- Roundtable - muug.ca

Climate change is messing with GPS time-keeping!
by Gilbert E. Detillieux 06 Aug '21

06 Aug '21

For those of you who took in Wyatt's May presentation on setting up a GPS-based NTP server,... https://muug.ca/meetings/20-21.html#may ... you may be interested in this bit of weirdness... https://twitter.com/ariadneconill/status/1422163289518313474?s=21 TIL: Climate change has resulted in the earth spinning faster, cancelling out leap seconds. “As I previously said, the reason it will affect live GPS is due to, and I hate to say it, global warming causing the earth to speed up, unexpectedly.” So, now you know!... :) Gilbert -- Gilbert E. Detillieux E-mail: <gedetil(a)cs.umanitoba.ca> Dept. of Computer Science Web: http://cs.umanitoba.ca/~gedetil/ University of Manitoba Winnipeg MB CANADA R3T 2N2

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Microsoft Quietly Released Its Own Linux Distro | Tom's Hardware
by Adam Thompson 26 Jul '21

26 Jul '21

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-released-cbl-mariner-linux-dist… Normally we'd put this in the next newsletter, but that won't come out for a while, so here you go. -Adam

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Reason to get a PinePhone #@$%^&
by Vicki Nemeth 19 Jul '21

19 Jul '21

OCCRP feature page on Pegasus at https://www.occrp.org/en/the-pegasus-project/ ----- Forwarded message ----- From: Drew Sullivan <membership(a)occrp.org> To: <vicki(a)vickinemethwriter.com> Subject: The Pegasus Project - Letter from the Publisher Date: Mon Jul 19 2021 12:46:01 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time) View this email in your browser Share Tweet Forward Dear OCCRP Reader, Yesterday, OCCRP published a groundbreaking investigation that found that military-grade spyware licensed by the Israeli technology firm NSO Group has been used to hack the smartphones of dozens of journalists and activists worldwide. Pegasus can secretly steal personal data, read conversations, and switch on microphones and cameras — no clicking is needed from the target. Led by Forbidden Stories with tech support from Amnesty International’s Security Lab, The Pegasus Project is an international collaboration of more than 80 journalists from 17 media organizations. Journalists from OCCRP have been working on the project for months. NSO Group says Pegasus is meant only to help fight crime and terrorism, and claims to hold its government clients to that requirement. Our reporting explodes that narrative. Four of the journalists in our network — András Szabó and Szabolcs Panyi from our Hungarian member center Direkt36, and Azerbaijani journalists Khadija Ismayilova and Sevinj Vaqifqizi, all of whom have reported on corruption at the highest levels of government — were on a list of 50,000 names allegedly selected for targeting. “As a journalist, there is nothing more disheartening than when you have to tell your colleagues that the world's most invasive spyware is being used against them.” Miranda Patrucic, Deputy Editor in Chief While the Pegasus Project exposes clear cases of misuse of NSO Group’s software, the company is just one player in a global, multi-billion-dollar spyware industry. For-profit spyware companies have "democratized" access to cutting-edge technology, enabling repressive governments to surveil and track journalists and activists. With little regulation and oversight, surveillance technology presents one of the biggest threats to democracy and freedom of expression in the world today. We’ll be publishing more stories throughout this week and next on this important investigation. And we’ll keep digging. Drew Sullivan Publisher Join the fight against corruption. SUPPORT OCCRP Share Tweet Forward Copyright © 2021 Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, All rights reserved. Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list. -- Get the content marketing done for your IT firm, office space, and furniture and green housewares store. Visit VickiNemethWriter.com

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Job posting (IT Systems Integration & Support Specialist - UofM Computer Science)
by Gilbert E. Detillieux 19 Jul '21

19 Jul '21

I've just posted the following to the "jobs" mailing list... http://www.muug.ca/pipermail/jobs/2021-July/000099.html ... in case you, or someone you know, may be interested. Gilbert -- Gilbert E. Detillieux E-mail: <gedetil(a)cs.umanitoba.ca> Dept. of Computer Science Web: http://cs.umanitoba.ca/~gedetil/ University of Manitoba Winnipeg MB CANADA R3T 2N2

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Re: [RndTbl] FreeSWITCH, WAN PBXs - Word to the wise
by Alex Weber 08 Jul '21

