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01/18/2019 LinuxSecurity.com

LinuxSecurity.com: **PHP version 7.2.14** (10 Jan 2019) **Core:** * Fixed bug php#77369 (memcpy with negative length via crafted DNS response). (Stas) * Fixed bug php#71041 (zend_signal_startup() needs ZEND_API). (Valentin V. Bartenev) * Fixed bug php#76046 (PHP generates "FE_FREE" opcode on the wrong line). (Nikita) **Date:** * Fixed bug php#77097 (DateTime::diff gives wrong diff when the

01/18/2019 LinuxSecurity.com

Fedora 29: radare2 Security Update

LinuxSecurity.com: Security fix for CVE-2018-20455 CVE-2018-20456 CVE-2018-20457 CVE-2018-20458 CVE-2018-20459 CVE-2018-20460 CVE-2018-20461 through rebase to 3.2.0

01/18/2019 LinuxSecurity.com

Fedora 29: gitolite3 Security Update

LinuxSecurity.com: 3.6.11: https://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite/commit/b49133dc5f49b12807165ed2503 07213c1ac0a53

01/18/2019 LinuxSecurity.com

Fedora 28: php Security Update

01/18/2019 LinuxSecurity.com

Fedora 28: radare2 Security Update

LinuxSecurity.com: Security fix for CVE-2018-20455 CVE-2018-20456 CVE-2018-20457 CVE-2018-20458 CVE-2018-20459 CVE-2018-20460 CVE-2018-20461 through rebase to 3.2.0

01/18/2019 LinuxSecurity.com

Fedora 28: gitolite3 Security Update

LinuxSecurity.com: 3.6.11: https://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite/commit/b49133dc5f49b12807165ed2503 07213c1ac0a53

01/18/2019 LinuxSecurity.com

Mageia 2019-0040: python-django16 security update

LinuxSecurity.com: It was discovered that Django incorrectly handled the default 404 page. A remote attacker could use this issue to spoof content using a malicious URL (CVE-2019-3498). References:

01/18/2019 LinuxSecurity.com

Mageia 2019-0042: php security update

LinuxSecurity.com: Several buffer overflows in the components GD, MBString, Phar and XMLRPC were discovered and fixed. References: - https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24165

01/18/2019 LinuxSecurity.com

Mageia 2019-0041: rdesktop security update

LinuxSecurity.com: rdesktop has been updated to fix multiple CVE's. Fix memory corruption in process_bitmap_data - CVE-2018-8794 Fix remote code execution in process_bitmap_data - CVE-2018-8795 Fix remote code execution in process_plane - CVE-2018-8797 Fix Denial of Service in mcs_recv_connect_response - CVE-2018-20175

01/18/2019 LinuxSecurity.com

openSUSE: 2019:0066-1: important: podofo

LinuxSecurity.com: An update that fixes 20 vulnerabilities is now available.

01/18/2019 LinuxSecurity.com

SUSE: 2019:13931-1 important: openssh

LinuxSecurity.com: An update that fixes four vulnerabilities is now available.

01/18/2019 LinuxSecurity.com

SUSE: 2019:0130-1 moderate: wireshark

LinuxSecurity.com: An update that fixes four vulnerabilities is now available.

01/18/2019 Linux Journal

Episode 13: Surveillance Marketing

Reality 2.0 - Episode 13: Surveillance Marketing

Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Dr. Augustine Fou about surveillance marketing, ad tech, and privacy.

Download ogg format

Links mentioned:

If it weren’t for retargeting, we might not have ad blocking

01/18/2019 Linux Journal

openSUSE Announces Three New Tumbleweed Snapshots for 2019, Malware in Google Play Using Motion Sensors to Avoid Detection, Leaked Android Q Features, deepen 5.9 Released and ZFS On Linux 0.8 Coming Soon

News briefs for January 18, 2019.

openSUSE announces three new Tumbleweed snapshots to start of 2019, which include updates for KDE Plasma, Vim, RE2, QEMU, curl and much, much more. The openSUSE blog post notes that, "all snapshots have either logged or are treading as moderately stable with a rating of 83 or above, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer. There are more than 300 packages in staging that will likely be released in several snapshots over the coming weeks."

