I suppose I would avoid connecting to untrusted networks, or avoid opening print dialogs while on them, or uninstall CUPS until a fix is available.

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.

Good question. Please see my follow-up comment.

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.

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.

threat actors backed by Beijing broke into a “handful” of U.S. internet service providers

Which ISPs?

Also, it would Be(e) better to link the original article (archived here), rather than this secondary reporting based on it.

Which KDE Neon download contains the current 6.2 beta?

(I ask because last time I tried to test a beta, none of them did.)

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.

I didn’t know that; thanks for sharing.

(BTW, I think you meant wreaking havoc.)

I don’t care how they estimate their cost in dollars. I think the cost to all of us in environmental impact would be more interesting.

Not to be confused with Khaaan!

SimpleX also loses messages if you don’t pick them up in time. Going on vacation for a few weeks could be problematic, for example.

Just keep in mind that any service that asks for a phone number can also disclose it.

I hope what leaves the Signal client is a hash of your phone number, rather than the number itself. They might even be using salts and expensive-to-execute key derivation functions, to mitigate brute force searches (which are otherwise easy given the relatively small search space of phone numbers). But if compelled, it would be trivial for Signal to change that behavior.

I don’t want to single out a favorite, but one who stands out is Tynan Sylvester. Not just for making RimWorld a good game, but for participating in unofficial community forums, discussing features and flaws discovered by players, and bringing a good attitude. This kind of openness helps improve things for everyone, IMHO. I wish it was more common.

As heartbreaking it is to say this, I have the impression that Hong Kong hasn’t had its own law for roughly five years. Isn’t this really mainland China’s law?

I suppose the people writing the headline have little choice but to go along with Beijing’s way of framing and phrasing things, no matter how misleading it might be.

Let’s hope they also do something meaningful about it.

A few million dollars in fines will not fix it. Making it a felony, convicting and punishing the people responsible (extraditing them if necessary), might.

Discord’s audio and video end-to-end encryption (“E2EE A/V” or “E2EE” for short)

That last bit is a little concerning. E2EE is widely understood to mean full end-to-end encryption of communications, not selective encryption of just the audio/video bits while passing the text around in the clear. If Discord starts writing “E2EE” for short when describing their partial solution, it is likely to mislead people into thinking their text chats are protected, or thinking that Discord is comparable to real E2EE systems. They aren’t, and it isn’t.

We want an E2EE A/V protocol that is publicly auditable

Their use of the word “auditable” here is also concerning. What does it mean for a protocol to be auditable? Sure, it’s nice that they’re publishing their design, but that doesn’t allow independent audit of the implementation that actually runs on their servers and (importantly) people’s devices. Without publicly auditable code that can be independently, built, run, and used instead of the binaries they provide, there’s no practical way to know that it matches the design that was reviewed. And even if code is made available, without a way to verify that the code being run is the code that was inspected, any claim giving the impression that the system was audited is misleading at best.

During the rollout phase, a single non-supporting member being present forces the call to transport-only encryption. The call will automatically “upgrade” to E2EE if that member disconnects.

This sort of thing has historically been ripe for abuse. (See also: downgrade attack.) I hope they are very careful about how they implement it.

The protocol uses Messaging Layer Security (MLS) for group key exchange

Interesting. This makes me wonder if their motivation might be eventual compliance with the European Digital Markets Act. If that is the case, perhaps they also have a plan in the works for protecting text chats?

My early impression, based on what they wrote:

This won’t fix Discord’s major fundamental flaws. However, if their E2EE A/V design holds up to scrutiny, and if they were to fix their problematic language and provide truly auditable client code, the protection offered for audio & video could at least reduce Discord users’ exposure to unwanted harvesting of voice & face samples. A step in the right direction, and a timely one, given that biometric data collection and AI impersonation are on the rise.

@latenightblog@procial.tchncs.de was created ~37 minutes ago.

Their only post violates rule 2, and probably violates lemmy.world rule 8 (misinformation).

Somebody please show them to the door.