This week Stack Overflow's CEO/founder Joel Spolsky spoke to Clive Thompson, the tech journalist who just published the new book Coders: the Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World . "It's a sort of ethnographic history of this particular tribe," explains a blog post at Stack Overflow, "examining how software developers fit into the world of business and culture and how their role in society has shifted in recent decades.

"The official conversation kicked off after a 15-minute tangent on Joel's collection of Omni magazine and the formative role this publication had for both men." Some excerpts: Clive: The question in my mind is, who is interested in this? What gets them bit by the bug so they are willing to crawl over all the broken glass that is the daily work.

Joel: In my time, it was the absolute control. Whatever code you wrote, that's what executed. There was no translation. It wasn't like, well the flour was kind of old, and I tried to make the souffle but it collapsed. Unlike so many things you will try to accomplish as a child or an adult, where you work on something but it doesn't turn out as you expect it to, with code it will do exactly what you told it. Even if that's not what you meant. You might suddenly realize you're obeying me to the point of making me angry.

Clive: The monkey's paw thing. I shouldn't have wished for that.

Joel: But the computer is still being completely obedient.

Clive: That thrill is a common thread I found in my research, from the 1960s through today. I will talk to people in their 80s who worked on machines the size of an entire room, and it's the same damn thing talking to a 15-year-old girl at an afterschool program working on a raspberry pi or P5. There is something unique about the micro-world that is inside the machine, qualitatively different from our real world.

Joel: It's sort of utopian. Things behave as they are supposed to. The reason I put a question mark on that, as programmers move higher and higher up the abstraction tree, that kinda goes away.

Clive: I think the rise of machine learning is an interesting challenge to the traditional craft of software development. Some of the people I spoke with for the book aren't interested in it because they don't like the idea of working with these indeterminate training systems... there is something unsettling about not really knowing what's going on with what you're building.

Joel: I just picked up Arduino a year ago and that was enormously fun because it was like going back to C, instead of all these fancy high-level languages where you don't know what they are going to do. It offered a really detailed level of control. If something doesn't work, you can figure it out, because everything is tractable.
They also discussed the future of coding -- and took a fond look back at its past. Spolsky remembers his first exposure to computers was an interactive terminal system connected to a mainframe that ran FORTRAN, BASIC, and PL/I programs. "Many, many years later I realized there was no way they had enough memory for three compilers and in fact what they had was a very simple pre-processsor that made Basic, FORTRAN, and PL/I all look like the same mush.

"It was a very crappy subset of each of those three languages."

"Debian Project Leader Sam Hartman has shared his August 2019 notes where he outlines the frustrations and issues that have come up as a result of init system diversity with some developers still aiming to viably support systemd alternatives within Debian," reports Phoronix: Stemming from elogind being blocked from transitioning to testing and the lack of clarity into that, Hartman was pulled in to try to help mediate the matter and get to the bottom of the situation with a lack of cooperation between the elogind and systemd maintainers for Debian as well as the release team. Elogind is used by some distributions as an implementation of systemd's logind, well, outside of systemd as a standalone daemon. Elogind is one of the pieces to the puzzle for trying to maintain a modern, systemd-free Linux distribution.

Various issues were raised that are trying to be worked through albeit many Debian developers face time limitations and other factors like emotional exhaustion. Hartman noted in his August notes, "I think we may be approaching a point where we need to poll the project -- to have a GR and ask ourselves how committed we are to the different parts of this init diversity discussion. Reaffirming our support for sysvinit and elogind would be one of the options in any such GR. If that option passed, we'd expect all the maintainers involved to work together or to appoint and empower people who could work on this issue. It would be fine for maintainers not to be involved so long as they did not block progress. And of course we would hold the discussions to the highest standards of respect."

MojoKid writes: Lakka with RetroArch is one of the most comprehensive open-source retro-gaming console front ends available, with support for a wide array of single-board computers and multiple operating systems. Although the more powerful Raspberry Pi 4 was released months ago, the developers of Lakka had a number of bugs to contend with that prevented an official stable release, until yesterday. Lakka 2.3 (with RetroArch 1.7.8) is available now though, and it appears to leverage the additional horsepower of the Pi 4 quite well. It's even able to play some of the more demanding Sega Dreamcast and Saturn games -- among many other retro-consoles, like the Atari 2600, SuperNES, and many others. In addition to the Pi 4, this latest Lakka release also adds support for the ROCKPro64 and incorporates a wide range of bug fixes and feature enhancements.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple released iOS 13 with a bunch of new features. But it also released the new OS with something else: a bug disclosed seven days ago that exposes contact details without requiring a passcode or biometric identification first. Independent researcher Jose Rodriguez published a video demonstration of the flaw exactly one week ago. It can be exploited by receiving a FaceTime call and then using the voiceover feature from Siri to access the contact list. From there, an unauthorized person could get names, phone numbers, email addresses, and any other information stored in the phone's contacts list. An Apple representative told Ars the bypass will be fixed in iOS 13.1, scheduled for release on Sept. 24.

