January 2020 - wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Huawei Unveils OpenEuler, CentOS-Based Linux Distribution
by Peter Reutemann 10 Jan '20

10 Jan '20

'Huawei has released the source code of openEuler, its distribution of Linux based on CentOS. The operating system was formally launched by Huawei in September 2019 in response to U.S. sanctions, which had briefly affected the company's access to Windows and Android operating systems. The source code has now been published on Gitee, the Chinese version of Github. OpenEuler comprises two organizations on Gitee, one for source code and one for package sources. The openEuler organization was keen to highlight two particular packages, iSulad and A-Tune, among the openEuler source code. "iSulad is a lightweight gRPC service-based container runtime. Compared to runc, iSulad is written in C, but all interfaces are compatible with OCI. A-Tune is a system software to auto-optimize the system adaptively to multiple scenarios with embedded AI-engine." The announcement continues: "You will also see several infrastructure-supported projects that set up the community's operating systems... these systems are built on the Huawei Cloud through script automation." Among the package sources, covered by the src-openeuler organization on Gitee, are around 1,000 packages with versions in both ARM64 and X86 architecture packages. Huawei claims its developers have made a number of enhancements to ARM64 openEuler code to improve multi-core efficiency. It is also working on a "green computing" ecosystem with Linaro and the Green Industry Alliance. At the moment, the organization claims, there are more than 50 contributors and just under 600 commits. The openEuler community has around 20 SIGs or project groups.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/20/01/09/058218 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 Ars tests Wi-Fi gear (and you can, too)
by Peter Reutemann 09 Jan '20

09 Jan '20

'The tools and methodology we test Wi-Fi with are open source—so you can use them, too. After our review of Google's Nest Wi-Fi kit last fall, we received an unexpected request: Ars reader GerbilMagnus hopped into the comments and asked for an explainer about how we test Wi-Fi. Machination minutiae hadn't necessarily struck us as something of interest, but ask and you shall receive dear readers. Today, we're taking GerbilMagnus' lead and taking readers behind the scenes of our Wi-Fi testing process—we'll also toss in a little theory and practice along the way. If you want to try our methods at home, know up front that you don't necessarily have to replicate our entire test setup to start seeing useful results for yourself. But if you want to put the latest and greatest mesh gear through the gauntlet, we'll absolutely cover everything from top to bottom before we're done.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/how-ars-tests-wi-fi-gear-and-you-ca… 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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Google Chrome To Hide Notification Spam Starting February 2020
by Peter Reutemann 09 Jan '20

09 Jan '20

'Following in Mozilla's footsteps, Google announced today plans to hide notification popup prompts inside Chrome starting next month, February 2020. ZDNet reports: According to a blog post published today, Google plans to roll out a "quieter notification permission UI that reduces the interruptiveness of notification permission requests." The change is scheduled for Google Chrome 80, scheduled for release on February 4, next month. Starting with Chrome 80 next month, Google's browser will also block most notification popups by default, and show an icon in the URL bar, similar to Firefox. When Chrome 80 launches next month, a new option will be added in the Chrome settings section that allows users to enroll in the new "quieter notification UI." Users can enable this option as soon as Chrome 80 is released, or they can wait for Google to enable it by default as the feature rolls out to the wider Chrome userbase in the following weeks. According to Google, the new feature works by hiding notification requests for Chrome users who regularly dismiss notification prompts. Furthermore, Chrome will also automatically block notification prompts on sites where users rarely accept notifications. ' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/20/01/08/0632203 Nice to see the "[f]ollowing in Mozilla's footsteps". :-) 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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Half of the Websites Using WebAssembly Use it for Malicious Purposes
by Peter Reutemann 09 Jan '20

