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Russia to Spend $646 Million to Block VPNs, Forbes Reports Tuesday, September 10, 2024 in Internet   1 Comment Russia’s communications watchdog Roskomnadzor plans to spend 59 billion rubles ($644 million) over the next five years to upgrade its internet traffic-filtering capabilities, the Russian edition of Forbes reported on Tuesday. The money will be used to upgrade hardware used to filter internet traffic, as well as block or slow down certain resources, Forbes reported, citing documents. Russia passed a law in 2019 to enable the country to cut itself off entirely from the internet, in what it calls a campaign to maintain its digital sovereignty. Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin forced out several foreign social media and internet companies, although many services remain accessible via virtual private networks, or VPNs. The system upgrades will allow Russian authorities to better restrict access to VPNs, according to the document. New equipment has been purchased yearly since 2020 as traffic volumes grow, Roskomnadzor’s press service said, according to Forbes. The Biden administration recently hosted representatives of several major tech companies, including Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Microsoft Corp., to discuss government-funded internet censorship evasion tools, Reuters reported last week. finance.yahoo.com

The most secure browser in the world is 15 years old Sunday, October 1, 2023 in Internet   No Comments From its humble beginnings as a one-man project from a basement in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, DuckDuckGo has grown to become one of the most respected privacy focused browsers in the world. Starting as a search engine, its aim from the outset was to challenge the dominance in the space by the likes of Google and, in the words of its founder and CEO, Gabriel Weinberg, "offer a user-centric alternative." With the company now celebrating its 15th birthday, Weinberg has outlined DuckDuckGo's journey to becoming a popular browser choice for those concerned with their online privacy, as well as what he thinks the future has in store for the internet and its users. Privacy first DuckDuckGo was launched in 2008, before, as Weinberg puts it, "the world had started to realize the scary power and creepy surveillance of companies like Google and Facebook." Although progress was slow, he notes that 2011 was the real breakout year for DuckDuckGo, expanding the team with new members who continue to work at the firm to this day. This was also when the "vision to raise the standard of trust online" was established. Privacy-focused browsers, although gaining popularity, still appear to be struggling as compared to the likes of Google Chrome and Apple's Safari, which are pretty much the default choices for many. This is despite the privacy issues such browsers have, indicating that perhaps people are still willing to sacrifice some of their privacy for the sake of convenience. However, Weinberg is bullish about his own company, saying that DuckDuckGo is a, "healthy, profitable company that protects user privacy, instead of exploiting it." Furthermore, he believes that people's concerns about their own privacy online is what "what fuels our growth." He cites a recent study from Forrester as evidence, which found that nearly 90% of US adults, “use at least one privacy- or security-protecting tool online.” Weinberg claims that the DuckDuckGo browser and its extensions have been downloaded over a quarter of a billion times, and Cloudflare puts its search engine at number two for mobile users third overall in the US, UK, Canada, Germany, France, India, Australia, Canada, and others. And looking ahead, Weinberg only sees the desire to make the switch growing, as big tech companies like Google and others commit "ever-increasing exploitation of personal data." He also believes that DuckDuckGo offers a simple and easy way for users to protect their online privacy, with the company being, "laser-focused on our product vision of being the “easy button” for privacy." However, things aren't so straightforward in the world of online privacy. Last year, a spat between DuckDuckGo and one of its main rivals, Brave, took place over the former's supposed allowance of Microsoft trackers. The altercation involved some deeper technicalities, but ultimately a company spokesperson defended DuckDuckGo, saying that the issue referred to "ad clicks only, which is protected in our agreement with Microsoft as strictly non-profiling (private)... these ads are privacy protected." Weinberg did concede, though, that, "unfortunately our Microsoft search syndication agreement prevents us from doing more to Microsoft-owned properties. However, we have been continually pushing and expect to be doing more soon." Similar sentiments were echoed by Weinberg throughout the company's anniversary blog post, citing continual push to improve privacy protections for its users, and assuring them with, "the simple promise laid out in our Privacy Policy: we don’t track you." msn.com

After 28 Years, Microsoft Announces it Will Remove WordPad From Windows Sunday, September 3, 2023 in Software   No Comments RIP, WordPad Microsoft has quietly revealed that WordPad, the basic word processor that’s been included with Windows since 1995, is being retired. “WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows,” the Deprecated features for Windows client page on Microsoft Learn notes in a September 1, 2023 addition. “We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt.” There’s no reason to be outraged by this decision, as WordPad has been out-of-date for years and is barely usable for its intended purpose, which was to replace to view and edit rich text files (RTF, or *.rtf). WordPad was introduced in Windows 95 as a replacement for Write, which was bundled with all previous Windows versions dating back to the original in 1985, and it had two major updates over the years: the ability to open Microsoft Word documents in Windows XP (2001) and a ribbon user interface in Windows 7 (2009). There were other updates, of course, but WordPad looks anachronistic in modern Windows versions, like some vestigial reminder of the past. And while Microsoft’s advice to use Microsoft Word instead seems a bit off-base, given that Word is a paid product, RTF is rarely used these days, and anyone can access the web versions of Word for free if needed. Anyway, it’s interesting that Microsoft revealed this deprecation separately from any major Windows version, though that’s not entirely unique for minor features. And the timing of its removal is unclear. As an example, Cortana was deprecated back in 2021 alongside Skype, but it was only made non-functional about a month ago and still hasn’t been removed from Windows. (Microsoft also recently announced that it was deprecating some obscure Edge features recently.) www.thurrott.com

