April 2021 - wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Slackware Approaches 28th Birthday With New Beta Release
by Peter Reutemann 18 Apr '21

18 Apr '21

'Slashdot reader LeeLynx shares news from The Register about a Slackware 15 beta release (following the debut of February's alpha), "nearly five years after the distribution last saw a major update." (And nearly 28 years after its initial release back in 1993...) Created by Patrick Volkerding (who still lays claim to the title Benevolent Dictator For Life), the current release version arrived in the form of 2016's 14.2... The Linux kernel has been updated to 5.10.30 (at time of writing) with 5.11.14 available for testing. Desktop fans may be pleased to see, among the many updates, KDE Plasma hitting 5.21.4 as well as updates for old faithfuls, such as Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird. The beta itself dropped on 12 April (with the 5.10.29 kernel) and Volkerding noted: "I'm going to go ahead and call this a beta even though there's still no fix for the illegal instruction issue with 32-bit mariadb. But there should be soon." Tinkering has continued since, judging by the change log, although the beta tag brings hope there will be a release before long.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/21/04/18/007214 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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China and Huawei's Dystopian 'New IP' Plan for 6G
by Peter Reutemann 18 Apr '21

18 Apr '21

'Just Security: Huawei's plans for 6G and beyond make U.S. concerns over 5G look paltry: Huawei is proposing a fundamental internet redesign, which it calls "New IP," designed to build "intrinsic security" into the web. Intrinsic security means that individuals must register to use the internet, and authorities can shut off an individual user's internet access at any time. In short, Huawei is looking to integrate China's "social credit," surveillance, and censorship regimes into the internet's architecture... To avoid scrutiny of New IP's shortcomings, Huawei has circumvented international standards bodies where experts might challenge the technical shortcomings of the proposal. Instead, Huawei has worked through the United Nations' International Telecommunications Union (ITU), where Beijing holds more political sway... Huawei dominance on New IP and 6G would not only create a less free, less interoperable internet, it would pave the way for authoritarian governments to gain expanded say over future changes to the internet for years to come.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/04/17/2041239 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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meeting next Monday
by Peter Reutemann 16 Apr '21

16 Apr '21

Hi everyone Due to ANZAC day being observed on Monday 26th, our next WLUG meeting is a week early on the 19th (ie next week!): 'Home automation (aka smart home) is now widely available through a range of consumer products. But often, these devices are only accessible through closed-source apps and also tend to "phone home". Let's have a look, together with Peter Reutemann, at Home Assistant (https://www.home-assistant.io/) an open-source home automation framework that puts local control and privacy first.' -- source: https://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/274861049/ 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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FreeBSD 13 Released
by Peter Reutemann 16 Apr '21

16 Apr '21

'"FreeBSD, the other Linux, reached version 13," writes long-time Slashdot reader undoman. "The operating system is known for its stable code, native ZFS support, and use of the more liberal BSD licenses." Phoronix highlights some of the major new improvements: FreeBSD 13.0 delivers on performance improvements (particularly for Intel CPUs we've seen in benchmarks thanks to hardware P-States), upgrading to LLVM Clang 11 as the default compiler toolchain, POWER 64-bit support improvements, a wide variety of networking improvements, 64-bit ARM (AArch64) now being a tier-one architecture alongside x86_64, EFI boot improvements, AES-NI is now included by default for generic kernel builds, the default CPU support for i386 is bumped to i686 from i486, and a variety of other hardware support improvements. Various obsolete GNU tools have been removed like an old version of GNU Debugger used for crashinfo, obsolete GCC 4.2.1 and Binutils 2.17 were dropped from the main tree, and also switching to a BSD version of grep. ' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/04/15/2034216 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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EFF Partners With DuckDuckGo
by Peter Reutemann 16 Apr '21

