The Pi Zero is awesome because it’s so small, but it still requires all kinds of cables and chargers. Over on NODE, they show off how to build the Pi Zero into a USB hub and power supply for an all-in-one computer. Read more…
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Wire a Raspberry Pi Zero Directly Into a Power Supply for a Low-Profile Computer
Long-time Slashdot reader t0qer writes: I’m the IT director at a medical marijuana dispensary. Last week the point of sales system we were using was hacked… What scares me about this breach is, I have about 30, 000 patients in my database alone. If this company has 1, 000 more customers like me, even half of that is still 15 million people on a list of people that “Smoke pot”… ” No patient, consumer, or client data was ever extracted or viewed, ” the company’s data directory has said. “The forensic analysis proves that. The data was encrypted — so it couldn’t have been viewed — and it was never extracted, so nobody has it and could attempt decryption.” They’re saying it was a “targeted” attack meant to corrupt the data rather than retrieve it, and they’re “reconstructing historical data” from backups, though their web site adds that their backup sites were also targeted. “In response to this attack, all client sites have been migrated to a new, more secure environment, ” the company’s CEO announced on YouTube Saturday, adding that “Keeping our client’s data secure has always been our top priority.” Last week one industry publication had reported that the outage “has sent 1, 000 marijuana retailers in 23 states scrambling to handle everything from sales and inventory management to regulatory compliance issues.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Hackers Corrupt Data For Cloud-Based Medical Marijuana System
Windows 10 is installed on 24.5% of devices — but that’s only half the story. “Apple’s Mac share of personal computers worldwide fell to a five-year low in December, ” reports Computerworld, adding that Linux and Windows “both benefited, with increases of around a half percentage point during 2016.” An anonymous reader quotes their report: According to web analytics vendor Net Applications, Apple’s desktop and notebook operating system — formerly OS X, now macOS — powered just 6.1% of all personal computers last month, down from 7% a year ago and a peak of 9.6% as recently as April 2016… The Mac’s 6.1% user share in December was the lowest mark recorded by Net Applications since August 2011, more than five years ago… In October, the company reported sales of 4.9 million Macs for the September quarter, a 14% year-over-year decline and the fourth straight quarterly downturn. Apple’s sales slide during the past 12 months has been steeper than for the personal computer industry as a whole, according to industry researchers from IDC and Gartner, a 180-degree shift from the prior 30 or so quarters, when the Mac’s growth rate repeatedly beat the business average. Apple’s success through 2016 was “fueled by Microsoft’s stumbles with Windows 8 and a race-to-the-bottom mentality among rival OEMs, ” according to the article, which also notes that the user share for Linux exceeded 2% in June, and reached 2.3% by November. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Apple’s Share of PC Users Drops To A Five-Year Low
Windows/Mac/Linux: While it’s gotten easier over the years to make a Raspberry Pi SD card, it’s still a little confusing for people new to the idea of burning images. Etcher is a cross-platform tool that simplifies the process dramatically. Read more…
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Etcher Is the Easiest Way to Make a Raspberry Pi SD Card
An anonymous reader writes: “An attacker going by the name of Harak1r1 is hijacking unprotected MongoDB databases, stealing and replacing their content, and asking for a 0.2 Bitcoin ($200) ransom to return the data, ” reports Bleeping Computer. According to John Matherly, Shodan founder, over 1, 800 MongoDB databases have had their content replaced with a table called WARNING that contains the ransom note. Spotted by security researcher Victor Gevers, these databases are MongoDB instances that feature no administrator password and are exposed to external connections from the internet. Database owners in China have been hit, while Bleeping Computer and MacKeeper have confirmed other infections, one which hit a prominent U.S. healthcare organization and blocked access to over 200, 000 user records. These attacks are somewhat similar to attacks on Redis servers in 2016, when an unknown attacker had hijacked and installed the Fairware ransomware on hundreds of Linux servers running Redis DB. The two series of attacks don’t appear to be related. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Over 1,800 MongoDB Databases Held For Ransom By Mysterious Attacker
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released an experimental version of its Linux-based Pixel OS for Windows and Mac PCs. The OS, originally designed to run only on the Raspberry Pi hobby board, comes with the Chromium web browser and a suite of productivity and coding tools. “We asked ourselves one simple question: If we like Pixel so much, why ask people to buy Raspberry Pi hardware in order to run it?” founder Eben Upton wrote in a blog post . Built on top of Debian, the OS is light enough to run most old machines, provided you have at least 512MB of RAM. “Because we’re using the venerable i386 architecture variant it should run even on vintage machines like my ThinkPad X40 (above), ” Upton said. It’s easy to try out, but Upton urges you back up machines that may have valuable data. After downloading the image, you burn it either to a DVD or USB stick, then enable booting of those devices. You can normally do that by tweaking your PC’s BIOS or by holding the “C” key down when you boot up a