The End of Computer Magazines in America Friday, April 21, 2023 in Computer   No Comments With Maximum PC and MacLife’s abandonment of print, the dead-tree era of computer journalism is officially over. It lasted almost half a century—and was quite a run. The April issues of Maximum PC and MacLife are currently on sale at a newsstand near you—assuming there is a newsstand near you. They’re the last print issues of these two venerable computer magazines, both of which date to 1996 (and were originally known, respectively, as Boot and MacAddict). Starting with their next editions, both publications will be available in digital form only. But I’m not writing this article because the dead-tree versions of Maximum PC and MacLife are no more. I’m writing it because they were the last two extant U.S. computer magazines that had managed to cling to life until now. With their abandonment of print, the computer magazine era has officially ended. It is possible to quibble with this assertion. 2600: The Hacker Quarterly has been around since 1984 and can accurately be described as a computer magazine, but the digest-sized publication has the production values of a fanzine and the content bears little resemblance to the slick, consumery computer mags of the past. Linux Magazine (originally the U.S. edition of a German publication) and its more technical sibling publication Admin also survive. Then again, if you want to quibble, Maximum PC and MacLife may barely have counted as U.S. magazines at the end; their editorial operations migrated from the Bay Area to the UK at some point in recent years when I wasn’t paying attention. (Both were owned by Future, a large British publishing firm.) Still, I’m declaring the demise of these two dead-tree publications as the end of computer magazines in this country. Back when I was the editor-in-chief of IDG’s PC World, a position I left in 2008, we considered Maximum PC to be a significant competitor, especially on the newsstand. Our sister publication Macworld certainly kept an eye on MacLife. Even after I moved on to other types of tech journalism, I occasionally checked in on our erstwhile rivals, marveling that they somehow still existed after so many other computer magazines had gone away. I take the loss personally, and not just because computer magazines kept me gainfully employed from 1991-2008. As a junior high student and Radio Shack TRS-80 fanatic, I bought my first computer magazine in late 1978, three years after Byte invented the category. It was an important enough moment in my life that I can tell you what it was (the November-December 1978 issue of Creative Computing) and where I got it (Harvard Square’s Out of Town News, the same newsstand that had Microsoft-is-set-to-close/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">played a critical role in the founding of Microsoft just four years earlier). Even before I purchased that Creative Computing, our mailman had misdelivered a neighbor’s copy of Byte to our house, an error I welcomed and did not attempt to correct. From the moment I discovered computer magazines, I loved them almost as much as I loved computers, which is why I ended up working in the field for so long. www.technologizer.com

Researchers unearth Windows backdoor that’s unusually stealthy Friday, February 17, 2023 in Security   No Comments Frebniis abuses Microsoft IIS to smuggle malicious commands in web traffic. Researchers have discovered a clever piece of malware that stealthily exfiltrates data and executes malicious code from Windows systems by abusing a feature in Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS). IIS is a general-purpose web server that runs on Windows devices. As a web server, it accepts requests from remote clients and returns the appropriate response. In July 2021, network intelligence company Netcraft said there were 51.6 million instances of IIS spread across 13.5 million unique domains. IIS offers a feature called Failed Request Event Buffering that collects metrics and other data about web requests received from remote clients. Client IP addresses and port and HTTP headers with cookies are two examples of the data that can be collected. FREB helps administrators troubleshoot failed web requests by retrieving ones meeting certain criteria from a buffer and writing them to disk. The mechanism can help determine the cause of 401 or 404 errors or isolate the cause of stalled or aborted requests. Criminal hackers have figured out how to abuse this FREB feature to smuggle and execute malicious code into protected regions of an already compromised network. The hackers can also use FREB to exfiltrate data from the same protected regions. Because the technique blends in with legitimate eeb requests, it provides a stealthy way to further burrow into the compromised network. The post-exploit malware that makes this possible has been dubbed Frebniis by researchers from Symantec, who reported on its use on Thursday. Frebniis first ensures FREB is enabled and then hijacks its execution by injecting malicious code into the IIS process memory and causing it to run. Once the code is in place, Frebniis can inspect all HTTP requests received by the IIS server. “By hijacking and modifying IIS web server code, Frebniis is able to intercept the regular flow of HTTP request handling and look for specially formatted HTTP requests,” Symantec researchers wrote. “These requests allow remote code execution and proxying to internal systems in a stealthy manner. No files or suspicious processes will be running on the system, making Frebniis a relatively unique and rare type of HTTP backdoor seen in the wild.” Before Frebniis can work, an attacker must first hack the Windows system running the IIS server. Symantec researchers have yet to determine how Frebniis does this. Frebniis parses all HTTP POST requests invoking the logon.aspx or default.aspx files, which are used to create login pages and serve default web pages, respectively. Attackers can smuggle requests into an infected server by sending one of these requests and adding the password “7ux4398!” as a parameter. Once such a request is received, Frebniis decrypts and executes .Net code that controls the main backdoor functions. To make the process more stealthy, the code drops no files to disk. arstechnica.com

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