Security and DRM Leftovers

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This Man Thought Opening A TXT File Is Fine, He Thought Wrong. MacOS CVE-2019-8761
Sorry for the clickbaity title, but CVE-2019-8761 really is an interesting macOS bug that lets attackers execute HTML within a TXT file, leak files, and do all sorts of other funky things.
This research originated when I realized the default text reader on OSX, TextEdit is used to open files with TXT extension by default. On the interface of TextEdit, it looked like you can do basic customization to your text (you can turn text bold, italic, change color etc...), so I was wondering how a TXT file was storing and parsing this information. It seems it uses RTF format instead of TXT if we add customizations to the text.
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AMD Admits Their Zen 3 CPUs Are Vulnerable To Spectre-STL Attacks
The American chip-designer AMD has published a long report where they admit that the Predictive Store Forwarding (PSF) technology in their Zen 3 processors make them vulnerable to Spectre-STL attacks. The Linux kernel does not, as of today's git tree, provide any protection against those kinds of attacks.
[...]
AMD has proposed a series of Linux kernel patches that would allow Linux users to enable security mitigations against Spectre-STL. Their proposal is to introduce two new kernel parameters: psfd and nopsfd. These new settings would give users the ability to change hardware control bit (MSR 48h bit 7) that allow the Predictive Store Forwarding Disable (PSFD) feature in Zen 3 processors to be enabled (default) or disabled. Adding psfd=on would, very oddly, set the PSFD bit to one and disable this feature while nopsfd would set the PSFD bit to zero and enable the feature. This seems a bit backwards; it would not be unreasonable to assume that nopsfd would result in .. no .. psfd. That is, apparently, not how AMD would like those parameters to work.
It does not currently matter what parameters AMD may get into the Linux kernel in the future because a close-up inspection of grep -R psfd . in the current linus.git kernel tree reveal no mention of, or even hint of, any psfd kernel parameter today. There is no such parameter in any of the current kernels code, and there is no mention of it in Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt.
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Sony Ends Support For Playstation Store For PSP, PS3, and Vita
A few days ago, we discussed the problem of video game preservation as a matter of art when developers, publishers, or platforms shut down certain services. The point of the post was fairly wide-reaching, with the focus being on the idea that game developers in the PC space should embrace the habit of releasing their source codes for games and let the gamer ecosystem take over. While that's an idea I find extremely interesting, it doesn't really apply to the console gaming space. And it was rumors of the shutdown of certain Sony PlayStation stores that kickstarted the whole conversation.
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digiKam 7.7.0 is released
After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release.
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Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand
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Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech
The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world.
Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility.
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today's howtos
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