09 Jan '20

'Around half of the websites that use WebAssembly, a new web technology, use it for malicious purposes, according to academic research published last year. From a report: WebAssembly is a low-level bytecode language that was created after a joint collaboration between all major browser vendors. It introduces a new binary file format for transmitting code from a web server to a browser. Once it reaches the browser, WebAssembly code (Wasm) executes with near-native speed, similar to compiled C, C++, or Rust code. WebAssembly was created for both speed and performance. Due to its binary machine-friendly format, Wasm code is smaller than its equivalent JavaScript form, but also many times faster when executing. This has made WebAssembly the next incarnation of Adobe Flash, allowing websites to run complex CPU-intensive code without freezing a browser, a task for which JavaScript was never designed or optimized for.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/20/01/08/1421216 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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Coming Soon: The Web “Thin Client”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 08 Jan '20

08 Jan '20

Here’s a new trend to watch out for: it’s being called “browser isolation” <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/07/cloudflare_buys_s2/>: S2 developed a ... headless version of Chromium – the open-source foundation of Chrome and about two dozen other browsers – that runs in the cloud and intercepts calls to the browser's Skia graphics layer. "Before it actually draws anything virtual, we intercept those Skia calls, we tokenize them, we compress them, we send them through to any HTML5 browser, where we redraw them locally, right on the machine," Remington explained. "We use WebAssembly. We push a little Skia library that runs local in your browser, any browser. ... Turns out, it's very secure, because that is not an attack vector. It's only draw commands." ... According to Harnett, S2's scheme results in a 60 per cent bandwidth savings. "People are surprised when we say that in many cases, it's faster than local" ...

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PGP keys, software security, and much more threatened by new SHA1 exploit
by Peter Reutemann 08 Jan '20

08 Jan '20

'Three years ago, Ars declared the SHA1 cryptographic hash algorithm officially dead after researchers performed the world’s first known instance of a fatal exploit known as a "collision" on it. On Tuesday, the dead SHA1 horse got clobbered again as a different team of researchers unveiled a new attack that’s significantly more powerful. The new collision gives attackers more options and flexibility than were available with the previous technique. It makes it practical to create PGP encryption keys that, when digitally signed using SHA1 algorithm, impersonate a chosen target. More generally, it produces the same hash for two or more attacker-chosen inputs by appending data to each of them. The attack unveiled on Tuesday also costs as little as $45,000 to carry out. The attack disclosed in 2017, by contrast, didn’t allow forgeries on specific predetermined document prefixes and was evaluated to cost from $110,000 to $560,000 on Amazon’s Web Services platform, depending on how quickly adversaries wanted to carry it out. The new attack is significant. While SHA1 has been slowly phased out over the past five years, it remains far from being fully deprecated. It’s still the default hash function for certifying PGP keys in the legacy 1.4 version branch of GnuPG, the open-source successor to PGP application for encrypting email and files. Those SHA1-generated signatures were accepted by the modern GnuPG branch until recently, and were only rejected after the researchers behind the new collision privately reported their results. Git, the world's most widely used system for managing software development among multiple people, still relies on SHA1 to ensure data integrity. And many non-Web applications that rely on HTTPS encryption still accept SHA1 certificates. SHA1 is also still allowed for in-protocol signatures in the Transport Layer Security and Secure Shell protocols.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/01/pgp-keys-software-se… 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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Firefox 72 Arrives With Fingerprinting Blocked By Default, Picture-in-Picture on macOS and Linux
by Peter Reutemann 08 Jan '20

08 Jan '20

'Mozilla today launched Firefox 72 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Firefox 72 includes fingerprinting scripts blocked by default, less annoying notifications, and Picture-in-Picture video on macOS and Linux. There isn't too much else here, as Mozilla has now transitioned Firefox releases to a four-week cadence (from six to eight weeks).' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/01/07/143225 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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Chrome OS Has Stalled Out
by Peter Reutemann 07 Jan '20

