Welcome to All Cloud, No Cattle Weekly #6.
Tech
An unpleasant sudo vulnerability
Jonathan Corbet, writing for LWN:
It would appear that “sudo” has a buffer-overflow vulnerability that allows any local user to gain root privileges, whether or not they are in the sudoers file. It has been there since 2011. See this advisory for details, but perhaps run an update first.
Since 2011.
The Next Gen Database Servers Powering Let’s Encrypt
Josh Aas and James Renken, writing on the Let’s Encrypt blog:
We’ll start by looking at our median time to process a request because it best reflects subscribers’ experience. Before the upgrade, we turned around the median API request in ~90 ms. The upgrade decimated that metric to ~9 ms!
Adobe Flash EOL Brings Down Chinese Railway Operator
David Cohen and Yue Sun, writing for Tech Node:
Depot staff were confused when their computers lost access to the local dispatch system on the morning of Jan. 12, according to the bulletin. The reason: Adobe’s last update to its Flash Player included a kill-switch set to go off that day, when the company ended support for the notoriously virus-prone web standard. Flash was little missed—except in the Chinese government, where it remains in widespread use.
Whoooooooops…
We have made the difficult decision to retire the Tucows Downloads site. We’re pleased to say that much of the software and other assets that made up the Tucows Downloads library have been transferred to our friends at the Internet Archive for posterity.
The end of an era.
History of the browser user-agent string
Aaron Anderson, for WebAIM back in 2008:
In the beginning there was NCSA Mosaic, and Mosaic called itself NCSA_Mosaic/2.0 (Windows 3.1), and Mosaic displayed pictures along with text, and there was much rejoicing.
And behold, then came a new web browser known as “Mozilla”, being short for “Mosaic Killer,” but Mosaic was not amused, so the public name was changed to Netscape, and Netscape called itself Mozilla/1.0 (Win3.1), and there was more rejoicing.
Grab Bag
The Best Disney Movies to Learn a Foreign Language According to Data Science
Frank Andrade on towards data science:
But Disney+ has around 662 movies in its catalog. This is too much content to choose from, so I made a data analysis to find the best Disney movies that will help us learn a foreign language easily as I previously did for Netflix shows and 3000 top-rated movies.
As a native anglophone who lives in a not-officially-English-speaking country, this is a gold mine.
Disclosure: Disney is my employer.