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Comment Re: Wrong /etc/hosts (Score 2) 47

by paranoidd (#53506869) Attached to: GoboLinux 016 Released With Its Own Filesystem Virtualization Tool
Note that settings files are not overlaid by GoboLinux's virtualization tool. Runner only creates customized views of bin, lib, include, share, libexec, and sbin -- your typical /usr tree. So, unless somebody borrows this idea and apply it poorly on another distro, there is no chance this particular discussion will take place in 5 years from now. :-)

Submission + - GoboLinux 016 released, featuring its own filesystem virtualization tool

Submitted by paranoidd
paranoidd writes: GoboLinux announced today the availability of a new major release. What's special about it is that it comes together with a container-free filesystem virtualization that's kind of unique thanks to the way that installed programs are arranged by the distro. Rather than having to create full-fledged containers simply to get around conflicting libraries, a lightweight solution simply plays with overlays to create dynamic filesystem views for each process that wants them. Even more interesting, the whole concept also enables 32-bit and 64-bit programs to coexist with no need for a lib64 directory (as implemented by mostly all bi-arch distributions out there). The announcement page brings some more interesting pieces of work coming from the 15-years old project.

Submission + - $300 Device Can Steal Mac FileVault2 Passwords (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Swedish hardware hacker Ulf Frisk has created a device that can extract Mac FileVault2 (Apple's disk encryption utility) passwords from a device's memory, before macOS boots, and anti-DMA protections kick in. The extracted passwords are in cleartext, and they also double as the macOS logon passwords.

The attack requires physical access, but it takes less than 30 seconds to carry out. A special device is needed, which runs custom software (on GitHub), and uses hardware parts that cost around $300. Apple fixed the attack in macOS 10.12.2. The device is similar to what Samy Kamker created with Poison Tap.
Music

Ask Slashdot: Hackable Portable Music Player For Helicopters? 158

Posted by timothy from the everyone-should-just-learn-to-hum dept.
First time accepted submitter mrhelio writes "I work for a medium-sized helicopter company; we mainly fly tourists around on sightseeing flights. My company needs help finding a hacker-friendly portable music player for our helicopters. We have a problem with our onboard music players — mostly because it is an obsolete terrible design. The manufacturer has made an updated model, but it's basically the same obsolete design with the same terrible software and user interface. We are worried about spending $1000 per unit on these because the manufacturer will eventually stop making replacement units and then we will be force to buy upgrades for our entire fleet again and get everything recertified. (Any piece of equipment hard mounted in a commercial aircraft has to be certified by the FAA and it takes a lot of paper work, time and money for that to happen.) So we have a new plan: get portable music players like iPods, and plug those into the aux input in the intercom system. We need something that has nine hours of battery life, can hold at least three hours of music, and has remote control options for start, stop, volume, and selecting tracks and playlists, and a display that is visible in bright and sunny as well as dark conditions. The remote control option is the toughest part to find. The pilots need to be able to control the music without taking their hands off the flight controls for safety reasons. There are buttons and toggle switches already designed into the flight controls for these kind of purposes and we have mechanics/ engineers that can wire it all together, but the music player has to support the remote interface in the first place. Our first choice would be to give each pilot an iPod, but Apple is notoriously anti-hacking and anti-open source, plus you have to pay them ridiculous licensing fees to get access to their USB interface. So we are looking for a manufacturer that is open source / hacker friendly and makes something that meets our needs. Do you know of anything that would work for us? Maybe something that runs Rockbox? Should we just break down and design something from scratch like the Butterfly MP3 player?"

Comment It can get more scary than that (Score 1) 349

In Brazil there's an agency called ECAD which already does that. However, the fees can get much higher than those mentioned in the article. Sometimes agents from ECAD show up at weddings and charge a fee based on the number of people attending it, or based on the physical size of the room, or as a percentage of the price paid for the rental of the place where the wedding is happening. It's common to see couples having to pau more than US$ 1k on that.

There are many cases of people who didn't have cash to pay when ECAD agents shown up on their wedding, and who were then ordered to stop the music and the event. They are very frequently sued, but yet they continue to charge that (and get richer).

Hopefully the same won't happen in Canada.
Security

Iran Says Siemens Helped US, Israel Build Stuxnet 300

Posted by Soulskill from the fair-and-balanced dept.
CWmike writes "Iran's Brigadier General, Gholam Reza Jalali, accused Siemens on Saturday with helping US and Israeli teams craft the Stuxnet worm that attacked his country's nuclear facilities. 'Siemens should explain why and how it provided the enemies with the information about the codes of the SCADA software and prepared the ground for a cyber attack against us,' Jalali told the Islamic Republic News Service. Siemens did not reply to a request for comment on Jalali's accusations. Stuxnet, which first came to light in June 2010 but hit Iranian targets in several waves starting the year before, has been extensively analyzed by security researchers. Symantec and Langner Communications say Stuxnet was designed to infiltrate Iran's nuclear enrichment program, hide in the Iranian SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) control systems that operate its plants, then force gas centrifuge motors to spin at unsafe speeds. Jalali suggested that Iranian officials would pursue Siemens in the courts, and claimed that Iranian researchers traced the attack to Israel and the US. He said information from infected systems was sent to computers in Texas."

Comment IBM Long Term File System (Score 2, Informative) 228

by paranoidd (#32531606) Attached to: Recent Sales Hint That Tape For Storage Is Far From Dead
IBM recently announced LTFS (Long Term File System), which allows one to operate LTO-5 tapes as if they were a normal file system.

That's a very exciting technology which allows for the standardization of tape formats -- its specs are freely available in the LTO Consortium website and the implementation has been released under the GNU LGPL (see the LTFS website for links).

Tapes are not dead, certainly!

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