Apple's latest iPhone software, iOS 13, is now available -- but on Tuesday, you'll already be able to download the first update, iOS 13.1. And you'll be able to revitalize your iPad with Apple's software created for its tablets. From a report: Apple may be best known for its hardware, but it's really the seamless integration of its devices with its software that's set it apart from rivals. The company's ability to control every aspect of its products -- something that began when Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple in 1976 -- has been key in making Apple the most powerful company in tech. The company's mobile software, iOS, gets revamped every year and launches when its latest phones hit the market. Starting Tuesday, you'll also be able to download the first update to the software, as well as the new iPadOS software tailored for Apple's tablets. iOS 13 brings a dedicated dark mode, a new swipe keyboard and a revamped Photos app (complete with video editing tools). iOS 13.1 will bring bug fixes and will let you share your ETA with friends and family members through Apple Maps. Siri shortcuts can be added to automations, and you can set up triggers to run any shortcut automatically.

Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) discovered a total of 125 different security vulnerabilities across 13 IoT devices, likely affecting millions of consumers. Help Net Security reports: In nearly all the devices (12 of the 13), ISE achieved its goal of obtaining remote root-level access. The table below shows the types of vulnerabilities that ISE identified in the targets. All 13 of the devices evaluated by ISE had at least one web application vulnerability such as cross-site scripting (XSS), operating system command injection (OS CMDi), or SQL injection (SQLi) that could be leveraged by an attacker to get remote access to the device's shell or gain access to the device's administrative panel. ISE obtained root shells on 12 of the devices, allowing complete control over the device.

Six of them can be remotely exploited without authentication: the Asustor AS-602T, Buffalo TeraStation TS5600D1206, TerraMaster F2-420, Drobo 5N2, Netgear Nighthawk R9000, and TOTOLINK A3002RU. "We found that many of these issues were trivial to exploit and should have been discovered even in a rudimentary vulnerability assessment," says ISE founder Stephen Bono. "This indicates that these manufacturers likely undergo no such assessment whatsoever, that the bug bounty programs they employ are ineffective, that vulnerability disclosures sent to them are not addressed, or more likely, all of the above."

Who should be responsible for maintaining and troubleshooting open-source projects? From a report: When you buy a product like Philips Hue's smart lights or an iPhone, you probably assume the people who wrote their code are being paid. While that's true for those who directly author a product's software, virtually every tech company also relies on thousands of bits of free code, made available through "open-source" projects on sites like GitHub and GitLab. Often these developers are happy to work for free. Writing open-source software allows them to sharpen their skills, gain perspectives from the community, or simply help the industry by making innovations available at no cost. According to Google, which maintains hundreds of open-source projects, open source "enables and encourages collaboration and the development of technology, solving real-world problems."

But when software used by millions of people is maintained by a community of people, or a single person, all on a volunteer basis, sometimes things can go horribly wrong. The catastrophic Heartbleed bug of 2014, which compromised the security of hundreds of millions of sites, was caused by a problem in an open-source library called OpenSSL, which relied on a single full-time developer not making a mistake as they updated and changed that code, used by millions. Other times, developers grow bored and abandon their projects, which can be breached while they aren't paying attention. It's hard to demand that programmers who are working for free troubleshoot problems or continue to maintain software that they've lost interest in for whatever reason -- though some companies certainly try. Not adequately maintaining these projects, on the other hand, makes the entire tech ecosystem weaker. So some open-source programmers are asking companies to pay, not for their code, but for their support services. Daniel Stenberg is one of those programmers. He created cURL, one of the world's most popular open-source projects.

