June 2020 - wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Windows 10 Linux Subsystem: You Get GPU Acceleration -- With Intel, AMD, Nvidia Drivers
by Peter Reutemann 23 Jun '20

23 Jun '20

'Nvidia, Intel and AMD have announced their support for Microsoft's new effort to bring graphics processor support to the Windows 10 Windows Subsystem for Linux to enhance machine-learning training. From a report: GPU support for WSL arrived on Wednesday in the Dev Channel preview of Windows 10 build 20150 under Microsoft's reorganized testing structure, which lets it test Windows 10 builds that aren't tied to a specific future feature release. Microsoft announced upcoming GPU support for WSL a few weeks ago at Build 2020, along with support for running Linux GUI apps. The move on GPU access for WSL is intended to bring the performance of applications running in WSL2 up to par with those running on Windows. GPU compute support is the feature most requested by WSL users, according to Microsoft. The 20150 update includes support for Nvidia's CUDA parallel computing platform and GPUs, as well as GPUs from AMD and Intel. It also supports DirectML (Direct Machine Learning), Microsoft's Windows 10 API for hardware-accelerated machine learning. ' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/20/06/22/1349251 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 To Start Fact-Checking Google Images
by Peter Reutemann 23 Jun '20

23 Jun '20

'In an effort to curb the spread of misinformation on its platform, Google said Monday it would begin to fact-check Google Images search results. From a report: The danger of text-based misinformation could be dwarfed by that posed by misleading, manipulated and outright fake photos and videos, including convincing "deepfakes" generated with the aid of artificial intelligence. The move, a first among major search engines, comes as tech firms continue to wrestle with how to address the misinformation that continue to run rampant on their platforms. Beginning Monday, Google will surface fact-check information in Google Images around the world, a similar effort to what is does in its regular search and news results.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/20/06/22/1634217 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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Nvidia Engineer Releases Open-Sourced Vulkan Graphics Driver for the Raspberry Pi
by Peter Reutemann 22 Jun '20

22 Jun '20

'Earlier this year, the Raspberry Pi Foundation hooked up with Igalia to start development on an open-sourced Vulkan graphics driver for the Raspberry Pi. However, Martin Thomas, an engineer at Nvidia, beat them to the punch. Thomas announced yesterday via his personal Twitter that his RPi-VK-Driver is ready for primetime. The talented engineer had been working on the Vulkan driver in his spare time for more than two years. Technically, Thomas' iteration isn't a Vulkan driver per se because it doesn't comply with the official standards established by The Khronos Group. Nonetheless, the resourceful developer produced a driver that adheres to the Vulkan parameters as much as possible, and as close as the hardware would permit it. There's just one limitation with the RPi-VK-Driver though. Unlike the official Vulkan driver that's still in the works, Thomas' version is only compatible with the Broadcom VideoCore IV GPU that's found inside the Raspberry Pi 1, 2, 3 and Zero devices.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/20/06/21/185227 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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Anyone Can Build This Open Source, DRM-Free Kindle Alternative
by Peter Reutemann 21 Jun '20

21 Jun '20

'It’s harder to get an open source e-reader than you might think. Kindles are popular, but they lock you into Amazon’s ecosystem. Amazon’s books come with digital rights protection and the company can remove them from your device whenever it wants. Those problems exist on tablets from Barnes and Nobles, Google, and Apple, too. When it comes to open source reading, there’s just no good options. The Open Book Project wants to change that. As first spotted by Hackster.io, “the Open Book aims to be a simple device that anyone with a soldering iron can build for themselves,” designer Joey Castillo said on the GitHub repository for the project. Castillo is still prototyping the device, and his goal is to build an e-reader that anyone can redesign, recode, or accessorize as they see fit. Of course, it should be able to read books in any format, from ePub to MOBI and everything in between. Castillo’s prototype is built from a circuit board of his own design. The design works in the Adafruit Feather ecosystem, a user friendly set of development boards and electronics. Castillo has listed all the parts you’ll need to build your own open source e-reader and tweak the design on his GitHub. (Castillo is still working on the device’s firmware, so you’ll have to write it yourself or wait for a release.)' -- source: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7x5kpb/anyone-can-build-this-open-source… 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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AI Magic Comes At A Price
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 20 Jun '20

20 Jun '20

Interview with a software developer <https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/19/generative_adversarial_networks_are_…> about the pitfalls of using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for the specific task of adding colour to old monochrome images. You can get them to produce good results most of the time, then every now and then they will go wrong in some weird and unsettling way: "GANs would spit out very weird specific glitches like odd splashes of colour on someone's hand and it made them look creepy," he told us. In some examples, people have turned an eerie alien green. And trying to tweak things manually can just as easily make things worse as better. He offers an open-source version of his product here <https://github.com/jantic/DeOldify>. Note the Jupyter notebooks. ;)

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Lawsuit vs. Western Digital wants to end any use of SMR in NAS drives
by Peter Reutemann 19 Jun '20