08 Jul '21

Very funny Troy. I made an even worsee mistake a few months ago. I exposed a new system (intended to be a router) with 'root:root' to the world thinking my brand new nftables knowledge was sound, and it was not. Literally the definition of "enough to be dangerous!". Had multiple successful SSH root logins in the course of only a few hours and decided I was better off wiping and starting over. Fun times! -Alex > Date: Wed, 7 Jul 2021 13:42:55 -0500 > From: Troy Denton <trdenton(a)gmail.com> > To: Continuation of Round Table discussion <roundtable(a)muug.ca> > Subject: [RndTbl] FreeSWITCH, WAN PBXs - Word to the wise > Message-ID: > <CAN8-H5_ONESqpnNu_78_taq8Uu9bnK9Po4FTyq_gkf_y8WKvOg(a)mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" > > Yesterday I modified my freeswitch config to allow phone registration over > the WAN for a very specific and short-term use case. You may remember a > warning about this in my FreeSWITCH presentation - this open registration > is a big no-no. You can probably see where this is going. > > Not being entirely foolish, I introduced an ACL to limit it to my household > IP - or so I thought! The ACL I modified had a default "allow" policy > (woops!!). Within 2 hours, I had hackers trying to authenticate. Within 24 > hours, they were making calls to the Caribbean and Palestine! > > I'm still doing a postmortem to see exactly how they were able to register > - the accounts they were able to use did not (and still do not) exist in my > dialplan. That one's a headscratcher. It's probably a goofy config on my > part. At worst, there was a freeswitch exploit used. > > Luckily les.net has some very good piracy detection, and they were able to > turn off my service before I had any serious financial impact - I'm out > about 25 cents. > > Moral of the story- don't open your PBX's internal registration to the > internet - even if you think you know what you're doing ;) >

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FreeSWITCH, WAN PBXs - Word to the wise
by Troy Denton 07 Jul '21

07 Jul '21

Yesterday I modified my freeswitch config to allow phone registration over the WAN for a very specific and short-term use case. You may remember a warning about this in my FreeSWITCH presentation - this open registration is a big no-no. You can probably see where this is going. Not being entirely foolish, I introduced an ACL to limit it to my household IP - or so I thought! The ACL I modified had a default "allow" policy (woops!!). Within 2 hours, I had hackers trying to authenticate. Within 24 hours, they were making calls to the Caribbean and Palestine! I'm still doing a postmortem to see exactly how they were able to register - the accounts they were able to use did not (and still do not) exist in my dialplan. That one's a headscratcher. It's probably a goofy config on my part. At worst, there was a freeswitch exploit used. Luckily les.net has some very good piracy detection, and they were able to turn off my service before I had any serious financial impact - I'm out about 25 cents. Moral of the story- don't open your PBX's internal registration to the internet - even if you think you know what you're doing ;)

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The Atlantic: The Internet Is Rotting
by Gilbert E. Detillieux 05 Jul '21

05 Jul '21

I found the following article on "link rot" interesting... The Internet Is Rotting "Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone." https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/06/the-internet-is-a-co… Hope the above link will still work for a while!... ;) Gilbert

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Open Source Animation Project
by Troy Denton 05 Jul '21

05 Jul '21

Hey all - I just finished up a fun little project. I made my first animation in over 10 years, completely with open source software. The software I used: Tahoma2D (https://tahoma2d.org/ <https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description&redir_token=QUFFLU…>) , kdenlive (https://kdenlive.org <https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description&redir_token=QUFFLU…>), Ardour (https://ardour.org/ <https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description&redir_token=QUFFLU…>), Debian - and a lot of patience :) You can see the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KTT8-B9ku4 -Troy

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WIRED: Tech Companies Don’t Need to Be Creepy to Make Money
by Gilbert E. Detillieux 25 Jun '21

25 Jun '21

I thought the following article was interesting... *Tech Companies Don’t Need to Be Creepy to Make Money* The unlikely survival—and success—of DuckDuckGo suggests a way to escape surveillance capitalism. Read in WIRED: https://apple.news/AQkH0EtdBQ5mm846r1zeg7A Gilbert

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iOS bug breaks WiFi if SSID contains "%" characters
by Gilbert E. Detillieux 22 Jun '21

22 Jun '21

This one made me laugh. Someone didn't clean up their input strings before passing them along to a formatting function... https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/iphone-bug-breaks-wifi-when-… https://www.engadget.com/iphone-wifi-network-name-bug-191550155.html Watch out for a proliferation of goofy-named hotspots until this one is fixed! Gilbert -- Gilbert E. Detillieux E-mail: <gedetil(a)cs.umanitoba.ca> Dept. of Computer Science Web: http://cs.umanitoba.ca/~gedetil/ University of Manitoba Winnipeg MB CANADA R3T 2N2 For best service, contact <cstech(a)cs.umanitoba.ca>.

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