Malware in Google Play used motion sensors in phones to hide itself, triggering only when the phones moved. According to Ars Technica, the malicious apps avoid detection by monitoring "the motion-sensor input of an infected device before installing a powerful banking trojan to make sure it doesn't load on emulators researchers use to detect attacks. The thinking behind the monitoring is that sensors in real end-user devices will record motion as people use them. By contrast, emulators used by security researchers—and possibly Google employees screening apps submitted to Play—are less likely to use sensors. Two Google Play apps recently caught dropping the Anubis banking malware on infected devices would activate the payload only when motion was detected first. Otherwise, the trojan would remain dormant." Trend Micro found the malware in two apps: BatterySaverMobi and Currency Converter.

XDA Developers got their hands on a Google Pixel 3 XL with a leaked version of Android Q, giving them a first look at what Google has been working on. First is a system-wide Dark Theme. In addition, it has a huge permissions revamp "in the Settings app that allows you to get an overview of permission access by apps and restrict certain permissions like location only while the app is in use". It also includes new Developer Options, accessibility settings and other miscellaneous changes.

deepin 5.9 has been released. This release fixes several bugs and "adds support for touchscreen gestures and onscreen keyboard, optimizes the using frequency algorithm for application sequence in Launcher mini mode, and introduces a new function - Smart Mirror Switch, hoping to bring users more stable and efficient experiences." You can download the ISO from here.

ZFS On Linux 0.8 is coming soon, and it's expected to be a huge release. Phoronix reports that this update will include "native encryption support, device removal, direct I/O, sequential scrub, pool checkpoints, and a lot of other new features for the first time with this Linux port of the Sun/Oracle ZFS file-system."

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01/18/2019 Linux Journal

Some Thoughts on Open Core

by Kyle Rankin

Why open core software is bad for the FOSS movement.

Nothing is inherently anti-business about Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). In fact, a number of different business models are built on top of FOSS. The best models are those that continue to further FOSS by internal code contributions and that advance the principles of Free Software in general. For instance, there's the support model, where a company develops free software but sells expert support for it.

Here, I'd like to talk a bit about one of the more problematic models out there, the open core model, because it's much more prevalent, and it creates some perverse incentives that run counter to Free Software principles.

If you haven't heard about it, the open core business model is one where a company develops free software (often a network service intended to be run on a server) and builds a base set of users and contributors of that free code base. Once there is a critical mass of features, the company then starts developing an "enterprise" version of the product that contains additional features aimed at corporate use. These enterprise features might include things like extra scalability, login features like LDAP/Active Directory support or Single Sign-On (SSO) or third-party integrations, or it might just be an overall improved version of the product with more code optimizations and speed.

Because such a company wants to charge customers to use the enterprise version, it creates a closed fork of the free software code base, or it might provide the additional proprietary features as modules so it has fewer problems with violating its free software license.

The first problem with the open core model is that on its face it doesn't further principles behind Free Software, because core developer time gets focused instead of writing and promoting proprietary software. Instead of promoting the importance of the freedoms that Free Software gives both users and developers, these companies often just use FOSS as a kind of freeware to get an initial base of users and as free crowdsourcing for software developers that develop the base product when the company is small and cash-strapped. As the company get more funding, it's then able to hire the most active community developers, so they then can stop working on the community edition and instead work full-time on the company's proprietary software.

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01/17/2019 Linux Journal

Oracle Releases First Critical Patch Update of 2019, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora to Drop MongoDB, The Linux Foundation Announces Its 2019 Event Lineup, Firefox Closing Its Test Pilot Program and GoDaddy to Support AdoptOpenJDK

News briefs for January 17, 2019.

