Russia's invasion of Ukraine turns up in Mike Melanson's column "This Week in Programming": While the Open Source Initiative's (OSI) definition of open source software is quite clear on the matter — there must be "no discrimination against persons or groups" and "no discrimination against fields of endeavor" — the issue of who should be allowed to use open source software, according to ethical considerations, has long been debated.

Over the last month, this topic has again become a focus of debate as Russia's invasion of Ukraine has led to developers calling for blanket bans by companies like GitHub and GitLab; and to some developers even taking action. Earlier this month, we wrote about how open source gateway Scarf began limiting access to open source packages for the Russian government and military entities, via its gateway.

As we noted at the time, there was a primary distinction made when Scarf took this action: distribution of open source software is separate from the licensing of it. Those points of the OSI definition pertain to the licensing, not to some entity actively providing the software to others.

Since then, discussions around these ideas have continued, and this week an essay by Bradley M. Kuhn, a policy fellow and hacker-in-residence at the Software Freedom Conservancy, argues that copyleft won't solve all problems, just some of them.

The essay specifically takes to task the idea that open source software can effectively affect change by way of licensing limitations. He spent nearly 3,000 words on the topic, before pointedly addressing the issue of Russia — with a similar conclusion to the one reached by Scarf earlier this month. Kuhn argues that "FOSS licenses are not an effective tool to advance social justice causes other than software freedom" and that, instead, developers have a moral obligation to take stances by way of other methods.

"For example, FOSS developers should refuse to work specifically on bug reports from companies who don't pay their workers a living wage," Kuhn offers in an example.

Regarding Russia specifically, Kuhn again points to distribution as an avenue of protest, while still remaining in line with the principles of free and open source software.

"Every FOSS license in existence permits capricious distribution; software freedom guarantees the right to refuse to distribute new versions of the software. (i.e., Copyleft does not require that you publish all your software on the Internet for everyone, or that you give equal access to everyone — rather, it merely requires that those whom you chose to give legitimate access to the software also receive CCS). FOSS projects should thus avoid providing Putin easy access to updates to their FOSS," writes Kuhn.

"Asahi Linux aims to bring you a polished Linux experience on Apple Silicon Macs," explains the project's web site.

And now that first Asahi Linux alpha release is out — ready for testing on M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max machines (except Mac Studio): We're really excited to finally take this step and start bringing Linux on Apple Silicon to everyone. This is only the beginning, and things will move even more quickly going forward!

Keep in mind that this is still a very early, alpha release. It is intended for developers and power users; if you decide to install it, we hope you will be able to help us out by filing detailed bug reports and helping debug issues. That said, we welcome everyone to give it a try — just expect things to be a bit rough.... Asahi Linux is developed by a group of volunteers, and led by marcan as his primary job. You can support him directly via Patreon and GitHub Sponsors....

Can I dual-boot macOS and Linux?

Yes! In fact, we expect you to do that, and the installer doesn't support replacing macOS at this point. This is because we have no mechanism for updating system firmware from Linux yet, and until we do it makes sense to keep a macOS install lying around for that. You can have as many macOS and Linux installs as you want, and they will all play nicely and show up in Apple's boot picker. Each Linux install acts as a self-contained OS and should not interfere with the others.

Note that keeping a macOS install around does mean you lose ~70GB of disk space (in order to allow for updates, since the macOS updater is quite inefficient). In the future we expect to have a mechanism for firmware updates from Linux and better integration, at which point we'll be comfortable recommending Linux-only setups....

Is this just Arch Linux ARM?

Pretty much! Most of our work is in the kernel and a few core support packages, and we rely on Linux's excellent existing ARM64 support. The Asahi Linux reference distro images are based off of Arch Linux ARM and simply add our own package repository, which only adds a few packages. You can freely convert between Arch Linux ARM and Asahi Linux by adding or removing this repository and the relevant packages, although vanilla Arch Linux ARM kernels will not boot on these machines at this time.
The project's home page adds that "All contributors are welcome, of any skill level!"