07 Jan '20

'Speaking of Chromebooks, David Ruddock, opines at AndroidPolice: Chrome OS' problems really became apparent to me when Android app compatibility was introduced, around five years ago. Getting Android apps to run on Chrome OS was simultaneously one of the Chrome team's greatest achievements and one of its worst mistakes. In 2019, two things are more obvious than ever about the Android app situation on Chrome. The first is that the "build it and they will come" mantra never panned out. Developers never created an appreciable number of Android app experiences designed for Chrome (just as they never did for Android tablets). The second is that, quite frankly, Android apps are very bad on Chrome OS. Performance is highly variable, and interface bugs are basically unending because most of those apps were never designed for a point-and-click operating system. Sure, they crash less often than they did in the early days, but anyone saying that Android apps on Chrome OS are a good experience is delusional. Those apps are also a crutch that Chrome leans on to this day. Chrome OS doesn't have a robust photo editor? Don't worry, you can download an app! Chrome doesn't have native integration with cloud file services like Box, Dropbox, or OneDrive? Just download the app! Chrome doesn't have Microsoft Office? App! But this "solution" has basically become an insult to Chrome's users, forcing them to live inside a half-baked Android environment using apps that were almost exclusively designed for 6" touchscreens, and which exist in a containerized state that effectively firewalls them from much of the Chrome operating system. As a result, file handling is a nightmare, with only a very limited number of folders accessible to those applications, and the task of finding them from inside those apps a labyrinthine exercise no one should have to endure in 2019. This isn't a tenable state of affairs -- it's computing barbarism as far as I'm concerned. And yet, I've seen zero evidence that the Chrome team intends to fix it. It's just how it is. But Android apps, so far as I can tell, are basically the plan for Chrome. Certainly, Linux environment support is great for enthusiasts and developers, but there are very few commonly-used commercial applications available on Linux, with no sign that will change in the near future. It's another dead end. And if you want an even more depressing picture of Chrome's content ecosystem, just look at the pitiable situation with web apps.' -- source: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/20/01/06/1626227 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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“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.

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Linus Torvalds Calls Blogger's Linux Scheduler Tests 'Pure Garbage'
by Peter Reutemann 06 Jan '20

06 Jan '20

'On Wednesday Phoronix cited a blog post by C++ game developer Malte Skarupke claiming his spinlocks experiments had discovered the Linux kernel had a scheduler issue affecting developers bringing games to Linux for Google Stadia. Linus Torvalds has now responded: The whole post seems to be just wrong, and is measuring something completely different than what the author thinks and claims it is measuring. First off, spinlocks can only be used if you actually know you're not being scheduled while using them. But the blog post author seems to be implementing his own spinlocks in user space with no regard for whether the lock user might be scheduled or not. And the code used for the claimed "lock not held" timing is complete garbage. It basically reads the time before releasing the lock, and then it reads it after acquiring the lock again, and claims that the time difference is the time when no lock was held. Which is just inane and pointless and completely wrong... [T]he code in question is pure garbage. You can't do spinlocks like that. Or rather, you very much can do them like that, and when you do that you are measuring random latencies and getting nonsensical values, because what you are measuring is "I have a lot of busywork, where all the processes are CPU-bound, and I'm measuring random points of how long the scheduler kept the process in place". And then you write a blog-post blamings others, not understanding that it's your incorrect code that is garbage, and is giving random garbage values... You might even see issues like "when I run this as a foreground UI process, I get different numbers than when I run it in the background as a batch process". Cool interesting numbers, aren't they? No, they aren't cool and interesting at all, you've just created a particularly bad random number generator... [Y]ou should never ever think that you're clever enough to write your own locking routines.. Because the likelihood is that you aren't (and by that "you" I very much include myself -- we've tweaked all the in-kernel locking over decades, and gone through the simple test-and-set to ticket locks to cacheline-efficient queuing locks, and even people who know what they are doing tend to get it wrong several times). There's a reason why you can find decades of academic papers on locking. Really. It's hard. "It really means a lot to me that Linus responded," the blogger wrote later, "even if the response is negative." They replied to Torvalds' 1,500-word post on the same mailing list -- and this time received a 1900-word response arguing "you did locking fundamentally wrong..." The fact is, doing your own locking is hard. You need to really understand the issues, and you need to not over-simplify your model of the world to the point where it isn't actually describing reality any more... Dealing with reality is hard. It sometimes means that you need to make your mental model for how locking needs to work a lot more complicated...' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/20/01/06/012251 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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