October 2021 - wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Protonmail Celebrates Swiss Court Victory Exempting it From Telco Data Retention Laws
by Peter Reutemann 28 Oct '21

28 Oct '21

'Encrypted email provider Protonmail has hailed a recent Swiss legal ruling as a "victory for privacy," after winning a lawsuit that sees it exempted from data retention laws in the mountainous realm. From a report: Referring to a previous ruling that exempted instant messaging services from data capture and storage laws, the Protonmail team said this week: "Together, these two rulings are a victory for privacy in Switzerland as many Swiss companies are now exempted from handing over certain user information in response to Swiss legal orders." Switzerland's Federal Administrative Court ruled on October 22 that email providers in Switzerland are not considered telecommunications providers under Swiss law, thereby removing them from the scope of data retention requirements imposed on telcos. The victory comes after controversy over a previous (and not directly related) Swiss court order that forced the company to collect mobile device push notification identifiers from a specified user's account. That user was later arrested by French police, who had asked their Swiss counterparts to obtain the surveillance order. Protonmail chief exec Andy Yen told The Register his business doesn't routinely collect such data on its users.' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/21/10/27/147224 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Intel Core i9 11900K: Five Linux Distros Show Sizable Lead Over Windows 11
by Peter Reutemann 28 Oct '21

28 Oct '21

'Phoronix: Now that Windows 11 has been out as stable and the initial round of updates coming out, I've been running fresh Windows 11 vs. Linux benchmarks for seeing how Microsoft's latest operating system release compares to the fresh batch of Linux distributions. First up is the fresh look at the Windows 11 vs. Linux performance on an Intel Core i9 11900K Rocket Lake system. Microsoft Windows 11 Pro with all stable updates as of 18 October was used for this round of benchmarking on Intel Rocket Lake. The Windows 11 performance was being compared to all of the latest prominent Linux distributions, including: Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS, Ubuntu 21.10, Arch Linux (latest rolling), Fedora Workstation 35, Clear Linux 35150. All the testing was done on the same Intel Core i9 11900K test system at stock speeds (any frequency differences reported in the system table come down to how the information is exposed by the OS, i.e. base or turbo reporting) with 2 x 16GB DDR4-3200 memory, 2TB Corsair Force MP600 NVMe solid-state drive, and an AMD Radeon VII graphics card. Each operating system was cleanly installed and then run at its OS default settings for seeing how the out-of-the-box OS performance compares for these five Linux distributions to Microsoft Windows 11 Pro. But for the TLDR version... Out of 44 tests run across all six operating systems, Windows 11 had just three wins on this Core i9 11900K system. Meanwhile Intel's own Clear Linux platform easily dominated with coming in first place 75% of the time followed by Fedora Workstation 35 in second place with first place finishes 9% of the time. The geometric mean for all 44 tests showed Linux clearly in front of Windows 11 for this current-generation Intel platform. Ubuntu / Arch / Fedora were about 11% faster overall than Windows 11 Pro on this system. Meanwhile, Clear Linux was about 18% faster than Windows 11 and enjoyed about 5% better performance overall than the other Linux distributions.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/21/10/27/1625217 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Setback for Nvidia's $54 Billion ARM Bid as EU Regulators Open Probe
by Peter Reutemann 28 Oct '21

28 Oct '21

'Nvidia suffered a setback on Wednesday as EU antitrust regulators opened a full-scale investigation into its $54 billion bid for British chip designer ARM on concerns the deal could lead to higher prices, less choice and reduced innovation. From a report: Britain's competition agency is also probing the deal for the country's most important technology company, warning that it could damage competition and weaken rivals. Reuters reported the European Commission viewed as insufficient concessions offered by the world's biggest maker of graphics and artificial intelligence (AI) chips during its preliminary review. Nvidia has not disclosed what these are but it has previously said it would maintain ARM as a neutral technology supplier to sooth concerns from customers such as Qualcomm, Samsung and Apple. The Commission said it would decide by March 15 whether to clear or block the deal. "Whilst Arm and Nvidia do not directly compete, Arm's IP is an important input in products competing with those of Nvidia, for example in datacentres, automotive and in Internet of Things," EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager said in a statement.' -- source: https://slashdot.org/story/21/10/27/1648229 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Android's 12L Feature Drop Aims To Be a Big Improvement for Folding Phones
by Peter Reutemann 28 Oct '21

28 Oct '21

'At this year's Android Dev Summit, Google announced an upcoming update for devices with larger screens, which includes tablets, foldables, and devices that run ChromeOS. From a report: Google is calling the update 12L, and it's supposed to make Android 12 run smoother on big screens. We first heard the possibility of a "12.1" update in late September, and it looks like many of the rumored features are true. 12L optimizes the layout of a device's UI, adjusting the placement of the home screen, lock screen, notifications, Quick Settings, and more. Google notes that any screen 600 density-independent pixels (dp) and above will display a two-column layout that makes use of the entire screen. In the example Google shows, the Quick Settings menu is pushed towards the left side of the screen, while the notifications panel is locked to the right, giving you the ability to access both simultaneously -- all without opening one app and closing another. 12L also introduces a new taskbar that makes it easier for users to quickly switch between different apps. Dragging and dropping an app from the taskbar opens it up in split-screen mode, which Google notes it has enabled for all apps, whether they're resizable or not.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/10/27/1821200 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Microsoft Trying To Cripple Its Own Open-Source Project
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 23 Oct '21

23 Oct '21

Microsoft is trying to remove a feature called “Hot Reload” from Dotnet, saying it is something that should only be available through Visual Studio <https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/22/microsoft_net_hot_reload_visual_stud…>. Trouble is, this is the (supposedly) Open-Source version of Dotnet. And you do not take away useful features from Open-Source projects. You can do that to proprietary products, where the users have no choice but to put up with it. As of this writing, the commit that removes the feature has already been merged, but a follow up request to revert that change, while gathering a lot of support, has not been accepted into the official code base yet. As one of the commenters says: “This is the PR that is truly going to decide .NET is really an OSS or not!”. This is just one in a long line of incidents <https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/18/net_foundation_gnome/> casting doubt on the independence of Dotnet as an Open-Source project.

