May 2018 - wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Stopping Alert Volume Going To 100%
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 20 Jan '21

20 Jan '21

For quite a while now, I’ve been annoyed by the system notification volume going to 100% on my Debian systems, regardless of my attempts to set it to a lower level. For example, when I open the KDE System Settings app, change something, then try to close the window, the sound that accompanies the save/discard/cancel alert is always startlingly loud. I think I have finally found a fix: in your /etc/pulse/daemon.conf, put in a line saying flat-volumes = no (You should find an existing comment “; flat-volumes = yes” that indicates the default.) You can make this new setting take effect in the current session immediately without having to logout or reboot, by executing the following as the currently-logged-in user: pulseaudio -k (This kills and restarts the PulseAudio daemon for your user session.) There are several discussions of the pros and cons of this issue online, going back some years. For example, here <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1265267>. Also a mention about the “flat-volumes” setting in the ever-reliable Arch Linux Wiki here <https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio>.

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Does Wi-Fi Security Really Matter?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 11 Apr '19

11 Apr '19

Seems the Wi-Fi Alliance is having yet another crack at coming up with a really secure protocol, this time to be called WPA3 <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/09/wi_fi_wpa3/>. Does anybody care? Remember that on the Internet, security is implemented between the endpoints, the protocols are designed not to care that everything in-between might be pawed through by eavesdroppers, or even active attackers trying to inject fake data.

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Microsoft Fixes Notepad
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 11 Dec '18

11 Dec '18

Windows Notepad has never been able to handle any newline convention other than the old DOS/Windows/CP/M one (CR-LF). Now, after so many decades, Microsoft has finally decided to give it “universal newline” capability, so it can handle lines ending in LF-only (Unix/Linux) and CR-only (old MacOS) <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/08/windows_notepad_unix_macos_line_end…>. Gee, I wonder how many lines of code that took...

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Aussie Law >> Maths
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 02 Oct '18

02 Oct '18

"The laws of Australia prevail in Australia, I can assure you of that," [Malcolm Turnbull] said on Friday. "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia." <https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170714/10385237789/aussie-prime-ministe…>

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UN Plan To Move The World To IPv6
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 06 Jun '18

06 Jun '18

The UN has a plan to try to increase IPv6 adoption <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/30/internet_engineers_united_nations_i…>. However, it does it by essentially saddling IPv6 with all the limitations of IPv4 that IPv6 was specifically created to overcome. The UN has been trying for a while to take over governance of the Internet and its standards. This has been fought off by a US-led effort in favour of the IETF, ICANN etc -- all the bodies we know and love. However, the UN can claim some moral high ground in its advocacy for greater adoption among the developing world -- places where such bodies tend to be under-represented.

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Inkscape: By The Way ...
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 01 Jun '18

01 Jun '18

That previous Libre Graphics World article linked to an item on Tavmjong Bah’s blog <http://tavmjong.free.fr/blog/>. “Mr Inkscape” himself has posts on the ins and outs of SVG and CSS, and tutorials on advanced features of Inkscape itself.

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SVG 2.0 Chicken-And-Egg Dilemma
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 01 Jun '18

01 Jun '18

From <http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/gradient-meshes-and-hatching-to-be…>: Essentially, we have arrived to the point where development of a major vector graphics file format for the Web is shaped by inactivity of Mozilla and Google, while Microsoft and W3C do the real work, a developer of one design tool [Inkscape] contributes a lot, but has no say in what goes into the standard, and a vendor [Adobe] of another design tool is taking a wait-and-see stance. By the way, it appears Alexandre Prokoudine has given up the battle with spammers, and has turned off all posting of new comments on his blog.

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Chrome and Firefox leaks let sites steal visitors’ Facebook names, profile pics
by Peter Reutemann 01 Jun '18

01 Jun '18

'For more than a year, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome may have leaked users’ Facebook usernames, profile pictures, and likes if the users’ browsers visited malicious websites that employed a cutting-edge hack, researchers said Thursday. The data could be extracted through what’s known as a side-channel vulnerability in the browsers’ implementation of new standards for cascading style sheets introduced in 2016. One of the new features known as the “mix-blend-mode” leaked visual content hosted on Facebook to websites that included an iframe linking to it and some clever code to capture the data. Normally, a security concept known as the same-origin policy forbids content hosted on one domain to be available to a different domain. The vulnerability was significant because it allowed hackers to bypass this bedrock principle for two of the Internet’s most widely used browsers. The leak was independently discovered by two different research teams, and it was fixed late last year in version 63 of Chrome and two weeks ago in Firefox 60. While the updated browsers no longer pose a threat to user privacy, one of the researchers who discovered the vulnerability said the increasingly powerful graphics capabilities being added in the HTML5 and CSS standards are likely to make similar hacks possible in the future.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/05/chrome-and-firefox-l… 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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1834: The World’s First Cyberattack
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 31 May '18

31 May '18

How a pair of bond-trader brothers were able to covertly get information on prices days ahead of the competition, using the French Government-only telegraph network <https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/05/1834_the_first_.html>.

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ProtonMail Launches Free ProtonVPN Service For Macs
by Peter Reutemann 31 May '18

31 May '18

'The creators of popular encrypted email service ProtonMail have released a free version of their ProtonVPN software for macOS. From a report: Even though the free version does not contain the full features that you would come to expect from a paid VPN service it is more than capable of obfuscating IP addresses and your location. While ProtonVPN has already released Windows and Android versions, according to Dr. Andy Yen, CEO of ProtonMail, their reason for releasing the free macOS version "is to make the world a safer place by ensuring that citizens around the world have access to an Internet free of spying and censorship. Releasing a free VPN service for macOS is another important step in that direction."' -- source: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/18/05/31/1327232 Here's the pricing/features overview: https://protonvpn.com/pricing 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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