Michael Stapelberg, maintains "a bunch" of Debian packages and services, and says the free software Linux distro "has been in my life for well over 10 years at this point."

Today he released a 2,255-word essay explaining why he's "winding down" his involvement in Debian to a minimum, citing numerous complaints including Debian's complicated build stack, waits of up to seven hours before package uploads can be installed, leading to "asynchronous" feedback -- and Debian's lack of tooling for large changes.
The closest to "sending out a change for review" is to open a bug report with an attached patch... Culturally, reviews and reactions are slow. There are no deadlines. I literally sometimes get emails notifying me that a patch I sent out a few years ago (!!) is now merged. This turns projects from a small number of weeks into many years, which is a huge demotivator for me.

Interestingly enough, you can see artifacts of the slow online activity manifest itself in the offline culture as well: I don't want to be discussing systemd's merits 10 years after I first heard about it.

Lastly, changes can easily be slowed down significantly by holdouts who refuse to collaborate. My canonical example for this is rsync, whose maintainer refused my patches to make the package use debhelper purely out of personal preference. Granting so much personal freedom to individual maintainers prevents us as a project from raising the abstraction level for building Debian packages, which in turn makes tooling harder.
There's also several complaints about old infrastructure -- for example, "I dread interacting with the Debian bug tracker. debbugs is a piece of software (from 1994) which is only used by Debian and the GNU project these days." Stapelberg also complains that the "painful" experience of developing using Debian "leaves a lot to be desired," and adds that "It baffles me that in 2019, we still don't have a conveniently browsable threaded archive of mailing list discussions."

"My frustration level ultimately exceeded the threshold," Stapelberg writes in the essay, adding "I hope this post inspires someone, ideally a group of people, to improve the developer experience within Debian." He'll soon transition packages to be team-maintained "where it makes sense," but also "orphan packages where I am the sole maintainer... For all intents and purposes, please treat me as permanently on vacation..."

"I will try to keep up best-effort maintenance of the manpages.debian.org service and the codesearch.debian.net service, but any help would be much appreciated."

"Two popular smart alarm systems for cars had major security flaws that allowed potential hackers to track the vehicles, unlock their doors and, in some cases, cut off the engine," reports CNET: The vulnerabilities could be exploited with two simple steps, security researchers from Pen Test Partners, who discovered the flaw, said Friday. The problems were found in alarm systems made by Viper [known as Clifford in the U.K.] and Pandora Car Alarm System, two of the largest smart car alarm makers in the world. The two brands have as many as 3 million customers between them and make high-end devices that can cost thousands...

Both apps' API didn't properly authenticate for update requests, including requests to change the password or email address. Ken Munro, founder of Pen Test Partners, said that all his team needed to do was send the request to a specific host URL and they were able to change an account's password and email address without notifying the victim that anything happened. Once they had access to the account, the researchers had full control of the smart car alarm. This allowed them to learn where a car was and unlock it. You don't have to be near the car to do this, and the accounts can be taken over remotely, Munro said. Potential attackers could also use the apps' API to target specific types of cars, the security researcher added...

Pandora's alarm system also contained a microphone that would've allowed potential hackers to listen in on live audio, the security company found.
Both companies fixed the issue in less than a week, CNET reports, possibly due to the seriousness of the issue. In a video demonstrating the severity of the bug, security researcher Munro even uses the driver's app to set off a car's alarms remotely. When that driver began pulling over, Munro then used the app to cut off the car's engine. "So simple, so serious," he said.

ZDNet notes that one of the companies had been advertising their "smart" alarms as "unhackable".

Google's bug-hunting researchers known as Project Zero have revealed a fresh zero-day vulnerability in macOS called "BuggyCow." "The attack takes advantage of an obscure oversight in Apple's protections on its machines' memory to enable so-called privilege escalation, allowing a piece of malware with limited privileges to, in some cases, pierce into deeper, far more trusted parts of a victim's Mac," reports Wired. "The trick's name is based on a loophole the hackers found in the so-called copy-on-write, or CoW, protection built into how MacOS manages a computer's memory." From the report: Some programs, when dealing with large quantities of data, use an efficiency trick that leaves data on a computer's hard drive rather than potentially clog up resources by pulling it into memory. That data, like any data in a computer's memory, can sometimes be used by multiple processes at once. The MacOS memory manager keeps a map of its physical location to help coordinate, but if one of those processes tries to change the data, the memory manager's copy-on-write safeguard requires it to make its own copy. Which is to say, a program can't simply change the data shared by all the other processes -- some of which could be more highly privileged, sensitive programs than the one requesting the change.

