September 2019 - 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>.

1 1

How Qualcomm Shook Down The Cell Phone Industry For Almost 20 Years
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 15 Aug '20

15 Aug '20

A pretty sobering read <https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/how-qualcomm-shook-down-the-cel…>: Qualcomm's first weapon against competitors: patent licensing terms requiring customers to pay a royalty on every phone sold—not just phones that contained Qualcomm's wireless chips. Sound familiar? Judge Koh draws a direct parallel to licensing behavior that got Microsoft in legal trouble in the 1990s. Microsoft would offer PC makers a discount if they agreed to pay Microsoft a licensing fee for every PC sold—whether or not the PC shipped with a copy of MS-DOS. This effectively meant that a PC maker had to pay twice if it shipped a PC running a non-Microsoft operating system. There’s a lot more--the article reads like a catalogue of gangster-like tactics. All of which is perfectly all right under the US interpretation of “Free Enterprise”, of course ... Also, reading the details of how Qualcomm managed to sabotage Intel’s efforts to develop 5G chips, it seems to me that Qualcomm is directly responsible for the situation today where US companies are lagging behind Chinese ones like Huawei in 5G capability.

1 1

Edge TV Now Online-Only
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 22 Apr '20

22 Apr '20

If there is anybody else besides me who wondered what happened to Edge TV, as of the beginning of this month it is no longer on Freeview, it can now only be viewed as an online stream <https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/tv-radio/113928839/the-edge-tv-remove…>. In the last few days of June, there was a promo announcing that it was going HD, but I don’t recall it mentioning that it was leaving the broadcast airwaves. Quote: MediaWorks chief executive Michael Anderson says the move is in line with audience trends, which show people primarily consume music videos online. While that may be mostly true, personally I would go look for videos on YouTube after seeing them first on Edge TV.

6 12

The State Of Video Streaming In NZ
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 03 Feb '20

03 Feb '20

Apple’s TV+ streaming service is coming soon, followed by Disney’s one <https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=122666…>. Note: Disney+ will break Sky's longtime near-monopoly on Disney content in these parts. Disney says that, ultimately, Disney+ will be the exclusive home of its content. So to get a comparable range of TV content to that you currently have free-to-air, you are going to have to subscribe to two or three or maybe more different streaming services. The increasing multitude of things to pay for isn’t about choice, but about no choice at all.

1 2

“Open Source” Journalism
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 06 Jan '20

06 Jan '20

This week’s “Listening Post” on Al Jazeera (viewable here <https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2019/09/xinjiang-story-c…>) talks, in the latter part, about this new phenomenon of “open source” journalism. My understanding is, the meaning of “source” here is not that of “source code” familiar to software developers, but “source of information” as understood by journalists. That means getting information from public sources available to all. Even a tightly-controlled society like China makes a surprising amount of information freely available online--more than it really wants to make available, sometimes. And this information can be pieced together like a puzzle by perceptive investigators, to point to conclusions which can be directly at odds with public pronouncements from Government officials.

1 1

Google's DNS-Over-TLS Plans Scrutinized By US Congress
by Peter Reutemann 01 Oct '19

01 Oct '19

'Google's plans to implement DNS over TLS in Chrome are being investigated by a committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, while the Justice Department has "recently received complaints" about the practice, according to the Wall Street Journal. An anonymous reader quotes Engadget: While Google says it's pushing for adoption of the technology to prevent spying and spoofing, House investigators are worried this would give the internet giant an unfair advantage by denying access to users' data. The House sent a letter on September 13th asking if Google would use data handled through the process for commercial purposes... Internet service providers are worried that they may be shut out of the data and won't know as much about their customers' traffic patterns. This could "foreclose competition in advertising and other industries," an alliance of ISPs told Congress in a September 19th letter... Mozilla also wants to use the format to secure DNS in Firefox, and the company's Marshall Erwin told the WSJ that the antitrust gripes are "fundamentally misleading." ISPs are trying to undermine the standard simply because they want continued access to users' data, Erwin said. Unencrypted DNS helps them target ads by tracking your web habits, and it's harder to thwart DNS tracking than cookies and other typical approaches. ' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/09/29/2033247 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/

2 1

UK Court Rules That E-Mail Sig Blocks Can Sign Contracts
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 30 Sep '19

30 Sep '19

An e-mail exchange has been ruled to be a binding contract <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/30/email_signature_legally_binding_co…> because the senders included their names at the end, as people commonly do.