"Doing this requires a tremendous amount of work, as Apple Silicon is an entirely undocumented platform," the team explains. "In particular, we will be reverse engineering the Apple GPU architecture and developing an open-source driver for it." But they're already documenting the Apple Silicon platform on their GitHub wiki. We will eventually release a remix of Arch Linux ARM, packaged for installation by end-users, as a distribution of the same name. The majority of the work resides in hardware support, drivers, and tools, and it will be upstreamed to the relevant projects....

Apple allows booting unsigned/custom kernels on Apple Silicon Macs without a jailbreak! This isn't a hack or an omission, but an actual feature that Apple built into these devices. That means that, unlike iOS devices, Apple does not intend to lock down what OS you can use on Macs (though they probably won't help with the development). As long as no code is taken from macOS to build the Linux support, the result is completely legal to distribute and for end-users to use, as it would not be a derivative work of macOS.
An interesting observataion from Slashdot reader mrwireless: It once again seems Apple is informally supportive of these efforts, as the recent release of OS Monterey 12.3 makes the process even simpler. As Twitter user Matthew Garrett writes:

"People who hate UEFI should read https://github.com/AsahiLinux/... — Apple made deliberate design choices that allow third party OSes to run on M1 hardware without compromising security, and with much less closed code than on basically any modern x86."

Sophos threat researcher Nick Gregory discovered a hole in Linux's netfilter firewall program that's "exploitable to achieve kernel code execution (via ROP [return-oriented programming]), giving full local privilege escalation, container escape, whatever you want." ZDNet reports: Behind almost all Linux firewalls tools such as iptables; its newer version, nftables; firewalld; and ufw, is netfilter, which controls access to and from Linux's network stack. It's an essential Linux security program, so when a security hole is found in it, it's a big deal. [...] This problem exists because netfilter doesn't handle its hardware offload feature correctly. A local, unprivileged attacker can use this to cause a denial-of-service (DoS), execute arbitrary code, and cause general mayhem. Adding insult to injury, this works even if the hardware being attacked doesn't have offload functionality! That's because, as Gregory wrote to a security list, "Despite being in code dealing with hardware offload, this is reachable when targeting network devices that don't have offload functionality (e.g. lo) as the bug is triggered before the rule creation fails."

This vulnerability is present in the Linux kernel versions 5.4 through 5.6.10. It's listed as Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE-2022-25636), and with a Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score of 7.8), this is a real badie. How bad? In its advisory, Red Hat said, "This flaw allows a local attacker with a user account on the system to gain access to out-of-bounds memory, leading to a system crash or a privilege escalation threat." So, yes, this is bad. Worse still, it affects recent major distribution releases such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.x; Debian Bullseye; Ubuntu Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise 15.3. While the Linux kernel netfilter patch has been made, the patch isn't available yet in all distribution releases.

Amid the ongoing disruption from Russia, some ethical hackers in Ukraine are feeling lost as bug bounty platform HackerOne has allegedly withheld their payouts. From a report: The loss due to the sudden halt is said to have mounted to hundreds and thousands of dollars. A few of the affected ethical hackers -- also known as cybersecurity researchers -- have taken the issue to social media. Some of them have also written to the platform to get clarity on why exactly it has disabled their payments in the middle of the humanitarian catastrophe in the country. Ethical hackers normally earn payouts ranging from tens and hundreds to over millions of dollars in the form of rewards through bug bounty platforms for reporting flaws in various Internet-based solutions. However, HackerOne is said to have suddenly stopped payouts for some Ukrainian hackers.

Earlier this month, HackerOne CEO Marten Mickos had announced, "[A]s we work to comply with the new sanctions, we'll withdraw all programmes for customers based in Russia, Belarus, and the occupied areas of Ukraine." On Monday, he clarified that the restrictions were for sanctioned regions - Russia and Belarus, not mentioning any clear details about the status of Ukraine. "That's a really weird situation," said independent security researcher Bob Diachenko, who has been associated with the San Francisco, California-based platform for the last two-three years now. The security researcher tweeted on Sunday that HackerOne stopped paying bounties worth around $3,000 for the flaws he reported. Alongside stopping payouts, HackerOne has removed its 'Clear' status from all Ukraine accounts. The status essentially allows ethical hackers to participate in private programmes run by various companies to earn a minimum of $2,000 for a high-severity vulnerability or $5,000 for a critical one. It requires background-check for researchers to participate in the listed programmes.

