All posts by dogwomble
dogwomble
Secure Boot rendered useless, over 200 PC models from different makers are affected
If you thought your laptop, desktop, or server was protected by Secure Boot, think again. A new vulnerability dubbed “PKfail” has left Secure Boot wide open on hundreds of PC and devices across several major tech brands. Researchers at cybersecurity firm Binarly just dropped a bombshell report showing how a leaked cryptographic key has essentially nuked the security guarantees of Secure Boot for over 200 product models.
xGeek Needs Your Opinion!
So I’ve been building this site over the last few weeks and trying to promote it as much as I can via the old zCrew. I know a few others here have also been trying to help. But for the people that are here, I would like to try and get your feedback on two things.
- What promotion you’d like to see to try and get word out about the site.
- Whether there are some additional features you’d like to see on the site.
I would welcome any feedback as comments to this post. While we may never have something on the scale of one of our previous incarnations, I would still like this site to be as successful as possible, particularly with the amount of effort that has been put in to make it work.
WordCamp Sydney 2024
I’m throwing this up for those geeks that might be interested. For those that are users of WordPress, WordCamp Sydney has been announced for 2-3 November 2024. WordCamp is a user conference for users of WordPress where you can come to nerd out about the platform. I will be attending, so if you’re planning on going, we can see you there!
xGeek Needs You!
OK so we’ve been building this site up over the past few weeks and, aside from a couple of hiccups, things seem to be working fairly well. For those that have been having a look and posting when you can, thank you – and hopefully you remember to keep it up! But I’d also love to get people involved by being as active as they can in the forums and the like, as well as promoting it to anyone who is interested! Please help in making the site as successful as it can be.
CrowdStrike blames test software for taking down 8.5 million Windows machines
CrowdStrike has published a post incident review of the buggy update it published that took down 8.5 million Windows machines last week. The detailed post blames a bug in test software for not properly validating the content update that was pushed out to millions of machines on Friday. CrowdStrike is promising to more thoroughly test its content updates, improve its error handling, and implement a staggered deployment to avoid a repeat of this disaster.
xGeek site back to normal
If you noticed the site had a few issues this morning, you were not alone. It’s not clear exactly what broke, but some sort of update process completely overwhelmed our hosting causing it to generate 503 errors. When that settled down, a recovery of our .htaccess file was needed to bring everything back. It’s not entirely clear how it broke, but I suspect the installer system I used to initially install our site had a whoopsie so I’ve made a few changes to try and prevent that from recurring. For now, it seems things are back to normal. Hopefully it doesn’t happen again!
Online Store Added
OK so if all has gone to plan, xGeek now has a basic online store! We’re just starting with a few flying monkey t-shirts and mouse mats. So if you want to help support the site, you now can!