Ransomware attack on MATLAB dev MathWorks – licensing center still locked down Software biz MathWorks is cleaning up a ransomware attack more than a week after it took down MATLAB, its flagship product used by more than five million people worldwide. Yesterday MathWorks finally confirmed users' suspicions that ransomware was behind the days-long outage. Its status page first indicated there were issues …
It's almost like relying on software which requires an internet connection to function is a bad idea.
It was some ten years back but I found Matlab's authentication thing to be a pain in the bum so I did my assessment work in Python instead. Python has it's flaws but an online requirement for doing local work is not one of them.
There isn't really any significant FOSS competition. Octave can do some of the maths and GnuPlot is pretty good at visualisation, but nothing links the different elements as well as MATLAB.
> There isn't really any significant FOSS competition.
Julia is becoming a very viable option, and maturing nicely in terms of functionality. If I were starting out today I would probably choose it over Matlab (or Python <shudders>).
> Octave can do some of the maths...
Yeah... it's the "some of" that's the problem - that and incompatibilities with Matlab.
> ... and GnuPlot is pretty good at visualisation,, ...
Gnuplot is much better for visualisation, although the learning curve is pretty steep. Matlab plotting is damn close to just plain broken. (Have you ever tried to export a plot to PDF or SVG that bears even a passing resemblance to the graphical plot - or even fits on the page? And don't get me started on the fonts.) I actually wrote a Matlab interface for Gnuplot, which I use in preference. (Octave uses Gnuplot for visualisation, although IIRC you only get a fraction of the functionality.)
> ... but nothing links the different elements as well as MATLAB.
Agreed. I actually like Matlab - and the nuts-and-bolts computational stuff blows the competition away in terms of quality and efficiency. I do feel it lost it's way somewhat over the last decade1, though, particularly regarding the online nonsense. Startup times have gone through the roof, and that MathWorksServiceHost POS drives me absolutely mental; I HAVE NO USE FOR IT! IT CRASHES! IT SPAWNS USELESS COPIES OF ITSELF! I CAN'T TURN THE BLOODY THING OFF2! (takes deep breaths... I'm okay now).
Interestingly, I've used Matlab pretty much daily over the past couple of weeks, and have not experienced any outages.
1Arguably it lost its way when it opted to use Java for the UI and graphics, which are frankly horrid and unstable. I understand why they did that, but in retrospect a decent cross-platform toolkit, though maybe more work to maintain (or maybe not) would have been a better choice. I always run Matlab with -nodesktop and a decent lightweight, Matlab-compatible IDE/text editor, like Geany.
2And boy, have I tried. Unfortunately Mathworks says no...
Yes, this a thousand times yes. The java components have long been the only unstable part of Matlab. I aliased mine to -nodesktop -nojvm and never had serious issues over twelve years of heavy usage. I even used it to do sys admin stuff (admittedly not a good idea but I was young and stupider then).
It's proprietary software you have to pay for. That means the victims will be compensated handsomely for their distress, right?
I mean, they didn't get the Source Code or the Modification Rights, that would naturally have come with software they didn't have to pay for; so they must have had something even more valuable instead, to make it worth their while paying for it. Right?
> MATLAB and similar tools are freely available if you know where to look.
Sure, Matlab is illegallyfreely available. I'm not sure what "similar tools" you are thinking of; Octave is a FOSS Matlab-alike, but is not really (yet?) up to Matlab in terms of quality and scope, and is not compatible enough to be a useful replacement.
> Open source alternatives shall soon displace them.
I don't know about "soon", but my money would be on Julia. (Python just... no.)
> However, at present these don't have such pretty front-ends.
Are you serious? The Matlab UI is a pug-ugly, unstable car-crash. (I always run Matlab with "-nodesktop", and "-nojvm" if I can get away with it.)
> students have complained about potentially missing deadlines as a result of the issues
This is what is known as "a teachable moment".
Wonder how many will be able to understand it?
Either the dangers to themselves of relying on these remote systems or about how their schools and institutions didn't bother to run a local license server.
Surprisingly simple at least until 2020 when I last had anything to do with the licence services of such software (including MATLAB); usually some variant of FlexLM.
Probably not obvious to most FlexLM users is that lmstat† downloads a full copy of the the licence file (license.dat) which can be captured typically with something like strace on a Linux box.
Invariably the licence service is bound to the licence server's mac (ethernet) address which is infinitely fiddleable‡ so setting up a local licence server with the captured licence file is pretty trivial with the only barrier being obtaining a copy of the vendor daemon.
While lmgrd is pretty blasé about node locking and time you might imagine the vendor daemon would be more particular; requiring a second factor perhaps; I have never found it so. :)
Occasionally found this useful when the numpty§ local distributor of particular packages with whom you were compelled by the vendor to deal, hadn't completed the licence renewal for which they had been paid.
Personally I never had any nefarious need to purloin proprietary software but I would think if an commercial application meets your needs the purchase price will always be cheaper than developing and maintaining equivalent software yourself.
† lmutil lmstat
‡ likewise you can fiddle (eg LD_PRELOAD) with time so your licence server thinks it running last year. Licence clients generally don't or can't detect that.
§ pretty much synonymous with local distributor
As other noted, what worked/works for me is Python with pandas/numpy/scikit/etc or Octave. I am pretty happy with both of them.
I will never use a proprietary software that requires an online license server (pure nonsense greed).