1 0

App Telemetry For Developers
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 23 Oct '21

23 Oct '21

Here’s an interesting idea <https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/22/new_relic_codestream/>: if an app should crash during a production run, it can send telemetry data back to the developer providing some program state and pinpointing exact locations in the source code. This is done using eBPF (Extended Berkeley Packet Filter), which is able to collect information about running applications with minimal impact. You thought packet-filtering was only about managing network activity, but no, it is more useful than that. Yes, there is potential for this sort of thing to be misused, if it is not correctly managed. With great power comes great responsibility etc. By the way, while eBPF may have its roots in the older BPF as found in the BSDs, it is nevertheless a Linux-only technology <https://ebpf.io/>. Though Microsoft is trying to port some parts of it to Windows <https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2021/05/10/making-ebpf-work-on-…>.

1 0

GPSD Bug Will Switch Your Time-Keeping Systems To March 2002 This Weekend, Unless You Update
by Peter Reutemann 22 Oct '21

22 Oct '21

'"Apparently a bug in GPSD, the daemon responsible for deriving time from the GPS system, is going to trigger on October 24, 2021, jumping the time back to March of 2002," writes Slashdot reader suutar. "There's a fix that's been committed since August, but of course not everything is up to date." ZDNet's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes: This will be ugly. Or, as Stephen Williams, who uncovered the bug put it, "I have a feeling that there will be some 'interesting moments' in the early morning when a bunch of the world's stratum 1 NTP servers using GPSD take the long strange trip back to 2002." GPSD maintainer Gary E. Miller has acknowledged the problem, and a fix has been made to the code. To be exact, the fix is in August 2021's GPSD 3.23 release. So, what's the problem if the fix is already in? Well, there are two problems. First, it won't be backported to previous releases. If you're still using an older version, you may be out of luck. Second, as Miller observed, not all distros "pick up GPSD updates or upstream their patches. [This] is a very sore spot with me." So, just because your operating system is up to date does not mean that it will have the necessary GPSD fix. Miller suggests that you check it and do it yourself: "I [am] gonna fall back on Greg K_H's dictum: All users must update." Oh, wondering what the mysterious root cause of all this commotion GPS Week Rollover? It's a legacy GPS problem. The GPS signal GPS week number uses a 10-bit code with a maximum value of 1,023. This means every 19.7 years; the GPS week number rolls over to zero. Or, as Miller noted, "This code is a 1024 week time warp waiting to happen." So, check your systems now for this problem. And, if, like most of us, you're relying on someone upstream from you for the correct time, check with them to make sure they've taken care of this forthcoming trouble.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/21/10/21/2053248 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Software Freedom Conservancy Sues Vizio for GPL Violations
by Peter Reutemann 21 Oct '21

21 Oct '21

'Jeremy Allison - Sam writes: Software Freedom Conservancy, a non-profit organization that promotes open-source software and defends the free software General Public License (GPL), announced today it has filed a lawsuit against Vizio for what it calls repeated failures to fulfill even the basic requirements of the GPL. The lawsuit alleges that Vizio's TV products, built on its SmartCast system, contain software that Vizio unfairly appropriated from a community of developers who intended consumers to have very specific rights to modify, improve, share, and reinstall modified versions of the software.' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/21/10/19/2043203 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

2 1

Intel Versus The Chip Foundries
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 21 Oct '21

21 Oct '21

Nice backgrounder <https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/10/intel-slipped-and-its-future-no…> on how Intel (and American chipmakers generally) slipped from their leadership position by overlooking an important new business: manufacturing chips according to other people’s designs. We’ve all heard of Taiwan-based TSMC, which is the world leader in this area; when it was founded way back in 1987 (with help from the Taiwanese Government and from Philips), none of the US companies would take such an idea seriously. They didn’t think it would amount to a very profitable business, and anyway they wanted to control their own Intellectual Property. Plus, a company that made chips both for its own internal businesses and for others could never be seen to be entirely above accusations of conflict of interest. Note also the role played by Carver Mead, basically the father of the whole concept of RISC. He wanted a place to go to, where his students (and those of other teachers) could get their designs turned into actual working chips. He had special personal connections with Intel to get access to their fabs, but he knew others were not so lucky. So he played an influential part in getting TSMC started.

1 0

Google Removes Support for FTP and Old-gen U2F Security Keys in Chrome 95
by Peter Reutemann 21 Oct '21

21 Oct '21

'Google today released Chrome v95, the latest version of its popular web browser and a version that contains several changes that will likely cause problems for a considerable part of its users. The problematic changes include: removing support for File Transfer Protocol (FTP) URLs -- ftp:// removing support for the Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) standard, used in old-generation security keys (Chrome will only support FIDO2/WebAuth security keys going forward) adding file size limits for browser cookies removing support for URLs with non-IPv4 hostnames ending in numbers, such as http://example.0.1 In addition to breaking changes, Chrome 95 also comes with a new UI component called the "Side Panel," which can be used to view the Chrome browser's Reading List and Bookmarks.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/10/20/206210 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0