Mac. From there, it’ll run the OS with no need to install anything. If you booted on a USB stick, you’ll get the option to run “with persistence, ” meaning any changes or files will stick for the next session. If you’d rather just play around and start fresh next time, you can run without persistence or reset it. As mentioned, you get a full suite of apps and a browser, but unlike with the Pi version, there’s no Minecraft or Wolfram Mathematica because of licensing issues. There are plenty of lightweight Linux distros for older PCs (including Debian itself), or you could use Neverware , which turns your old laptop into a Chromebook. However, the Pi Foundation supplies a lot of useful Linux apps with Pixel, and aims to make it as easy to use as possible. By porting it to desktop machines, Upton also feels “we can more easily see where [the operating system’s] weak points are and work to fix them [on the Pi].” The group thinks it could be a perfect for schools (where the Raspberry Pi already has a big foothold ) to help students learn programming and various apps. The idea is that they can learn at school, then using the persistent boot option, continue working at home with exactly the same setup. As mentioned, the Pixel OS is still in the experimental stages, and doesn’t run on all machines. On his own modern Mac, Upton said, “the machine fails to identify the image as bootable.” They’ll be releasing more updates going forward, but if you’re interested in giving it a try, you can hit announce post to find it. Source: Raspberry Pi
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Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs
New submitter iampiti writes: The Document Foundation has announced a new user interface concept for LibreOffice. Users will be able to choose from several toolbar configurations including the “Notebook bar” which is similar to Microsoft Office’s ribbon. According to TDF, “The MUFFIN (My User Friendly — Flexible Interface) represents a new approach to UI design, based on the respect of user needs rather than on the imposition of a single UI to all users” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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LibreOffice Will Have New ‘MUFFIN’ UI
MalwareHunterTeam has discovered “Popcorn Time, ” a new in-development ransomware with a twist. Gumbercules!! writes: “With Popcorn Time, not only can a victim pay a ransom to get their files back, but they can also try to infect two other people and have them pay the ransom in order to get a free key, ” writes Bleeping Computer. Infected victims are given a “referral code” and, if two people are infected by that code and pay up — the original victim is given their decryption key (potentially). While encrypting your files, Popcorn Time displays a fake system screen that says “Downloading and installing. Please wait” — followed by a seven-day countdown clock for the amount of time left to pay its ransom of one bitcoin. That screen claims that the perpetrators are “a group of computer science students from Syria, ” and that “all the money that we get goes to food, medicine, shelter to our people. We are extremely sorry that we are forcing you to pay but that’s the only way that we can keep living.” So what would you do if this ransomware infected your files? Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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New Ransomware Offers The Decryption Keys If You Infect Your Friends
msm1267 quotes Kaspersky Lab’s ThreatPost: A critical, local code-execution vulnerability in the Linux kernel was patched more than a week ago, continuing a run of serious security issues in the operating system, most of which have been hiding in the code for years. Details on the vulnerability were published Tuesday by researcher Philip Pettersson, who said the vulnerable code was introd in August 2011. A patch was pushed to the mainline Linux kernel December 2, four days after it was privately disclosed. Pettersson has developed a proof-of-concept exploit specifically for Ubuntu distributions, but told Threatpost his attack could be ported to other distros with some changes. The vulnerability is a race condition that was discovered in the af_packet implementation in the Linux kernel, and Pettersson said that a local attacker could exploit the bug to gain kernel code execution from unprivileged processes. He said the bug cannot be exploited remotely. “Basically it’s a bait-and-switch, ” the researcher told Threatpost. “The bug allows you to trick the kernel into thinking it is working with one kind of object, while you actually switched it to another kind of object before it could react.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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5-Year-Old Critical Linux Vulnerability Patched
For the third month in a row the share of worldwide desktop computer users running Linux has been above two percent — up from one percent — according to data from web analytics company Net Market Share. From a OMGUbuntu report: We reported back in July that Linux marketshare had passed two percent for the first time, and that figure remains the highest they’ve ever reported for Linux, at 2.33 percent. But the share for September 2016 was almost as good at 2.23 percent. It’s the third consecutive month that Linux marketshare has been above 2 percent. Those of us who use Linux as our primary desktop computing platform can take a degree of pride in these figures. They do show a clear trend towards Linux, rather than away from it. But we should also remember that statistics, numbers and reporting methods vary between analytics companies and that all figures, however positive, remain open to interpretation and debate. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Linux Marketshare is Above 2-Percent For Third Month in a Row