"News of a fresh Spectre BHB vulnerability that only impacts Intel and Arm processors emerged this week," reports Tom's Hardware, "but Intel's research around these new attack vectors unearthed another issue.

"One of the patches that AMD has used to fix the Spectre vulnerabilities has been broken since 2018." Intel's security team, STORM, found the issue with AMD's mitigation. In response, AMD has issued a security bulletin and updated its guidance to recommend using an alternative method to mitigate the Spectre vulnerabilities, thus repairing the issue anew....

Intel's research into AMD's Spectre fix begins in a roundabout way — Intel's processors were recently found to still be susceptible to Spectre v2-based attacks via a new Branch History Injection variant, this despite the company's use of the Enhanced Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (eIBRS) and/or Retpoline mitigations that were thought to prevent further attacks. In need of a newer Spectre mitigation approach to patch the far-flung issue, Intel turned to studying alternative mitigation techniques. There are several other options, but all entail varying levels of performance tradeoffs. Intel says its ecosystem partners asked the company to consider using AMD's LFENCE/JMP technique. The "LFENCE/JMP" mitigation is a Retpoline alternative commonly referred to as "AMD's Retpoline."

As a result of Intel's investigation, the company discovered that the mitigation AMD has used since 2018 to patch the Spectre vulnerabilities isn't sufficient — the chips are still vulnerable. The issue impacts nearly every modern AMD processor spanning almost the entire Ryzen family for desktop PCs and laptops (second-gen to current-gen) and the EPYC family of datacenter chips....

In response to the STORM team's discovery and paper, AMD issued a security bulletin (AMD-SB-1026) that states it isn't aware of any currently active exploits using the method described in the paper. AMD also instructs its customers to switch to using "one of the other published mitigations (V2-1 aka 'generic retpoline' or V2-4 aka 'IBRS')." The company also published updated Spectre mitigation guidance reflecting those changes [PDF]....

AMD's security bulletin thanks Intel's STORM team by name and noted it engaged in the coordinated vulnerability disclosure, thus allowing AMD enough time to address the issue before making it known to the public.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm for submitting the story...

Cognitive Dissident writes: Ars Technica is reporting a major new vulnerability in Linux. Named "Dirty Pipeline" it involves abuse of 'pipes' at the shell level as you might guess.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: New research, published in the journal Physiological Entomology, suggests that the palm-sized Joro spider, which swarmed North Georgia by the millions last September, has a special resilience to the cold. This has led scientists to suggest that the 3-inch (7.6 centimeters) bright-yellow-striped spiders -- whose hatchlings disperse by fashioning web parachutes to fly as far as 100 miles (161 kilometers) -- could soon dominate the Eastern Seaboard. Since the spider hitchhiked its way to the northeast of Atlanta, Georgia, inside a shipping container in 2014, its numbers and range have expanded steadily across Georgia, culminating in an astonishing population boom last year that saw millions of the arachnids drape porches, power lines, mailboxes and vegetable patches across more than 25 state counties with webs as thick as 10 feet (3 meters) deep, Live Science previously reported.

Common to China, Taiwan, Japan and Korea, the Joro spider is part of a group of spiders known as "orb weavers" because of their highly symmetrical, circular webs. The spider gets its name from Jorgumo, a Japanese spirit, or Ykai, that is said to disguise itself as a beautiful woman to prey upon gullible men. True to its mythical reputation, the Joro spider is stunning to look at, with a large, round, jet-black body cut across with bright yellow stripes, and flecked on its underside with intense red markings. But despite its threatening appearance and its fearsome standing in folklore, the Joro spider's bite is rarely strong enough to break through the skin, and its venom poses no threat to humans, dogs or cats unless they are allergic. That's perhaps good news, as the spiders are destined to spread far and wide across the continental U.S., researchers say.