16 Apr '21

'The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today announced it has enhanced its groundbreaking HTTPS Everywhere browser extension by incorporating rulesets from DuckDuckGo Smarter Encryption. According to the digital rights group's press release, HTTPS Everywhere is "a collaboration with The Tor Project and a key component of EFF's effort to encrypt the web and make the Internet ecosystem safe for users and website owners." From the press release: "DuckDuckGo Smarter Encryption has a list of millions of HTTPS-encrypted websites, generated by continually crawling the web instead of through crowdsourcing, which will give HTTPS Everywhere users more coverage for secure browsing," said Alexis Hancock, EFF Director of Engineering and manager of HTTPS Everywhere and Certbot web encrypting projects. "We're thrilled to be partnering with DuckDuckGo as we see HTTPS become the default protocol on the net and contemplate HTTPS Everywhere's future." EFF began building and maintaining a crowd-sourced list of encrypted HTTPS versions of websites for a free browser extension -- HTTPS Everywhere -- which automatically takes users to them. That keeps users' web searching, pages visited, and other private information encrypted and safe from trackers and data thieves that try to intercept and steal personal information in transit from their browser. [...] DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine, also joined the effort with Smarter Encryption to help users browse securely by detecting unencrypted, non-secure HTTP connections to websites and automatically upgrading them to encrypted connections. With more domain coverage in Smarter Encryption, HTTPS Everywhere users are provided even more protection. HTTPS Everywhere rulesets will continue to be hosted through this year, giving our partners who use them time to adjust. We will stop taking new requests for domains to be added at the end of May. ' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/21/04/15/2047229 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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Inspur, China's Largest Cloud Hardware Vendor, Joins Open-Source Patent Consortium
by Peter Reutemann 14 Apr '21

14 Apr '21

'ZDNet: The Open Invention Network (OIN) defends the intellectual property (IP) rights of Linux and open-source software developers from patent trolls and the like. This is a global fight and now the OIN has a new, powerful allied member in China: Inspur. Inspur is a leading worldwide provider and China's leading data center infrastructure, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence (AI) server providers. While not a household name like Lenovo, Inspur ranks among the world's top-three server manufacturers. Inspur is only the latest of many companies to join the OIN. Besides such primarily hardware-oriented companies as Inspur, Baidu, China's largest search engine company, and global banks such as Barclays and the TD Bank Group, have joined the OIN. In 2021, companies far removed from traditional Linux companies such as Canonical, Red Hat, and SUSE all recognize Linux and OSS's importance. Donny Zhang, VP of Inspur information, said, "Linux and open source are critical elements in technologies which we are developing and provisioning. By joining the Open Invention Network, we are demonstrating our continued commitment to innovation, and supporting it with patent non-aggression in core Linux and adjacent open-source software." "Linux is rewriting what is possible in infrastructure computing," says OIN CEO Keith Bergelt. "OSS-based cloud computing and on-premise data centers are driving down the cost-per-compute while significantly increasing businesses' ability to provision AI and machine-learning (ML) capabilities. We appreciate Inspur's participation in joining OIN and demonstrating its commitment to innovation and patent non-aggression in open source."' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/04/13/2058235 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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NAME:WRECK Vulnerabilities Impact Millions of Smart and Industrial Devices
by Peter Reutemann 14 Apr '21

14 Apr '21

'Catalin Cimpanu, reporting at Record: Security researchers have found a new set of vulnerabilities that impact hundreds of millions of servers, smart devices, and industrial equipment. Called NAME:WRECK, the vulnerabilities have been discovered by enterprise IoT security firm Forescout as part of its internal research program named Project Memoria -- which the company describes as "an initiative that aims at providing the cybersecurity community with the largest study on the security of TCP/IP stacks." Although never visible to end-users, TCP/IP stacks are libraries that vendors add to their firmware to support internet connectivity and other networking functions for their devices. These libraries are very small but, in most cases, underpin the most basic functions of a device, and any vulnerability here exposes users to remote attacks. The NAME:WRECK research is the fifth set of vulnerabilities impacting TCP/IP libraries that have been disclosed over the past three years, and the third set disclosed part of Project Memoria.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/21/04/13/1849248 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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There's Another Facebook Phone Number Database Online
by Peter Reutemann 14 Apr '21

14 Apr '21

'An online tool lets customers pay to unmask the phone numbers of Facebook users that liked a specific Page, and the underlying dataset appears to be separate from the 500 million account database that made headlines last week, signifying another data breach or large scale scraping of Facebook users' data, Motherboard reports. From the report: Motherboard verified the tool, which comes in the form of a bot on the social network and messaging platform Telegram, outputs accurate phone numbers of Facebook users that aren't included in the dataset of 500 million users. The data also appears to be different to another Telegram bot outputting Facebook phone numbers that Motherboard first reported on in January. "Hello, can you tell me how you got my number?" one person included in the dataset asked Motherboard when reached for comment. "Omg, this is insane," they added. Another person returned Motherboard's call and, after confirming their name, said "If you have my number then yes it seems the data is accurate." A description for the bot reads "The bot give [sic] out the phone numbers of users who have liked the Facebook page." To use the bot, customers need to first identify the unique identification code of the Facebook Page they want to get phone numbers from, be that a band, restaurant, or any other sort of Page. This is possible with at least one free to use website. From there, customers enter that code into the bot, which provides a cost of the data in U.S. dollars and the option to proceed with the purchase, according to Motherboard's tests. A Page with tens of thousands of likes from Facebook users can cost a few hundred dollars, the bot shows. The data for Motherboard's own Page would return 134,803 results and cost $539, for example.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/04/13/1953232 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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Nvidia To Make CPUs, Going After Intel
by Peter Reutemann 13 Apr '21

