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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • In a nutshell, a backdoor was intentionally planted by a malicious actor in xz Utils, an open-source data compression utility widely used in Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. This discovery was made by Andres Freund, a developer and engineer working on Microsoft’s PostgreSQL offerings. He was troubleshooting performance problems on a Debian system. Specifically, SSH logins were consuming excessive CPU cycles and generating errors with Valgrind, a memory debugging tool. Through sheer luck and Freund’s careful eye, he eventually discovered that these issues were the result of updates made to xz Utils. Upon closer inspection, he found that updates to xz Utils were the result of a maliciously inserted backdoor. The backdoor, present in xz Utils versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1, manipulated the sshd executable, allowing anyone with a predetermined encryption key to upload and execute arbitrary code on affected devices.






  • I’ve enjoyed No Man’s Sky since day 1. I didn’t really follow the game or any of the major hype behind it, I just saw a cool space game on ps4 and played the hell out of it. Fell in love with the music, the setting, and just walking around weird landscapes, flying to different atlas stations, and just enjoying being alone.

    I still play it, and am so happy HG continues to give the game constant love and attention, but there are days I turn networking off on my ps4 and play the 1.0 version again, just to go back to that part of my life for a little bit.