The scientists came to this conclusion after comparing the Joro spider to a close cousin, the golden silk spider, which migrated from tropical climates 160 years ago to establish an eight-legged foothold in the southern United States. By tracking the spiders' locations in the wild and monitoring their vitals as they subjected caught specimens to freezing temperatures, the researchers found that the Joro spider has about double the metabolic rate of its cousin, along with a 77% higher heart rate and a much better survival rate in cold temperatures. Additionally, Joro spiders exist in most parts of their native Japan -- warm and cold -- which has a very similar climate to the U.S. and sits across roughly the same latitude. [...] While most invasive species tend to destabilize the ecosystems they colonize, entomologists are so far optimistic that the Joro spider could actually be beneficial, especially in Georgia where, instead of lovesick men, they kill off mosquitos, biting flies and another invasive species -- the brown marmorated stink bug, which damages crops and has no natural predators. In fact, the researchers say that the Joro is much more likely to be a nuisance than a danger, and that it should be left to its own devices.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: When Erik Johnson couldn't get his university's mobile student ID app to reliably work, he sought to find a workaround. The app is fairly important, since it allows him and every other student at his university to pay for meals, get into events and even unlock doors to dorm rooms, labs and other facilities across campus. The app is called GET Mobile, and it's developed by CBORD, a technology company that brings access control and payment systems to hospitals and universities. But Johnson -- and the many who left the app one-star reviews in frustration -- said the app was slow and would take too long to load. There had to be a better way.

And so by analyzing the app's network data at the same time he unlocked his dorm room door, Johnson found a way to replicate the network request and unlock the door by using a one-tap Shortcut button on his iPhone. For it to work, the Shortcut has to first send his precise location along with the door unlock request or his door won't open. Johnson said as a security measure students have to be physically in proximity to unlock doors using the app, seen as a measure aimed at preventing accidental door openings across campus. It worked, but why stop there? If he could unlock a door without needing the app, what other tasks could he replicate?

Johnson didn't have to look far for help. CBORD publishes a list of commands available through its API, which can be controlled using a student's credentials, like his. But he soon found a problem: The API was not checking if a student's credentials were valid. That meant Johnson, or anyone else on the internet, could communicate with the API and take over another student's account without having to know their password. Johnson said the API only checked the student's unique ID, but warned that these are sometimes the same as a university-issued student username or student ID number, which some schools publicly list on their online student directories, and as such cannot be considered a secret. Johnson described the password bug as a "master key" to his university -- at least to the doors that are controlled by CBORD. As for needing to be in close proximity to a door to unlock it, Johnson said the bug allowed him to trick the API into thinking he was physically present -- simply by sending back the approximate coordinates of the lock itself. The vulnerability was fixed and session keys were invalidated shortly after TechCrunch shared details of the bug with CBORD.

The creator of Apple's Swift programming language stayed involved in the Swift core team and Evolution community... until this week. Though he'd left Apple more than five years ago, "Swift is important to me, so I've been happy to spend a significant amount of time to help improve and steer it," Lattner wrote in an explanatory comment on the Swift community forum. "This included the ~weekly core team meetings (initially in person, then over WebEx)..."

The tech news site DevClass notes Lattner is also "the mind behind compiler infrastructure project LLVM," but reports that "Apparently, Lattner hasn't been part of the [Swift] core team since autumn 2021, when he tried discussing what he perceived as a toxic meeting environment with project leadership after an especially noteworthy call made him take a break in summer." "[...] after avoiding dealing with it, they made excuses, and made it clear they weren't planning to do anything about it. As such, I decided not to return," Lattner wrote in his explanation post. Back then, he planned to keep participating via the Swift Evolution community "but after several discussions generating more heat than light, when my formal proposal review comments and concerns were ignored by the unilateral accepts, and the general challenges with transparency working with core team, I decided that my effort was triggering the same friction with the same people, and thus I was just wasting my time."

Lattner had been the steering force behind Swift since the language's inception in 2010. However, after leaving Apple in 2017 and handing over his project lead role, design premises like "single things that compose" seem to have fallen by the wayside, making the decision to move on completely easier for language-creator Lattner.
The article points out Lattner's latest endeavour is AI infrastructure company Modular.AI.

