So, I got malware that seemed to create an hidden proxy or VPN or something when I was online, without me having to install anything. I was on Fedora using Firefox in private mode with Ublock Origin and some script blocker. Ghostery, or Privacy Badger, or something. Fedora has it’s firewall enabled and blocking inbound connections, and SELinux was running. It would occasionally report small things like VLC or Clam AV wanting access to something.

It took me a little bit to realize something was wrong.

I realized it after Google started demanding repeated captcha attempts for everything, I started seeing unsuccessful attempts to sign into my Microsoft account from around the world, and some websites started blocking my IP for abuse. A few times, the blocking page (usually Cloudflare) showed that my public IP was over 240.0.0.0, in the unassigned block. My modem logs showed my machine making outbound connections to these random or impossible IPs at times that roughly lined up with my connection issues.

But if I simply hit refresh on those pages when they blocked me, the websites suddenly returned my correct residential IP address and started working again. I was slow to catch on. Hell, I hadn’t even used my Microsoft account for years, and I assumed Fedora with SELinux would alert me if anything strange was going on. It didn’t. My machine started acting weird, but I couldn’t place my finger on exactly how. I tried tools like Clam AV, or any number of intrusion detection solutions to assuage my growing paranoia. Problem is that they require some knowledge and you have to set them up before things go wrong.

Besides a terminal tool to unhide running processes, which inconsistently returned zero to dozens of unknown short-lived programs with increasingly high PIDs, nothing was detected. I later ran that unhide tool on a live USB of Fedora, and it did the same thing, so I assumed it was a false positive.

Ultimately, it was my fault, I know. I just went on a shady website to watch a TV show. Stupid, but not uncommon. My android phone also started acting strangely around the same time. I assume because I visited the same site to finish some season in bed using Firefox mobile. It’s been replaced entirely now.

But the point is that SELinux didn’t stop anything, I didn’t have to explicitly download or install anything to my machine, and it was some kind of drive-by infection that somehow added my machine to a kind of botnet, I think. Hard to tell just from the various logs I gathered from my machine and modem.

I don’t know what it was doing, but when I finally put all the pieces together, I completely wiped the drive in that machine, including a long dd operation on the drives with /dev/random. Still not sure what I’m going to do with it.

I’m also not sure if the infection was limited to Firefox itself, or if my entire machine was compromised. I may never know for sure.

While I was being stupid, I wasn’t being completely reckless and just running untrusted code from strange places. I watched TV in Firefox’s embedded video player. All it took was going to a website that I found by other people recommending it on social media. I should have known better, but I’m human.

If I can’t even visit a webpage without getting invisible botnet malware that escapes professionally configured tools like SELinux on Fedora, then how are complete newbies, or kids, or grandparents, or “know just enough to be dangerous nerds” (like me) supposed to be safe?

I agree that the user is the single biggest point of failure in security, and should be mindful. But when you’re not installing random Github packages, or turning off your firewall, or enabling SSH, and your machine can still get so easily pwned, what then?

That’s the value of anti-virus software. Yeah, it’s not perfect, but neither is your list of rules to follow. There is no single perfect approach, and people are lazy, impulsive, and sometimes drunkenly want to watch Breaking Bad. I don’t know what the solution is, but outright denying everyday antivirus seems… unwise, I guess?

Even if if takes a month for the vendor to be able to detect it, that’s still protection for anyone who comes after. It doesn’t have to be perfect to make a positive difference.

And, no: For anyone curious, I’m not going into more detail about the website.

Or even a criminal organization.

I’m pretty sure it was Debian in the early aughts.

Nice!

Needs the unified menu for the active/maximized window at the top. Else, it’s perfect.

Linux already won years ago. Linux won so thoroughly that Windows 10 includes a Linux subsystem, almost every supercomputer runs Linux or BSD, and the majority of all mobile devices use the Linux kernel.

Not too bad for a bunch of nerds sharing code. :)

Instead of each frame of animation being a grid of pixels, each frame is a small collection of math describing the visuals.

But we’d still have frames to use for animation, if we want.

Instead of replacing one PNG for another PNG to make the illusion of movement, we replace one SVG with one SVG instead.

I’m okay with being wrong, it just means I’m less wrong in the future. Thank you for the info.

I’m still following an open bug report from a year ago where the desktop does weird stuff with AMD GPUs, like randomly scramble graphics or unmap half the screen for no reason.

Oh no, I got you. I was kind of looking at if from another angle.

You normally can’t buy a machine with desktop Linux pre-installed, but you can with ChromeOS. Despite that, Linux has a bigger market share. I think part of the reason why is specifically because ChromeOS is so limited and intrinsically tied to Google, that people who do things like install new OSes avoid it like the plague. Google’s push to satisfiy shareholders and build walled gardens is the reason their desktop OS isn’t being used.

