January 2017 - wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

New Term To Scare You With: “Line Of Death”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 20 Jan '17

20 Jan '17

... a.k.a. the demarcation between pixels in a web browser window that the user can trust, and those they can’t. And how every new advance in “user experience” seems calculated to weaken this line. Another lovely new term: “picture-in-picture phishing attack”. <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/19/browser_line_of_death/>

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SporeStack: Anonymous, Disposable Servers
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 19 Jan '17

19 Jan '17

Paid for with Bitcoin: <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/19/disposable_servers_available_anonym…>.

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Microsoft-Owned Minecraft No Longer Supported On Microsoft-Owned Windows Phone/Mobile
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 19 Jan '17

19 Jan '17

<http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/01/microsoft-owned-minecraft-no-longer-s…>: In the meantime, however, the game stands as yet another anomaly in the company's approach to software development. It isn't following the rules it suggests that others should obey, and third-party platforms—including the relatively rarely used Fire OS—are seeing stronger software support than the company's own. This tendency to offer better support for non-Windows systems continues to annoy Windows fans, and the failure to capitalize on the universal-ness of UWP leads developers to wonder, "If Microsoft isn't consistently writing universal apps, why should we?"

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Big Astronomy Destroys Big Data
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 18 Jan '17

18 Jan '17

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/18/murchison_radiotelescope_opens_the_…>: A curious detail in the CSIRO blog post caught Vulture South's eye: ASKAP is producing 5.2 TB per second of data, which the CSIRO reckons is equivalent to about 15 per cent of the current data rate for the whole of the Internet. That's bigger, by a nice fat margin, than two things: the connection from Murchison to the Pawsey supercomputer centre in Perth; the amount of disk available once the data arrives in Perth. Clearly, there's a serious amount of data reduction happening along the way... In short, 5.2TB/s of raw data in, 22MB/s of high-res image data out. The latter is what’s stored for further processing.

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Project Isambard To Test Feasibility Of An ARM-Based Supercomputer
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 18 Jan '17

18 Jan '17

Four UK universities will build a 10,000+-core ARM super to determine whether such a beast can beat the usual Xeon-based beasties on price/performance. There’s a suggestion of support for other architectures for comparison purposes as well. <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/18/arm_met_office_hpc/>

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Guilty SPARC: Oracle euthanizes Solaris 12, expunging it from roadmap
by Peter Reutemann 18 Jan '17

18 Jan '17

'Rumors have been circulating since late last year that Oracle was planning to kill development of the Solaris operating system, with major layoffs coming to the operating system's development team. Others speculated that future versions of the Unix platform Oracle acquired with Sun Microsystems would be designed for the cloud and built for the Intel platform only and that the SPARC processor line would meet its demise. The good news, based on a recently released Oracle roadmap for the SPARC platform, is that both Solaris and SPARC appear to have a future. The bad news is that the next major version of Solaris—Solaris 12— has apparently been canceled, as it has disappeared from the roadmap. Instead, it's been replaced with "Solaris 11.next"—and that version is apparently the only update planned for the operating system through 2021.' -- source: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/01/oracle-sort-of-confir… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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meeting on Monday (incl SGM)
by Peter Reutemann 18 Jan '17

18 Jan '17

Hi everyone We have a meeting coming up next Monday: SGM with the following (preliminary) agenda: - elect Vice president Meeting topics - distro roundup: Fedora, Devuan, Zorin - a bit different: ReactOS, FreeDOS Details: https://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/236393751/ Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Vivaldi is building “Opera as it should’ve been”
by Peter Reutemann 16 Jan '17

16 Jan '17

'Working in tight niches occupied by the behemoths of the Internet world is hard; doing it as a startup without external funding is even harder. The 35-strong team of Vivaldi, the spiritual successor to Opera, is doing exactly that: two years after the first public beta and eight months after the release of version 1.0, the Web browser has about 1 million users—but it still isn't turning a profit. Vivaldi, which was envisioned by the Opera Software co-founder and former CEO Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, is catering first of all to power users and the tech-savvy lot. The team, however, has high expectations for their product and hopes it will have a broader appeal over time in order to start actually making money.' -- source: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/01/vivaldi-opera-one-mil… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Raspberry Pi upgrades Compute Module with 10 times the CPU performance
by Peter Reutemann 16 Jan '17

16 Jan '17

'The Raspberry Pi Compute Module is getting a big upgrade, with the same processor used in the recently released Raspberry Pi 3. The Compute Module, which is intended for industrial applications, was first released in April 2014 with the same CPU as the first-generation Raspberry Pi. The upgrade announced today has 1GB of RAM and a Broadcom BCM2837 processor that can run at up to 1.2GHz. "This means it provides twice the RAM and roughly ten times the CPU performance of the original Compute Module," the Raspberry Pi Foundation announcement said.' -- source: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/01/raspberry-pi-upgrades… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Debian 8.7 Released
by Peter Reutemann 15 Jan '17

15 Jan '17

'Debian 8.7 has been released. An anonymous reader quotes Debian.org: This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available. Please note that this update does not constitute a new version of Debian 8 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away old "jessie" CDs or DVDs but only to update via an up-to-date Debian mirror after an installation, to cause any out of date packages to be updated. Those who frequently install updates from security.debian.org won't have to update many packages and most updates from security.debian.org are included in this update. 86 packages have been updated -- including some fixes for systemd. ("Rework logic to determine when we decide to add automatic deps for mounts; various ordering fixes for ifupdown; systemctl: Fix argument handling when invoked as shutdown...")' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/17/01/15/0144253 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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