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Free Download Manager Site Compromised to Distribute Linux Malware to Users for 3+ Years

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A download manager site served Linux users malware that stealthily stole passwords and other sensitive information for more than three years as part of a supply chain attack. The modus operandi entailed establishing a reverse shell to an actor-controlled server and installing a Bash stealer on the compromised system. The campaign, which took place between 2020 and 2022, is no longer active. "

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LinuxGeek
88 days ago
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I'd guess that it was unnoticed because linux doesn't need a download manager. Why would a linux user even visit that website?
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Meet the Guy Preserving the New History of PC Games, One Linux Port At a Time

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Historically, video game preservation efforts usually cover two types of games. The most common are very old or "retro" games from the 16-bit era or earlier, which are trapped on cartridges until they're liberated via downloadable ROMs. The other are games that rely on a live service, like Enter the Matrix's now unplugged servers or whatever games you can only get by downloading them via Nintendo's Wii Shop Channel, which shut down in 2019. But time keeps marching on and a more recent era of games now needs to be attended to if we still want those games to be accessible: indies from the late aughts to mid twenty-teens. That's right. Fez, an icon of the era and indie games scene, is now more than a decade old. And while we don't think of this type of work until we need it, Fez, which most PC players booted on Windows 7 when it first came out, is not going to magically run on your Windows 11 machine today without some maintenance. The person doing that maintenance, as well as making sure that about 70 of the best known indie games from the same era keep running, is Ethan Lee. He's not as well known as Fez's developer Phil Fish, who was also the subject of the documentary Indie Game: The Movie, but this week Lee started publicly marketing the service he's been quietly providing for over 11 years: maintenance of older games. "The way that I've been pitching it is more of like, the boring infrastructure," he said. "Let's make sure the current build works, whereas a lot of times, people feel like the only way to bring a game into a new generation is to do a big remaster. That's cool, but wouldn't have been cool if Quake II just continued to work between 1997 and now without all the weird stuff in between? That's sort of why I've been very particular about the word maintenance, because it's a continuous process that starts pretty much from the moment that you ship it." As he explains in his pitch to game developers: "the PC catalog alone has grown very large within the last 15 years, and even small independent studios now have an extensive back catalog of titles that players can technically still buy and play today! This does come at a cost, however: The longer a studio exists, the larger their catalog grows, and as a result, the maintenance burden also grows." Just a few of the other indie games Lee ported include Super Hexagon, Proteus, Rogue Legacy, Dust: An Elysian Tail, TowerFall Ascension, VVVVVV, Transistor, Wizorb, Mercenary Kings, Hacknet, Shenzhen I/O, and Bastion. [...] With the PC, people assume that once a game is on Windows, it can live on forever with future versions of Windows. "In reality, what makes a PC so weird is that there's this big stack of stuff. You have an x86 processor, the current-ish era of like modern graphics processors, and then you have the operating system running on top of that and its various drivers," Lee said. A change to any one of those layers can make a game run badly, or not at all.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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LinuxGeek
91 days ago
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Musk shut off Starlink to prevent Ukraine attack on Russian ships, report says

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A Starlink satellite dish sits on the ground in Ukraine.

Enlarge / Starlink satellite dish seen on September 25, 2022, in Izyum, Kharkiv region, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (credit: Getty Images | Yasuyoshi Chiba)

Elon Musk ordered SpaceX engineers to temporarily disable Starlink in order to thwart a Ukrainian submarine drone attack on the Russian naval fleet last year, according to a report based on a new biography of Musk. The book provides more details on a previously reported incident.

A CNN exclusive report today said, "Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company's Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet, according to an excerpt adapted from Walter Isaacson's new biography of the eccentric billionaire titled 'Elon Musk.'"

"As Ukrainian submarine drones strapped with explosives approached the Russian fleet, they 'lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,' Isaacson writes," the CNN report said. Ukrainian officials reportedly begged Musk to turn satellite service in the area back on.

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LinuxGeek
94 days ago
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Elon Musk: get off the fence. You joined this war in Ukraine by giving them internet access. Turning it off to protect the Russians is just being a wishy-washy turncoat.
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Carmakers fail privacy test, give owners little or no control on personal data they collect

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Cars are getting an “F” in data privacy
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LinuxGeek
96 days ago
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Article suggests that choosing a used, pre-digital vehicle provides better privacy - and it probably does, but only slightly. With the prevalence of license plate readers and cell phone tracking, I despair of retaining any semblance of privacy.
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NYPD using drones to check out noisy backyard parties over Labor Day weekend

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A drone equipped with a camera hovers in the air

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Richard Newstead)

The New York City Police Department said it will use drones to check out backyard parties when neighbors call to complain about large crowds this weekend.

"The drones are going to be responding to non-priority calls and priority calls," NYPD Assistant Commissioner Kaz Daughtry said at a press conference yesterday. "For example, if we have any 311 calls on our non-emergency line where if a caller states there's a large crowd, a large party in the backyard, we're going to be utilizing our assets to go up, to go check on the party, to make sure if the call is founded or not, and we'll be able to determine how many resources we need to send to that location for this weekend. So we will have our drone teams out there starting tonight, all the way into Monday morning."

Daughtry spoke near the end of a press conference (see video) about safety and security measures for J'Ouvert, a "traditional street festival honoring the vast heritage and culture of the Caribbean diaspora," and the West Indian Day Parade.

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LinuxGeek
100 days ago
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The technology innovation of low-cost drones with cameras has a huge impact on privacy. You can put up No Trespassing signs and tall privacy fences, but there's still nothing to stop a snooping drone. I believe that it still illegal to shoot or snare the offending drone - even if it is not owned by Law Enforcement.
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Windows 11 browser change: Europe applauds, outrage everywhere else

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Microsoft will soon allow users in the European Union, as well as from Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway, to once again open all links in Windows using their default web browser rather than forcing the use of Microsoft Edge. [...]
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LinuxGeek
102 days ago
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"When you're at the point of tricking your operating system into thinking you're in a different country in order to make it function properly, it may be time to try a new OS"
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