Developers of the LastPass password manager have patched a vulnerability that made it possible for websites to steal credentials for the last account the user logged into using the Chrome or Opera extension. Ars Technica reports: The vulnerability was discovered late last month by Google Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy, who privately reported it to LastPass. In a write-up that became public on Sunday, Ormandy said the flaw stemmed from the way the extension generated popup windows. In certain situations, websites could produce a popup by creating an HTML iframe that linked to the Lastpass popupfilltab.html window, rather than through the expected procedure of calling a function called do_popupregister(). In some cases, this unexpected method caused the popups to open with a password of the most recently visited site. "Because do_popupregister() is never called, ftd_get_frameparenturl() just uses the last cached value in g_popup_url_by_tabid for the current tab," Ormandy wrote. "That means via some clickjacking, you can leak the credentials for the previous site logged in for the current tab."

On Friday, LastPass published a post that said the bugs had been fixed and described the "limited set of circumstances" required for the flaws to be exploited. "To exploit this bug, a series of actions would need to be taken by a LastPass user including filling a password with the LastPass icon, then visiting a compromised or malicious site and finally being tricked into clicking on the page several times," LastPass representative Ferenc Kun wrote. "This exploit may result in the last site credentials filled by LastPass to be exposed. We quickly worked to develop a fix and verified the solution was comprehensive with Tavis."

Password manager LastPass has released an update last week to fix a security bug that exposes credentials entered on a previously visited site. From a report: The bug was discovered last month by Tavis Ormandy, a security researcher with Project Zero, Google's elite security and bug-hunting team. LastPass, believed to be the most popular password manager app today, fixed the reported issue in version 4.33.0, released last week, on September 12. If users have not enabled an auto-update mechanism for their LastPass browser extensions or mobile apps, they're advised to perform a manual update as soon as possible. This is because yesterday, Ormandy published details about the security flaw he found. The security researcher's bug report walks an attacker through the steps necessary to reproduce the bug.

Mozilla has quietly launched a new product for enterprise customers: Ability to buy paid premium support for Firefox. From a report: The premium enterprise support for Firefox costs $10 per supported installation and offers customers the ability to submit bugs privately, get critical security bug fixes, get access to a private customer portal, get access to the enterprise critical issues distribution list, and have the ability to contribute to Firefox and its roadmap. According to Mozilla, it will support Firefox installations as long as they are running on machines that meet the system requirements. Windows, Mac, and Linux based operating systems are listed in the systems requirements so all platforms should be covered by the premium support.

An anonymous reader quotes MS Poweruser: Microsoft's latest Cumulative Update KB4512941 for Windows 10 May 2019 Update(1903) may be Microsoft's buggiest yet, with the update already known for being plagued with high CPU usage bugs* and crippled search.

Now reports of a new bug are filtering in, with users reporting that their screenshots all have an orange tint, no matter which method or app they use to take them.

The issue appears to be related to older video drivers, as updating drivers (or uninstalling KB4512941) appears to fix this problem.
* Microsoft has told Forbes that the spike in CPU usage "only occurs on devices that have disabled searching the web using Windows Desktop Search" -- and that they're planning to release a fix for this update-related bug in mid-September.

An anonymous reader quotes 9to5Google: Like it or not, Chromebooks do have something of an expiration date when you purchase them, namely that one day they'll stop receiving updates. Thankfully, that date is typically over five years after the Chromebook's original release. For some, however, Chrome OS has been wrongly indicating this week that their Chromebook has received its "final update" many years too early.

Just like the Chrome browser on desktop and Android, Chrome OS has four different update "channels" -- Stable, Beta, Dev, and Canary. Each one of these after Stable trades a level of stability for more rapid updates, with Canary receiving highly unstable updates almost every day. People who are bold enough to put their Chromebook on Dev or Canary have been facing an interesting new issue for the past few days. Upon restarting their device, Chrome OS immediately displays a notification warning that "this is the last automatic software and security update for this Chromebook." Of course, if you're seeing this message this week, there's a decent chance that this is not actually the case.

Instead, these final update warnings are caused by a bug in the most recent versions of Chrome OS.

The electric utility non-profit NERC has posted a "Lessons Learned" document detailing a March 5th incident that Environment & Energy News calls "a first-of-its-kind cyberattack on the U.S. grid". While it didn't cause any blackouts -- it was at a "low-impact" control center -- NERC is now warning power utilities to "have as few internet facing devices as possible" and to use more than just a firewall for defense.

puddingebola shared this report from Environment & Energy News: The cyberthreat appears to have been simpler and far less dangerous than the hacks in Ukraine. The March 5 attack hit web portals for firewalls in use at the undisclosed utility. The hacker or hackers may not have even realized that the online interface was linked to parts of the power grid in California, Utah and Wyoming. "So far, I don't see any evidence that this was really targeted," said Reid Wightman, senior vulnerability analyst at industrial cybersecurity firm Dragos Inc. "This was probably just an automated bot that was scanning the internet for vulnerable devices, or some script kiddie," he said, using a term for an unskilled hacker...

