After repeatedly suffering issues with scam apps making it onto the Snap Store, Canonical maker of Ubuntu Linux have now decided to manually look over submissions.
        • Pantherina@feddit.de
          41·
          9 months ago

          Ubuntu may be good at being semi-stable.

          Just run unsnap and experience actually secure apps.

          Did you know that Snaps are only sandboxed on Ubuntu with Apparmor? This makes them more versatile than Flatpaks using Bubblewrap (the whole system is sandboxed like that) but will break all sandboxing if systems dont use Apparmor, or dont include all patches.

      • fluckx@lemmy.world
        62·
        9 months ago

        But not voluntarily. Since it’s.integrated with apt you randomly get snap garbage installed instead.

      • okamiueru@lemmy.world
        3·
        9 months ago

        Last I used Ubuntu, removing snap was a one time thing that took 5 minutes, of which 4 of them was looking for my notes from the time before.

        I ditched Ubuntu, but it wasn’t because of snap. Maybe this has changed in the last 3 years?

        • KISSmyOS@feddit.de
          1·
          9 months ago

          Yes. Now if you use apt to install Firefox or Thunderbird, it will reinstall snap and install the snap versions of those programs.
          If you blacklist snap, it’ll throw an error when you try to install Firefox or Thunderbird cause it can’t resolve their “dependencies”.
          You’ll have to install those programs from outside of Ubuntu’s repositories, and the list of affected programs is growing.
          Ubuntu’s stated goal is to eventually use snap for all userland apps.

          • echo64@lemmy.world
            304·
            9 months ago

            This thread is a good example of just how circlejerky and bubble like lemmy has become.

            You are correct. Outside of the hard-core users and tech nerds, Ubuntu is massively popular. But you listen to this community, and you’d think the opposite.

            • shirro@aussie.zoneEnglish
              71·
              9 months ago

              Most of us do live in bubbles (not exclusive to lemmy or tech nerds). I first picked up Ubuntu in 2004. It was a massive leap forward at the time as Gnome was moving a lot faster than Debian stable and I was running Sid to keep up. I am genuinely surprised everytime I learn Ubuntu is still “popular” as they have made so many NIH misteps over the years (mir,upstart,unity,snap) and frustrated their users. I moved back to Debian years ago for server/dev as Ubuntu re-packaging wasn’t adding any value and once I was on another distro for desktop I lost all interest.

              Ubuntu started off with some amazing community building. It felt more like a peoples distro than Canonicals for a time. I felt more invested in it in those days so I can relate to Ubuntu users but I also understand some of the criticism aimed at Canonical and their choices.

            • woelkchen@lemmy.world
              620·
              9 months ago

              You are correct. Outside of the hard-core users and tech nerds, Ubuntu is massively popular. But you listen to this community, and you’d think the opposite.

              So which part of the internet is Steam Hardware & Software Survey then?

              The most popular Ubuntu version is at a whopping 5% of all Linux users.

              Ubuntu went from the most popular desktop distribution to the most or at least one of the most popular container distributions, ie. for hard-core users and tech nerds. Meanwhile Steam Deck sold millions and I’m confident to say that a good chunk of the users have no idea what Steam Deck runs, let alone SteamOS being an Arch Linux derivative.

              • meleethecat@lemmy.world
                252·
                9 months ago

                Very few linux installs include steam and this survey only represents a few thousand gamers. The only thing it shows is that steam users like steam os.

                • woelkchen@lemmy.world
                  210·
                  9 months ago

                  Very few linux installs include steam

                  Millions of sold Steam Deck units run Linux and default to Steam. It’s easily the most popular personal computing device running GNU/Linux out there.

                  steam users

                  So regular users, “outside of the hard-core users and tech nerds”.

              • SheeEttin@programming.devEnglish
                7·
                9 months ago

                That’s not a meaningful comparison because it splits Ubuntu by version but all of Arch is a single category. We’d need to roll up the Ubuntu users for it to be apples to apples.

