Another Day at the Office- Google Lies to Congress

The Goog is in trouble. Read the article for only minor horrors about how the Fair and Balanced search engine works, and how many fingers are on the results you see. Yet another reason to use Duckduckgo. You can tell goog is important because they've already lied to Congress.


Researchers found 146 vulnerabilities in various android firmwares....
Plus the updates your carrier 'forgot' to send you....


Yippee! The PinePhone is now available for pre-order!
This version is for early adopters. $149 is so tempting....
You should also research your intended linux phone distro.


Manipulating text with grep
Go grep yourself.


Malware attack drops double remote access trojan in Windows to steal Chrome and Firefox browser data.

The Jesus Ransomware

No, seriously... someone's working on it. The file extension is .jc

While the article said this much, it didn't mention what it did after it infected the computer.

Let me guess... it puts ten rules onscreen....

1. Thou shalt have no other processors before me
2. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's RAM
3. Thou shalt not not lay with Macs
4. In order to decripteth, thou shalt require 17 bitcoins and the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch
5. Thou shalt not overclock, unlessith thou cooleth properly
6. Thou shalt not take the name of Linus Torvalds in vain
7. Remember Black Friday sales, and keep them holy
8. Thou shalt not steal CPU cycles for pictures of kitties
9. Honor thy processors that came before
10. If thou art bored, thou can get in some coveting of thy neighbor's wife's ass

Infection vector: clicking on a link in an email from A. Priest.

Damage: adds .jc extension to all the new little files, marks files Saved.

Repair: when repair is threatened, ransomware moves the infection to a different computer, in a different country; pretends nothing happened.

Oopsie - Faceyspaces did it again.
A bug in the app accesses the iPhone's camera while the user scrolls through News Feed.

Reached for comment, Faceyspaces confirmed the bug was "inadvertently introduced" and promised a fix was in the works.

"Inadvertently introduced" - the same way impeachment was inadvertently introduced.

• An oopherectomy is getting rid of ovaries. An uberectomy is getting rid of a car service that will either rape or kill you.

Bad Intel drivers give hackers a backdoor to the Windows kernel.
Patch yer damn computers.


As if it weren't enough that Google is after every possible piece of information it can get, it just went into healthcare. As if healthcare wasn't enough, it's now in banking, via checking accounts. Early next year, it will start monitoring air and change its name to Cyberdyne Systems. In response to the rapid growth, Google has decided to drop its privacy policy, beacause.. you know... Google.




How about a video on a DDOS attack?
Warning: don't click the link if you aren't interested.



I just get done mentioning the PinePhone, and here's an article, with it running KDE's OS.  This is Big News<tm>. No Google. No Apple. Open source hardware and the linux phone platform you choose. I'm going to wait for the next generation, which will hopefully have more horsepower. Or maybe I won't....



McAfee Antivirus lets hackers execute arbitrary code and escalate system privilege.  It was patched, but make sure your system is ok and that it was patched.


Newer Intel CPUs vulnerable to variant 2 of ZombieLoad attack.
Just in case your CPU wasn't vulnerable to the first version, here's your attack.
Here's further info on MDS, the hardware vulnerability.
These guys found the initial processor loophole.
These guys find themselves too busy singing to deal with vulnerabilities.



And because you just haven't had enough of today's shit show of vulnerabilities, your Trusted Platform Module may leak your VPN server's private key.




Aside from that, it was a pretty good day.

Pinebooks are comin'

I've written before about the Pinebook, the $199 laptop.

There are many pros and cons, if you read the reviews, but for $199, you get a functional laptop. The second batch went out to customers and they are naturally posting unboxing videos, because if you don't post video of you physically opening a box, you never got the box or what was supposed to be inside it.

At the price, it's almost a throwaway. I'm tempted, especially because you can't get a tablet for that little. I urge you to read the reviews, forum, and all of the specs before you say or do anything.  Understand that this is a 64 bit ARM processor.  There's also a linux-only open source hardware phone, to be available for pre-order. It's compatible with all major linux phone project software. In other words, buy the phone, install your favorite OS. I'm watching this project carefully.



So do you, for some strange reason, have an iDevice and run MS Office?
Be careful because it turns out that when you disable the macros, they aren't disabled. Aside from that, I'm sure Office is every bit as lovely as it is on Windows systems.



Popular period tracking apps share your sexual health data with Faceyspaces. Read about how this came to be and what, if anything, is being done about it.

Told you so.



The CEO of Foursquare has called on Congress to regulate the location data industry.  Next week, oil companies are going to call on Congress to regulate them too.  My question is whether the gentleman has already made the adjustments he asks for to his own company (the article doesn't say).

My suggestion: run your company the way you ask and encourage other companies to also. Because you don't need tech-illiterate, overreaching blowhards to legislate things for you. In fact, it's in your best interests to self-regulate, because you have no idea what will happen when the tech-illiterates 'help' you with regulation. Unless they're already in your pocket.




Happy weekend.