THE PULP JANUARY, 2021 The P U L P Newsletter of the Hartford User Group Exchange http://www.huge.org Volume 40 Issue --01 JANUARY 19th General Meeting: Pranks & … Rev. Fleming Hall 2533 Main Street, Glastonbury, CT Q&A Session: 7 PM–7:15PM Meeting starts at: 7:15PM Contents Page From the Editor 2 Stu’s Quiz Page 3 How to Decode Apple Ver- 4 sion and Build Numbers UEFI Configuration for Boot- 7 ing Live Media Genealogy Research Online 9 Calendar 10 Page 1 THE PULP JANUARY, 2021 The PULP is published monthly by and for members of the Hartford User Group MEETING LOCATIONS Exchange, Inc. (HUGE). HUGE is a nonprofit organization whose aim is to pro- vide an exchange of information between users of personal computers. The PULP is Rev. Fleming Hall not in any way affiliated with any computer manufacturer or software company. Original, uncopyrighted articles appearing in the PULP may be reproduced without 2533 Main Street, prior permission by other nonprofit groups. Please give credit to the author and the Glastonbury, CT PULP, and send a copy to HUGE. The opinions and views herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of HUGE. Damages caused by use or abuse of information appearing in the PULP are the sole responsibility of the user of the in- formation. We reserve the right to edit or reject any articles submitted for publica- tion in the PULP. Trademarks used in this publication belong to the respective own- ers of those trademarks. From The Editor by Stuart Rabinowitz Happy New Year. Thanks to everyone that added to the UEFI/BIOS firmware Three million users installed 28 mali- December discussion.. Those of you that were at the meeting cious Chrome or Edge extensions. A hacker is selling access to may notice a theme to at least one of the articles in this the email accounts of hundreds of C-level executives. month’s PULP. It relates to a topic that came up in the Apple ID has added a recovery key option, but it’s not yet meeting. The January. topic is inspired by a frantic ‘FaceTime’ ready for you to use. call. Law enforcement took down three ‘bulletproof’ VPN Also, as those of you that attended the December meeting providers. may remember, no heat. There is a very good chance the heat Facebook launches new initiative to fight against iOS 14 ad will not be fixed as the are working to get bids to replace the tracking protections hot air gas furnace. If we need to be virtual, I’ll send out a link. Older Android phone just dodged a big web browsing problem. This time we’ll be using ‘Jitsi” which is an open source soft- All Android phones should now be able to access sites secured ware. An iOS and Android version is available. with certificates from Let's Encrypt until 2024. To those of you that sent your dues check into Marty, I 5G standalone networks may have more vulnerabilities than apologize for not having deposited them. We are in the process you think of changing banks to reduce fees, but are having issues with satisfying the bank with our documentation. Microsoft has created a Rewards program which promises sweepstakes for prizes, discounts toward items in the Mi- In the news: The SolarWinds Trojan affected about 18,000 crosoft Store, and other personal benefits, but you need to enterprises that must use hot patches, isolate compromised enroll and provide them some personal information. The pro- gear Reports indicates the company was warned about gram tracks what those customers search on Bing, what web- insecurities years ago. A backdoor was found in the sites they visit and how often, and what time of day are they SolarWinds Orion IT monitoring and management software in online, etc. a dynamic link library called SolarWinds.Orion.Core. Google’s huge Gmail and YouTube outage on 12/14 lasted 50 Some organizations have been infected with Sunburst (not to minutes affected billions and was due to an errant 'zero' be confused with SolarWinds) malware released online. The biggest names on this list include Cisco, SAP, Intel, Cox Send your comments to [email protected] Communications, Deloitte, Nvidia, Fujitsu, Belkin, Amerisafe, Until next month…Happy computing!! Lukoil, Rakuten, Check Point, Optimizely, Digital Reach, and Here is the appropriate copyright citation for the “Tidbits” Digital Sense. articles. Each article has a link to the full text. Academics have been able to turn RAM into Wi-Fi cards to steal data from air-gapped systems. They do need to be fairly http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ close to the computers, at present. FireEye, one of the world's largest security firms, has disclosed security breach. TheNew TrickBot version can tamper with Page 2 THE PULP JANUARY, 2021 A Little Computer Quiz Dec. Quiz Answers Continuing a theme from last month— 1 One of the currently hottest computer pro- 1 Java was developed in the summer of gramming languages is Python, when was it 1994 , but was not originally called have. released? What was the original name? A 1991 2 What company developed it? 2 When was work on it started? A Work began in 1989 3 Who was the lead developer? 