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Below seems like such an obvious solution.
We need a Conservative majority.
Until then, we’ll…
Stuff…
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Chiefio Techie thoughts.
- Techies may like this stuff. Likely some eye rolling, followed by, scrolling. 🙂
Micro$oft Backdoor & P.O.’d Security Tester
A Feud between Micro$oft & A Security Guy going hot…
This is a fun one…
Has everything from corporate intrigue to morality play, big corp crushing small guys who keep fighting, and just to round it out, a zero day exploit that looks a lot like a “backdoor” (or could just be stupid programmer games).
I’d worry if I ran anything Microsoft, but I don’t, so I don’t 😉
Yes, it is a couple of months old, but I don’t usually follow M.S. stuff closely. The White hat “Nightmare Eclipse” is having a bit of a feud with M.S. over their ‘bug bounty’ program. Having not been paid for turning in some serious exploits, Nightmare Eclipse then started dropping “zero day” exploits on public servers. M.S. responded by getting them banned from Git Hub and Git Lab (so a bit of “whack a mole” going on). That won’t end well as the more they push the disclosure toward dark web / mesh network tech, the more exploits will be zero-day for the Black Hat community and hidden from the White Hats & the company.
Yes, a ZERO DAY exploit is bad. Yes having it quarantined with the company until a fix is published is better. BUT when the company goes all Pissy Dissy at the folks notifying them, the company can expect lack of cooperation in return. Companies can play nice or have Dark Web Exploits floating around for weeks or months before they find out. M.S. is not known for playing nice, IMHO.
FWIW: I survived all sorts of zero day exploits for years (decades…) via other site sanitation measures. Just because a given computer has an exploit doesn’t mean you can’t protect it. Isolation of critical systems from communications networks (i.e. not everything needs to be on the internet all the time…), very tight isolating firewalls, network architecture that prevents some kinds of access, access control facilities and more. They all work.
For example: I have a lot of data on disk. It is absolutely safe from attack from the internet. Why? Because the disk is not plugged into a computer, it is locked in a drawer. Also, the computer is left turned off and without power 99%+ of the time (that computer is only used when I want to access those disks) and, unless I’m actively downloading data from the internet, it doesn’t need an internet connection. I can download things (on a different system / uSD chip) that that gets moved to the archival system, maintaining isolation.
Bit of a PITA for things like system updates and adding data? Yeah, but a lot less trouble than getting shut down or data corrupted / stolen. Also note that I have copies of my various computer builds in the archive. IF one of my systems got corrupted or “locked” for ransom: I just remove the media with the locked OS on it, flash a new one from the saved image using my offline system builder system, and I’m back in business. All the important offline data is still secure and the online system recovered. Maximum loss is whatever I’ve done very recently, not backed up, and usually that’s easily recreated or just not important to me.
So yes, were I running a live on-line corporate center, some of those zero day exploits would matter to me a lot more (they did back when was doing that for a living). BUT, I find it a lot easier to have a dedicated system for personal web / on-line stuff that is semi-disposable, AND separate systems used only for things like financials, archives, and building systems. Compromising an exposed system doesn’t compromise anything important. With a separate computer costing in the $100 range, and uSD cards for an isolated system down around $10, running multiple computer images is very cheap and easy. Add that the Raspberry Pi 4 & 5 are enough for common web browsing stuff, and the barriers to entry for isolating “random browsing” from “important stuff” drops to the cost of a fancy coffee or at most a tank of gasoline.
Yes, that also involves avoiding the Microsoft Tax on the systems (one licence each) via Linux, but I’m fine with that 😉
So, here’s the Soap Opera Story, along with the tech of the exploit(s) involved:
Yes, this “exploit” requires access to the hardware. That’s one of the first big barriers to protect yourself. Keep your hardware / systems away from physical access by randoms. The laptop I use “on the road” at public WiFi has NOTHING on it of importance. No financials. No email archive. At most, a couple of days of “on the road” email reading records (email left on the server when on the road). Isolating use cases, it’s a good thing.
Also note that at about 11 minutes, there’s a ‘letter’ from Nightmare Eclipse stating that M.S. patched a vulnerability under active exploit without telling anyone (a bad behaviour). Once you push the patch, you notify everyone so they can assure they patch it AND find out if they were hacked.