And Lattner wrote in his comment that Swift's leadership "reassures me they 'want to make sure things are better for others in the future based on what we talked about' though...." Swift has a ton of well meaning and super talented people involved in and driving it. They are trying to be doing the best they can with a complicated situation and many pressures (including lofty goals, fixed schedules, deep bug queues to clear, internal folks that want to review/design things before the public has access to them, and pressures outside their team) that induce odd interactions with the community. By the time things get out to us, the plans are already very far along and sometimes the individuals are attached to the designs they've put a lot of energy into. This leads to a challenging dynamic for everyone involved.

I think that Swift is a phenomenal language and has a long and successful future ahead, but it certainly isn't a community designed language, and this isn't ambiguous. The new ideas on how to improve things sounds promising — I hope they address the fundamental incentive system challenges that the engineers/leaders face that cause the symptoms we see. I think that a healthy and inclusive community will continue to benefit the design and evolution of Swift.
DevClass also reported on the aftermath: Probably as a consequence of the move, the Swift core team is currently looking to restructure project leadership. According to Swift project lead Ted Kremenek... "The intent is to free the core team to invest more in overall project stewardship and create a larger language workgroup that can incorporate more community members in language decisions."

Kremenek also used the announcement to thank Lattner for his leadership throughout the formative years of the project, writing "it has been one of the greatest privileges of my life to work with Chris on Swift."
In 2017 Chris Lattner answered questions from Slashdot's readers.

Respondents to the annual survey of the Rust community reported an uptick in weekly usage and challenges, writes InfoWorld: Among those surveyed who are using Rust, 81% were using the language on at least a weekly basis, compared to 72% in last year's survey. Of all Rust users, 75% said they are able to write production-ready code but 27% said it was at times a struggle to write useful, production-ready code.... While the survey pointed toward a growing, healthy community of "Rustaceans," it also found challenges. In particular, Rust users would like to see improvements in compile times, disk usage, debugging, and GUI development...

- For those who adopted Rust at work, 83% found it "challenging." But it was unclear how much of this was a Rust-specific issue or general challenges posed by adopting a new language. During adoption, only 13% of respondents believed the language was slowing their team down while 82% believed Rust helped their teams achieve their goals.

- Of the respondents using Rust, 59% use it at least occasionally at work and 23% use it for the majority of their coding. Last year, only 42% used Rust at work.
From the survey's results: After adoption, the costs seem to be justified: only 1% of respondents did not find the challenge worth it while 79% said it definitely was. When asked if their teams were likely to use Rust again in the future, 90% agreed. Finally, of respondents using Rust at work, 89% of respondents said their teams found it fun and enjoyable to program.

As for why respondents are using Rust at work, the top answer was that it allowed users "to build relatively correct and bug free software" with 96% of respondents agreeing with that statement. After correctness, performance (92%) was the next most popular choice. 89% of respondents agreed that they picked Rust at work because of Rust's much-discussed security properties.

Overall, Rust seems to be a language ready for the challenges of production, with only 3% of respondents saying that Rust was a "risky" choice for production use.
Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for submitting the story...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch, written by security editor Zack Whittaker: Consumer-grade spyware is often sold under the guise of child monitoring software, but also goes by the term "stalkerware" for its ability to track and monitor other people or spouses without their consent. Stalkerware apps are installed surreptitiously by someone with physical access to a person's phone and are hidden from home screens, but will silently and continually upload call records, text messages, photos, browsing history, precise location data and call recordings from the phone without the owner's knowledge. Many of these spyware apps are built for Android, since it's easier to plant a malicious app than on iPhones, which have tighter restrictions on what kind of apps can be installed and what data can be accessed. Last October, TechCrunch revealed a consumer-grade spyware security issue that's putting the private phone data, messages and locations of hundreds of thousands of people, including Americans, at risk. But in this case it's not just one spyware app exposing people's phone data. It's an entire fleet of Android spyware apps that share the same security vulnerability.