Google's BuggyCow trick, however, takes advantage of the fact that when a program mounts a new file system on a hard drive -- basically loading a whole collection of files rather than altering just one -- the memory manager isn't warned. So a hacker can unmount a file system, remount it with new data, and in doing so silently replace the information that some sensitive, highly privileged code is using. Technically, as a zero-day vulnerability with no patch in sight, BuggyCow applies to anyone with an Apple laptop or desktop. But given the technical skill and access needed to pull it off, you shouldn't lose much sleep over it. To even start carrying out this Rube Goldberg -- style attack, a hacker would need a victim to already have some form of malware running on their computer. And while BuggyCow would allow that malware to potentially mess with the inner workings of higher-privileged parts of the computer, it could do so only if it found a highly privileged program that kept its sensitive data on the hard drive rather than memory. Project Zero says it warned Apple about BuggyCow back in November, but Apple hadn't acted to patch it ahead of last week's public reveal.

Exploit vendor Zerodium said today it would pay up to $500,000 for zero-days in popular cloud products and services such as Microsoft's Hyper-V and (Dell) VMware's vSphere. From a report: Both Hyper-V and vSphere are what experts call virtualization software, also called hypervisors -- software that lets a single "host" server create and run one or more virtual "guest" operating systems. Virtualization software is often found in cloud-powered data centers. Hyper-V is the technology at the core of Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform, while VMware's vSphere is used by Amazon Web Services and SAP.

With cloud services growing in adoption, especially for hosting websites and crucial IT infrastructure, the importance of both technologies has been slowly increasing in recent years. This paradigm shift hasn't gone unnoticed in the exploit market, where Zerodium -- a Washington, DC-based exploit vendor -- is by far the leading company. In a tweet earlier today, Zerodium announced plans to pay up to $500,000 for fully-working zero-days in Hyper-V and vSphere that would allow an attacker to escape from the virtualized guest operating system to the host server's OS.

Over the weekend, a disturbed Android TV owner took to Twitter when he realized, through the Google Home app, he could access a massive list of random accounts, as well as photos they'd added to their Google Photos albums. From a report: If someone were to click on "linked accounts" while setting your Google Photos screensaver, the Google Home bug apparently showed a giant, scrolling list of users. From there, the bug allowed limited access to users' personal images in Google Photos, which could then be displayed as Ambient Mode screensavers. That is, someone could have theoretically displayed your photos as screensavers on their Android TV without you knowing it. The user who discovered this bug theorized that the list of accounts were other users with the same TV model, but that hasn't been confirmed yet. There's no answer yet on where this bug came from, but Google is working on a fix and has disabled Google Photos screensavers in the meantime.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: Riders in Switzerland and New Zealand have reported the front wheels of their electric scooters locking suddenly mid-ride, hurling riders to the ground. The malfunction has resulted in dozens of injuries ranging from bruises to broken jaws. Lime pulled all its scooters from Swiss streets in January when reports of the incidents surfaced there. When the city of Auckland, New Zealand voted to suspend the company earlier this week following 155 reported cases of sudden braking, the company acknowledged that a software glitch was causing the chaos. The company claims that fewer than 0.0045% of all rides worldwide have been affected, adding that "any injury is one too many." An initial fix reduced the number of incidents, it said, and a final update underway on all scooters will soon be complete. "Recently we detected a bug in the firmware of our scooter fleet that under rare circumstances could cause sudden excessive braking during use," Lime wrote in a blog post Saturday. "[I]n very rare cases -- usually riding downhill at top speed while hitting a pothole or other obstacle -- excessive brake force on the front wheel can occur, resulting in a scooter stopping unexpectedly."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Switzerland made headlines this month for the transparency of its internet voting system when it launched a public penetration test and bug bounty program to test the resiliency of the system to attack. But after source code for the software and technical documentation describing its architecture were leaked online last week, critics are already expressing concern about the system's design and about the transparency around the public test. Cryptography experts who spent just a few hours examining the leaked code say the system is a poorly constructed and convoluted maze that makes it difficult to follow what's going on and effectively evaluate whether the cryptography and other security measures deployed in the system are done properly.

