• 44 Posts
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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: February 10th, 2024

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  • Thanks. This looks like about the best we’re going to get, given what PBS says about the debate moderation and hosting:

    It’s being moderated by “CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan of CBS’ “Face the Nation.” CBS News is airing the debate on its broadcast network live and will livestream it on all platforms where CBS News 24/7 and Paramount+ are available. It’s also being made available for simulcast, and networks like PBS will air it.

    Edit:

    It looks like this PBS news stream will also have the debate, and at nominally higher resolution than the CBS stream:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5g_ObRA4Y4

    I’m watching this one, since I generally prefer the in-between segments on PBS to those on CBS.






  • That refers to the fact that printer advertisements can contain lies: When you see a familiar printer name appear on a network, it could always be an impostor secretly pointing to the address of a malicious device.

    So my first advice stands: Avoid interaction with untrusted or potentially compromised print servers.

    To be clear, when I say “interaction”, I don’t just mean printing to them. I mean any interaction at all. Even just browsing a network for printers could potentially mean your system contacts the devices at the advertised addresses, and receives data from them. This Qualys report doesn’t make clear whether this kind of interaction is safe, so I have to assume for now that it is not.


  • Exploitation involves sending a malicious UDP packet to port 631 on the target, directing it to an attacker-controlled IPP server.

    Okay, so at least until this is patched, it would be a good idea to shut down any CUPS-related process that’s listening on port 631, and avoid interaction with untrusted or potentially compromised print servers.

    Either of these commands will list such processes:

    $ sudo lsof -i :631
    
    $ sudo fuser -v 631/tcp 631/udp
    

    I don’t want to diminish the urgency of this vulnerability, but it is worth noting that “affecting all GNU/Linux systems” does not mean that every affected system is actually running the vulnerable code. Some installations don’t run print services and don’t ever communicate with printers.

    Also, I suspect that the author’s use of “GNU” in that warning is misleading, potentially giving a false sense of security. (Sadly, a certain unfortunate meme has led many people to think that all Linux systems are GNU systems, and the author appears to be among them.) I don’t see any reason to think musl builds of CUPS are immune, for example, so I don’t assume my Alpine systems are safe just because they are not GNU/Linux.



  • Not putting your WiFi password in would absolutely be reliable.

    No, it would not.

    I’d love to hear your ideas on how they’d remotely break into your WiFi Network

    They wouldn’t, of course, nor did I say they would.

    (But since you brought it up, we have already seen internet providers quietly using their CPE to create special-purpose wireless networks surrounding customers’ homes. These could obviously be made available to any company that paid the ISP for access, just as cellular networks have been made available to companies like OnStar. So a TV could do this with a business deal rather than breaking in to your normal WiFi.)

    However, your network is not the only network in the world, and WiFi is not the only kind of link. Neighbors exist. Open guest networks exist. Drive-by and fly-by networks exist. Mesh networks exist (and are already created by devices like Amazon Echo). Power line networking exists. Bluetooth, LoRa, cellular, etc. etc. etc. Maybe you live on an isolated mountain top where these things are unlikely to reach you (at least until satellite links become a little smaller and cheaper) but even that is not absolute, and most of us don’t.

    Unless you disassemble your TV and examine all the components within, and know what they do, it could have any number of these capabilities.

    Also, partly due to how prevalent multi-network support is becoming in electronics integration, it is not unusual for related functionality to be dormant at first yet possible to activate later.

    I’d love for you not to be adversarial, and to learn more about a topic before making bold claims about it in absolute terms.


  • Friendly reminder that gaming console monitors, computer monitors, projectors, dumb TVs, and commercial displays exist.

    Yes, I could hack a smart TV to disable its networking capabilities. (Merely withholding my wifi password is not reliable.) But that would still be showing the manufacturers that I find spyware TVs acceptable, and supporting the production of those models.

    Also, this would be a good time to pressure our legislators into criminalizing this nonsense.


  • mox@lemmy.sdf.orgtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    9 days ago

    It’s disappointing to see that a couple dozen people decided to hit your post with drive-by downvotes, rather than using their words to express themselves in a way that actually contributes to this community.

    Your question is a legitimate one, and relevant at a time when Windows is increasingly bloated and invasive, spyware is out of control, and Linux is increasingly a viable alternative even in certain tough areas like games. I just wish you had elaborated on why you singled out Ubuntu when several other widely-supported Linux distributions exist.

    If those were my only two options, I would pick Ubuntu over Windows, no contest. I would replace its default desktop with KDE Plasma (or just choose the Kubuntu variant in the first place), rip out as much of Snap as I could, update the kernel, and plan to migrate to a distro that I like better whenever I was able.

    For what it’s worth, Debian Stable with a few hand-picked backports and flatpacks suits me well, mainly for gaming and software development. (I’m a bit of an outlier among Linux users who post on social media, though: Having my system be low-maintenance is more important to me than always having the latest features in every app, and I’ve been known to make my own debian packages and flatpaks when something I want isn’t ready-made.)

    Linux Mint, Pop_OS, and Arch Linux are also popular. There are quite a few more.





  • mox@lemmy.sdf.orgtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    12 days ago

    No, it does not. The closest it comes is allowing a PC to take control of a mobile client on the same local network. That might be a convenient way to type with a full-sized keyboard if you have both devices in the same place, but it is not what people mean when talking about multi-device support.

    GP wants the ability to use their account from multiple devices independently. From different locations, not tethered on a LAN. With shared message history, notifications, unread state, identity, etc. That’s what multi-device support means in the context of messaging services.