On the front line of the operation is a collection of white-label Android spyware apps that continuously collect the contents of a person's phone, each with custom branding, and fronted by identical websites with U.S. corporate personas that offer cover by obfuscating links to its true operator. Behind the apps is a server infrastructure controlled by the operator, which is known to TechCrunch as a Vietnam-based company called 1Byte. TechCrunch found nine nearly identical spyware apps that presented with distinctly different branding, some with more obscure names than others: Copy9, MxSpy, TheTruthSpy, iSpyoo, SecondClone, TheSpyApp, ExactSpy, FoneTracker and GuestSpy. Other than their names, the spyware apps have practically identical features under the hood, and even the same user interface for setting up the spyware. Once installed, each app allows the person who planted the spyware access to a web dashboard for viewing the victim's phone data in real time -- their messages, contacts, location, photos and more. Much like the apps, each dashboard is a clone of the same web software. And, when TechCrunch analyzed the apps' network traffic, we found the apps all contact the same server infrastructure. But because the nine apps share the same code, web dashboards and the same infrastructure, they also share the same vulnerability.

The vulnerability in question is known as an insecure direct object reference, or IDOR, a class of bug that exposes files or data on a server because of sub-par, or no, security controls in place. It's similar to needing a key to unlock your mailbox, but that key can also unlock every other mailbox in your neighborhood. IDORs are one of the most common kinds of vulnerability [...]. But shoddy coding didn't just expose the private phone data of ordinary people. The entire spyware infrastructure is riddled with bugs that reveal more details about the operation itself. It's how we came to learn that data on some 400,000 devices -- though perhaps more -- have been compromised by the operation. Shoddy coding also led to the exposure of personal information about its affiliates who bring in new paying customers, information that they presumably expected to be private; even the operators themselves. After emailing 1Byte with details of the security vulnerability, the email address was shut down along with "at least two of the branded spyware apps," according to TechCrunch. "That leaves us here. Without a fix, or intervention from the web host, TechCrunch cannot disclose more about the security vulnerability -- even if it's the result of bad actors themselves -- because of the risk it poses to the hundreds of thousands of people whose phones have been unknowingly compromised by this spyware."

In a separate report, security editor Zack Whittaker explains how one can remove common consumer-grade spyware.

"On Saturday, attackers stole hundreds of NFTs from OpenSea users, causing a late-night panic among the site's broad user base," reports the Verge.

"A spreadsheet compiled by the blockchain security service PeckShield counted 254 tokens stolen over the course of the attack, including tokens from Decentraland and Bored Ape Yacht Club." The bulk of the attacks took place between 5PM and 8PM ET, targeting 32 users in total. Molly White, who runs the blog Web3 is Going Great, estimated the value of the stolen tokens at more than $1.7 million.

The attack appears to have exploited a flexibility in the Wyvern Protocol, the open-source standard underlying most NFT smart contracts, including those made on OpenSea. One explanation (linked by CEO Devin Finzer on Twitter) described the attack in two parts: first, targets signed a partial contract, with a general authorization and large portions left blank. With the signature in place, attackers completed the contract with a call to their own contract, which transferred ownership of the NFTs without payment. In essence, targets of the attack had signed a blank check — and once it was signed, attackers filled in the rest of the check to take their holdings.

"I checked every transaction," said the user, who goes by Neso. "They all have valid signatures from the people who lost NFTs so anyone claiming they didn't get phished but lost NFTs is sadly wrong...."

Writing on Twitter shortly before 3AM ET, OpenSea CEO Devin Finzer said the attacks had not originated from OpenSea's website, its various listing systems, or any emails from the company. The rapid pace of the attack — hundreds of transactions in a matter of hours — suggests some common vector of attack, but so far no link has been discovered.
An update to OpenSea's smart contract was scheduled the day before (to remove old and inactive listings from the platform), and the scammer mimicked a genuine OpenSea email, according to The Street. A user who posted the text of the phishing email online explains that the scammer "then got a number of people to sign permissions with WyvernExchange. No exploit, just people not reading sign permissions as normal."

CEO Finzer told Bloomberg that some of the stolen NFTs have actually been returned, with no further malicious activity seen from the attacker's account. "He also dispelled rumors of a $200 million hack, saying the attacker has $1.7 million of Ethereum in his wallet from selling some of the stolen NFTs."

And PC Magazine shares this update about the wallet: CoinDesk reports that Etherscan, which bills itself as "the Ethereum blockchain explorer," has flagged the account that appears to be connected to these NFT thefts. (The public name of which is, fittingly enough, "Fake_Phishing5169.")

