Malicious app “Exodus” impersonating a popular crypto wallet infiltrated Snap Store, absconding with around $500,000 in Bitcoin from a user. This recurrence highlights the vulnerability of Snap Store to such threats.
The fraudulent app, deployed in early February, leveraged the snap sandbox but lacked authenticity compared to the official Exodus app, utilizing Flutter instead of Electron.
Operating under the guise of Exodus, the scam prompted users to input their 12-word passphrase—a departure from the official Exodus protocol, which never requests such sensitive information. Subsequently, the scam likely exploited this passphrase to access and deplete the wallet via an API.
Canonical, in response, has isolated the compromised snap and is endeavoring to bolster identity verification measures for all snap publishers. Suggestions include mandating credit card authentication and employing industry-standard identity verification technology or implementing a fee-based system with a waiting period to mitigate risks, albeit at the expense of prolonged app publishing timelines.
Warp Terminal on Linux: Warp, a juiced-up terminal app with hardware acceleration, collaborative work, and AI features, is now available on Linux as a DEB or AppImage.
The Linux version has better performance than the macOS version due to Linux-specific optimizations.
The terminal is built using Rust and uses the Cosmic Text library developed by System76 for their Cosmic desktop.
The app isn’t open source yet, but developers plan to open source parts of it.
Linux RGB API: Tuxedo Computers is working on a dedicated kernel interface to handle complex RGB devices and interactions on Linux.
The API would make things better for everyone, not just Tuxedo Computers.
Cosmic Desktop on Fedora: There are plans to create a Fedora spin using the Cosmic desktop environment.
Firefox 123: The latest Firefox release has several new features, including built-in translation improvements, better controller support, and improved performance on ARM devices.
Gaming News:
Progress on the proposed NT Sync driver for the Linux kernel, which aims to implement a better way to use Windows NT synchronization when running Windows games through Proton or Wine.
The latest NVIDIA drivers (510 branch) have improved Vulkan extension support, support for various color formats, HDR improvements, and fixes for older NVIDIA GPUs.
Proton 9.0 public beta released, based on Wine 9.0, bundling the latest Vkd3d-Proton, DXVK, DXVK-NVAPI, and other underlying libraries for gaming on Linux.
Crossover 24 has been released with Wine 9.0, Wine Mono 8.10, VkD3D 1.1.0, and MoltenVK 1.2.5, with UI improvements and new features.
DreamWorks Animation has open-sourced their renderer MoonRay, a multi-award winning state-of-the-art production renderer.
System76 announcing a refresh for their line of laptops with newer 14th-gen Intel CPUs.
Juno Computers announcing the fifth generation of the Saturn lineup of Linux-powered laptops.
KDE Slimbook 5, the first laptop to come pre-installed with KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment.
Manjaro partnering with Slimbook and Orange Pi to develop new hardware.
KDE Plasma 5.25 is set to be released next week, and GNOME 46 beta has been announced.
LXQt 20 is on its way, with most default apps and core components already ported to Qt 6.
Valve is releasing more of their software as open source, including Steam Audio.
GIMP 2.99.18 is the final development version before GIMP 3.0, which includes new features and improvements for color management and non-destructive editing.
LXQt 20 is expected to be released in April 2024, with a new default application menu and improved support for Wayland display protocol.
