December 2022

In 2022 I published this as a Mainline one-liner: add a PPA, mainline --install-latest, reboot. The commands still work. They were never the interesting part. Ubuntu does not have one kernel you “upgrade.” It has a shipping model. GA stays on the version that shipped on day one. HWE rolls forward from interim releases. OEM is a vendor-laptop cadence that is supposed to fold back. Mainline is a set of unofficial builds from kernel.ubuntu.com that Canonical does not support. DKMS is the reason jumping tracks is not free on a laptop. ...

In 2022 I published this as a sed on /etc/apt/sources.list: replace jammy with kinetic, then apt full-upgrade. I have used that pattern on servers. It can work. It is not how Ubuntu ships releases, and the example was the wrong jump — Kinetic was 22.10, an interim, nine months of support, off the LTS track. Ubuntu does not have one “upgrade” command. It has three different operations that people collapse into that word: package updates inside a release, point releases of the same LTS, and a release upgrade to a new codename. do-release-upgrade is the supported path for the third. Rewriting sources by hand is still how I change series. It is a bad default if apt dying halfway through would leave you without a next step. ...

You’ve heard it again and again: You need to use a password manager to generate strong, unique passwords and keep track of them for you. And if you finally took the plunge with a free and mainstream option, particularly during the 2010s, it was probably LastPass. For the security service’s 25.6 million users, though, the company made a worrying announcement last week: A security incident the firm previously reported on November 30 was actually a massive and concerning data breach that exposed encrypted password vaults—the crown jewels of any password manager—along with other user data. ...

Microsoft researchers found a cross-platform botnet that originates from malicious software downloads on Windows devices & succeeds in propagating to a variety of Linux-based devices by enumerating default credentials on internet-exposed SSH-enabled devices. Microsoft researchers observed that the initial infection points related to the botnet were devices infected through the installation of malicious cracking tools that purport to acquire illegal Windows licenses. The cracking tools contain additional code that downloads and launches a fake version of svchost.exe through a PowerShell command. In some cases, the downloaded file is named svchosts.exe. ...

What is Molybdenum? Molybdenum is a chemical element with the symbol Mo and atomic number 42 which is located in period 5 and group 6. The name is from Neo-Latin molybdaenum, which is based on Ancient Greek Μόλυβδος molybdos, meaning lead, since its ores were confused with lead ores. Why Molybdenum Is an Essential Nutrient You may not have heard of the trace mineral molybdenum, but it is essential to your health. ...