The Latest News from Across the FOSS Universe
You have probably met people or heard of them who claim they are feeling better after quitting social media platform. But does it really help? Participants were regularly asked to log their mood through text messages with the researchers, who also verified that the subjects actually kept their accounts inactive. It was found that the […]
The post Quitting Facebook For A Month Makes People Happier: Study appeared first on Fossbytes.
After Xiaomi unveiled the Redmi Note 7 under the newly established Redmi sub-brand, Xiaomi India has been teasing its launch in the country. Now, it is suggested that the smartphone is soon to make its entry this month. According to a report by 91Mobiles, Xiaomi is expected to launch the Redmi Note 7 at an […]
The post Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 To Launch In India On February 12 appeared first on Fossbytes.
Twitter wants to make the platform spam free, and in a bid to do so, the social media company has started cracking down on services that offer paid services to gain followers. Twitter has cut off API access to three such companies that are famous for helping users increase their number of followers using automated […]
The post Twitter Is Blocking Services That Sell Fake Followers appeared first on Fossbytes.
We spotlight 4 stunning new Linux icon themes that will look great on any desktop, Ubuntu or otherwise. Although the Suru icon theme now ships as Ubuntu’s default icon set, and although GNOME designers are busy working on a major icon revamp of their own, third-party icon themes still have their place. After all, one […]
This post, 4 Stunning Icon Themes for Your Linux Desktop, was written by Joey Sneddon and first appeared on OMG! Ubuntu!.
The second point release of the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system series is set to arrive as early as next week as a refreshed media to help users easily deploy the Linux OS on new computers.
The recently released Mozilla Firefox 65 web browser is now available for download from the stable software repositories of all supported Ubuntu Linux operating system series.For someone like me who frequently taps the pocket to reassure that I still have my wallet, a Bluetooth tracker is a life-saving device. However, most Bluetooth trackers that I have come across are difficult to carry in a wallet. Of course, I don’t want an awkward bulge from a Bluetooth tracker device in my […]
The post Never Lose Your Wallet Again With Orbit Bluetooth Tracker appeared first on Fossbytes.
Smartphone users are usually torn between the two choices — Android or iOS. Their dominance is such that other competing OS like Windows, BlackBerry OS, or Symbian have almost been abandoned. Those who don’t want either of them can opt for Pine64’s Linux phone dubbed the PinePhone, which offers good hardware and software at an affordable […]
The post PinePhone Linux Smartphone Priced At $149 To Arrive This Year appeared first on Fossbytes.
On Tuesday, Techcrunch reported that Facebook is paying teenagers to install a “Research” VPN app in iOS devices in exchange for $20 gift cards. The main motive behind the app was to analyze the web activity and smartphone usage patterns of teenagers. The social media company invited participants to the dubious research program by putting […]
The post Facebook Defends ‘Research’ App; Says Kids Consented To Data Collection appeared first on Fossbytes.
GNOME 3.32 is due for release next month, and the biggest change will be its performance. See, the GNOME Shell desktop is often criticised as being a bit on the ‘heavy’ side. Folks blast it for having comparatively high memory usage on start-up, for being taxing on the CPU, and for having a UI that […]
This post, GNOME Shell is Getting a Major Speed Boost, was written by Joey Sneddon and first appeared on OMG! Ubuntu!.
News briefs for January 31, 2019.
Ubuntu 18.04 needs to be patched to fix several security bugs. ZDNet reports that Canonical is updating Ubuntu 18.04 to a new kernel, 4.15.0-44.47, which contains 11 security fixes. The most important of these addresses problems with the ext4 filesystem. If you use Ubuntu 18.04, patch your system as soon as possible. See also the Ubuntu security notice for more information and instructions on how to update.
Alpine 3.9 was released this week—the first release of the v3.9 stable series of the "security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and busybox". New features include support for armv7, a switch from LibreSSL to OpenSSL and improved GRUB support. Go here to download.
Three new openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots were released this week that contained new versions of PHP7, poppler, GTK3 and LibreOffice. The first of the snapshots also included all the package upgrades for KDE Applications.
Red Hat this morning announced the latest version of the Red Hat infrastructure migration solution. New capabilities provide "greater customer choice, helping to further reduce infrastructure complexity and facilitating a pathway to open hybrid cloud environments". The two new target platforms are the Red Hat OpenStack Platform and the Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Virtualization.
Electric Cloud yesterday announced a new version of its software build and test acceleration platform, ElectricAccelerator 11.0. The press release notes that "the platform now offers new plug-and-play support for Android Open Source Project, accelerated embedded Linux builds based on the Yocto project, and cloud bursting for AWS and Kubernetes help businesses shrink development cycles and improve software quality."
Linux Mint project leader Clement Lefebvre published today the monthly newsletter of the project to inform the community about their plans for improving the Ubuntu-based operating system and related components.Learn about how the cutting-edge, free software Heads project detects BIOS and kernel tampering, all with keys under your control.
Disclaimer: I work for Purism, and my experience with Heads began as part of supporting it on Purism's hardware. As a technical writer, I personally find ads that mask themselves as articles in technical publications disingenuous, and this article in no way is intended to be an advertisement for my employer. However, in writing this deep dive piece, I found that mentioning Purism was unavoidable in some places without leaving out important information about Heads—in particular, the list of overall supported hardware and an explanation of Heads' HOTP alternative to TOTP authentication, because it requires a specific piece Purism hardware.
Some of the earliest computer viruses attacked the boot sector—that bit of code at the beginning of the hard drive in the Master Boot Record that allowed you to boot into your operating system. The reasons for this have to do with stealth and persistence. Viruses on the filesystem itself would be erased if users re-installed their operating systems, but if they didn't erase the boot sector as part of the re-install process, boot sector viruses could stick around and re-infect the operating system.
