November 2018 - wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Mozilla's 'Privacy Not Included' Gift Report Highlights Security Concerns
by Peter Reutemann 15 Nov '18

15 Nov '18

'Mozilla has released its second annual "Privacy Not Included" guide that rates 70 products to help give you an idea as to how secure or insecure they are. "We want to provide people information about how to make informed decisions when shopping for gifts that are connected to the internet," says Ashley Boyd, vice president of advocacy at Mozilla. "These products are becoming really popular. And in some cases, it's easy to forget that they're even connected to the internet." Wired reports: Among the important signifiers of a trustworthy stocking stuffer, according to Mozilla's rubric: the use of encryption, pushing automatic software security updates, strong password hygiene, a way to deal with vulnerabilities should they arise, and a privacy policy that doesn't take a PhD to parse. The most surprising result of Mozilla's testing may be how many products actually earned its seal of approval. Thirty-three of the 70 items in the "Privacy Not Included" guide passed muster; fans of the Nintendo Switch, Google Home, and Harry Potter Kano Coding Kit can sleep a little easier. On the other end of the scale, Mozilla highlighted seven products that may not hit the mark -- yes, including the sous vide wand, the Anova Precision Cooker. Also scoring low marks in Mozilla's accounting: the DJI Spark Selfie Drone (no encryption, does not require users to change the default password), the Parrot Bebop 2 drone (no encryption, complex privacy policy), and unsurprisingly, at least one baby monitor. The remaining 30 items on the list all exist somewhere in the murky middle, usually because Mozilla was unable to confirm at least one attribute. Which may be the real takeaway from the report: Typically, you have no reasonable way to find out if a given internet-connected device is secure. "If you can't tell, that says that there's a problem of communication between manufacturers and consumers," says Boyd. "We would love for makers of these products to be more clear and more transparent about what they're doing and not doing. That's a big place we think change is needed." ' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/11/15/0042210 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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A New Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ Has Arrived With Bluetooth 4.2 and Dual-Band Wi-Fi For $25
by Peter Reutemann 15 Nov '18

15 Nov '18

'Raspberry Pi has introduced a new version of one of its most popular models just in time to stuff your stocking: the Model A+. And this time around, it's even more attractive. From a report: The Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ costs $25, $5 more than the previous generation, but has a lot more going for it. Just like the top-of-the-line Model B+, the new Model A+ has a 1.4GHz 64-bit quad-core processor, and you'll also get dual-band Wi-Fi (2.4GHz + 5 GHz), a feature that was missing from the previous A+. And you'll have to use it, since the A+ doesn't have an Ethernet port. It does, however, have Bluetooth 4.2 on board. For $10 less than the $35 Model B+, you'll also only get a single USB port (versus four on the B+) as well as 512MB of RAM (versus 1GB on the B+). But otherwise, the devices are identical, with a full-size HDMI port, CSI camera port, DSI display port, stereo output and composite video port, and a micro SD port. The Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ isn't the cheapest Pi model available -- the Zero costs $5 and the Zero W costs just $10 -- but it rounds out the options nicely. The new model is available now through Raspberry Pi retailers.' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/18/11/15/1846205 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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AGM
by Peter Reutemann 15 Nov '18

15 Nov '18

Hi everyone For those who weren't at the meeting last night or aren't on meetup.com, the WLUG AGM is next month: https://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/246737212/ 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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ProtonVPN Passes 1 Million Users and Launches on iOS
by Peter Reutemann 14 Nov '18

14 Nov '18

'Encrypted email service provider ProtonMail has launched its standalone VPN app for iOS devices. From a report: The announcement comes more than a year after ProtonVPN launched globally for desktop users and 10 months after it landed on Android, so the iOS launch has been a long time coming. There is, of course, no shortage of VPN apps out there already, but ProtonMail has built a solid reputation in the encrypted communications realm since it was founded out of CERN in 2013. Following the launch of its privacy-focused email service nearly three years ago, the company subsequently added two-factor authentication (2FA), Tor support, an encrypted contacts manager, and of course a VPN service. ProtonMail offers various pricing tiers for ProtonVPN, ranging from free to $24 per month. Those who choose not to pay can access three countries' servers, with access on one device, but will have slower speeds, while the top $24/month tier offers access on 10 devices with server access in all available countries. In related news, ProtonMail said that ProtonVPN now has 1 million users globally.' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/18/11/14/1646222 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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Researchers Discover Seven New Meltdown and Spectre Attacks
by Peter Reutemann 14 Nov '18

14 Nov '18

'A team of nine academics has revealed today seven new CPU attacks. The seven impact AMD, ARM, and Intel CPUs to various degrees. From a report: Two of the seven new attacks are variations of the Meltdown attack, while the other five are variations on the original Spectre attack -- two well-known attacks that have been revealed at the start of the year and found to impact CPUs models going back to 1995. Researchers say they've discovered the seven new CPU attacks while performing "a sound and extensible systematization of transient execution attacks" -- a catch-all term the research team used to describe attacks on the various internal mechanisms that a CPU uses to process data, such as the speculative execution process, the CPU's internal caches, and other internal execution stages. The research team says they've successfully demonstrated all seven attacks with proof-of-concept code. Experiments to confirm six other Meltdown-attacks did not succeed, according to a graph published by researchers.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/18/11/14/181225 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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USB Hardware Firewall
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 14 Nov '18