Oracle released its first Critical Patch Update of the year this week, which addresses 284 vulnerabilities. eWeek reports that "Thirty-three of the vulnerabilities are identified as being critical with a Common Vulnerabilities Scoring System (CVSS) score of 9.0 or higher."

Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora are dropping MongoDB. ZDNet reports that the decision is due to MongoDB's new Server Side Public License (SSPL), which, according to Red Hat's Technical and Community Outreach Program Manager Tom Callaway, is "intentionally crafted to be aggressively discriminatory towards a specific class of users." ZDNet explains that "specific objection is that SSPL requires, if you offer services licensed under it, that you must open-source all programs that you use to make the software available as a service."

The Linux Foundation has announced its event schedule for 2019. New events for this year include include Cephalocon and gRPC Conf. See the full lineup here.

Firefox is closing its Test Pilot program and moving to a new model. From the announcement: "Migrating to a new model doesn't mean we're doing fewer experiments. In fact, we'll be doing even more! The innovation processes that led to products like Firefox Monitor are no longer the responsibility of a handful of individuals but rather the entire organization. Everyone is responsible for maintaining the Culture of Experimentation Firefox has developed through this process. These techniques and tools have become a part of our very DNA and identity. That is something to celebrate. As such, we won't be uninstalling any experiments you're using today, in fact, many of the Test Pilot experiments and features will find their way to Addons.Mozilla.Org, while others like Send and Lockbox will continue to take in more input from you as they evolve into stand alone products."

GoDaddy recently announced support for AdoptOpenJDK, which provides prebuilt open-source OpenJDK binaries. Charles Beadnall, GoDaddy CTO, says "GoDaddy supports an open access Internet because our 18 million customers depend on the open and equal nature of the Internet to compete with enterprises and corporations with more resources. With this sponsorship, we're proud to provide further support for open-source software and our community of entrepreneur customers."

01/17/2019 Linux Journal

Ditching Out-of-Date Documentation Infrastructure

by Zack Brown

Long ago, the Linux kernel started using 00-Index files to list the contents of each documentation directory. This was intended to explain what each of those files documented. Henrik Austad recently pointed out that those files have been out of date for a very long time and were probably not used by anyone anymore. This is nothing new. Henrik said in his post that this had been discussed already for years, "and they have since then grown further out of date, so perhaps it is time to just throw them out."

He counted hundreds of instances where the 00-index file was out of date or not present when it should have been. He posted a patch to rip them all unceremoniously out of the kernel.

Joe Perches was very pleased with this. He pointed out that .rst files (the kernel's native documentation format) had largely taken over the original purpose of those 00-index files. He said the oo-index files were even misleading by now.

Jonathan Corbet was more reserved. He felt Henrik should distribute the patch among a wider audience and see if it got any resistance. He added:

I've not yet decided whether I think this is a good idea or not. We certainly don't need those files for stuff that's in the RST doctree, that's what the index.rst files are for. But I suspect some people might complain about losing them for the rest of the content. I do get patches from people updating them, so some folks do indeed look at them.

Henrik told Jonathan he was happy to update the 00-index files if that would be preferable. But he didn't want to do that if the right answer was just to get rid of them.

Meanwhile, Josh Triplett saw no reason to keep the 00-index files around at all. He remarked, "I was *briefly* tempted, reading through the files, to suggest ensuring that the one-line descriptions from the 00-INDEX files end up in the documents themselves, but the more I think about it, I don't think even that is worth anyone's time to do."

Paul Moore also voiced his support for removing the 00-index files, at least the ones for NetLabel, which was his area of interest.

The discussion ended there. It's nice that even for apparently obvious patches, the developers still take the time to consider various perspectives and try to retain any value from the old thing to the new. It's especially nice to see this sort of attention given to documentation patches, which tend to get left out in the cold when it comes to coding projects.

Note: if you're mentioned above and want to post a response above the comment section, send a message with your response text to ljeditor@linuxjournal.com.

