Tag Archives: Linux

Linus Torvalds reiterates his tabs-versus-spaces stance with a kernel trap

Enlarge / Cans of Tab diet soda on display in 2011. Tab was discontinued in 2020. There has never been a soda named “Spaces” that had a cult following. Getty Images reader comments 57 Anybody can contribute to the Linux kernel, but any person’s commit suggestion can become the subject of the kernel’s master and… Read More »

German state gov. ditching Windows for Linux, 30K workers migrating

reader comments 117 Schleswig-Holstein, one of Germany’s 16 states, on Wednesday confirmed plans to move tens of thousands of systems from Microsoft Windows to Linux. The announcement follows previously established plans to migrate the state government off Microsoft Office in favor of open source LibreOffice. As spotted by The Document Foundation, the government has apparently… Read More »

Backdoor found in widely used Linux utility breaks encrypted SSH connections

Enlarge / Internet Backdoor in a string of binary code in a shape of an eye. Getty Images reader comments 93 Researchers have found a malicious backdoor in a compression tool that made its way into widely used Linux distributions, including those from Red Hat and Debian. The compression utility, known as xz Utils, introduced… Read More »

HDMI Forum to AMD: No, you can’t make an open source HDMI 2.1 driver

Getty Images reader comments 95 Any Linux user trying to send the highest-resolution images to a display at the fastest frame rate is out of luck for the foreseeable future, at least when it comes to an HDMI connection. The licensing group that controls the HDMI standard, the HDMI Forum, has reportedly told AMD that… Read More »

Critical vulnerability affecting most Linux distros allows for bootkits

reader comments 10 Linux developers are in the process of patching a high-severity vulnerability that, in certain cases, allows the installation of malware that runs at the firmware level, giving infections access to the deepest parts of a device where they’re hard to detect or remove. The vulnerability resides in shim, which in the context… Read More »

Convicted murderer, filesystem creator writes of regrets to Linux list

Enlarge / A portion of the cover letter attached to Hans Reiser’s response to Fredrick Brennan’s prompt about his filesystem’s obsolescence. Fredrick Brennan reader comments 96 With the ReiserFS recently considered obsolete and slated for removal from the Linux kernel entirely, Fredrick R. Brennan, font designer and (now regretful) founder of 8chan, wrote to the filesystem’s… Read More »

Stealthy Linux rootkit found in the wild after going undetected for 2 years

reader comments 14 Stealthy and multifunctional Linux malware that has been infecting telecommunications companies went largely unnoticed for two years until being documented for the first time by researchers on Thursday. Researchers from security firm Group-IB have named the remote access trojan “Krasue,” after a nocturnal spirit depicted in Southeast Asian folklore “floating in mid-air,… Read More »

CD-indexing cue files are the core of a serious Linux remote code exploit

Enlarge / Cue files used to be much better-known, back when we all used CD-Rs to make legal backup copies of material that we owned outright. Getty Images reader comments 6 with It has been a very long time since the average computer user thought about .cue files, or cue sheets, the metadata bits that… Read More »

Chinese hackers have unleashed a never-before-seen Linux backdoor

reader comments 7 with Researchers have discovered a never-before-seen backdoor for Linux that’s being used by a threat actor linked to the Chinese government. The new backdoor originates from a Windows backdoor named Trochilus, which was first seen in 2015 by researchers from Arbor Networks, now known as Netscout. They said that Trochilus executed and… Read More »

Password-stealing Linux malware served for 3 years and no one noticed

Enlarge / A digital Trojan horse. Getty Images | posteriori reader comments 51 with A download site surreptitiously served Linux users malware that stole passwords and other sensitive information for more than three years until it finally went quiet, researchers said on Tuesday. The site, freedownloadmanager[.]org, offered a benign version of a Linux offering known… Read More »