14 Nov '18

You may know that it is possible for USB devices to be created that do malicious things to your PC by committing deceptions right at the USB protocol level. This kind of thing cannot be defeated by antivirus software or erased by, for example, reformatting a USB stick. For example, a device that is labelled as a USB storage stick could actually identify to the PC as two devices, one the actual storage device and the other a keyboard, that feeds malicious keystrokes at carefully-chosen times. Alternatively, it can detect when the PC is booting, and activate a separate partition containing a virus, which is otherwise invisible to antivirus software, at only that point. More details about such possibilities are available here <https://opensource.srlabs.de/projects/badusb>. Here <https://github.com/robertfisk/USG/wiki> is an interesting project to create a hardware device that will act as a “firewall” for untrusted USB devices, to prevent malicious protocol exchanges from occurring between them and your PC. If you don’t want to build your own, there’s a link in the readme to buy NZ-made ones.

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World’s Top Three Most Powerful Supercomputers Are Non-Intel
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 13 Nov '18

13 Nov '18

Machines based on IBM’s Power9 architecture have taken the top two spots in the list of the world’s most powerful (publicly-known) supercomputers <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/13/500_supercomputers_list/>. China’s Sunway TaihuLight machine, which is based on some derivative of MIPS, is in third place, with another Chinese machine, the highest-ranking Intel-based one, coming next. There is also the first ARM-based beastie, built by HP Enterprises, appearing on the list, at number 203.

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Windows 10 Spontaneous Downgrade
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 08 Nov '18

08 Nov '18

Some users of Windows 10 Pro are discovering that their machines are suddenly claiming to only have a Windows 10 Home licence <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/08/windows_10_activation/>. This isn’t confined to the “Insider” prereleases, but production releases as well (both upgrades and fresh installs). Seems some Microsoft support staff have confirmed that there is a “temporary issue” with the licence servers, which may take 1-2 days to fix.

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WLinux, the First Paid-for Linux Distro for Windows 10, Goes On Sale on Microsoft Store
by Peter Reutemann 07 Nov '18

07 Nov '18

'WLinux is a $20 open-source, Debian-based distribution, designed to run on Windows 10's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). The WSL allows Windows 10 to run various GNU/Linux distros inside Windows as Microsoft Store apps, providing access to Ubuntu, openSUSE, Debian, Fedora, Kali Linux, and others. The WSL has disadvantages over a running a dedicated GNU/Linux system. For example, there's no official support for desktop environments or graphical applications, and I/O performance bottlenecks, but it is being improved over time. The developers of WLinux describe it as a "fast Linux terminal environment for developers", saying it is the first distribution to be "pre-configured and optimized to run specifically on Windows Subsystem for Linux". Announcing WLinux's availability, Microsoft program manager Tara Raj, called out the wlinux-setup tool, "which allows users to easily set up common developer toolchains, and removes unsupported features like systemd."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/18/11/07/1510223 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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How New, Polite Linus Torvalds Points Out Bad Kernel Code
by Peter Reutemann 06 Nov '18

06 Nov '18

'Linus Torvalds "has shown already for the new Linux 4.20~5.0 cycle he isn't relaxing his standards but is communicating better when it comes to bringing up coding," reports Phoronix, adding "So far it looks like Linus' brief retreat is paying off with still addressing code quality issues -- and not blatantly accepting new code into the kernel as some feared -- but in doing so in a professional manner compared to his past manner of exclaiming himself over capitalized sentences and profanity that at time put him at odds with some in the Linux kernel community." AmiMoJo quotes their report: Last Saturday he took issue with the HID pull request and its introduction of the BigBen game controller driver that was introduced: the developer enabled this new driver by default. Linus Torvalds has always frowned upon random new drivers being enabled by default in the kernel configuration driver. [H]e still voiced his opinion over this driver's default "Y" build configuration, but did so in a more professional manner than he has done in the past: We do *not* enable new random drivers by default. And we most *definitely* don't do it when they are odd-ball ones that most people have never heard of. Yet the new "BigBen Interactive" driver that was added this merge window did exactly that. Just don't do it. Yes, yes, every developer always thinks that _their_ driver is so special and so magically important that it should be enabled by default. But no. When we have thousands of drivers, we don't randomly pick one new driver to be enabled by default just because some developer thinks it is special. It's not.... Please don't do things like this. Phoronix also describes another "kernel oops" testing Torvalds' patience, in which Linus responded tactfully that "What makes me *very* unhappy about this is that if I'm right, I think it means that code was literally not tested at all by anybody who didn't have one of the entries in that list."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/18/11/03/1833213 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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