For this particular bug, I don’t see it as a major risk for most users / use cases. For secure sites depending on disk encryption? Yeah, it would be an issue. OTOH, as someone who has needed to use “exploits” to recover other folks systems sometimes: To me it looks more like a way to recover an encrypted disk when the employee left the company or the PIN was lost… not all “security bypasses” are bad all the time…
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Worthy re-run from Tuesday…
A Nice Summary of Why Ubuntu Now Sucks
I’m removing Ubuntu from any of my systems
Why? Because the path forward now sucks. Management at Canonical has made a series of “corporate friendly user hostile” decisions. SNAP is obligatory, which also means loss of control of YOUR code as it self updates “packages”. The inherent code bloat has pushed memory demand to levels higher than Microsoft Windows(!). Wayland is now obligatory so kiss off any old Xorg applications or recovery methods. Want to remove SNAP? Then you also lose sound as computer sound now depends on it. Kernel stable? Maybe, maybe not, as the Long Term Support version release may happen before kernel stability date. Then there is Uutils, the Rusty re-write of well tested well proven Gnu Coreutils pretty much guaranteed to induce bugs, script failures, downtime and commands that do not act as they did before.
I also have several very old PC boxes that I like to keep in service. Keeps e-waste down and old hardware useful. Canonical is abandoning old hardware, so abandoning me.
The “good news” is that the only system I’ve regularly used with Ubuntu was an Asus Laptop that came with it pre-installed. After some effort, I’ve reached the point where I can manage EUFI well enough to swap the OS on it – just as the keyboard and power connection have started being flaky… so I bought a new Think Penguin laptop with Devuan pre-installed. My only other Ubuntu systems tend to be alternative uSD cards for various Single Board Computers since many vendors supported Ubuntu first or only. Odroid, for example, liked to support it. For them, I’ve generally gotten a Devuan or Armbian alternative running as the main OS. I’ll now be “not bothering” to use the alternative Ubuntu, and actively replacing it.
Some of the boards (Odroid N2) were purchased with a pre-installed Ubuntu on an emmc chip. I’ll be putting the main OS on that chip instead… Devuan where possible, Void sometimes,others as interesting. Slackware runs on some of them too.
Canonical has embraced “The Microsoft Way” and abandoned The Unix Way, so I’m abandoning them. Here’s a nice 17 minute summary of why Ubuntu 26.04 LTS sucks:
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Chiefio, Seems to be on a rant of sorts over Linux, Big Tech taking over…or something…
Wonder how our techie brainiacs feel about Chiefios perspective on Linux, Ubuntu…
Linux, Corporate Capture, and Init Freedom / X11
Posted on 28 August 2026 by E.M.Smith
A Minor Rant about Huge Corporations trying to “enclose the commons”
Over the last couple of decades, a growing trend in Linux has been Big Corporate “Support” in the form of Money, Programmers on Staff, and Membership In Governance Boards.
This has been very helpful in that resources have been provided to what had been a “Potluck Programming by The Little Guys” process without much funding or resources at all. This has been bad to the extent that the Big Corporate Players gain power over the direction of Linux, and then use it to capture it, and remove the very freedom that created it in the first place.
Microsoft has long had a known strategy of “Embrace and extend” (to capture and kill…). So they would “embrace” a proposed Standard, but then extend it in proprietary ways that were not compatible. Due to their size, they could do this with impunity, but it also prevented Other People and Other Companies from running on their “stuff” and ‘encouraging’ you to Buy Micro$oft products…
RedHat rose to dominate a lot of the Userland Codebase, so what RedHat did got propagated out to many (most?) other distributions. SystemD is a good example. Now owned by IBM (since 2019). Note that IBM has a long history of attempted monopoly practices in various markets. (Disclosure: At one time I worked for Amdahl Corp. who made “IBM compatible” mainframe computers, so saw this up close.) IBM does not care, at all, about Open Source or keeping free software free. ANY “new and improved” way of doing things from RedHat / IBM is something I will suspect of being directed at capturing control of the commons.
Canonical (Ubuntu) is also a large corporation and mostly cares about making an OS Release that works well and is easy for them to maintain. Your control and your choices and machine efficiency not so much. So they embrace SNAPS despite resources that uses and despite putting the package run (and updates to it) beyond your control. (SNAPS are automatically updated when Canonical feels like it, on your machine, for example.) Canonical is also making somewhat incompatible changes to their version of Linux, pushing you into being tied to their way of doing things – like forcing the use of the Rust based uutils instead of the GNU CoreUtils.
Mozilla (the FireFox browser) is pushing their creation of the Rust computer language. Supposedly for the “memory safety”, but that is only one type of bug and is NOT concerned with memory footprint or efficiency on small machines (like the Single Board Computers -SBCs- I like). After the re-write in Rust, FireFox tended to keep hold of more memory when a lot of tabs were kept open. I like to keep a lot of tabs open, even if inactive. This eventually had me move from FireFox to Brave (that seems to understand a page cached to disk doesn’t need to stay in memory). Do I really want ever more chunks of my Rusty-Linux system to demand memory residency?