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01/16/2019 Linux Journal

Keep Smart Assistants from Spying on You with Alias, Security Advisory for Old scp Clients, Major Metasploit Framework Release, Mozilla Working on a New Browser for Android and VirtualBox 6.0.2 Is Out

News briefs for January 16, 2019.

A new open-source hardware project called Alias will keep Amazon and Google smart assistants from spying on you. According to the project's GitHub page, "Alias is a teachable 'parasite' that is designed to give users more control over their smart assistants, both when it comes to customisation and privacy. Through a simple app the user can train Alias to react on a custom wake-word/sound, and once trained, Alias can take control over your home assistant by activating it for you."

A security advisory from Harry Sintonen was issued this week concerning the scp clients in OpenSSH, PuTTY and more. LWN quotes the advisory: "Many scp clients fail to verify if the objects returned by the scp server match those it asked for. This issue dates back to 1983 and rcp, on which scp is based. A separate flaw in the client allows the target directory attributes to be changed arbitrarily. Finally, two vulnerabilities in clients may allow server to spoof the client output."

A new major release of the open-source Metasploit Framework is now available. According to the Rapid7 blog post, version 5.0 of the penetration-testing tool is the first milestone update since version 4.0 came out in 2011. Along with a new release cadence, "Metasploit's new database and automation APIs, evasion modules and libraries, expanded language support, improved performance, and ease-of-use lay the groundwork for better teamwork capabilities, tool integration, and exploitation at scale."

Mozilla is working on a new Android browser called Fenix. According to ZDNet, this "new non-Firefox browser for Android is apparently targeted at younger people, with Mozilla developers on GitHub tagging the description, 'Fenix is not your parents' Android browser'." In addition, mockups suggest that Fenix developers are "currently toying with the idea of putting the URL bar and home button down at the bottom of user interface."

VirtualBox 6.0.2 was released yesterday, the first maintenance release of the 6.0 series. This release fixed a conflict between Debian and oracle build desktop files, fixed building drivers on SLES 12.4, fixed building shared folder driver with older kernels and much more. See the changelog for all the details.

01/16/2019 Linux Journal

Bash's Built-in printf Function

by Mitch Frazier

Even if you're already familiar with the printf command, if you got your information via "man printf" you may be missing a couple of useful features that are provided by bash's built-in version of the standard printf(1) command.

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01/15/2019 Linux Journal

Where There's No Distance or Gravity

by Doc Searls

The more digital we become, the less human we remain.

I had been in Los Angeles only a few times in my life before the October day in 1987 when I drove down from our home in the Bay Area with my teenage son to visit family. The air was unusually clear as we started our drive back north, and soon the San Gabriel Mountains—Los Angeles' own Alps (you can ski there!)—loomed over the region like a crenelated battlement, as if protecting its inhabitants from cultures and climates that might invade from the north. So, on impulse, I decided to drive up to Mount Wilson, the only crest in the range with a paved road to the top.

I could see from the maps I had already studied that the drive was an easy one. Our destination also was easily spotted from below: a long, almost flat ridge topped by the white domes of Mount Wilson Observatory (where Hubble observed the universe expanding) and a bristle of towers radiating nearly all the area's FM and TV signals. The site was legendary among broadcast engineering geeks, and I had longed to visit it ever since I was a ham radio operator as a boy in New Jersey.

After checking out the observatory and the towers, my son and I stood on a promontory next to a parking lot and surveyed the vast spread of civilization below. Soon four visiting golfers from New York came over and started asking me questions about what was where.

I answered like a veteran docent, pointing out the Rose Bowl, Palos Verdes Peninsula, Santa Catalina and other Channel Islands, the Hollywood Hills, the San Fernando Valley, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Santa Anita Park and more. When they asked where the Whittier Narrows earthquake had happened a few days before, I pointed at the Puente Hills, off to the southeast, and filled them in on what I knew about the geology there as well.