"Most of the system is split across hundreds of different files, each configured at various levels," Sarah Jamie Lewis, a former security engineer for Amazon as well as a former computer scientist for England's GCHQ intelligence agency, told Motherboard. "I'm used to dealing with Java code that runs across different packages and different teams, and this code somewhat defeats even my understanding." She said the system uses cryptographic solutions that are fairly new to the field and that have to be implemented in very specific ways to make the system auditable, but the design the programmers chose thwarts this. "It is simply not the standard we would expect," she told Motherboard. [...] It isn't just outside attackers that are a concern; the system raises the possibility for an insider to intentionally misconfigure the system to make it easier to manipulate, while maintaining plausible deniability that the misconfiguration was unintentional. "Someone could wire the thing in the wrong place and suddenly the system is compromised," said Lewis, who is currently executive director of the Open Privacy Research Society, a Canadian nonprofit that develops secure and privacy-enhancing software for marginalized communities. "And when you're talking about code that is supposed to be protecting a national election, that is not a statement someone should be able to make." "You expect secure code to be defensively written that would prevent the implementers of the code from wiring it up incorrectly," Lewis told Motherboard. But instead of building a system that doesn't allow for this, the programmers simply added a comment to their source code telling anyone who compiles and implements it to take care to configure it properly, she said.

The online voting system was developed by Swiss Post, the country's national postal service, and the Barcelona-based company Scytl. "Scytl claims the system uses end-to-end encryption that only the Swiss Electoral Board would be able to decrypt," reports Motherboard. "But there are reasons to be concerned about such claims."

A group of researchers say that it will be difficult to avoid Spectre bugs in the future unless CPUs are dramatically overhauled. From a report: Google researchers say that software alone is not enough to prevent the exploitation of the Spectre flaws present in a variety of CPUs. The team of researchers -- including Ross McIlroy, Jaroslav Sevcik, Tobias Tebbi, Ben L Titzer and Toon Verwaest -- work on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine. The researchers presented their findings in a paper distributed through ArXiv and came to the conclusion that all processors that perform speculative execution will always remain susceptible to various side-channel attacks, despite mitigations that may be discovered in future.

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft's Edge browser contains a secret whitelist that lets Facebook run Adobe Flash code behind users' backs. The whitelist allows Facebook's Flash content to bypass Edge security features such as the click-to-play policy that normally prevents websites from running Flash code without user approval beforehand.

The whitelist isn't new. It existed in Edge before, and prior to February 2018, it included 58 entries, including domains and subdomains for Microsoft's main site, the MSN portal, music streaming service Deezer, Yahoo, and Chinese social network QQ. The list was narrowed down to only two Facebook domains (facebook.com and apps.facebook.com) after a Google security researcher found that the whitelist mechanism had some security issues. The bug report also contains the original version of the whitelist, with all the 58 domains.

An anonymous reader writes: Apple's new Mac products might have a serious audio glitch for professional users. The company's newest Mac products with its T2 security chip suffer from a software-related bug that leads to issues with audio performance. The issue seemingly affects devices with the T2 chip -- that includes the iMac Pro, Mac Mini 2018, MacBook Air 2018, and MacBook Pro 2018. Although Apple's T2 chip is designed to offer improved security, it's affecting users in the pro audio industry.

As CDM reports, there is a bug in macOS that leads to dropouts and glitches in audio whenever a Mac automatically updates its system clock through the system time daemon. Users have been reporting the issue across a bunch of different pro audio forums for months, and it seems like the issue has never been acknowledged by Cupertino. The issue here is pretty simple to understand, as explained by a DJ software developer on Reddit: whenever the system time daemon automatically updates the system time, it somehow sends a 'pause-audio-engine' message to the kernel, leading to dropouts and glitches in audio.

An excerpt from a report, which looks at the complicated business of funding open source software development: On the surface, the open source software community has never been better. Companies and governments are adopting open source software at rates that would've been unfathomable 20 years ago, and a whole new generation of programmers are cutting their teeth on developing software in plain sight and making it freely available for anyone to use. Go a little deeper, however, and the cracks start to show. The ascendancy of open source has placed a mounting burden on the maintainers of popular software, who now handle more bug reports, feature requests, code reviews, and code commits than ever before.

At the same time, open source developers must also deal with an influx of corporate users who are unfamiliar with community norms when it comes to producing and consuming open source software. This leads to developer burnout and a growing feeling of resentment toward the companies that rely on free labor to produce software that is folded into products and sold back to consumers for huge profits. From this perspective, Heartbleed wasn't an isolated example of developer burnout and lack of funding, but an outgrowth of a systemic disease that had been festering in the open source software community for years. Identifying the symptoms and causes of this disease was the easy part; finding a cure is more difficult. Further reading: How Does Heartbleed Alter the 'Open Source Is Safer' Discussion?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Twitter retains direct messages for years, including messages you and others have deleted, but also data sent to and from accounts that have been deactivated and suspended, according to security researcher Karan Saini. Saini found years-old messages in a file from an archive of his data obtained through the website from accounts that were no longer on Twitter. He also reported a similar bug, found a year earlier but not disclosed until now, that allowed him to use a since-deprecated API to retrieve direct messages even after a message was deleted from both the sender and the recipient -- though, the bug wasn't able to retrieve messages from suspended accounts.