In the March episode, a flaw in the victim utility's firewalls allowed "an unauthenticated attacker" to reboot them over and over again, effectively breaking them. The firewalls served as traffic cops for data flowing between generation sites and the utility's control center, so operators lost contact with those parts of the grid each time the devices winked off and on. The glitches persisted for about 10 hours, according to NERC, and the fact that there were issues at multiple sites "raised suspicion." After an initial investigation, the utility decided to ask its firewall manufacturer to review what happened, according to NERC, which led to the discovery of "an external entity" -- a hacker or hackers -- interfering with the devices. NERC stressed that "there was no impact to generation...."

Wightman said the "biggest problem" was the fact that hackers were able to successfully take advantage of a known flaw in the firewall's interface. "The advisory even goes on to say that there were public exploits available for the particular bug involved," he said. "Why didn't somebody say, 'Hey, we have these firewalls and they're exposed to the internet -- we should be patching?'"

Large power utilities are required to check for and apply fixes to sensitive grid software that could offer an entry point for hackers.

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes VentureBeat: Google, which has already paid security researchers over $15 million since launching its bug bounty program in 2010, today increased the scope of its Google Play Security Reward Program (GPSRP). Security researchers will now be rewarded for finding bugs across all apps in Google Play with 100 million or more installs. At the same time, the company launched the Developer Data Protection Reward Program (DDPRP) in collaboration with [bug bounty platform] HackerOne. That program is for data abuses in Android apps, OAuth projects, and Chrome extensions....

Google also uses this vulnerability data to create automated checks that scan all Google Play apps for similar vulnerabilities. Affected app developers are notified via the Play Console. The App Security Improvement (ASI) program provides them with information on the vulnerability and how to fix it. In February, Google revealed that ASI has helped over 300,000 developers fix over 1,000,000 apps on Google Play.
The article also notes that Android apps and Chrome extensions found to be abusing data "will be removed from Google Play and the Chrome Web Store."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For months, security practitioners have worried about the public release of attack code exploiting BlueKeep, the critical vulnerability in older versions of Microsoft Windows that's "wormable," meaning it can spread from computer to computer the way the WannaCry worm did two years ago. On Friday, that dreaded day arrived when the Metasploit framework -- an open source tool used by white hat and black hat hackers alike -- released just such an exploit into the wild. The module, which was published as a work in progress on Github, doesn't yet have the polish and reliability of the EternalBlue exploit that was developed by the NSA and later used in WannaCry. For instance, if the people using the new module specify the wrong version of Windows they want to attack, they'll likely wind up with a blue-screen crash. Getting the exploit to work on server machines also requires a change to default settings in the form of a registry modification that turns on audio sharing.

The latest flaw, which is indexed as CVE-2019-0708 but is better known by the name BlueKeep, resides in earlier versions of the Remote Desktop Services, which help provide a graphical interface for connecting to Windows computers over the Internet. It affects Windows 2003 and XP, Vista 7, Server 2008 R2, and Server 2008. When Microsoft patched the vulnerability in May, it warned that computers that failed to install the fix could suffer a similar fate if reliable attack code ever becomes available. The reason: like the flaw that EternalBlue exploited, BlueKeep allowed for self-replicating attacks. Like a falling line of dominoes, a single exploit could spread from vulnerable machine to vulnerable machine with no interaction required of end users. "The release of this exploit is a big deal because it will put a reliable exploit in the hands of both security professionals and malicious actors," Ryan Hanson, principal research consultant at Atredis Partners and a developer who helped work on the release, told Ars. "I'm hoping the exploit will be primarily used by offensive teams to demonstrate the importance of security patches, but we will likely see criminal groups modifying it to deliver ransomware as well."

The European Space Agency (ESA) yesterday took action to avoid a collision with a SpaceX broadband satellite after a bug in SpaceX's on-call paging system prevented the company from getting a crucial update. Ars Technica reports: "For the first time ever, ESA has performed a 'collision avoidance maneuver' to protect one of its satellites from colliding with a 'mega constellation,'" the ESA said on Twitter. The "mega constellation" ESA referred to is SpaceX's Starlink broadband system, which is in the early stages of deployment but could eventually include nearly 12,000 satellites. Action had to be taken because the ESA's Aeolus satellite and a Starlink satellite were on a course that carried more than a 1-in-10,000 chance of a collision. According to the ESA, the Earth-observation satellite Aeolus "fired its thrusters, moving it off a collision course with a SpaceX satellite in their Starlink constellation." "SpaceX explained in a statement today that it didn't initially take action because of early estimates that the risk of collision was much lower than it turned out to be," the report adds. "SpaceX said it would have coordinated with ESA to avoid a collision once the estimates got worse, if only the paging-system bug hadn't prevented SpaceX from getting an update on the collision probability. SpaceX said it is trying to fix the bug to prevent such mishaps in the future."