        • Shamot@jlai.lu
          191·
          9 months ago

          Like Windows, Ubuntu is installed by default on many computers. In my university, all the computers have a dual boot Ubuntu Windows.

          • woelkchen@lemmy.world
            222·
            9 months ago

            Ubuntu is installed by default on many computers.

            SteamOS is installed on more computers, though.

            • gaylord_fartmaster@lemmy.world
              161·
              9 months ago

              You don’t honestly believe that, right? Like you’re aware that the Steam hardware survey only includes Steam users that have it installed and choose to participate in the survey? There are way more computers and servers running Ubuntu than there are steam decks.

              • woelkchen@lemmy.world
                210·
                9 months ago

                You don’t honestly believe that, right?

                Context is computers dual booting Windows and Ubuntu, so obviously consumer hardware and not servers and also not multiple containers on one device. There are millions of Steam Decks sold already and Steam Deck is consumer hardware which means that there are millions of individual devices running SteamOS.

                servers running Ubuntu

                Sure there are hardcore users that run dozens of containers simultaneously and Ubuntu is quite a popular choice among those. Completely different topic from the one I’ve replied to, though.

              • Pantherina@feddit.de
                2·
                9 months ago

                That should be possible by changing the repos, shouldnt it? I will try this in a VM.

                Downgrading will be harder than rebasing from Ubuntu LTS to Debian Sid for example. But at the same time I imagine its easier to downgrade from Sid to Stable on the same Distro.

            • Dandroid@sh.itjust.works
              62·
              9 months ago

              Not the person you are replying to, but my server is on Ubuntu. It was the distro my work used and it was probably the only distro I had heard of at the time I set up my server. At this point I run so much shit that can never go down on my server that I will never consider touching the distro ever.

              Plus, who cares? It’s a server. I don’t interact with the distro. I only ssh in, run services through containers, and add port forwards. Every distro is identical for that stuff. I even prefer old kernel and package versions for ultra stability, as my server can never go down. Sure, Debian would be the same, but why touch it now? That’s just asking for headache.

            • SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip
              1·
              9 months ago

              I use it because a class wanted me to either use it in a VM or use WSL but WSL didn’t work and I figured it was easier to set up a dual boot than setting up a VM since I’ve installed Linux quite a few times.

        • FutileRecipe@lemmy.world
          41·
          9 months ago

          People still use Ubuntu?

          They’re currently number 6 on DistroWatch’s Last 6 Months. So people are at least still interested in it.

          The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics are a light-hearted way of measuring interest in Linux distributions and other free operating systems among the visitors of this website. They correlate neither to usage nor to quality and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions. They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch was accessed each day, nothing more.

          • woelkchen@lemmy.world
            61·
            9 months ago

            They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch was accessed each day, nothing more.

            Which can be manipulated by scripting or setting the browser’s home page to the DistroWatch page of a distribution. No way in hell is MX Linux actually popular.

    • AChiTenshi@sh.itjust.works
      345·
      9 months ago

      I would imagine the recent xz backdoor discovery spooked them a bit. So now they are going to check things.

      We shall see if it continues or not.

              • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.org
                5·
                9 months ago

                That is a very good question. At this point, a hash function in the SHA-2 family is generally considered secure.

                MD5 has been known to be cryptographically insecure since about 2008. Collisions can be reliably reached in sub-second timeframes on hardware that is over a decade old. It also has many other attack vectors. The only place that it really could reasonably be used is when checking for file integrity for an rsync or the like but even then, with modern hardware, there’s little reason to not use a secure hashing algorithm.

                For SHA-1, successful collisions were hit in under 2^69 ops as early as 2005.

                In 2017, Big G (when they were still trying but to be evil) announced the SHAttered attack that that reliably reached collisions with 2^63.1 ops. SHAttered required 6500 CPU-years and 110 GPU-years to implement but that’s a number well within reach for a well-funded adversary. Several other attacks from other directions have been proven out with the barrier to entry getting significantly lower. It doesn’t even take a state actor anymore with costs being estimated as low as $45k USD in 2020.

