April 2020 - wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Apple > Ikea
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 17 Apr '20

17 Apr '20

Guess how much it costs to get the castor wheel kit for your new Apple Mac Pro <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/16/apple_mac_pro_699_dollar_wheels/>. I wonder what other furnishing-related items Apple could sell. How about a nice doily to go on top?

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New Jersey Needs COBOL Programmers!
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 17 Apr '20

17 Apr '20

The Governor of the US state of New Jersey is appealing for help in maintaining their elderly COBOL-based mainframe systems <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/05/new_jersey_seeks_cobol_volunteers/> that process welfare benefit requests. The volume of requests has gone up a lot lately, and the systems are having trouble coping. By the way, I don’t understand this “ugly side of technical debt” phrase. Does technical debt have a pretty side?

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Linksys Asks Users To Reset Passwords After Hackers Hijacked Home Routers Last Month
by Peter Reutemann 17 Apr '20

17 Apr '20

'Router vendor Linksys has locked user accounts on its Smart WiFi cloud service and is asking them to reset passwords after hackers have been observed hijacking accounts and changing router settings to redirect users to malware sites. From a report: Linksys' decision only impacts Smart WiFi accounts. Linksys Smart WiFi is a cloud-based account system that lets device owners connect to Linksys routers (and other equipment) over the internet to manage router settings. Smart WiFi is widely deployed across Linksys' router fleet, making it an ideal target for hackers who may want to hijack routers en-masse. According to a Bitdefender report published last month, this is exactly what's been recently happening. The cyber-security firm said it detected an organized campaign to break into D-Link and Linksys routers and change DNS settings.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/20/04/16/1727210 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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The secret behind “unkillable” Android backdoor called xHelper has been revealed
by Peter Reutemann 17 Apr '20

17 Apr '20

'In February, a researcher detailed a widely circulating Android backdoor that’s so pernicious that it survives factory resets, a trait that makes the malware impossible to remove without taking unusual measures. The analysis found that the unusual persistence was the result of rogue folders containing a trojan installer, neither of which was removed by a reset. The trojan dropper would then reinstall the backdoor in the event of a reset. Despite those insights, the researcher still didn’t know precisely how that happened. Now, a different researcher has filled in the missing pieces.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/solved-how-android-b… 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 To Remove Support For the FTP Protocol
by Peter Reutemann 16 Apr '20

16 Apr '20

'Mozilla has announced plans to remove support for the FTP protocol from Firefox. Going forward, users won't be able to download files via the FTP protocol and view the content of FTP links/folders inside the Firefox browser. From a report: "We're doing this for security reasons," said Michal Novotny, a software engineer at the Mozilla Corporation, the company behind the Firefox browser. "FTP is an insecure protocol and there are no reasons to prefer it over HTTPS for downloading resources," he said. "Also, a part of the FTP code is very old, unsafe and hard to maintain and we found a lot of security bugs in it in the past." Novotny says Mozilla plans to disable support for the FTP protocol with the release of Firefox 77, scheduled for release in June this year.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/03/19/169246 There's always FileZilla... 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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NASA Uses 3D Cardboard Glasses
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 16 Apr '20

16 Apr '20

Here’s a fun one: normally, the drivers of the Curiosity Mars rover have active-shutter 3D glasses for viewing images of the Martian terrain on their office machines. But these don’t work on the hardware that these staffers are currently using from home. So they are falling back to those cheap cardboard red-and-blue glasses that they would give out, included in the price of the ticket, at cinemas <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/15/nasa_cardboard_3d_glasses_for_curi…>.

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Jailbreaking Medical Equipment
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 16 Apr '20

16 Apr '20

A security researcher has been taking a look at a piece of “CPAP” (“Continuous Positive Airway Pressure”) equipment <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/04/firmware-jailbreak-l…>, normally used to treat sleep apnoea, just to see whether it can be adapted to function as a “BIPAP” (“Bi-Level Positive Airway Pressure”) device, i.e. a full-on ventilator. The manufacturer says no, but the researcher says yes, the device already has the essential functionality available in its firmware, just needing a patch to enable it.

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A story with a happy ending
by Ian Stewart 15 Apr '20

15 Apr '20

Seven years ago, in March 2013, I discovered a bug in the BASIC programming language that is included with LibreOffice suite of applications. I found that if BASIC was requested to return a 1 to 4 x nibbles Hex string, it would return positive integers OK but it would have an error when attempting to return a negative integer. For examples: Cint(&H0) returned 0 OK Cint(&H7FFF) returned 32767 OK Cint(&HFFFF) should have returned -1, but returned an "overflow error" Cint(&H8000) should have returned -32768, but returned an "overflow error". On the 14th March 2013, I opened a case for this issue on Bugzilla and it was logged as Bug 62326 https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62326 === The most recent comment posted on this bug was two weeks ago: Comment 39 Commit Notification 2020-03-30 06:59:05 UTC Andreas Heinisch committed a patch related to this issue. It has been pushed to "master": https://git.libreoffice.org/core/commit/ffbcbbc8dcc946d4d91cc08a937c2067be5… Cleanup for tdf#130476, tdf#62323 and tdf#62326 It will be available in 7.0.0. === Version 7.0 of LibreOffice is scheduled for release in August 2020. === So.... Good things come to those who wait! cheers, Ian.

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RIP John Conway
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 15 Apr '20

15 Apr '20

One of the higher-profile victims† of Covid-19 has been mathematician John Conway, best known to most people for the invention of the cellular-automata game he called “Life”. This article <https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/john-conway-inventor-of-the-game-of…> has some details, including a link to a YouTube video showing a quite amazing configuration of 6 “engines” that generate an endless stream of “Corderships” that go sailing off in one direction. †Another victim I personally feel sad about is Tim Brooke-Taylor. But while I enjoyed his humour (for example in “The Goodies” and “At Last, The 1948 Show” on TV, and “I’m Sorry, I’ll Read That Again” on radio), I can’t think of anything appropriate to this group to say about him...

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Samsung's S-Voice Is Shutting Down On June 1st
by Peter Reutemann 14 Apr '20

14 Apr '20

'Samsung is reportedly shutting off the servers for its S-Voice voice assistant on June 1, 2020, "at which point Samsung's original voice assistant will stop attempting to respond to your voice queries," reports Ars Technica. From the report: S-Voice arose in the early days of voice assistants, when Android OEMs were scrambling to photocopy Apple's Siri voice assistant, which launched in 2011. Samsung licensed the same underlying technology for S-Voice that Apple originally used for Siri -- Nuance Communication's voice recognition -- and set about building its Siri sibling. S-Voice was Samsung's chosen voice assistant for its smartphones until it rebooted its voice efforts with the launch of "Bixby" in 2017. Samsung's Bixby project initially grew out of an acquisition of Viv Labs, a voice-assistant company founded by members of the original Siri team (see a pattern here?). The Galaxy S8 and every device after it launched with Bixby and not S-Voice, so this shutdown should only effect older devices. SamMobile hunted down a list of applicable devices, saying "The affected models that have the S Voice icon on the app screen include the Galaxy A3, A5, A7, A8, A9, Galaxy Note FE, Galaxy Note 2, 3, 4, 5, Galaxy S3, 4, S5, S6, S6 edge in addition to the Galaxy Note Pro 12.2, Galaxy W, Galaxy Tab 4, Galaxy Tab 4 8.0/10.1, Galaxy Tab S8.4 and S10.5. ' -- source: https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/20/04/13/2336220 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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