Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, December 11, 2021 – Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: Convincing Microsoft phishing uses fake Office 365 spam alert; Consumer Reports conducted an in-depth test of 16 well-known VPNs; How and why people use password managers; and Senator Doubles Down On Data Privacy, Sends Letter to CFPB.
: “I work on the Go team at Google, but this is my personal opinion as someone who built a career on Open Source both at and outside big companies. Open Source software runs the Internet, and by extension the economy. This is an undisputed fact about reality in 2021. And yet, the role of Open Source maintainer has failed to mature from a hobby into a proper profession.The catastrophic consequences are almost a daily occurrence. Less than a couple months ago, the United States Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency issued an alert about the hijacking of a popular NPM package named ua-parser-js. That project has 6.5k stars on GitHub and has raised a total of $41.61 on OpenCollective. Earlier this week, a severe RCE in a logging library called Log4j2 got everyone, from Apple to Minecraft. As of yesterday, the maintainer who patched the vulnerability had three sponsors on GitHub: Michael, Glenn, and Matt. I could go on and on and on. We’ve all seen the xkcd. Most maintainers fall in one of two categories: volunteers or big company employees.
Sometimes both. Neither model is healthy. Volunteers are doing their best in their spare time out of passion, or because they are (or were) having fun. They feel tremendous responsibility, but ultimately can’t be expected to persevere in the face of burnout, a change in life circumstances (like, having a kid or changing jobs), or even shifting priorities. They also can’t be expected to provide professional levels of performance because, again, no one is paying them and they are well within their rights to do only the fun parts of the “job”. Professionals are expensive for a reason…”
“CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS) employs a unique approach to archiving (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) that was initiated by Stanford University librarians in 1999. Digital content is stored in the CLOCKSS archive with no user access unless a “trigger” event occurs. The LOCKSS technology regularly checks the validity of the stored data and preserves it for the long term. CLOCKSS operates 12 archive nodes at leading academic institutions worldwide, preserving the authoritative versions of 46 million journal articles, over 25,000 serial and 260,000 book titles, and a growing collection of supplementary materials and metadata information. As of August 2021, 66 titles have been triggered and made available from our archive via open access. CLOCKSS participants include 300 libraries and 400 publishers. This secure, robust, and decentralized infrastructure can withstand threats from technological, economic, environmental, and political failures. A destructive event in one location won’t jeopardize the survival of preserved digital content because the 11 other locations serve as mirror sites to back-up and repair the disrupted location’s archive. Another CLOCKSS advantage is that publications are preserved in their original format. When an unavailable publication is triggered, the authoritative version is dynamically migrated to an accessible format via up-to-date technology. CLOCKSS has been designated as a trustworthy repository by the Center for Research Libraries’ Certification Advisory Panel. CLOCKSS received the only perfect score for Technology.”
The New York Times – “…For many organizational leaders, addressing the anxieties of their work force has been the only constant in the R.T.O. process…Return-to-office dates used to be like talismans; the chief executives who set them seemed to wield some power over the shape of the months to come. Then the dates were postponed, and postponed again.
At some point the spell was broken. For many companies, office reopening plans have lost their fear factor, coming to seem like wishful thinking rather than a sign of futures filled with alarm clocks, commutes and pants that actually button. The R.T.O. date is gone. It’s been replaced with “we’ll get back to you.”…
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