Direct messages once let users "unsend" messages from someone else's inbox, simply by deleting it from their own. Twitter changed this years ago, and now only allows a user to delete messages from their account. "Others in the conversation will still be able to see direct messages or conversations that you have deleted," Twitter says in a help page. Twitter also says in its privacy policy that anyone wanting to leave the service can have their account "deactivated and then deleted." After a 30-day grace period, the account disappears, along with its data. But, in our tests, we could recover direct messages from years ago -- including old messages that had since been lost to suspended or deleted accounts. By downloading your account's data, it's possible to download all of the data Twitter stores on you. A Twitter spokesperson said the company was "looking into this further to ensure we have considered the entire scope of the issue."

The Swiss government is offering bug bounties of up to CHF 50,000 (around $50,000) to anyone who can expose vulnerabilities in its internet-based e-voting system in a test later this month. From a report: In total, 150,000 CHF (around $150,000) will be up for grabs for any white hat hackers who register for the "Public Intrusion Test" (PIT). The Swiss Post system will be open for a dummy election between February 24th and March 24th, the length of a typical Swiss federal vote, during which time any registered "white hat" hackers will be free to discover and report vulnerabilities.

This PIT comes as the Swiss government is planning to expand its e-voting capabilities by October 2019 to two thirds of the 26 cantons that make up the Swiss Confederation. The country has conducted more than 300 trials of e-voting systems over the past 14 years, but current rules limit the amount of electronic votes to 10 percent of the total for referendums and 30 percent for constitutional amendments. However, the expansion plans have been met by opposition by politicians who claim current e-voting systems are insecure, expensive, and prone to manipulation.

Video game publisher Ubisoft is working with Mozilla to develop an AI coding assistant called Clever-Commit, head of Ubisoft La Forge Yves Jacquier announced during DICE Summit 2019 on Tuesday. From a report: Clever-Commit reportedly helps programmers evaluate whether or not a code change will introduce a new bug by learning from past bugs and fixes. The prototype, called Commit-Assistant, was tested using data collected during game development, Ubisoft said, and it's already contributing to some major AAA titles. The publisher is also working on integrating it into other brands. "Working with Mozilla on Clever-Commit allows us to support other programming languages and increase the overall performances of the technology. Using this tech in our games and Firefox will allow developers to be more productive as they can spend more time creating the next feature rather than fixing bugs. Ultimately, this will allow us to create even better experiences for our gamers and increase the frequency of our game updates," said Mathieu Nayrolles, technical architect, data scientist, and member of the Technological Group at Ubisoft Montreal.

The fleets of electric scooters that have inundated cities are alarming enough as is. Now add cybersercurity concerns to the list: Researchers from the mobile security firm Zimperium are warning that Xiaomi's popular M365 scooter model has a worrying bug. From a report: The flaw could allow an attacker to remotely take over any of the scooters to control crucial things like, ahem, acceleration and braking. Rani Idan, Zimperium's director of software research, says he found and was able to exploit the flaw within hours of assessing the M365's security. His analysis found that the scooters contain three software components: battery management, firmware that coordinates between hardware and software, and a Bluetooth module that lets users communicate with their scooter via a smartphone app. The latter leaves the devices woefully exposed.

Idan quickly found that he could connect to the scooter via Bluetooth without being asked to enter a password or otherwise authenticate. From there, he could go a step further and install firmware on the scooter without the system checking that this new software was an official, trusted Xiaomi update. This means that an attacker could easily put malware on a scooter, giving herself full command over it. "I was able to control any of the scooter features without authentication and install malicious firmware," Idan says. "An attacker could brake suddenly, or accelerate a person into traffic, or whatever the worst case scenario you can imagine."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The world's insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a "catastrophic collapse of nature's ecosystems," according to the first global scientific review. More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century. The planet is at the start of a sixth mass extinction in its history, with huge losses already reported in larger animals that are easier to study. But insects are by far the most varied and abundant animals, outweighing humanity by 17 times. They are "essential" for the proper functioning of all ecosystems, the researchers say, as food for other creatures, pollinators and recyclers of nutrients.

