Category Archives: Operating Systems

Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made

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We will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to.

EFF, where are you?

Source: Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made | Network World

From August 2015

Sudo Flaw Lets Linux Users Run Commands As Root Even When They’re Restricted

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What’s more interesting is that this flaw can be exploited by an attacker to run commands as root just by specifying the user ID “-1” or “4294967295.”

That’s because the function which converts user id into its username incorrectly treats -1, or its unsigned equivalent 4294967295, as 0, which is always the user ID of root user..

Source: Sudo Flaw Lets Linux Users Run Commands As Root Even When They’re Restricted

Computer historians crack passwords of Unix’s early pioneers

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Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie’s was “dmac”, Bourne’s was “bourne”, Schmidt’s was “wendy!!!” (his wife’s name), Feldman’s was “axlotl”, and Kernighan’s was “/.,/.,”.

Source: Computer historians crack passwords of Unix’s early pioneers / Boing Boing

and Ken Thompson’s was “p/q2-q4!” (chess notation for a common opening move).

CentOS 8 is finally here

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CentOS offers a bit of a different take on installing and updating packages. First off, the default package manager has migrated from YUM to DNF. The command structure for each is quite similar, so instead of running a command like:

sudo yum install httpd

You’d issue the command:

sudo dnf install httpd

For more information on DNF, see How to use the DNF package manager.

Source: CentOS 8 is finally here – TechRepublic

Why putting a script in /etc/cron.hourly is not working?

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As you’ve probably seen in the comments to your question, the cronjobs in /etc/cron.hourly (and the other, similar directories) are executed by run-parts. run-parts is a little picky about filenames. By default it doesn’t execute files whose filenames contain anything other than (all of those from ASCII)

  • uppercase letters
  • lowercase letters
  • digits
  • underscores
  • dashes (“minus signs”)

So if your script has a filename of for example “myscript.sh”, it just is ignored, because run-parts does not like the dot.

Source: Why putting a script in /etc/cron.hourly is not working? – Ask Ubuntu

LOL!

How to Free up Unused Memory in Ubuntu/Linux Mint

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In this tutorial, we will see how to use the terminal to clean up unused memory that was not released properly after being used by your system. No need to use any third-party software, just a few commands will do the job pretty easily.

Source: How to Free up Unused Memory in Ubuntu/Linux Mint

Have a little problem with a server freezing which might be memory related.  This simple tutorial was very helpful.

You can free up unused memory under Ubuntu/Linux Mint using this command:

sudo sysctl -w vm.drop_caches=3