Somewhere in my Bone Yard is an old Hitachi Laptop from about 1988? that has 8 MB of memory. Yes MEGAbytes. It has a RedHat Linux on it (from that era, not updated). I “inherited it” for free when it could no longer run Windows (so I don’t really know how old it is…). I turned it into a firewall / router for my office when I was the Build Master & IT Guy for a small software company of about 50 people. All MY traffic went through it to the corporate network. (Why? Because the Systems Admin AND a guy in charge of defending the sanctity of a build chain MUST protect against all kinds of things, even folks inside the company). The point?
Re-purposing old small memory & CPU equipment is of no interest to Major Corporations (selling new equipment is), but it IS in the interest of small corporations, independent developers, students, anyone who is poor and living in the 3rd World, and folks interested in reducing the tonnage of resources hitting landfills as eWaste.
A large part of the Linux World population has goals and values that do not align with those of the Major Corporations. Major Corporations want to control the commons and exploit it for their profit and gain. Not necessarily a bad thing (I’m all for profit in corporations, as long as it is not evil in execution). The problem comes with the “Enclosure of the commons”. A problem defined since before Medieval times. When there was a “commons” where everyone could chop wood or hunt food, then The King (or other local Lord) would claim it was for his private use alone. Under his rules. Kind of like saying: You Must use SystemD, Gnome & Wayland…
Also note, that the Rusting of various packages often comes with a licence change from GPL (GNU Public Licence that is “copyleft” and requires changes be published) to MIT (“permissive” that lets you keep changes a hidden secret). The point of a copyleft license is to prevent “Embrace and extend” as a way to “enclose the commons”. The move away from GPL to MIT helps big corporations, but endangers the Open Source Community and encourages making Variations Of Linux that are NOT compatible with others, that are proprietary and tied to one vendor.
I choose to stay in the GPL License world. Not as energetic about it as Richard Stallman, I’ll accept proprietary driver code for some odd peripheral, but aware of the risks of Corporate Capture, Enclosure of The Commons, and Proprietary incompatibility risks “going forward”. So I will run Wayland sometimes, but encourage Xlibre. I’d try to avoid SystemD, and I’ll not use Gnome at all. Ubuntu is on my “walk away and avoid” list due to their changes over the last few years, and Void is coming on board.
Embrace those Linux distributions who recognize these Corporate Capture Risks. Stay free.
This article was inspired by this video:
More…
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Slow, pause the scrolling….please.
ht Marie Ursula and Wolf.
THIS Is 100% worthy of your attention.
- Marie Ursula posted
- Wolf reposted Thursday
- Slow guy posts for a third time today…
IF you have not watched this video, please do so.
May be wise to share with siblings, children, grands, friends…
An Inconvenient Study
MarieUrsula dropped off a link for one of the best documentaries I’ve seen in years – and IMO you would do well to watch this, too.
Her comment:
MarieUrsula (@guest_1644157) Online
#1644157
Found on my trapline a few hours ago, on a related subject:
“Here’s a story about vaccines with danger, deception, and intrigue, like a thriller. It’s an important piece of the vaccine puzzle. Produced by Del Bigtree, it’s essential for anyone still considering the validity of vaccines.” c. 1 hour 22 minutes.
https://www.aninconvenientstudy.com
You can actually download the movie yourself (below), or watch it online at the link (above). Both are FREE.
Downloadable Link (MP4 Format) – https://static.arkengine.com/video/cmgoige8f000g6dc3us4ib19o/file/mp4/AIS_1_5.mp4
This movie explains a whole bunch of things – even more than they intended to explain. The logic is beautiful. Del Bigtree is a truly excellent journalist. He understands exactly how to make things make sense with zero ambiguity.
This movie explains…..
- numerous problems with vaccines
- a critical study which went unpublished because it gave the wrong finding, but had a “plausible” exit for the author and institution
- why RFKJ wants to do placebo studies
- how the vaxxbots skate out of placebo studies on bogus ethics grounds
https://www.aninconvenientstudy.com
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Grateful our ancestors broke the British chains, again, and again…
Thankfully, Trump is finishing off the Brits, Canucks… Along with NATO. Ideally UN.
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Stay The Course. Trust Trump. Remember…
Never, Ever, forget what they did to us.
Celebrate America, Everyday!!!
Relax, It’s Saturday.
Night crew, your nickel.
KK