Antivirus software vendors ultimately added the ability to scan the boot sector for known viruses, so the problem was solved, right? Unfortunately, as computers, operating systems and BIOSes became more sophisticated, so did the boot-sector attacks. Modern attacks take over before the OS is launched and infect the OS itself, so when you try to search for the attack through the OS, the OS tells you everything is okay.
That's not to say modern defenses to this type of attack don't exist. Most modern approaches involve proprietary software that locks down the system so that it can boot only code that's signed by a vendor (typically Microsoft, Apple, Google or one of their approved third-party vendors). The downside, besides the proprietary nature of this defense, is that you are beholden to the vendor to bless whatever code you want to run, or else you have to disable this security feature completely (if you can).
Fortunately, an alternative exists that is not only free software, but that also takes a completely different approach to boot security by alerting you to tampering instead of blocking untrusted code. This approach, Heads, can detect tampering not only in the BIOS itself but also in all of your important boot files in the /boot directory, including the kernel, initrd and even your grub config. The result is a trusted boot environment with keys fully under your own control.
In this article, I describe some of the existing boot security approaches in more detail, along with some of their limitations, and then I describe how Heads works, and how to build and install it on your own system.
The Windows 10 19H1 a.k.a the April Update 2019 is only a few months away with the RTM build coming in March. In the meantime, Windows 10 users can enroll in the Windows Insider Skip Ahead Ring to get features of next-to-next feature update — Windows 10 19H2. As reported a few days ago, Microsoft is all-set […]
The post Windows 10 Insider “Skip Ahead” Ring Registrations Are Now Open appeared first on Fossbytes.
Popular Indian digital wallet Paytm has added the facility to book hotels, as the company has now acquired hotel-booking service NightStay in India. Paytm has acquired NightStay for INR 142 crores and plans to further invest another INR 500 crores to enhance its operations. With an aim to compete with the established hotel booking services […]
The post PayTm Starts New ‘Hotel Booking Service’ To Challenge OYO Rooms appeared first on Fossbytes.
After teasing its first foldable smartphone, Samsung has been rumored to step into the gaming arena and introduce a gaming smartphone. Now, it seems like the South Korean company plans to merge the concepts and produce a foldable gaming smartphone, as hinted by a new patent. New Samsung Patent As per a report by LetsGoDigital, […]
The post Samsung’s New Patent Suggests A Foldable Gaming Smartphone appeared first on Fossbytes.
Facebook is not the only company that misused Apple’s Enterprise Certificate system, as Google has now admitted that it also violated the same policies as Facebook’s “Research App.” A TechCrunch report earlier revealed that Facebook was secretly distributing a VPN app which covertly collects data on how they used their devices in exchange for money($20). The research […]
The post Google Caught Violating Apple Policies Just Like Facebook appeared first on Fossbytes.
For someone like me who has to frequently tap on pant’s pocket to reassure that I still have my wallet, a Bluetooth tracker is a life-saving device. However, most Bluetooth trackers that I have come across are difficult to carry in a wallet. Of course, I don’t want an awkward bulge from a Bluetooth tracker device […]
The post Get Over Your Fear Of Losing Wallet With Orbit Card – World’s Thinnest Bluetooth Tracker appeared first on Fossbytes.
The start of 2019 has led to the beginning of Apple’s 2019 iPhone rumor thread. And taking this forward, the new rumor has something to say about the possible camera capabilities of the smartphones. According to a report by The Bloomberg, 2019 will also see three iPhone models (successors to the iPhone XS, XS Max, […]
The post 2019 iPhones Likely To Include Three Rear Cameras And USB-C Port appeared first on Fossbytes.
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State Bank of (SBI), one of the largest bank in India, left millions of its customer’s financial data exposed for anyone to a look into, according to a TechCrunch report. The Mumbai-based server, which has been secured now, stored over two months of user data including bank balances, transaction history, and more. The report states […]
The post SBI Leaked Banking Data of Millions Of Users Through Unprotected Server appeared first on Fossbytes.
After a massive data breach that exposed the profiles of the users, Google announced that it would pull the plug on Google+, its social networking service. Soon another data leak affected the user data, and Google fast-forwarded its plan to shut down Google+. Now, the company has issued a formal timeline as to how the process will be […]
The post Google+ Will Start Deleting User Data From April 2nd appeared first on Fossbytes.
Just yesterday, we reported the massive Facetime bug in iOS 12.1 devices that allowed people to eavesdrop a conversation, even before the recipient picks up a call. Now, a report suggests that some users are gravely affected by the bug. Bloomberg reports that a Texas-based lawyer is suing Apple, alleging that the iPhone bug allowed an unknown person to listen to his private […]
The post Apple Faces Lawsuit Over The FaceTime Eavesdropping Bug appeared first on Fossbytes.
We are a couple of months away from Apple’s annual developer conference where the Cupertino giant company will unveil the latest version of its operating system — iOS 13. Rumors have started pouring regarding the features that we could see in iOS 13. A report by Bloomberg that talks about Apple’s plan to equip upcoming iPhones with a powerful 3D […]
The post iOS 13 Bringing Dark Mode, A New Home Screen, And Multitasking: Bloomberg appeared first on Fossbytes.
I dream of owning a proper Linux tablet, one running something like Ubuntu — and that dream just took a step closer to reality. Pine64 plan to release a 10-inch Linux tablet later this year priced at a ludicrously low $79. The company is already well known as the makers of several popular (and cheap) ARM 64 […]
This post, $79 PineTab: The First Real Linux Tablet?, was written by Joey Sneddon and first appeared on OMG! Ubuntu!.
