linux

647 Articles

Everything In A Linux Terminal

September 10, 2025 by 46 Comments

Here at Hackaday Central, we fancy that we know a little something about Linux. But if you’d tasked us to run any GUI program inside a Linux terminal, we’d have said that wasn’t possible. But, it turns out, you should have asked [mmulet] who put together term.everything.

You might be thinking that of course, you can launch a GUI program from a terminal. Sure. That’s not what this is. Instead, it hijacks the Wayland protocol and renders the graphics as text. Or, if your terminal supports it, as an image. Performance is probably not your goal if you want to do this. As the old saying goes, “It’s not that the dog can sing well; it’s that the dog can sing at all.”

If, like us, you are more interested in how it works, there’s a write up explaining the nuances of the Wayland protocol. The article points out that Wayland doesn’t actually care what you do with the graphical output. In particular, “… you could print out the graphics and give them to a league of crochet grandmas to individually tie together every single pixel into the afghan of legend!” We expect to see this tested at an upcoming hacker conference. Maybe even Supercon.

We generally don’t like Wayland very much. We use a lot of hacks like xdotool and autokey that Wayland doesn’t like. We also think people didn’t understand X11’s network abilities until it was too late. If you think of it as only a video card driver, then you get what you deserve. But we have to admit, we are humbled by term.everything.

Linux Fu: Windows Virtualization The Hard(ware) Way

August 21, 2025 by 31 Comments

As much as I love Linux, there are always one or two apps that I simply have to run under Windows for whatever reason. Sure, you can use wine, Crossover Office, or run Windows in a virtual machine, but it’s clunky, and I’m always fiddling with it to get it working right. But I recently came across something that — when used improperly — makes life pretty easy. Instead of virtualizing Windows or emulating it, I threw hardware at it, and it works surprisingly well.

Once Upon a Time

First, a story. Someone gave me a Surface Laptop 2 that was apparently dead. It wouldn’t charge, and you can’t remove the keyboard without power. Actually, you can with a paper clip, and I suggested pulling it to see if the screen would charge by itself. They said they had already bought a new computer, so they didn’t care.

Unsurprisingly, once I popped the keyboard off, the computer charged and was fine. You just have to replace the keyboard or use another one. Or use it as a tablet, which it is set up for anyway. But I have plenty of laptops and computers of every description. What was I going to do with this nice but keyboardless computer? Continue reading “Linux Fu: Windows Virtualization The Hard(ware) Way” →

This Week In Security: Spilling Tea, Rooting AIs, And Accusing Of Backdoors

August 1, 2025 by 4 Comments

The Tea app has had a rough week. It’s not an unfamiliar story: Unsecured Firebase databases were left exposed to the Internet without any authentication. What makes this story particularly troubling is the nature of the app, and the resulting data that was spilled.

Tea is a “dating safety” application strictly for women. To enforce this, creating an account requires an ID verification process where prospective users share their government issued photo IDs with the platform. And that brings us to the first Firebase leak. 59 GB of photo IDs and other photos for a large subset of users. This was not the only problem.

There was a second database discovered, and this one contains private messages between users. As one might imagine, given the topic matter of the app, many of these DMs contain sensitive details. This may not have been an unsecured Firebase database, but a separate problem where any API key could access any DM from any user.

This is the sort of security failing that is difficult for a company to recover from. And while it should be a lesson to users, not to trust their sensitive messages to closed-source apps with questionable security guarantees, history suggests that few will learn the lesson, and we’ll be covering yet another train-wreck of similar magnitude in another few months.

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Linux Fu: The Cheap Macropad Conundrum

July 30, 2025 by 9 Comments

You can get cheap no-brand macropads for almost nothing now. Some of them have just a couple of keys. Others have lots of keys, knobs, and LEDs. You can spring for a name brand, and it’ll be a good bet that it runs QMK. But the cheap ones? Get ready to download Windows-only software from suspicious Google Drive accounts. Will they work with Linux? Maybe.