                SHA-2 has not yet had any publicly disclosed success in defeating all hashing rounds. Last year, there was success in collision in 31/60 rounds for SHA-256 and 31/80 rounds for SHA-512. So, it’s generally thought to still be secure (noone has had yet disclosed a practical collision or pseudo collusion that is close to defeating ALL rounds).

                EDIT: Newlines to avoid formatting (how do I escape formatting characters?)

                • vanderbilt@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  5·
                  9 months ago

                  The use of MD5 becomes a bigger issue when paired with the lack of package signatures. You can inject code into a package and find a colliding digest absurdly fast. I and a friend from Threatlocker created a Metasploit module to use Deb packages for local privesc based on the concept. If it touches the filesystem outside of the APT cache it becomes a vector.

          • Pantherina@feddit.de
            51·
            9 months ago

            Cough Fedora does that (using rpm-sequoia written in Rust) and also uses zst instead of xz for RPMs since Fedora 31

            • vanderbilt@lemmy.worldEnglish
              3·
              9 months ago

              Did they ever make good on this plan?

              RPM must accept SHA-1 hashes and DSA keys for Fedora 38, ideally with a deprecation warning that it will be disabled in F39.

  • wiki_me@lemmy.mlEnglish
    323·
    9 months ago

    How is that not a security theater? , you just need to :

    • publish a good snap
    • change it to malware after it is approved
    • profit

    The extra cost added to override this is fairly small, i don’t think it will help.

    • progandy@feddit.de
      20·
      9 months ago

      At least this prevents impersonation of well-known publishers or their software. Maybe all changes to metadata like the description should require a manual review even for established packages.

      • wiki_me@lemmy.mlEnglish
        11·
        9 months ago

        At least this prevents impersonation of well-known publishers or their software

        how?

        • progandy@feddit.de
          5·
          9 months ago

          That depends on the depth of the review, e.g. verifying the submitter is a member of the project, the software name does not conflict with a well known name,…

          • wiki_me@lemmy.mlEnglish
            1·
            9 months ago

            verifying the submitter is a member of the project

            That’s a different requirement as far as i can tell (When you do that you get the “plus” sign next to the name on the store).

            the software name does not conflict with a well known name,…

            It should conflict, the point is that some random dude can create a package and people could use it.

            They can review and check that the URL in the manifest used to build or install the package is from upstream, but that can later be changed, it would be better to have some system where you need to whitelist URL’s i think.

  • octopus_ink@lemmy.mlEnglish
    312·
    9 months ago

    I’ve heard all the arguments about how these new packaging formats are supposed to make things easy for developers and for users with different use cases than my own (apparently), but I will continue to avoid them until they have further matured. I’m relieved that this is still possible.

    • tempest@lemmy.ca
      20·
      9 months ago

      The idea is good I think but the implementation has only ever caused me problems and seems to have a bunch of frustrating edge cases.

      • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
        82·
        9 months ago

        I’ve been using snaps for a few years now and while they still could use some improvements, the snaps I’m currently using seem to be fairly indistinguishable from deb-based packaging thanks to bug fixes they have done over the years. I think the idea of containerized applications is a good one, I think it actually can be safer. Performance is also fine for me with snap applications even like Firefox snap startup speed, although I’m using an R9 5900x and Gen 4 M2 NVMe SSD so maybe that’s why, or maybe they really have improved the snap software and it is just as fast now for the most part.

        • ben_dover@lemmy.ml
          5·
          9 months ago

          I’ve had to swap Firefox on my laptop for the deb package, the snap took like 5sec to open, whereas the deb opens instantly. Other than that, i don’t see much of a difference, but i run into sandboxing issues quite often (same with flatpak though)

          • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
            2·
            9 months ago

            I had a “Save As” issue in Firefox snap where it just wouldn’t be able to save pages, but since upgrading to either Ubuntu 20.04 or 22.04 (can’t remember which version fixed it), that problem has gone away entirely.

