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Security Leftovers

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Security
  • Human Rights Groups Warn UN Cybercrime Treaty Must Avoid 'Chilling Effect'

    Ahead of a United Nations session next week, nearly 130 academics and advocacy groups asserted that "it is vitally important to apply a human rights-based approach" to drafting a potential cybercrime treaty.

    "A convention without such safeguards or that dilutes states' human rights obligations would place individuals at risk and make our digital presence even more insecure."

  • Nearly 130 Public Interest Organizations and Experts Urge the United Nations to Include Human Rights Safeguards in Proposed UN Cybercrime Treaty

    The proposed treaty will likely deal with cybercrime, international cooperation, and access to potential digital evidence by law enforcement authorities, as well as human rights and procedural safeguards. UN member states have already written opinions discussing the scope of the treaty, and their proposals vary widely. In a letter to the committee chair, EFF and Human Rights Watch along with partners across the world asked that members include human rights considerations at every step in the drafting process. We also recommended  that cross-border investigative powers include strong human rights safeguards, and that global civil society be provided opportunities to participate robustly in the development and drafting of any potential convention.

    Failing to prioritize human rights and procedural safeguards in criminal investigations can have dire consequences.  As many countries have already abused their existing cybercrime laws to undermine human rights and freedoms and punish peaceful dissent, we have grave concerns that this Convention might become a powerful weapon for oppression. We also worry that cross-border investigative powers without strong human rights safeguards will sweep away progress on protecting people’s privacy rights, creating a race to the bottom among jurisdictions with the weakest human rights protections.

    We hope the Member States participating in the development and drafting of the treaty will recognize the urgency of the risks we mention, commit to include civil society in their upcoming discussions, and take our recommendations to heart.

  • EFF Asks Appeals Court to Rule DMCA Anti-Circumvention Provisions Violate First Amendment
  • EFF Threat Lab’s “apkeep” APK Downloader, Now More Capable and Available in More Places

    In addition to the ability to download Android packages from the Google Play Store and APKPure, we’ve added support for downloading from the free and open source app repository F-Droid. Packages downloaded from F-Droid are checked against the repository maintainers’ signing key, just like in the F-Droid app itself. The package index is also cached, which makes it easy to run multiple subsequent requests for downloads.

    You can now download specific versions of apps from either the apk-pure app store, which mirrors the Google Play Store, or from f-droid. To try it, issue the following command to see which versions are available:

    Once you’ve picked a desired version, download it with this command:

  • Microsoft touts first PCs to ship natively with secure Pluton chip [Ed: This is not about security at all]

    Asked why the chip is initially disabled, the spokesperson said enterprise customers "have told us they extensively test and evaluate any new security-related software or feature that will be introduced into their network and can choose to enable Pluton on their devices as they see fit. As Pluton rolls out into market and we have time to assess the customer demand for factory enablement, we will review enabling [it]."

    The Pluton processor is aimed at delivering greater protection than the existing Trusted Platform Module (TPM) as it’s a dedicated security chip that handles security features such as BitLocker, Windows Hello, and System Guard.

  • AWS is Not a Dumb Pipe

    The telcos didn't go down without a fight. They successfully got so many regulations passed against VoIP that it served a serious barrier to entry for more than a decade. The hyperscalers have an even better card to play than regulation: open source. By bringing the cost of software down to zero, they can commoditize their complement. If AWS open sourced all higher-level services, they would still be a "dumb pipe", but with fewer competitors.

  • “Biggest cyber breach in history” as techs scramble to be heard above Omicron din [Ed: A bit of a distraction from the greater perils]

    The devil child of the moment, if you want to call it that, is the very technically named Log4j computer vulnerability, which has left governments and corporations world wide open to attack and scrambling to patch, or repair, their systems. It is being called the biggest cyber security breach in history.

    With the news bandwidth consumed by Omicron and the public immured to cyber scare stories, the scale of the recent Log4j story and the implications it has for the secure operation of government services and infrastructure is only just becoming more broadly understood.

  • Google calls for new government action to protect open-source software projects [Ed: Meeting stacked by the worst culprits, as usual]

    Following a summit on open-source security hosted at the White House Thursday, Google has called for increasing government involvement in identifying and securing critical open-source software projects.

    In a blog post published shortly after the summit, Kent Walker, president for global affairs and chief legal officer at Google and Alphabet, said that collaboration between governmen

  • White House Convenes Open-Source Security Summit Amid Log4j Risks

    The virtual summit, led by deputy national security adviser Anne Neuberger, included executives from Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc., Meta Platforms Inc. and Microsoft Corp. , among others, along with specialist open-source software organizations such as GitHub Inc., the Apache Software Foundation and the Linux Open Source Foundation.

    The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the Commerce Department, the Defense Department and the Energy Department were among the federal agencies present.

More in Tux Machines

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. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

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. Read more

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.