February 2021 - wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

WLUG meeting
by Peter Reutemann 19 Feb '21

19 Feb '21

Hi everyone We have a meeting next Monday: "Roger Hardy and Lawrence D'Oliveiro will talk about experiences of a small business with locally hosted server virtualisation using open source Xen based hypervisors." Details: https://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/274861044/ Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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LastPass' Free Tier Will Become a Lot Less Useful Next Month
by Peter Reutemann 17 Feb '21

17 Feb '21

'LastPass is adding new restrictions to its free subscription tier starting March 16th that'll only allow users to view and manage passwords on one category of devices: mobile or computer. From a report: Mobile users will be limited to iOS and Android phones, iPads, Android tablets, and smartwatches. Computer subscribers will be able to use their passwords from Windows, macOS, and Linux desktops and laptops, the LastPass browser extension, and Windows tablets. Users on LastPass' free tier will be asked to pick between the two options the first time they log in after March 16th, and the company says they'll be able to switch between categories up to three times after they've picked. Although customers are restricted to a single category of devices on the free tier, they'll still be able view and manage passwords from an unlimited number of devices within either the mobile or computer category. LastPass says no users will be locked out of their accounts or lose access to their passwords as a result of the changes. As well as restricting its device types, LastPass is also changing the kinds of customer support free tier users will be able to access. From May 17th, free users will lose access to email support, the company announced.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/02/16/166221 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Dev creeped out after he fired up Ubuntu VM on Azure, was immediately approached by Canonical sales rep
by Peter Reutemann 16 Feb '21

16 Feb '21

'An Azure customer was outraged after finding himself on the receiving end of an unexpected LinkedIn message from Ubuntu maker Canonical last night. The user, Luca Bongiorni, had spun up an instance of the Linux distro on an Azure corporate subscription in order to evaluate some tooling. Sensibly, the subscription is used as a sandbox for the purpose of testing. Upon clicking "Add new VM", the first option was Ubuntu 18.04, according to Bongiorni, which he selected in order to get his Linux kicks. Shortly after, however, a message turned up from an Enterprise Development representative at Ubuntu with the ominous phrase: "I saw that you spun up an Ubuntu image in Azure," and offering to be a point of contact.' -- source: https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/11/microsoft_azure_ubuntu_data_sharing/ Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Happy ENIAC Day
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 16 Feb '21

16 Feb '21

75 years ago today, the University of Pennsylvania launched ENIAC, the first non-classified programmable digital computer <https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/15/eniac_day/>. (The UK Colossus preceded it, but the existence of that was kept secret for a few more decades.) This was not a “stored-program” machine, at least not at first: programming was initially done using patch cords and switches. You may also like this interview <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buAYHonF968> with the late Jean Jennings Bartik, about some of the fun she and her colleagues had programming the ENIAC, and the innovations they came up with. The electronics engineers who built the first computers didn’t think of programming as a very interesting activity, so they left it to women.

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History Of VLC
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 15 Feb '21

15 Feb '21

Found this <https://www.protocol.com/vlc-history-open-source> linked from a report on the new version of VLC, describing the history of the project back to its beginnings. Once upon a time there was “VideoLAN Server” and “VideoLAN Client”, but today everything has been rolled into a single “VLC” program. Of course it’s been in the sights of Intellectual Property lawyers for a long time: VLC's success also put it on the radar of patent lawyers, who started to send the VideoLAN team a growing number of legal threats, looking to extract licensing fees. Over the years, the VLC team received hundreds such legal threats over alleged patent violations. Virtually all of them were without merit, according to Kempf. Many were based on U.S. software patents that weren't easily enforceable in Europe. Others were citing technology that VLC was using even before companies tried to patent it. "No one is checking whether these patents are valid," Kempf said. "It's a complete mafia; it's protection money." The open-source x264 codec implementation was also an offshoot of VLC. And Jean-Baptiste Kempf says he could have done those software-bundling deals where unwary users get all kinds of things installed on their PCs in addition to the package they thought they were installing, and thereby earned tens of millions of dollars, but he didn’t want to. The project gets money from donations, but also from companies employing developers to build custom implementations for their set-top boxes.