    • ___@lemm.ee
      4·
      9 months ago

      The problem for me is portability. Flatpak, Snap, Appimage, docker, podman, lxc, they all do the same thing, but they’re splitting the market into “servers” and “desktops”.

      We need a portable container runtime we can build from a compose file, run cli or gui apps, and migrate to a server with web app capability displaying the UI. There are too many build targets, and too much virtual market segmentation.

      Nix tries to solve the issue, but the problem is you have to use Nix.

    • Richard@lemmy.worldEnglish
      25·
      9 months ago

      True. Actual package managers are still thousands of times superior to flat and snap.

      • Pantherina@feddit.de
        5·
        9 months ago

        That scentence makes little sense as both are using package managers that work similarly. Flatpak even uses ostree which is more advanced.

        • octopus_ink@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          9 months ago

          My thing (I’m not the guy you replied to) is all the various user-facing complaints that I tend to see in these discussions. I use a distro where I can get current versions of anything I’ve ever needed, and I know how to maintain my system.

          As a user, even if the various alternatives are fine most of the time, without concerns about security, integration, etc - I’ve never read anything that would make me want the additional complication. (I say this recognizing that there are security concerns regardless of how you get your software - I’m not saying these new solutions are inherently worse in that regard.)

          I suppose at some point I’ll want or need to embrace flatpak/appimage/snaps, but I can’t find any reason I’d do so now - it feels like it increases the number of gotchas I need to worry about when installing software without actually giving me anything I want that I don’t already get with my “legacy” package manager.

          • Pantherina@feddit.de
            2·
            9 months ago

            We dont live in such a perfect world. Linux has a small marketshare for non-server software, so packaging is done by your distro.

            You would need to have user-facing settings for Apparmor or SELinux to replicate what already exists with Flatpak.

            Principle of least privilege.

            Maybe you prefer native packages, but bubblejail or SELinux confined users are complicated as hell and both are pre-alpha in my experience.

            So yes you add bloat, dependencies etc. But you also add stability, a small core system, take load of OS developers and unify the packaging efforts so that it is done by developers not packagers.

            This reduces complexity a lot, as the underlying system is not as important anymore, and you can just use whatever you want. Software is separated from the OS.

            Flatpak is the only good format, as explained in this talk

            (Snap has no sandboxing outside of Ubuntu and is thus not portable, Appimages are inherently insecure)

            • octopus_ink@lemmy.mlEnglish
              2·
              9 months ago

              I will check out the video, thanks! I still say you can have the aur and arch repos when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers, but I’m openminded.

  • Empricorn@feddit.nlEnglish
    302·
    9 months ago

    Maybe adding a proprietary *layer to an open-source OS was a bad idea (for end users)?

  • eveninghere@beehaw.org
    15·
    9 months ago

    I have this unpopular thought: If I had to choose between Canonical’s Snap Store and Apple App Store…

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    81·
    9 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    After repeatedly suffering issues with scam apps making it onto the Snap Store, Canonical maker of Ubuntu Linux have now decided to manually look over submissions.

    I’ve covered the issues with the Snap Store a few times now like on March 19th when ten scam crypto apps appeared, got taken down and then reappeared under a different publisher.

    Also earlier back in February there was an issue where a user actually lost their wallet as a result of a fake app.

    Multiple fake apps were also put up back in October last year as well, so it was a repeating issue that really needed dealing with properly.

    So to try and do something about it, Canonical’s Holly Hall has posted on their Discourse forum about how “The Store team and other engineering teams within Canonical have been continuously monitoring new snaps that are being registered, to detect potentially malicious actors” and that they will now do manual reviews whenever people try to register “a new snap name”.

    Hopefully this will begin to put an end to scam apps making it into the Snap Store and onto machines running Ubuntu and any other Linux distribution that enables Snap packages.

    The original article contains 238 words, the summary contains 195 words. Saved 18%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    51·
    9 months ago

    Just remove the crypto bullshit apps and 99% of the problems will go away.

    And maybe release the SnapStore code so they can all scam each other over there.