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.

Like when McDonalds offered free fries or something for everyone who used the app, but then quietly changed the terms of service for the app to include forced arbitration.

If a company does something bad, you can sue to fix it.

Suing sets legal precedent and forces all companies to abide by the ruling, more or less.

But now if a company tricks you out of your right to sue by putting arbitration clauses in everything, then you can’t sue. You can only have a (hopefully) impartial third part tell the company to stop doing something specifically to you. The company is still free to keep doing the thing to everyone else, and their arbitration doesn’t affect any other companies also doing bad things.

There are other issues too.

Let’s keep in mind that if this is a state actor or some sort of global organized crime, then they don’t put all their eggs into one basket. If that’s the case, they’re going to have a bunch of other plans and backdoor attempts ongoing. This isn’t the end and we can assume there’s something else somewhere that went unnoticed.

Security is a constantly changing war of attrition, not a goal/product/configuration.

Or even a criminal organization.

This isn’t the same thing, but I’m reminded of Minecraft.

Minecraft is a massively popular game. Notch once said he planned to make it open source when its popularity died down. But now Microsoft owns it.

Not only that, but Mojang accounts don’t work anymore. You have to have a Microsoft account to play it now. Even trying to download and play an older version of the game offline requires Microsoft to approve it. Microsoft is actively tightening the leash on the game because it makes them money. Open sourcing the game will likely never happen now. The best we can hope for it for versions to fall into public domain after 70-ish years.

That’s how I see Microsoft. They only care about what its beneficial for them to drive profits. Working on open source projects, and open sourcing a few of their tools to get the benefits of community adoption and code review is great, sure. But they’d sooner try to incorporate Linux into Windows to keep people in their surveillance ecosystem, than to open source Windows.

Remember when Windows 10 was the last version, until they changed their minds? Remember when they floated the idea of charging a recurring subscription to use Windows, before they silently dropped the idea? Remember when there was credible talk about the next version of Windows being cloud-based where they controlled all your data and you had no privacy? Hell, you have basically no privacy on Windows 10. Trying to reclaim some involves registry edits, special third party tools, and a constant battle with automatic updates reverting your changes.

I’ll say it again. Microsoft doesn’t care about OSS. It’s just currently beneficial for them to pretend they do.

Goggle seemed to care a lot about OSS, then started making everything in Android depend on their proprietary ecosystem to function. Now Google is using the dominant position they got by taking advantage of OSS adoption, and have been pushing privacy-invading standards and trying to get rid of ad blockers online, among many other things.

For these huge companies, OSS is just a tool to get more control and power. The moment it’s no longer useful, they’ll find ways to work around the license and enshitify everything again.

It keeps happening. I refuse to keep trusting bad actors every time they dangle a shiny trinket over our heads.

I do appreciate the work this person did in finding the bug. It’s not all doom and gloom.

Damn fine work all around.

I know this is an issue fraught with potential legal and political BS, and it’s impossible to check everything without automation these days, but is there an organization that trains and pays people to work as security researchers or QA for open source projects?

Basically, a watchdog group that finds exploitable security vulnerabilities, and works with individuals or vendors to patch them? Maybe make it a publicly owned and operated group with mandatory reporting of some kind. An international project funded by multiple governments, where it’s harder for a single point of influence to hide exploits, abuse secrets, or interfere with the researchers? They don’t own or control any code, just find security issues and advise.

I don’t know.

Just thinking that modern security is getting pretty complicated, with so many moving parts and all.

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

This creates a single backdoor for all sign-ons on your phone.

SC-Controller, although it seems to have been abandoned.

Gpodder-adaptive

When I saw this on a custom ROM, it was basically the same thing, but said that my financial institution or whoever had admin access to my phone, including seeing texts and everything else, until my phone was paid off. Still not sure why that was there in a custom ROM, but I ended up not using it.

They all work well enough on my weak machine with an RX580.

Buuuuuuuuuut, RWKY had some kind of optimization thing going that makes it two or three times faster to generate output. The problem is that you have to be more aware of the order of your input. It has a hard time going backwards to a previous sentence, for example.

So you’d want to say things like “In the next sentence, identify the subject.” and not “Identify the subject in the previous text.”

Glad it’s working! Thanks for the follow-up, for anyone who runs into the same issue in the future.

Nice!

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

This won’t help you recover during a freeze or crash, but it may help find the cause…maybe.

Try running Steam from a terminal, and see if the game gives any output when crashing. I’d put the game in window mode so I can see the terminal and the game at the same time, in-case you lose control over the system. See if the terminal shows any errors.

Usually, when my computer starts to freeze up, it’s because the disk IO is saturated. I moved my Steam library to a different drive than my OS, and that hasn’t happened since. The interface really shouldn’t freeze just because the drive is busy, but that’s what I did to fix it. Don’t know if it’s a GNOME 3 problem, a Fedora problem, or something else.

Sad to see this fork of SC Controller is now archived. It provides an Appimage version, and also worked with my PS4 controller. Credit to Kozec, the original creator.

https://www.patreon.com/kozec

https://github.com/Ryochan7/sc-controller

There was also Qjoypad, but I haven’t used it in a while.

Basically, the game is reading the raw controller input as well as the translated virtual controller input. I’ve run into that a lot before on other games. The fix I found is usually to try another mapper, or to disable the controller in the game and map the controller to keyboard and mouse. It’s annoying.

With luck, you -might- have luck with closing the game and setting up the controller mapper, then start the game. If the mapping program provides an Xinput option, try toggling that and see if it helps.

Good luck.

EDIT: Did Kozec stop developing the app? I used to support them on Patreon before I lost my job. There haven’t been any official updates in a while. Sad day. :(

Other offline tools I’ve found:

GPT4All

RWKY-Runner

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.