Flutter developers to bring their platform to the Linux desktop. My interest was piqued.
Personally I like the concept of writing applications which can run on many platforms. I sometimes dabble with game development engines like Construct3, GDevelop, Unity & Godot which all have multiple export options for different platforms. Having similarly powerful, cross-platform and open source tools for building mobile and desktop (non-game) applications is welcome in my book.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 673 for the week of February 28 – March 6, 2021. The full version of this issue is available here.
There are plenty of Amlogic TV boxes around, but unless you buy from the big players, most devices won’t support Netflix FullHD/4K because certification is hard to get for smaller companies.
The Hailstorm device scaling program launched in 2018 aimed to make the process easier on Amlogic and Hisilicon processors, and HiMedia S1 TV dongle was one of the first to get approved. But now MECOOL KM2 joins the rank of Netflix 4K certified devices. The TV box is powered by an Amlogic S905X2-B processor running Android TV 10, also known as Android TV on Android 10.
When you have started playing with Arduino boards, the standard programming language is provided by Arduino. This language is extremely useful for getting started and can even be used for real use. People who have used it for a while, though, notice a few limitations. You might also be used to programming in Python already. For this reason, developers have invented Micropython.
With Micropython, you have all the basics of Python, with limitations due to the hardware you are finally running it on. This article will not discuss these limitations. Hopefully, you have a clear picture of what a microcontroller can do. Most likely, you will find that it can do much more than you imagined before you started.
With NXP i.MX 8M Plus AI processor nearing mass production, we’ve seen many companies introduce i.MX 8M Plus systems-on-module at Embedded World 2021. But as one would come to expect, there should also be single board computers based on the new processor, and Advantech has unveiled the RSB-3720 2.5-inch SBC (aka Pico-ITX SBC) compatible with the company’s UIO40-Express expansion boards.
Continuing the intro, now we will try LibreOffice Online with team collaboration. This allows you and friends (a team) altogether to edit a document simultaneously via the internet. It supports computer, laptop, as well as Android device users. How to do that? This simple tutorial explains it step by step for you.
[...]
Once a friend clicked the link, he/she will open your document on the web browser, asked for a name, asked for the password if any, and finally can edit the document together with you at the same time. The name asked will be used as identifier when a team working together.
The GPL is so embedded into WordPress that it is not just the license the platform is under but a part of the community’s culture. Friends have been gained and lost over discussions of it. Bridges burned. Battles waged. People cast out to the dark corners of the web that “we don’t talk about.” There was even a time when one could expect a fortnightly GPL dust-up in which the inner WordPress world argued the same points over and over, ad nauseam.
It might be hard to imagine a world where — outside of third-party libraries — direct contributions to the software are under anything other than the GPL. However, the wheels are now in motion. The Gutenberg project, which is the foundation of WordPress going forward, may soon be under both the GNU General Public License (GPL) v2 and the Mozilla Public License (MPL) v2.0.
From a natural interest in computers and fixing things as a young woman, Olga Gleckler from St Petersburg, Russia, found WordPress took her on a journey to becoming a successful female tech entrepreneur. On International Women’s Day, we share her story.
The Computed property is usually used to compute data from some other data. It is known for its reactivity because whenever a variable involved in some computed property gets changed, the whole property gets recomputed.This post will learn to pass the parameter to computed property and see how to use Vue computed with parameter. Before getting started with passing parameters to the computed property, let’s first understand the computed properties by going through the example.
Vue.js is a very popular JavaScript library that is known for its reactivity, flexibility, and intuitive API. However, reactivity and flexibility come with some drawbacks, leading to the developer’s performance or a headache. The computed property is a very famous and most known feature of Vue.js, which is used to update some variable or perform some calculation depending upon some other variable’s updation.
This post will try to troubleshoot the problems that occurred when the computed property does not work or update what we want. Let’s have a look at the scenarios, what might go wrong, and Vue Computed Property not updating.
Here document (Heredoc) is an input or file stream literal that is treated as a special block of code. This block of code will be passed to a command for processing. Heredoc originates in UNIX shells and can be found in popular Linux shells like sh, tcsh, ksh, bash, zsh, csh. Notably, other programming languages like Perl, Ruby, PHP also support heredoc.
Structure of Herdoc
Heredoc uses 2 angle brackets (<<) followed by a delimiter token. The same delimiter token will be used to terminate the block of code. Whatever comes within the delimiter is considered to be a block of code.
Look at the example below. I am redirecting the block of code to the cat command. Here the delimiter is set to “BLOCK” and terminated by the same “BLOCK“.