After a few minutes of this, they asked me how long I had lived there. I said all this stuff was almost as new to me as it was to them. "Then how do you know so much about it?", they asked. I told them I had studied maps of the area and refreshed my knowledge over lunch just before driving up there. They were flabbergasted. "Really?", one guy said. "You study maps?"

Indeed, I did. I had maps of all kinds and sizes at home, and the door pockets of my car bulged with AAA maps of everywhere I might drive in California. I also added local and regional Southern California maps to my mobile inventory before driving down.

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01/15/2019 Linux Journal

Participate in Fedora Test Day Today, Netrunner Announces Netrunner 19.01 Blackbird, Security Patch for GNOME Bluetooth Tools in Ubuntu 18.04, New Giant Board SBC from Groboard and Linspire Posts Development Roadmap for 2019-2020

News briefs for January 15, 2019.

Today is Fedora Test Day for kernel 4.20. To participate, you just need to be able to download the test materials (which include some large files) and read and follow directions. See the wiki page for more information on how to participate.

Netrunner yesterday announced the release of Netrunner 19.01 Blackbird. This desktop distro is based on Debian Testing, and updates with this version include KDE Plasma 5.14.3, KDE Frameworks 5.51, KDE Applications 18.08, Qt 5.11.3 and many more. It also sports a new look and feel called "Netrunner Black" among other changes. You can get the Netrunner 19.01 ISO from here.

Canonical yesterday released a security patch for the GNOME Bluetooth tools to address a security vulnerability with Ubuntu 18.04. Softpedia News reports that security researcher Chris Marchesi discovered the vulnerability in the BlueZ Linux Bluetooth stack, "which made it incorrectly handle disabling Bluetooth visibility, allowing a remote attacker to possibly pair to Bluetooth devices." All Ubuntu 18.04 LTS users should update immediately to the gnome-bluetooth 3.28.0-2ubuntu0.1 and libgnome-bluetooth13 3.28.0-2ubuntu0.1 packages from the official repos. See the wiki for detailed instructions.

Groboards has launched a new "tiny, Adafruit Feather form-factor 'Giant Board' SBC that runs Linux on Microchip's SiP implementation of its Cortex-A5-based SAMA5D SoC and offers 128MB RAM, micro-USB, microSD and I/O including ADC and PWM", Linux Gizmos reports. There's no pricing or availability information yet, but see the OSH Park blog and the Groboards site for specs and more info.

Linspire recently posted its development roadmap for Linspire and Freespire releases for 2019 and 2020. The Linspire CE 8.0 Office 365 Edition is planned for February 21, 2019, with Linspire Server on April 14, 2019. Freespire 4.5 is planned for May 5, 2019 and Freespire 5.0 is scheduled for November 15, 2019.

01/14/2019 Linux Journal

Linux Thursday - Jan 13, 2019 - Lingering Cough Edition

01/14/2019 Virtualization

Researchers Reveal Play With Docker Security Vulnerability

Researchers from CyberArk discovered a way to hack the popular Play-with-Docker training site, escaping the confines of the container isolation boundary, revealing misconfigurations that have now been fixed.

01/09/2019 InfoWorld Linux

What is Kubernetes? Container orchestration explained

Docker containers have reshaped the way people think about developing, deploying, and maintaining software. Drawing on the native isolation capabilities of modern operating systems, containers support VM-like separation of concerns, but with far less overhead and far greater flexibility of deployment than hypervisor-based virtual machines.

Containers are so lightweight and flexible, they have given rise to new application architectures. The new approach is to package the different services that constitute an application into separate containers, and to deploy those containers across a cluster of physical or virtual machines. This gives rise to the need for container orchestration—a tool that automates the deployment, management, scaling, networking, and availability of container-based applications.

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01/02/2019 Virtualization

eWEEK’s Top Vendors for Cloud, Data Center Storage

eWEEK TOP COMPANIES: New-gen data storage is all about providing the correct information on demand while at the same time maintaining data privacy for users at all levels. These requirements are the same for physical data center storage and for storage in a cloud service.