19 Jun '20

'Law firm Hattis & Lukacs has filed an amendment to its class-action lawsuit against Western Digital for including SMR technology in its WD Red line of NAS drives. The amendment adds five more named plaintiffs from five new states, and it includes significant additional technical detail. If you aren't up to date on the SMR saga, this is one article in an ongoing series. The short version: SMR—Shingled Magnetic Recording—is a relatively new hard drive recording technology that allows higher data densities. It does so by laying down overlapping tracks—like shingles on a roof—with a write head that's wider than the read head. Unfortunately, this technology makes rewriting existing disk sectors agonizingly slow in many cases—rewriting a single 4KiB sector will generally mean needing to both read and rewrite an entire 256MiB zone. The original American class-action suit (there's a Canadian one as well) had a single named plaintiff, Wisconsin's Nicholas Malone. The amendment features five new plaintiffs, each from a different state, and tells each plaintiff's story in detail. New York plaintiff Steve Gravel's story is particularly wince-inducing—he wasn't just using the drives for photo and movie storage; he had an iSCSI target on his QNAP NAS, and the performance decrease when he replaced CMR drives with SMR was, as you might expect, terrible.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/06/lawsuit-vs-western-d… 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 pushes “text fragment links” with new Chrome extension
by Peter Reutemann 19 Jun '20

19 Jun '20

'Google has been cooking up an extension to the URL standard called "Text Fragments." The new link style will allow you to link not just to a page but to specific text on a page, which will get scrolled to and highlighted automatically once the page loads. It's like an anchor link, but with highlighting and creatable by anyone. The feature has actually been supported in Chrome since version 80, which hit the stable channel in February. Now a new extension from Google makes it easy to create this new link type, which will work for anyone else using Chrome on desktop OSes and Android. Google has proposed the idea to the W3C and hopes other browsers will adopt it, but even if they don't, the links are backward-compatible.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/google-pushes-text-fragment-links-w… 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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Massive Spying on Users of Google's Chrome Shows New Security Weakness
by Peter Reutemann 19 Jun '20

19 Jun '20

'A newly discovered spyware effort attacked users through 32 million downloads of extensions to Google's market-leading Chrome web browser, researchers at Awake Security told Reuters, highlighting the tech industry's failure to protect browsers as they are used more for email, payroll and other sensitive functions. From a report: Google said it removed more than 70 of the malicious add-ons from its official Chrome Web Store after being alerted by the researchers last month. "When we are alerted of extensions in the Web Store that violate our policies, we take action and use those incidents as training material to improve our automated and manual analyses," Google spokesman Scott Westover told Reuters. Most of the free extensions purported to warn users about questionable websites or convert files from one format to another. Instead, they siphoned off browsing history and data that provided credentials for access to internal business tools. Based on the number of downloads, it was the most far-reaching malicious Chrome store campaign to date, according to Awake co-founder and chief scientist Gary Golomb.' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/06/18/1341219 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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AWS Said It Mitigated a 2.3 Tbps DDoS Attack, the Largest Ever
by Peter Reutemann 18 Jun '20

18 Jun '20

'Amazon said its AWS Shield service mitigated the largest DDoS attack ever recorded, stopping a 2.3 Tbps attack in mid-February this year. The incident was disclosed in the company's AWS Shield Threat Landscape [PDF], a report detailing web attacks mitigated by Amazon's AWS Shield protection service. The report didn't identify the targeted AWS customer but said the attack was carried out using hijacked CLDAP web servers and caused three days of "elevated threat" for its AWS Shield staff. [...] The previous record for the largest DDoS attack ever recorded was of 1.7 Tbps, mitigated by NETSCOUT Arbor in March 2018. Before that, the biggest DDoS attack ever recorded was a 1.3 Tbps DDoS attack that hit GitHub, a month before, in February 2018.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/20/06/17/1958227 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 Medical Device Maker Threatens iFixit Over Ventilator Repair Project
by Peter Reutemann 18 Jun '20

18 Jun '20

'STERIS Corporation, a company that makes sterilization and other medical equipment, sent a letter to iFixit claiming their online database of repair manuals for ventilators and medical equipment violates their copyrights. Motherboard reports: "It has come to my attention that you have been reproducing certain installation and maintenance manuals relating to our products, documentation which is protected by copyright law," the letter said. The letter then went on to tell [Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit] to remove all Steris copyrighted material from the iFixit website within 10 days of the letter. As Motherboard reported in March, major manufacturers of medical devices have long made it difficult for their devices to be repaired through third party repair professionals. Manufacturers have often lobbied against right to repair legislation and many medical devices are controlled by artificial "software locks" that allow only those with authorization to make modifications. "I'm disappointed that Steris is resorting to legal threats to stop hospitals from having access to information about how to maintain critical sterilization equipment during a pandemic," Wiens told Motherboard in an email. "No manufacturer should be stopping hospitals from repairing their equipment," Wiens said. "The best way to ensure patient safety is to make sure that equipment is being maintained regularly using the manufacturer's recommended procedures. The only way to do that is if hospitals have up to date manuals." With regards to the letter sent by Steris, Wiens said iFixit has not removed any material from its website. "We explained to Steris that what we did is a lawful and protected fair use under the U.S. Copyright act," Wiens said. "iFixit is protected by Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows online platforms to host content contributed by users provided they comply with the Act's requirements, which iFixit does," a letter to Steris from the Electronic Frontier Foundation on behalf of iFixit said.' -- source: https://science.slashdot.org/story/20/06/17/2013232 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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