If it wasn't odd enough during these pandemic times seeing Nintendo 64 support upstreamed into the Linux 5.12 kernel a few weeks back, the latest vintage hardware seeing open-source support still going on is the Motorola 68000 series 32-bit processors. LLVM/Clang today merged the "m68k" target for these three decade old processors.
The Motorola 68000 (m68k) 32-bit processors were found in early Apple Macintosh computers, the Amiga, Sega Genesis, and other vintage devices. Motorola hasn't even been developing the 68000 series since the mid 90's but it has remained popular in some retro computing circles and still sees Linux/open-source work.
If you have ever used CSS, then you know how hard it is to position elements. But by the end of this tutorial you'll know much more about CSS positioning and Flexbox, and you'll be able to position elements in your dream project like a boss.
C++ supports Object Oriented Programming, and classes and objects are the heart of this programming paradigm.
You might be wondering – what is a class and why do we need them? In this article I'll go over some basics to help you understand how classes work in C++.
This tutorial will teach you a few fundamental concepts and terms related to the Jetpack Compose UI Library on Android.
While this is a beginner's guide to Compose, it will not be a beginner's guide to Android – so you should have built at least an application or two (though not in Compose, necessarily).
Before we begin, I was initially planning to write a follow up article directed towards more senior developers until I came across Leland Richardson’s two part article series. Leland is not only a Software Engineer working on the Jetpack Compose team, but I see that he is a great writer as well.
A distributed version control system is a system that helps you keep track of changes you've made to files in your project.
This change history lives on your local machine and lets you revert to a previous version of your project with ease in case something goes wrong.
Git makes collaboration easy. Everyone on the team can keep a full backup of the repositories they're working on on their local machine. Then, thanks to an external server like BitBucket, GitHub or GitLab, they can safely store the repository in a single place.
This way, different members of the team can copy it locally and everyone has a clear overview of all changes made by the whole team.
Git has many different commands you can use. And I've found that these fifty are the ones I use the most often (and are therefore the most helpful to remember).
It is a very common requirement for the web application to display data on the web page based on the user’s interest. The searching feature of the application makes it more user-friendly. Django framework has a built-in filter() method to filter data from the database tables. A table can contain many records and sometimes determining some specific data are required based on the particular criteria. This task becomes easier by using the filter() method in different ways. How the data from a database table can be filtered using the filter method in four different ways will be discussed in this tutorial.
A template contains HTML data that is generated from a view and displayed in the browser. The static and dynamic HTML pages can be created using the template. Logic and design have been kept separately in the Django application. Python code can’t be used directly in the Django template because the browser can’t interpret the python code. The designer can design the HTML pages only with the necessary format or styling, and the coder adds the static or dynamic data into the template using Django Template Language (DTL).
How the Django template can be created and how the DTL can be used to add static or dynamic content to the template have been shown in this tutorial.
The use of the form is an essential part of any web application. The input from the website users can be taken using the form. It can contain different types of fields, such as text box, combo box, check box, radio button, etc. to take data from the users. Django framework contains a large number of libraries to help the web developer to design an HTML form for taking input from the user, process the input, and respond to the user’s input.
How HTML form can be used to take data from the user, read the input values, and print the values in the browser using Django is shown in this tutorial.
The Pandas package in Python gives you a bunch of cool functions and features that help you manipulate data more efficiently. It also lets you perform numerous data cleaning and data preprocessing steps with very little hassle.
That's great isn't it? Here's a list of some of the most frequently used Pandas functions and tricks to help you enjoy your data science journey.
tldr: Rust/coreutils ( https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/ ) is now available in Debian, good enough to boot a Debian with GNOME, install the top 1000 packages, build Firefox, the Linux Kernel and LLVM/Clang. Even if I wrote more than 100 patches to achieve that, it will probably be a bumpy ride for many other use cases. It is also a terrific project to learn Rust. See the list of good first bugs.
Even if I see Rust code every day at Mozilla, I was looking for an actual personal project (i.e. this isn't a Mozilla project) to learn Rust during the various COVID lockdowns.
I started contributing to the alternative Coreutils developed in Rust. The project aims at proposing a drop-in replacement of the C-based GNU Coreutils, and I wanted to evaluate if this could be used to run a regular Debian. Similar to what I have done with clang.debian.net a few years ago (rebuilding the Debian archive using clang instead of gcc).
I expect that most of the readers know what the Coreutils. It is a set of programs performing simple operations (copy/move file, change permissions/ownership, etc). Even if some commands are from the 70th, they are at the base of Linux, Unix and macOS. While different implementations can be found, they are trying to remain compatible in terms of arguments, options, etc. This implementation of Coreutils isn’t different!