Linux programmers fixed bugs faster than anyone — in an average of just 25 days (improving from 32 days in 2019 to just 15 in 2021). That's the conclusion of Google's "Project Zero" security research team, which studied the speed of bug-fixing from January 2019 to December 2021.

ZDNet reports that Linux's competition "didn't do nearly as well." For instance, Apple, 69 days; Google, 44 days; and Mozilla, 46 days. Coming in at the bottom was Microsoft, 83 days, and Oracle, albeit with only a handful of security problems, with 109 days.

By Project Zero's count, others, which included primarily open-source organizations and companies such as Apache, Canonical, Github, and Kubernetes, came in with a respectable 44 days.

Generally, everyone's getting faster at fixing security bugs. In 2021, vendors took an average of 52 days to fix reported security vulnerabilities. Only three years ago the average was 80 days. In particular, the Project Zero crew noted that Microsoft, Apple, and Linux all significantly reduced their time to fix over the last two years.

As for mobile operating systems, Apple iOS with an average of 70 days is a nose better than Android with its 72 days. On the other hand, iOS had far more bugs, 72, than Android with its 10 problems.

Browsers problems are also being fixed at a faster pace. Chrome fixed its 40 problems with an average of just under 30 days. Mozilla Firefox, with a mere 8 security holes, patched them in an average of 37.8 days. Webkit, Apple's web browser engine, which is primarily used by Safari, has a much poorer track record. Webkit's programmers take an average of over 72 days to fix bugs.

As both the Chrome and Firefox browsers approach their 100th versions, what should be a reason for the developers to celebrate could turn into a bit of a mess. From a report: It turns out that much like the Y2K bug, the triple-digit release numbers coded in the browsers' User-Agents (UAs) could cause issues with a small number of sites, Bleeping Computer reported. Mozilla launched an experiment last year to see if version number 100 would affect sites, and it just released a blogpost with the results. It did affect a small number of sites (some very big ones, though) that couldn't parse a user-agent string containing a three-digit number. Notable ones still affected included HBO Go, Bethesda and Yahoo, according to a tracking site. The bugs include "browser not supported" messages, site rendering issues, parsing failures, 403 errors and so on.

Popular video conferencing platform Zoom this week released an important update to its macOS app following user reports about the microphone not being disabled after ending a conference. Luckily, according to the company, this was just a bug that has now been fixed. 9to5Mac reports: Since December last year, a number of users have been complaining about this bug in the Zoom Community (via The Register). According to them, the Mac's microphone stayed active even after ending a Zoom conference -- which certainly raised privacy concerns.

Zoom has confirmed that there was a bug in its macOS app that could cause the orange microphone-in-use indicator to appear even after leaving a call. According to a company representative, the latest version of the app no longer has this problem: "We experienced a bug relating to the Zoom client for macOS, which could show the orange indicator light continue to appear after having left a meeting, call, or webinar. This bug was addressed in the Zoom client for macOS version 5.9.3 and we recommend you update to version 5.9.3 to apply the fix."

Apple has acknowledged an iOS 15 bug that may have recorded interactions with Siri on some devices, regardless of whether the user opted out, according to a report from ZDNet. From a report: The bug automatically enabled the Improve Siri & Dictation setting that gives Apple permission to record, store, and review your conversations with Siri. Apple tells The Verge that it identified the bug shortly after the release of iOS 15, stopped reviewing any recordings inadvertently received, and is deleting info received from affected devices. After discovering the bug, the company turned off the feature for "many" users and corrected the opt-in setting when it released iOS 15.2. As ZDNet points out, this is the reason why you might get a prompt asking for your permission to enable the Improve Siri & Dictation feature once you install the new 15.4 beta or, eventually, its official release.

ExpressVPN has updated its bug bounty program to make it more inviting to ethical hackers, now offering a one-time $100,000 bug bounty to whoever can compromise its systems. Bleeping Computer reports: Today, ExpressVPN announced that they are now offering a $100,000 bug bounty for critical vulnerabilities in their in-house technology, TrustedServer. "This is the highest single bounty offered on the Bugcrowd platform and 10 times higher than the top reward previously offered by ExpressVPN," the company shared in an email to BleepingComputer. The new $100,000 one-time bounty is offered with the following conditions:

- The first person to submit a valid vulnerability, granting unauthorized access or exposing customer data, will receive the $100,000 bounty. This one-time bonus is valid until the prize has been claimed.
- The one-time $100,000 bounty is only eligible for vulnerabilities in ExpressVPN's VPN Server.
- Activities should remain in scope to the TrustedServer platform. If unsure that your testing is considered in-scope, please reach out to support@bugcrowd.com to confirm first.

