linux

Google says phone and tablet makers who alter Android's code to add security measures may actually be undermining security. It says device manufacturers should stick to Android's own measures. Jann Horn of Google's Project Zero security team ... specifically pointed to an alteration made by Samsung for the Galaxy A50 phone, which he says contained a bug that made the device vulnerable to attack. He says he discovered and reported the bug to Samsung in September 2018 but it wasn't patched until Samsung's security updates released this month. (Source: blogspot.com ) Ironically Horn believes the ... (view more)

Apple is offering a million dollar bounty to anyone who can successfully hack an iPhone and shares the details. But its limited to specific circumstances that will mean the payout is well worth it for the company. Like several tech giants, Apple ... already had a reward scheme for people who find and report bugs. To date the biggest bounty Apple has offered is $200,000 and only to people who have previously been approved to explore Apple bugs. The million dollar bounty is officially open to anyone. The new offer was made at the Black Hat convention in Las Vegas, the leading annual gathering of ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Sam G. writes: " Dear Dennis, I came across your website while researching a postfix question. I am also a Linux systems administrator. As of late our organization has been bombarded with scam emails from 'hackers' purporting to ... have hacked our email accounts and PCs, and are demanding $800 in the form of bitcoin ('hush money') to keep things quiet. Is there any way to block all emails with bitcoin wallet requests? I would say 9.9 times out of 10, any bitcoin wallet money request through email is a scam. " My response: For the record this same bitcoin scam email is being ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Steve V. writes: " Dear Dennis, I came across your post on screenconnect.com, entitled ' Mono eating too much memory (Linux) ' and am having the same issue. It seems that ScreenConnect is uncontrollably eating memory - for ... example, when I click on client previews, the mono process eats 300mb+ of RAM and will continue to do so for each click. Surely this is not right! At this point I receive 'Internal error' on my ScreenConnect browser control panel (where I can view my clients). Ultimately, /var/log/messages reports 'Out of memory: Kill process xxxx (mono) score xxx or ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Steve P. writes: " Dear Dennis, The company I work for is renting a dedicated Linux web server, which runs CentOS 6.5 and PHPList to manage their mailing list. Recently we were faced with a power outage on the server which then ... caused corruption in the PHPList database. When I look at mysqld.log I see a lot of error messages that 'mysqld: Table './phplist/phplist_usermessage' is marked as crashed and should be repaired'. I checked the database drive for errors using 'e2fsck -n /dev/sdb1' and am getting an error message that '/dev/sdb1: ********** WARNING: Filesystem still ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Todd G. writes: " Dear Dennis, I am using Windows 10 and I have VMWare workstation installed. I have been playing around with a CentOS (Linux) virtual machine for the last few months. When I first created the virtual machine, I ... selected the default size for the operating system which is 8 gigabytes. However, I'd like to create a larger partition because I am running out of space. I am using the Ext4 file system with a logical volume for my primary partition. I tried using gparted to increase the volume size on /dev/sda, but when I rebooted, the 'df -h' command shows that my ... (view more)

Microsoft has unveiled some of the features for the next major update to Windows 10. Among the biggest surprise is better support for the world of Linux. The new features and tweaks will come in an update that's been codenamed Windows 10 Redstone. ... It's expected some time this summer and is planned to be the biggest update yet. Microsoft has likened Redstone to the level of change that came with Windows 8.1, though thankfully this time it will be less about undoing changes in the initial release that went down badly. Cortana & Action Center Overhauled The most visible changes for ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Richard W. writes: " Dear Dennis, I took your advice and purchased Acronis True Image to backup my computer's hard drive (using disk image backups). My question is: how can I be sure the disk image backups are not corrupt and will ... properly restore, if and when I need to do a restore? What is the best way to do a test restore of a disk image backup? " My response: You are not the only person to ask me how to restore a disk image backup -- and it's an excellent question to ask. The simple answer is that you need to run through the entire process of a restore ... (view more)