I authored the BSidesSF 2021 CTF Challenge “CuteSrv”, which is a service to display cute pictures.
We recently launched the LFS260 – Kubernetes Security Essentials eLearning course in partnership with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the home of Kubernetes. This course provides the skills and knowledge on a broad range of best practices for securing container-based applications and Kubernetes platforms during build, deployment and runtime. It also gets you ready to sit for the Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) exam.
This weekend, several days after the Patch Tuesday when Microsoft released fixes for the ProxyLogon vulnerability, Netcraft found more than 99,000 unpatched Outlook Web Access servers accessible on the internet — of which several thousand have clear evidence of one of more web shells installed.
Outlook Web Access (OWA) provides remote access to on-premises Microsoft Exchange mailboxes. While a treasure trove of corporate email is a tempting enough target itself, it can also act as jumping-off point for deeper network access. Vulnerable versions allow unfettered remote access to the mail server. Originally attributed to the Hafnium group, the variety of different web shells and file naming conventions found by Netcraft suggest that the shells belong to multiple groups who have been spurred into action since Microsoft’s announcement by the scale of the opportunity.
Sometimes when a complex story takes us by surprise or knocks us back on our heels, it pays to revisit the events in a somewhat linear fashion. Here’s a brief timeline of what we know leading up to last week’s mass-hack, when hundreds of thousands of Microsoft Exchange Server systems got compromised and seeded with a powerful backdoor Trojan horse program.
When did Microsoft find out about attacks on previously unknown vulnerabilities in Exchange?
Pressed for a date when it first became aware of the problem, Microsoft told KrebsOnSecurity it was initially notified “in early January.” So far the earliest known report came on Jan. 5, from a principal security researcher for security testing firm DEVCORE who goes by the handle “Orange Tsai.” DEVCORE is credited with reporting two of the four Exchange flaws that Microsoft patched on Mar. 2.
I thought I’d do a walk through of how I expected players to solve the challenge, so I’ll write this as if I’m playing the challenge.
Visiting the web service, we find an upload page for text and not much else. When we perform an upload, we see that we’re redirected to a page to view the encrypted upload...
Lots of people keep referring to the awesome summary put together by a friendly pseudonymous “Tim” which says that “53 out of 95” (55.7%) security flaws in curl could’ve been prevented if curl had been written in Rust. This is usually in regards to discussions around how insecure C is and what to do about it. I’ve blogged about this topic before, but things change, the world changes and my own view on these matters keep getting refined.
I did my own count: how many of the current 98 published security problems in curl are related to it being written in C?
Possibly due to the slightly different question, possibly because I’ve categorized one or two vulnerabilities differently, possibly because I’m biased as heck, but my count end up at:
51 out of 98 security vulnerabilities are due to C mistakes
That’s still 52%. (you can inspect my analysis and submit issues/pull-requests against the vuln.pm file) and yes, 51 flaws that could’ve been avoided if curl had been written in a memory safe language. This contradicts what I’ve said in the past, but I will also show you below that the numbers have changed and I still was right back then!
An injunction is an equitable remedy with a long history in the courts of equity. The injunctive power historically and necessarily includes the attendant power for a court also to order restitutionary disgorgement of a defendant’s ill-gotten gains, among other forms of equitable monetary relief. That has been a long-standing and steadfast rule in equity jurisprudence for nearly two hundred years. It has also been a consistent holding in this Court’s cases. And this Court has required statutes to be clear and unambiguous in disclaiming traditional equity powers. The FTC Act does not do so.
Amici are 43 professors and scholars of remedies, restitution, antitrust, and intellectual property law throughout the United States. Amici include editors of major casebooks and books on Remedies, Antitrust, and Intellectual Property, and one of the amici is the new editor of the leading treatise on Remedies. Many of the amici also have served as Advisers and Members of the Consultative Group to the Restatement (Third) of Restitution and Unjust Enrichment (Am. Law Inst. 2011). Two are the Reporters, and several serve as Advisers, for the Restatement (Third) of Torts: Remedies (in progress). One is President Emeritus of the American Law Institute. All amici have taught at major law schools and regularly publish articles in the areas of remedies, restitution, antitrust, and intellectual property. Amici seek to clarify the history and source of power for equitable remedies incident to injunctions such as disgorgement of a wrongdoer’s profits.
