This Week In Security: OpenSSH, Git, And Sort-of NGINX 0-day

OpenSSH has minted their 9.0 release, and it includes a pair of security changes. Unlike most of the releases we cover here, this one has security hardening to prevent issues, not emergency fixes for current ones. First up, the venerable scp/rcp protocol has been removed. Your scp commands will now use SFTP under the hood. The more interesting security change is the new default key exchange, the NTRU algorithm. NTRU is thought to be quantum-hard.
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Raspberry Pi Foosball Scoreboard

Foosball, also known as table football, is a classic game from the 1920s that is completely devoid of the bells and whistles of modern gaming. Players control stoic little figures with the most simplistic of input devices in order to move a tiny ball to and fro on the playing field. So naturally, somebody thought they should add a Raspberry Pi to it and drag the whole thing kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

The team at [Matmi] spend a good portion of their down time huddled over a foosball table, but they found the experience was significantly less exciting for the spectators than the players. To add a little more pomp to their sessions they added a flashy display that not only shows the current score, but makes individual scores a bit more exciting by showing some celebratory confetti.

Micro switches mounted in the ball return tubes of the table allow the Raspberry Pi to know who scored and when. This information is picked up by the web-based scoreboard written in Vue.js and served out by nginx. The actual scoreboard is being displayed by a laptop that’s connected to the Pi over Wi-Fi.

If the software setup seems a bit convoluted, it’s because the project itself was something of a learning experience for HTML5 and web programming in general. Further updates are planned to streamline the system a bit to make it more self-contained, as well as adding more features to the scoreboard such as tournaments and randomized matches.

Interestingly, we’ve seen quite a few foosball hacks over the years. It seems these tables are somewhat ubiquitous in offices and hackerspaces. From turning it into an online-enabled experience to building an AI table you can play against, there’s plenty of ways to inject some new life into this nearly 100-year-old game.

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Net Neutrality: FCC Hack Is A Speed Bump On The Internet Fast Lane

Net neutrality is one of those topics we’ve been hearing more and more about in recent years. The basic idea of net neutrality is that all Internet traffic should be treated equally no matter what. It shouldn’t matter if it’s email, web sites, or streaming video. It shouldn’t matter if the traffic is coming from Wikipedia, Netflix, Youtube, etc. It shouldn’t matter which Internet Service Provider you choose. This is the way the Internet has worked since it’s inception. Of course, not everyone agrees that this is how things should stay. We didn’t always have the technology to filter and classify traffic. Now that it’s here, some believe that we should be able to classify internet traffic and treat it differently based on that classification.

It seems like much of the tech savvy community argues that net neutrality is a “given right” of the Internet. They believe that it’s the way the Internet has always been, and always should be. The other side of the argument is generally lobbied by Internet service providers. They argue that ISP’s have the right to classify Internet traffic that flows through their equipment and treat it differently if they so choose. As for everyone else, just about everyone these days relies on the Internet for business, banking, and entertainment but many of those people have no idea how the Internet works, nor do they really care. It’s like the electricity in their home or the engine in their car. As long as it’s working properly that’s all that matters to them. If they can check Facebook on their phone while watching Breaking Bad on Netflix in full HD, why should they care how that stuff gets prioritized? It work’s doesn’t it? Continue reading “Net Neutrality: FCC Hack Is A Speed Bump On The Internet Fast Lane”