Hello everyone and welcome to a week of Linux news for the 15th January 2017.
I know last week was rather bleak with all the attacks against Linux, but there is actually
a good theory behind launching malicious attacks around Christmas time - most sys admins will
taking time off work, and the last lot of updates before Christmas will likely be postponed
until the New Year.
The news sites catch up on all the exploits first week of January, and by the second week
it's business as usual more or less.
Fossforce have written an interesting article entitled Linux people should say “You’re
welcome Windows users”.
If it wasn’t for Linux setting the bar so high, would Windows users still be dealing
with the “blue screen of death” several times a day?
The author discusses how Microsoft really had to up their game in terms of stability
and security, and that is evident in the improvement from Windows 95 to Windows 7.
He likens the improvement American car makers have had to make to their vehicles due to
the introduction of European and Japanese cars into the US.
Interesting point because the British car industry failed to improve fast enough against
the onslaught of European rivals.
A brand new Rover was 10 years out of date compared to the latest Volkswagen equivalent,
and now the company is over and gone.
Hey wait a minute this is a tech video, personally I would have made the comparison against
Internet Explorer and Firefox.
In the early 2000s Microsoft held a 99% monopoly on browser usage, they had crushed their main
competitor Netscape, and they were so assured of their dominance that they disbanded most
of the IE developer team.
What Microsoft had neglected realise was a small open source browser called Firefox was
gaining traction.
It was vastly superior to Internet Explorer 6 with features like tabbed browsing, and
it could be heavily customised.
Oh and it was W3C standards compliant.
By the time Microsoft responded with IE 7 the damage had been done.
Firefox, and now Chrome have lead to Microsoft having to pour resources into improving IE
and making it W3C standards compliant.
Microsoft are no longer the driving force behind the standards, but rather playing catchup.
I believe their new browser Edge is still fighting a losing war against Chrome.
We can see the same thing with gaming on Windows, the competition from SteamOS has forced Microsoft
to get on with developing DirectX in Windows 10, after it had been neglected in
Windows 8.
Its sad to see that Linux is still the underdog for gaming, despite Valves huge effort.
I don’t think it has been wasted though, because it sparked efforts by nvidia to improve
driver support in Linux.
Or did Linus’s quote of "Fuck nvidia" do the job?
There is some positive news for gaming in Linux that Civilization 6 will be coming after
users sent bribes of cookies and Penguin plushies to Aspyr Media who are handling the port.
“Besides daily inquiries asking for Sid Meier’s Civilization VI, we’ve also received
twelve dozen warm chocolate chip cookies as well as squishy Linux penguin toys for the
entire office.
To say that we are excited to bring Sid Meier’s Civilization VI to Linux is an understatement.”
says Elizabeth Howard, Aspyr’s vice president of publishing.
We can see a picture of one gift from Linux gaming subreddit.
Although I have to say I’m still stuck in the era of retro gaming and haven’t moved
on from Civilization 2 and Alpha Centauri.
The open source No-SQL Database MongoDB has taken a battering this past week with some
27,000 out of 99,000 instances open to the Internet having been compromised.
Its another variant of ransomware, where the entire database is deleted, and demands between
0.2 and 1 BTC (£136 to £686) ($167 to $853) to restore the data.
There is no guarantee that the data can be restored, so the recommendation is
not to pay the ransom.
MongoDB maintainers have put out a blog post showing users how to prevent attacks to their
database using the built in security features.
The problem is MongoDB port runs on TCP 27017 and is very easy to identify.
Leaving it open without proper precautions is sadly asking for trouble.
Now this is not a vulnerability as such with Linux, but rather at the application level.
And there is no issue here for the average home user of Linux, the vulnerability lies
with web servers running poorly secured instances of MongoDB.
Mercedes Benz is the tenth car maker to join AGL - The Automotive Grade Linux foundation,
which is a project dedicated to creating open source software solutions for automotive applications,
with much of the work going towards in vehicle infotainment.
It almost sounds like what Android does for mobiles, only more open source and targeted
specifically at the automotive market.
I don’t believe any cars are available with AGL built in yet, from what I’ve read we
won’t see demo models until later this year, with the first cars being available for sale
in 2018
The Beta version of KDE 5.9 has been released.
It comes with some nice new features, including: The ability to drag and drop screenshot images
directly into a web browser form or email composer without leaving the application you’re
currently in.
Global menus have returned.
This brings back a feature reminiscent of Ubuntu Unity desktop that was available in
the later end of KDE 4.
The network configuration module now uses the Qt Modelling Language and brings us a
nice new style.
At some point in the 5.9 release I believe that KDE Neon will move to using Wayland by
default.
Can’t really say I’m looking forward to that point, unless it is finally going to
work properly with proprietary Nvidia drivers.
There are also few other features coming to KDE Plasma 5.9, and as always I’ll leave
a link to all these stories in the video description.
That concludes the week of Linux news.
Thanks for watching and I’ll see you all later.