For nearly 30 years, pharmaceutical patent policy in Canada has been designed to strike a balance between rewarding pharmaceutical innovation and enabling affordable drug access. This balance has evolved over time. From entry into the original North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993 until entry into the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) in 2014, the Canadian government has successfully resisted trade obligations and pressures that, had it acceded, would have forced this delicate balance to tip in favour of intellectual property (IP) protection for pharmaceuticals.
With CETA, the Canadian government agreed to measures to enhance pharmaceutical IP protection, including the extension of patent terms to reflect delays in regulatory approval. This form of protection is called supplementary protection certificates (SPCs) in the European Union. In agreeing to implement SPC-like measures, Canadian trade negotiators introduced safeguards to limit extended patent terms to two years and to exempt pharmaceutical manufacturing that is for the purposes of export. An apparent premise of Canada’s agreement to introduce SPC-like measures was that the protection would be similar to (and not broader than) SPC protection but balanced with the negotiated safeguards.
Last week, the Federal Circuit affirmed a jury verdict against Baxalta Inc., Baxalta US Inc., and Nektar Therapeutics for infringing Bayer Healthcare's patent to human blood clotting factor conjugates in Bayer Healthcare LLC v. Baxalta Inc.
Bayer Healthcare sued Defendants on U.S. Patent No. 9,364,520, alleging willful infringement by Baxalta's product, Adynovate€®. This product is a recombinant human Factor VIII (the blood clotting factor responsible for causing Hemophilia A) having the protein structural domains A1-A2-B-A3-C1-C2, wherein the B portion was specifically modified by addition of polyethylene glycol (PEG). PEGylation is important because Factor VIII has an 11-hour half-life which requires frequent injections and leads to reduced patient compliance. The prior art had disclosed "random" modification of Factor VIII with PEG, which had "several drawbacks" due to the multiplicity of PEGylations sites ("158 lysines, the two N-termini, and multiple histidines, serines, threonines, and tyrosines") in the Factor VIII protein, which led to heterogeneity in the species produced, including ones having deleterious effects on Factor VIII activity and ones having a multiplicity of PEG residues conjugated to the protein.
The Disney Patent, filed on February 9, 2021, is the newest design idea by The Walt Disney Company and requests to protect the idea of turning any room into a show. But if one reads the filed papers, they will find that this proposed technology mentions over and over hotel room use and how to engage a Resort Guest.
Will Disney utilize this tech in upcoming hotels or perhaps refit existing hotel rooms for multimedia shows?
According to the report the body has invalidated 2,000 patents since its inception in 2012, including nearly 200 just from Apple. Many of these patents, the report notes, are held by patent trolls, whose sole business models involve acquiring patents and then suing companies allegedly in breach of using them without licensing. The board was set up in 2011 by Congress "as a faster and cheaper alternative to litigation".
[...]
The Supreme court may reportedly go as far as to stop the board from reviewing any more patents, stripping 250 judges of their jobs in the process and possibly meaning cases would have to be reconsidered.
According to LG, the Mannheim Regional Court last week ruled in favour of the South Korean company, having found that TCL infringed upon LG's standard essential patent, EP 2 627 146 B1, in Germany. The patent is related to LTE technology.
LG said it would take immediate steps to halt TCL from using patented technology in its smartphones without a licence.
The Chinese company can appeal the decision however, and its request to the German Federal Patent Court to nullify the patent in question is still pending.
In November 2019, LG filed infringement lawsuits for three patents against TCL. There are two lawsuits still ongoing for the other patents. The hearing for one started last week and another will start in May.
Morocco filed the third greatest number of patents in Africa in 2020, trailing only South Africa and Egypt in a year notable for its economic upheaval and innovation amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Between January and December of last year, Moroccan companies filed 42 patents across multiple industries, according to recent figures from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The figure rose nearly 30% from the 33 patents filed by Morocco in 2019.
China led the world in patent filings in 2020, registering 68,720 parents in 2020 alone. The United States followed at 59,230, while Japan rounded out the top three at 50,520 patent requests.
On March 5, 2021, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a final written decision in Unified Patents, LLC v. SynKloud Technologies, LLC holding all claims of U.S. Patent 9,098,526 unpatentable. SynKloud Technologies is a subsidiary of Ideahub, Inc. The ‘526 patent, directed to providing remote storage for wireless devices, has been asserted against Hewlett-Packard and Blu Products.
In the complaint, Vivint asserts that ADT infringes six of Vivint’s U.S. patents related to security and smart home technology. As one of the premier providers of smart home technology, Vivint is recognized throughout the industry for its products, innovation and customer satisfaction. Vivint has more than 300 issued patents related to its proprietary technology.