3 Who created Python? 4 What was the first app written? A Guido van Rossum, He has been Presi- dent of the Python Software Foundation, after 5 When was JavaScript announced? stepping down it 2018 as (BDFL) ‘benevolent dictator for life’. 4 Even older is BASIC. When was the first BASIC program successfully run? A May 1. 1964 at 4 AM on a General Elec- tric computer. 6 Where? A Dartmouth College in Hanover NH. Stuart Rabinowitz Page 3 THE PULP JANUARY, 2021 How to Decode Apple Version and Build Numbers build numbers, you can glean additional information about any given release. DAVID SHAYER 8 July 2020 Everyone knows that Apple operating systems have ver- Understanding Apple Version and Build Numbers sion numbers, like iOS 13.5.1 or macOS 10.15.5. But have Apple’s two main operating system lines, iOS and macOS, you noticed that Apple operating systems also have build have independent version and build number systems. iOS, numbers? For instance, iOS 13.5.1 is build number 17F80. iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS share a common system since But what does that mean? they are all derived from the iOS code base. (Only Dar- To see your macOS version and build numbers on a Mac, win-derived operating systems—macOS, iOS, iPadOS, choose Apple > About This Mac and click the version watchOS, and tvOS—use build numbers. Classic Mac OS number. In iOS or iPadOS, go to Settings > General > and iPod OS didn’t use the same build number system.) About and tap Software Version. For watchOS, in your As you know, every Apple operating system release has an iPhone’s Watch app, go to General > About and look at official version number, composed of three parts: the Version line. Major version: For iOS, it’s incremented once per year for significant upgrades. For macOS, the major version num- ber has been 10 since the initial release of Mac OS X, ren- dering it pointless up until the upcoming update to mac- OS 11 Big Sur. Minor version: For iOS, the minor version is incremented as necessary (usually three to six times) throughout the lifespan of a major version to reflect updates that contain new features along with bug fixes. For macOS, the minor version is really the major version, incrementing for each annual named release of macOS. Patch version: For iOS, the patch version increments as necessary for bug fix updates to each minor release. For macOS, Apple updates the patch version for every release that’s more than just a quick bug fix—those are called “supplemental updates” and don’t get their own version numbers. But their build numbers change! Here’s a simple chart to help clarify the official version numbering scheme. OS Major Minor Patch iOS 13 5 1 macOS 10 15 5 An Apple build number also has three parts: Finding build numbers in Apple operating systems Although it’s easy to check the build number of any oper- Major version: Within Apple, the major version is called ating system you’re running, Apple doesn’t publish a the build train. canonical list of them anywhere. For that information, Minor version: For iOS and its descendants, the minor head to Wikipedia’s iOS Version History, macOS Version version tracks with the minor release; for macOS, it tracks History, watchOS, and tvOS articles or look in the Mac- with patch releases. Tracker app (for the macOS build numbers, you’ll need to Daily build version: The daily build indicates how many click through from the version history article to the ex- times Apple has built the source code for the release since panded article about each release). the previous public release. Apple makes a new build of each operating system at least To make this crystal clear, look at iOS 13.5.1, which is build every night, so there’s a fresh version ready for the engi- 17F80, and macOS 10.15.5 with its supplemental update, neers each morning. Most of these builds are never re- which is build 19F101. leased outside the company, so they don’t get an official version number like 13.5.1. But the engineers still need a OS Major Minor Daily way to identify a particular build. That’s what build num- iOS 13.5.1 17 F 80 bers are for.