Insect population collapses have recently been reported in Germany and Puerto Rico, but the review strongly indicates the crisis is global. The researchers set out their conclusions in unusually forceful terms for a peer-reviewed scientific paper: "The [insect] trends confirm that the sixth major extinction event is profoundly impacting [on] life forms on our planet. The analysis, published in the journal Biological Conservation, says intensive agriculture is the main driver of the declines, particularly the heavy use of pesticides. Urbanization and climate change are also significant factors. "One of the biggest impacts of insect loss is on the many birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish that eat insects," the study says, noting a recent study in Puerto Rico where there was a 98% fall in ground insects over 35 years. Butterflies and moths are among the worst hit.

Apple on Thursday released iOS 12.1.4, an iPhone update that fixes a Group FaceTime bug that allowed users to eavesdrop on each other. The update is a available for the iPhone 5S and later, iPad Air and later, and iPod touch 6th generation. From a report: Last week, Apple turned off Group FaceTime after a bug was identified that allowed iPhone users to call another device via the FaceTime video chat service and hear audio on the other end before the recipient had answered the call. It essentially turned any iPhone into a hot mic without the user's knowledge. Apple on Friday said it'd fixed the vulnerability on its servers and that it'd issue a software update to re-enable Group FaceTime. Apple also apologized to users who were affected and said it takes the security of its products "extremely seriously."

An anonymous reader shares a report: New interface styles and feature improvements are available in version 6.2 of LibreOffice -- the most popular open-source office suite -- released Thursday by The Document Foundation. As with any software update, bug fixes and feature enhancements are present, making this release a significant upgrade, particularly for users coming from Microsoft Office, or working with files created with those programs. LibreOffice now supports SVG-based icons for toolbars in the Breeze, Colibre, and Elementary icon sets as an experimental feature, to better support HiDPI displays increasingly found in notebook PCs. The Elementary icon set was also improved significantly, adding a 32px PNG version, and fixing inconsistencies between the 16, 24, and 32px versions, as well as adding more icons across the set to prevent reverting to defaults. In LibreOffice 6.2, the "Tabbed" interface is now available for Writer, Calc, Impress, and Draw, and is considered sufficiently stable to be a default option. This interface mimics the oft-maligned "Ribbon interface" in Office 2007. The "traditional" Office-style toolbar is default, though the Tabbed interface can be enabled through the "View > User Interface" menus.

Linuz Henze, a credible researcher, has revealed an exploit that in a single button press can reveal the passwords in a Mac's keychain. From a report: Keychain is where macOS stores most of the passwords used on the machine, ranging from iMessage private encryption keys to certificates, secured notes, Wi-Fi, and other Apple hardware passwords, app passwords, and web passwords. A pre-installed app called Keychain Access enables users to view the entire list of stored items, unlocking each one individually by repeatedly entering the system password, but Henze's KeySteal exploit grabs everything with a single press of a "Show me your secrets" button.

While the demo is run on a 2014 MacBook Pro without Apple's latest security chips, Henze says that it works "without root or administrator privileges and without password prompts, of course." It appears to work on the Mac's login and system keychains, but not iCloud's keychain. Generally, white hat security researchers publicly reveal flaws like this only after informing the company and giving it ample time to fix the issues. But Henze is refusing to assist Apple because it doesn't offer paid bug bounties for macOS.

Grant Thompson, the teenager that reported the FaceTime bug last week, will be eligible for the Apple bug bounty program. "Apple's bug bounty system is typically invite-only and limited to specific categories of security flaws, like accessing iCloud account data or demonstrating ways for iPhone apps to escape the security sandbox of iOS," reports 9to5Mac. "It appears the company is making an exception here given the embarrassingly public nature of the case, although further details about the reward have yet to be discussed." From the report: The FaceTime bug that made waves as result of 9to5Mac's coverage last week was actually first reported to Apple by Grant Thompson and his mother in Arizona a week earlier. However, deficiencies in the Apple bug reporting process meant that the report was not acted upon by the company. Instead, the teenager made headlines when his mother shared their Apple communications on Twitter. Their claims were later proved to be legitimate.

Around January 22, Apple Support directed them to file a Radar bug report, which meant the mother had to first register a developer account as an ordinary customer. Even after following the indicated steps, it does not appear that Apple's product or engineering teams were aware of the problem until its viral explosion a week later. CNBC reports that an unnamed "high-level Apple executive" met with the Thompsons at their home in Tucson, Arizona on Friday. They apparently discussed how Apple could improve its bug reporting process and indicated that Grant would be eligible for the Apple bug bounty program.