ExpressVPN also invites security researchers to uncover possible ways to leak the actual IP address of clients and monitor user traffic. The bug bounty program is run through BugCrowd, which offers a safe harbor for researchers who attempt to breach ExpressVPN's servers as part of the program.

jrepin writes: Plasma is a popular desktop environment, which will also be powering the desktop mode on the Steam Deck hand-held gaming console. Today, KDE Community announced release of KDE Plasma 5.24, a Long Term Support (LTS) release that will receive updates and bug fixes until the final Plasma 5 version, before transition to Plasma 6.

This new Plasma release focuses on smoothing out wrinkles, evolving the design, and improving the overall feel and usability of the environment. Highlights include: Overview effect for managing all your desktops and application windows, easy discovery of KRunner features with the help assistant, and unlocking screen and authentication using fingerprint reader. You will also notice a new Honeywave wallpaper, the ability to pick any color for accent, and critically important Plasma notifications now come with an orange strip on the side to visually distinguish them from less urgent messages.

The Biden administration has formed a panel of senior administration officials and private-sector experts to investigate major national cybersecurity failures, and it will probe as its first case the recently discovered Log4j internet bug, officials said. From a report: The new Cyber Safety Review Board is tasked with examining significant cybersecurity events that affect government, business and critical infrastructure. It will publish reports on security findings and recommendations, officials said. Details of the board will be announced Thursday. The board, officials have said, is modeled loosely on the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates and issues public reports on airplane crashes, train derailments and other transportation accidents. The new panel's authority derives from an executive order that President Biden signed in May to improve federal cybersecurity defenses.

The cyber board isn't an independent agency like the transportation board and will instead reside within the Department of Homeland Security. It will have 15 members -- three times as many as the full complement of the transportation board -- from government and the public sector who don't need to be confirmed by the Senate. It lacks subpoena power, unlike the transportation board. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in an interview that the cyber board was intended to draw solutions to future problems from past cybersecurity crises, rather than casting blame where shortcomings are identified.

"Intel will have to defend itself against claims that the semiconductor goliath knew its microprocessors were defective and failed to tell customers," reports the Register: On Wednesday, Judge Michael Simon, of the US District Court of Oregon, partially denied the tech giant's motion to dismiss a class-action lawsuit arising from the 2018 public disclosure of Meltdown and Spectre, the family of data-leaking chip microarchitecture design blunders....

To defend against Meltdown and Spectre, Intel and other affected vendors have had to add software and hardware mitigations that for some workloads make patched processors mildly to significantly slower. The disclosure of related flaws has continued since that time, as researchers develop variations on the initial attacks and find other parts of chips that similarly expose privileged data. It is a problem that still is not entirely solved...

[L]awsuits have been consolidated into a multi-district proceeding known as "Intel Corp. CPU Marketing, Sales Practices and Products Liability Litigation" (3:18-md-02828-SI). And since 2018, Intel has been trying to get them to go away. Twice before the judge had dismissed the plaintiffs' complaint while allowing the plaintiffs to amend and refile their allegations. This third time, the judge only partially granted Intel's motion to toss the case. Judge Simon dismissed claims based on purchases up through August 2017 because Intel was unaware of the microarchitecture vulnerabilities up to that point. But he allowed seven claims, from September 2017 onward, to proceed, finding the plaintiffs' contention that Intel delayed disclosure of the flaws to maximize holiday season sales plausible enough to allow the case to move forward.

"Based on plaintiffs' allegations, it is not clear that Intel had a countervailing business interest other than profit for delaying disclosure for as long as it did (through the holiday season), for downplaying the negative effects of the mitigation, for suppressing the effects of the mitigation, and for continuing to embargo further security exploits that affect only Intel processors," the judge wrote in his order. [PDF]