Of course, if you don’t mind the keypad doing whatever it normally does, that’s fine. These are little more than HID devices with USB or Bluetooth. But what do those keys send by default? You will really want a way to remap them, especially since they may just send normal characters. So now you want to reverse engineer it. That’s a lot of work. Luckily, someone already has, at least for many of the common pads based around the CH57x chips.

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This Week In Security: Sharepoint, Initramfs, And More

July 25, 2025 by 12 Comments

There was a disturbance in the enterprise security world, and it started with a Pwn2Own Berlin. [Khoa Dinh] and the team at Viettel Cyber Security discovered a pair of vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s SharePoint. They were demonstrated at the Berlin competition in May, and patched by Microsoft in this month’s Patch Tuesday.

This original exploit chain is interesting in itself. It’s inside the SharePoint endpoint, /_layouts/15/ToolPane.aspx. The code backing this endpoint has a complex authentication and validation check. Namely, if the incoming request isn’t authenticated, the code checks for a flag, which is set true when the referrer header points to a sign-out page, which can be set arbitrarily by the requester. The DisplayMode value needs set to Edit, but that’s accessible via a simple URL parameter. The pagePath value, based on the URL used in the call, needs to start with /_layouts/ and end with /ToolPane.aspx. That particular check seems like a slam dunk, given that we’re working with the ToolPane.aspx endpoint. But to bypass the DisplayMode check, we added a parameter to the end of the URL, and hilariously, the pagePath string includes those parameters. The simple work-around is to append another parameter, foo=/ToolPane.aspx.

Putting it together, this means a POST of /_layouts/15/ToolPane.aspx?DisplayMode=Edit&foo=/ToolPane.aspx with the Referrer header set to /_layouts/SignOut.aspx. This approach bypasses authentication, and allows a form parameter MSOTlPn_DWP to be specified. These must be a valid file on the target’s filesystem, in the _controltemplates/ directory, ending with .iscx. But it grants access to all of the internal controls on the SafeControls list.

There’s an entire second half to [Khoa Dinh]’s write-up, detailing the discovery of a deserialization bug in one of those endpoints, that also uses a clever type-confusion sort of attack. The end result was remote code execution on the SharePoint target, with a single, rather simple request. Microsoft rolled out patches to fix the exploit chain. The problem is that Microsoft often opts to fix vulnerabilities with minimal code changes, often failing to fix the underlying code flaws. This apparently happened in this case, as the authentication bypass fix could be defeated simply by adding yet another parameter to the URL.

These bypasses were found in the wild on July 19th, and Microsoft quickly confirmed. The next day, the 20th, Microsoft issued an emergency patch to address the bypasses. The live exploitation appears to be coming from a set of Chinese threat actors, with a post-exploitation emphasis on stealing data and maintaining access. There seem to be more than 400 compromised systems worldwide, with some of those being rather high profile.

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Personal Reflections On Immutable Linux

July 10, 2025 by 51 Comments

Immutable distributions are slowly spreading across the Linux world– but should you care? Are they hacker friendly? What does “immutable” mean, anyway?

Immutable means “not subject or susceptible to change” according to Merriam-Webster, which is not 100% accurate in this context, but it’s close enough and the name is there so we’re stuck with it. Immutable distributions are subject to change, it’s just that how you change them is quite a bit different than bog-standard Linux. Will this matter to you? Read on to find out! (Or, if you know the answers already, read on to find out how angry you should be in the comments section.) Continue reading “Personal Reflections On Immutable Linux” →

FLOSS Weekly Episode 840: End-of-10; Not Just Some Guy In A Van

July 9, 2025 by No comments

This week Jonathan chats with Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss about KDE’s eco initiative and the End of 10 campaign! Is Open Source really a win for environmentalism? How does the End of 10 campaign tie in? And what does Pewdiepie have to do with it? Watch to find out!

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