An unprecedented iPhone hacking operation, which attacked "thousands of users a week" until it was disrupted in January, has been revealed by researchers at Google's external security team. From a report: The operation, which lasted two and a half years, used a small collection of hacked websites to deliver malware on to the iPhones of visitors. Users were compromised simply by visiting the sites: no interaction was necessary, and some of the methods used by the hackers affected even fully up-to-date phones.

Once hacked, the user's deepest secrets were exposed to the attackers. Their location was uploaded every minute; their device's keychain, containing all their passwords, was uploaded, as were their chat histories on popular apps including WhatsApp, Telegram and iMessage, their address book, and their Gmail database. The one silver lining is that the implant was not persistent: when the phone was restarted, it was cleared from memory unless the user revisited a compromised site. However, according to Ian Beer, a security researcher at Google: "Given the breadth of information stolen, the attackers may nevertheless be able to maintain persistent access to various accounts and services by using the stolen authentication tokens from the keychain, even after they lose access to the device."

Apple has released today an iOS security update to patch a bug the company accidentally un-patched in an earlier release, introducing a security weakness that allowed hackers to craft new jailbreaks for current iOS versions. From a report: The original bug, discovered by Ned Williamson, a Google Project Zero security engineer, allows a malicious app to exploit a "user-after-free" vulnerability and run code with system privileges in the iOS kernel. iOS version 12.4.1, released today, re-patches this bug that was initially fixed in iOS 12.3 but was accidentally unpatched in iOS 12.4, last month. Sadly, Apple's blunder didn't go unnoticed and earlier this month, a security researcher named Pwn20wnd released a public exploit based on Williamson's bug that could be used to jailbreak up-to-date iOS devices and grant users complete control over their iPhones. But while users taking a risk and jailbreaking their own devices doesn't sound that dangerous, a lesser-known fact is that malware operators and spyware vendors can also use Pwn20wnd's jailbreak as well.

"Were it not for third-party components, the August Android Security Bulletin would have been the first report to be released with only a single critical vulnerability found," reports TechRepublic. "However, with the inclusion of Broadcom and Qualcomm components, there are seven in total."

Meanwhile, Forbes reports on what's being fixed in September's release of Android 10: 193 Android security vulnerabilities needed to be fixed, covering a broad swathe of elevation of privilege, remote code execution, information disclosure and denial of service categories. Two of these are in the Android runtime itself, another two in the library and 24 in the framework. The bulk, however, is split between the Android media framework with 68 vulnerabilities and the Android system with 97. All have been scored as "moderate" severity.

The good news is that all will be fixed by the default Android 10 patch level of 2019-09-01 on release of the new OS. Also on the positive news front, the security bulletin update stated that "we have had no reports of active customer exploitation or abuse of these newly reported issues."

Python's End-of-Life date is 129 days away, warns the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). "There will be no more bug fixes, or security updates, from Python's core developers."

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: The UK's cyber-security agency warned developers Thursday to consider moving Python 2.x codebases to the newer 3.x branch due to the looming end-of-life of Python 2, scheduled for January 1, 2020... "If you continue to use unsupported modules, you are risking the security of your organisation and data, as vulnerabilities will sooner or later appear which nobody is fixing."

"If you maintain a library that other developers depend on, you may be preventing them from updating to 3," the agency added. "By holding other developers back, you are indirectly and likely unintentionally increasing the security risks of others... If migrating your code base to Python 3 is not possible, another option is to pay a commercial company to support Python 2 for you," the NCSC said.

The agency warns that companies who don't invest in migrating their Python 2.x code might end up in the same position as Equifax or the WannaCry victims. "At the NCSC we are always stressing the importance of patching. It's not always easy, but patching is one of the most fundamental things you can do to secure your technology," the agency said. "The WannaCry ransomware provides a classic example of what can happen if you run unsupported software," it said. "By making the decision to continue using Python 2 past its end of life, you are accepting all the risks that come with using unsupported software, while knowing that a secure version is available."