1 0

Linus Torvalds Approves New Kernel 'Lockdown' Feature
by Peter Reutemann 30 Sep '19

30 Sep '19

'"After years of countless reviews, discussions, and code rewrites, Linus Torvalds approved on Saturday a new security feature for the Linux kernel, named 'lockdown'," reports ZDNet: The new feature will ship as a LSM (Linux Security Module) in the soon-to-be-released Linux kernel 5.4 branch, where it will be turned off by default; usage being optional due to the risk of breaking existing systems. The new feature's primary function will be to strengthen the divide between userland processes and kernel code by preventing even the root account from interacting with kernel code -- something that it's been able to do, by design, until now. When enabled, the new "lockdown" feature will restrict some kernel functionality, even for the root user, making it harder for compromised root accounts to compromise the rest of the OS... "When enabled, various pieces of kernel functionality are restricted," said Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel creator, and the one who put the final stamp of approval on the module yesterday. This includes restricting access to kernel features that may allow arbitrary code execution via code supplied by userland processes; blocking processes from writing or reading /dev/mem and /dev/kmem memory; block access to opening /dev/port to prevent raw port access; enforcing kernel module signatures; and many more others, detailed here.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/09/30/0312211 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/

1 0

Firefox Promises UK Government DNS-Over-HTTPS Won't Be Default in UK
by Peter Reutemann 30 Sep '19

30 Sep '19

'"Despite looking to make DNS-over-HTTPS the default for its American users, Mozilla has assured culture secretary Nicky Morgan that this won't be the case in the UK," reports Gizmodo: DNS-over-HTTPS has been fairly controversial, with the Internet Services Providers Association nominating Mozilla for an 'Internet Villain' over the whole thing, saying it will "bypass UK filtering obligations and parental controls, undermining internet safety standards in the UK." In his letter to Morgan, Mozilla vice president of global policy, trust and security, Alan Davidson, stressed that the company "has no plans to turn on our DNS-over-HTTPS feature by default in the United Kingdom and will not do so without further engagement with public and private stakeholders". He did add that Mozilla does "strongly believe that DNS-over-HTTPS would offer real security benefits to UK citizens. The DNS is one of the oldest parts of the internet's architecture, and remains largely untouched by efforts to make the web more secure. "Because current DNS requests are unencrypted, the road that connects your citizens to their online destination is still open and used by bad actors looking to violate user privacy, attack communications, and spy on browsing activity. People's most personal information, such as their health-related data, can be tracked, collected, leaked and used against people's best interest. Your citizens deserve to be protected from that threat."' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/09/29/0434233 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/

1 0

Do We Need To Rethink What Free Software Is?
by Peter Reutemann 30 Sep '19

30 Sep '19

'Matthew Garrett is a security developer at Google and a Linux contributor who in 2014 won the Free Software Foundation's annual "Advancement of Free Software" award. But now he's asking if we need to re-think what free software is: If users can pay Amazon to provide a hosted version of a piece of software, there's little incentive for them to pay the authors of that software. This has led to various projects adopting license terms such as the Commons Clause that effectively make it nonviable to provide such a service, forcing providers to pay for a commercial use license instead. In general the entities pushing for these licenses are VC backed companies who are themselves benefiting from free software written by volunteers that they give nothing back to, so I have very little sympathy. But it does raise a larger issue -- how do we ensure that production of free software isn't just a mechanism for the transformation of unpaid labour into corporate profit...? At the same time, people are spending more time considering some of the other ethical outcomes of free software. Copyleft ensures that you can share your code with your neighbour without your neighbour being able to deny the same freedom to others, but it does nothing to prevent your neighbour using your code to deny other fundamental, non-software, freedoms. As governments make more and more use of technology to perform acts of mass surveillance, detention, and even genocide, software authors may feel legitimately appalled at the idea that they are helping enable this by allowing their software to be used for any purpose. The JSON license includes a requirement that "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil", but the lack of any meaningful clarity around what "Good" and "Evil" actually mean makes it hard to determine whether it achieved its aims. As stewards of the free software definition, the Free Software Foundation should be taking the lead in ensuring that these issues are discussed. The priority of the board right now should be to restructure itself to ensure that it can legitimately claim to represent the community and play the leadership role it's been failing to in recent years, otherwise the opportunity will be lost and much of the activist energy that underpins free software will be spent elsewhere. If free software is going to maintain relevance, it needs to continue to explain how it interacts with contemporary social issues. If any organisation is going to claim to lead the community, it needs to be doing that.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/09/28/1741229 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/

1 0