I’ve installed Android in virtual machines and played with x86 builds on bare metal. I’ve installed Linux on Macbooks, desktops, servers, and handhelds. I’ve tried out BSD on network shares and other little devices. I’ve never done anything like that with ChromeOS. It holds zero appeal to me, despite being easily purchasable at a retail store.

Not gonna lie, I’ve submitted tiny feature requests to the dev team for Cinnamon and Mate before. One or two of them got implemented, and I was so … happy? proud? idk

I was such a cool feeling though. Being able to participate is very underrated.

I use Gnome 3 because of Comic-like tiling extensions, lack of random bugs and crashes (looking at you my beloved KDE), and because so many apps require GTK that it almost always gets installed by something I want to use.

I dislike using it because SO MANY features and quality of life things were removed and never reintroduced. Like, I have to make a custom bookmark for root or my Desktop folder in Nautilus, and can’t remove the default ones that I never use. Creating symlinks is disabled by default. I have to go to “other locations” and manually type in a network address because you can’t even type in the ADDRESS BAR. If too many windows are open on a tiled workspace, the lack of any reserved clickable space on the titlebar means Nautilus gets squished and I can’t drag and move a window without either moving something else first, opening the overview, or using the keyboard. Not entirely the Gnome team’s fault, but it’s little oversights like that which make the desktop a pain to use. The awful “classic mode” application menu with no ability to search or right click on entries for more options is a good example too. I have to open the mobile-like workspaces view or whatever its call to do that stuff now. I’m not on mobile, this is a desktop.

It’s like they’re trying to force me to use their cursor/touch based UX in some ways, but in others I have to use a keyboard or dig in the settings to do anything. Or maybe they’re just of the opinion that if people want features, someone will volunteer to make and maintain an extension to enable them.

Don’t get me wrong, Gnome 3 is impressive, looks good, and is generally simple to use, but I end up trying to spend so much time working around its intentional limitations, that I start to hate it a little more every day. I use it begrudgingly, waiting for something better to come along. If I was a smarter person with more time, I’d try to help the project with these papercuts, but my coding skills are crap.

But, just so I’m not beating up on them for no good reason, I’ll add that there are a ton of very nice things they created or implemented that I enjoy. The quick settings menu comes to mind; and the settings app in general is very nice.

I think the Gnome devs made a lot of good choices. I just wish they could have done so without removing so many features or trying to force a paradigm change in how I use my computer. I appreciate their work, I really do, but damn…

I love the idea of the Pinenote, but could never afford one.

Not sure, but I’ll say that if you use ChromeOS, you’re much more likely to buy special hardware (Chromebooks) to run it on. Not many people download ChromeOS to run on their pre-existing computers. But you can just slap Linux on a toaster if you really want to. Even more, Valve’s Steam Deck comes with Linux by default, and that’s basically a desktop with touch and gamepad controls in mind.

I just wish the culture around open source gave more back to the people working on the software, even if it was just businesses. I think we’d see even more delevopment and support if the one guy making a critical driver for some obscure device that only power plants use, could take a vacation or quit his day job.

People around the world depend on open source being freely available and shareable. But if you’re making millions of dollars a year, I think it’s only fair to give some money to the people making your profit possible.

Huh, kind of wish there was a column with a few words on why each one was blocked. Kind of curious about them, but don’t want to get myself put on a list by visiting the wrong server, you know?

Thanks everyone for the server and service. It’s appreciated. If I wasn’t broke and jobless at the moment, I’d be happy to kick over some monthly money on Patreon or Kofi or whatever people are using these days.

Voyager on Android seems to be working fine. 👍

It also tried to save space with auto hiding the sidebar and using global menus built into the panel, instead of having a panel and then a titlebar.

The far future: A man sits at a table, staring at a floating hologram display. He watches as an indecipherable block of alphanumeric characters wiggles and splits into two segments. He nods slowly.

He takes a breath and closes his eyes, broadcasting a message to everyone on duty that day.

“Merge the request. Tell Linus#3418 that Wayland is now the default display manager.”

Well, they’re still working in Wayland support as far as I know. Some windows have double title bars for some reason, or extra large invisible borders. I have a portrait rotated monitor, and had trouble with wallpapers in general.

It was basically a bunch of little stuff like that, nothing major as far as I remember.

Well, they’re still working in Wayland support as far as I know. Some windows have double title bars for some reason, or extra large invisible borders. I have a portrait rotated monitor, and had trouble with wallpapers in general.

It was basically a bunch of little stuff like that, nothing major as far as I remember.