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Why NVidia Really Wants To Buy ARM
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 13 Feb '21

13 Feb '21

From <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/nvidia-wants-to-buy-cpu-designer-ar…>: Owning Arm outright would also allow Nvidia much greater leeway to innovate upon the design. We've spoken to several vendors who described the sort of innovation that the RISC-V architecture allows as effectively impossible with Arm; the vendors have said "they just won't let you" make changes, like adjustments to the instruction set. If Nvidia owns Arm, it will no longer face such restrictions. And it will be the only company in such a position with respect to ARM. That may make it more competitive with RISC-V, but it will likely just drive other vendors away from ARM ... and towards RISC-V.

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Hauwei router source code.
by Ian Stewart 10 Feb '21

10 Feb '21

Hi, I recently searched for the User Manual for a Huawei Model HG253s V2 Home Gateway. I found the document which is dated 2015. Google also found the HG253s V2 open source code.zip file from February 04, 2015 @117MB. Featuring the Linux kernel version 2.6.30 this file was available from huawei.com at... https://consumer-tkb.huawei.com/weknow/servlet/download/public?contextNo=S1… So, based on what I've heard from the CIA, MI6, GCSB and Five-Eyes, I'm now looking through the source code for the functions that send the messages back to the mothership in China 😉 ...Haven't found any code that does this so far ! In summary. I was surprised that Huawei release their source code. Admittedly it's for a device that's at least five years old and, for all I know, it may be the same code that OpenWRT use. I guess I'll still have to wait a while for the source code for the Huawei 5G routers. cheers, Ian.

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Most Anti-Zoombombing Measures Are Futile
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 05 Feb '21

05 Feb '21

How do you keep unwanted busybodies out of your videoconference meetings? This analysis <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/02/zoombombing-counterm…> concludes that common measures like password-protected meetings and waiting rooms are ineffective because they guard against the wrong threats. One thing that does help is giving each invited participant a unique join link. Ideally this link can only be used once. But even if not, it still allows organizers to identify the source of a leak to a zoombomber.

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Firefox 85 Hammers the Final Nail Into the Adobe Flash Coffin
by Peter Reutemann 03 Feb '21

03 Feb '21

'With Mozilla's release of Firefox 85 on Tuesday, Adobe's once ubiquitous Flash technology is really gone for good. The software had been widely used to expand gaming, video and animation on the web, though Adobe stopped supporting it at the end of 2020. Firefox was the last major browser to support Flash. From a report: Apple, whose late boss Steve Jobs helped sink Flash by banning it from iPhones and iPads, ditched Flash with Safari 14 in September 2020. Google Chrome, the most widely used browser, completely excised it on Jan. 19 with version 88. Microsoft's Edge 88 followed suit on Jan. 21. The schedule of removals shows just how hard it is to advance technology foundations as widely used as the web. Browser makers for years wanted to remove Flash, replacing it with more advanced standards built directly into the web. Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash" letter in 2010 solidified the opposition, and Adobe started recognizing the software's doom by scrapping the Android version of Flash in 2011. It's taken years of effort to drop Flash completely. Adobe took until 2017 to announce that Flash would be completely unsupported at the end of 2020, and still some are willing to jump through lots of hoops to keep Flash around a little longer.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/21/01/26/1618254 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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ActiveX All Over Again?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 02 Feb '21

02 Feb '21

Is Google repeating history, by pushing new browser features regardless of their security implications, like Microsoft did in the bad old days? This article <https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/01/chrome_89_beta_brings_desktop/> reports on Chrome adding some new capabilities that other browser developers (like Mozilla and Apple) feel are far too dangerous to allow, at least in their current form. The problem is, will most users fail to appreciate the security issues, see this feature omission as a bug in those browsers, and reinforce the dominance of Chrome as a result?

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