13 Apr '21

'Nvidia said it's offering the company's first server microprocessors, extending a push into Intel's most lucrative market with a chip aimed at handling the most complicated computing work. Intel shares fell more than 2% on the news. From a report: The graphics chipmaker has designed a central processing unit, or CPU, based on technology from Arm, a company it's trying to acquire from Japan's SoftBank Group. The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre and U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory will be the first to use the chips in their computers, Nvidia said Monday at an online event. Nvidia has focused mainly on graphics processing units, or GPUs, which are used to power video games and data-heavy computing tasks in data centers. CPUs, by contrast, are a type of chip that's more of a generalist and can do basic tasks like running operating systems. Expanding into this product category opens up more revenue opportunities for Nvidia. Founder and Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang has made Nvidia the most valuable U.S. chipmaker by delivering on his promise to give graphics chips a major role in the explosion in cloud computing. Data center revenue contributes about 40% of the company's sales, up from less than 7% just five years ago. Intel still has more than 90% of the market in server processors, which can sell for more than $10,000 each. The CPU, named Grace after the late pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper, is designed to work closely with Nvidia graphics chips to better handle new computing problems that will come with a trillion parameters. Systems working with the new chip will be 10 times faster than those currently using a combination of Nvidia graphics chips and Intel CPUs. The new product will be available at the beginning of 2023, Nvidia said.' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/21/04/12/1639237 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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The FSF Doubles Down On Restoring RMS After His Non-Apology Apology
by Peter Reutemann 13 Apr '21

13 Apr '21

'In late March, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) readmitted its founder Richard M. Stallman (RMS) to its board, catching everyone by surprise. Now, weeks later, RMS "offers a defensive non-apology apology for the words and actions that led to his resignation from the FSF," writes Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols via ZDNet. Slashdot reader destinyland shares an excerpt of his statement from the Free Software Foundation's official website: Looking back over his life starting as a teenager, Stallman writes: "I realized that I didn't understand the subtle cues that other people were responding to. Later in life, I discovered that some people had negative reactions to my behavior, which I did not even know about. Tending to be direct and honest with my thoughts, I sometimes made others uncomfortable or even offended them -- especially women. This was not a choice: I didn't understand the problem enough to know which choices there were." "Sometimes I lost my temper because I didn't have the social skills to avoid it," Stallman adds. "Some people could cope with this; others were hurt. I apologize to each of them. Please direct your criticism at me, not at the Free Software Foundation. Occasionally I learned something about relationships and social skills, so over the years I've found ways to get better at these situations. When people help me understand an aspect of what went wrong, and that shows me a way of treating people better, I teach myself to recognize when I should act that way. I keep making this effort, and over time, I improve. Some have described me as being 'tone-deaf,' and that is fair. With my difficulty in understanding social cues, that tends to happen." This is just an excerpt. But through eight short paragraphs, Stallman seems to want to offer up a larger context for his badly-received defense of Professor Minsky on an MIT mailing list. (And Stallman adds later that "I condemn racism and sexism, including their systemic forms, so when people say I don't, that hurts too...") "I've learned something from this about how to be kind to people who have been hurt," writes Stallman. "In the future, that will help me be kind to people in other situations, which is what I hope to do." "RMS did not, however, address the many other issues which caused people to regret his return to a position of leadership," writes Vaughan-Nichols. Soon after the RMS post appeared on the FSF's front page, the board spoke on why they'd brought him back. The unsigned document states: The voting members of the Free Software Foundation, which include the board of directors, voted to appoint Richard Stallman to a board seat after several months of thorough discussion and thoughtful deliberation. We decided to bring RMS back because we missed his wisdom. His historical, legal and technical acumen on free software is unrivaled. He has a deep sensitivity to the ways that technologies can contribute to both the enhancement and the diminution of basic human rights. His global network of connections is invaluable. He remains the most articulate philosopher and an unquestionably dedicated advocate of freedom in computing. RMS acknowledges that he has made mistakes. He has sincere regrets, especially at how anger toward him personally has negatively impacted the reputation and mission of FSF. While his personal style remains troubling for some, a majority of the board feel his behavior has moderated and believe that his thinking strengthens the work of the FSF in pursuit of its mission. We take full responsibility for how badly we handled the news of his election to a board seat. We had planned a flow of information that was not executed in a timely manner or delivered in the proper sequence. [...]' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/04/12/2039234 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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