November 2023 - wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Juice TV Hiccup
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 15 Oct '24

15 Oct '24

Currently when I switch to FreeView Channel 200, it shows a frozen image with the text “Cinegy” and “Demo Version” on it. Searching for that name takes me to a site that talks about “software defined television”. Either their product licence has expired, or they never had one in the first place ...

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List Of IPTV Resources
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 22 Sep '24

22 Sep '24

This user <https://github.com/iptv-org> just popped up in my GitHub feed. One repo <https://github.com/iptv-org/iptv> claims to be a list of links to over 8000 streaming TV channels from nations all over the world, while the other is a list of tools*, providers and other resources. Do be aware it’s a bit of a mixed bag: yes, there are legitimate channels (no encryption so far that I have noticed), but also some dubious-looking links. *Oddly, FFmpeg and youtube-dl aren’t in the list.

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Enabling Case-Insensitive Filenames On Linux
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 06 Feb '24

06 Feb '24

The ext4 filesystem has had the “casefold” option for a while now <https://lwn.net/Articles/784041/>. This allows you to specify, when you initialize a new filesystem, that you want file/directory names to be treated as case-insensitive. At the same time, you have to specify that the filenames are to be interpreted as UTF-8 encoding; normally the kernel doesn’t care, it only singles out ASCII slash and NUL bytes for special interpretation, and simply passes through any other byte values in the names. I was able to create such a filesystem, but I wasn’t able to mount it in my last-upgraded-just-a-few-days-ago Debian Unstable setup. When I try, it fails, and in the dmesg log I see Filesystem with casefold feature cannot be mounted without CONFIG_UNICODE Turns out the Debian 5.10 kernel has not been built with this CONFIG_UNICODE option enabled. However, this situation looks set to change shortly, according to <https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=985689>.

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Easy Relative Symbolic Links
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 23 Jan '24

23 Jan '24

You probably know about the “ln” command to create a new link to an existing file. You probably know about “ln -s” to create a symbolic link. But did you know about “ln -rs” to easily create relative symbolic links? Relative links are often preferable to absolute ones, because that way they stay valid if the whole containing directory tree is moved to a different location (e.g. as the result of a bind mount). But typing the right number of “../” prefixes can get quite fiddly. And if you want to rely on autocomplete to help, you have to change directory to the destination where the symlink is to be created. Instead, a simpler way is to use “ln -rs”, then use autocomplete from wherever you are to get to the right source file/directory, and the ln command will automatically convert the resulting path, whatever it might be (either absolute or relative to your current working directory) to a suitable relative one based on the destination for the link. <https://manpages.debian.org/ln.1.en.html>

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RHEL 10 Plans To Drop X.Org Server Except For XWayland
by Peter Reutemann 01 Dec '23

01 Dec '23

'"Red Hat is going to do away with the X.Org server and support Wayland and XWayland for apps that currently (or only) run on X11," writes Slashdot reader motang. Red Hat's Carlos Soriano Sanchez confirmed on the Red Hat blog: "The result of this evaluation is that, while there are still some gaps and applications that need some level of adaptation, we believe the Wayland infrastructure and ecosystem are in good shape, and that we're on a good path for the identified blockers to be resolved by the time RHEL 10 is out, planned to be released on the first half of 2025. With this, we've decided to remove Xorg server and other X servers (except Xwayland) from RHEL 10 and the following releases. Xwayland should be able to handle most X11 clients that won't immediately be ported to Wayland, and if needed, our customers will be able to stay on RHEL 9 for its full life cycle while resolving the specifics needed for transitioning to a Wayland ecosystem. It's important to note that "Xorg Server" and "X11" are not synonymous, X11 is a protocol that will continue to be supported through Xwayland, while the Xorg Server is one of the implementations of the X11 protocol. [...] This decision will allow us to focus our efforts starting from RHEL 10 solely on a modern stack and ecosystem. This means we will be able to tackle problems such as HDR, increased security, setups with mixed low and high density displays or very high density displays, better GPU/Display hot-plugging, better gestures and scrolling, and so on. We are confident that Wayland will provide a solid platform and we're excited to work with the community and all of our partners and customers on building the future for Linux." ' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/11/29/0559207 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Don Hopkins Blog
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 30 Nov '23

30 Nov '23

Following some random link (as you do) left me ending up at a collection of postings on Medium <https://donhopkins.medium.com/> by one Don Hopkins. His brief bio on that page starts “User interface flower child”, and his personal network includes such luminaries as Alan Kay and bright sparks at Sun Microsystems and elsewhere. (You can tell from those names that he’s been around a while.) Here <https://donhopkins.medium.com/alan-kay-on-should-web-browsers-have-stuck-to…> is an example of the kind of freewheeling discussion he and his mates get into, over the connections between web browsers, the PostScript printing language, Apple’s old HyperCard and AppleScript technologies, Xerox PARC, SimCity (!) and other fun stuff. Including some concepts that might have been, but never were.

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Weta Digital’s Technology Division Sold To US Firm
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 30 Nov '23

30 Nov '23

Let me see if I understand this article <https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/sir-peter-jackson-to-sell-weta-digital-…> correctly: the part of Weta Digital that used to develop the in-house 3D graphics/effects tools that they use in all those movies is being sold to US-based Unity Software. The part that is left will be called “WetaFX”, and will become a customer of Unity for the use of those tools, no longer doing its own development in-house. By the way, I’ve been looking at the Unity site <https://unity.com/>, and it looks like all their products are rentware (subscription-based).

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ownCloud vulnerability with maximum 10 severity score comes under “mass” exploitation
by Peter Reutemann 30 Nov '23

30 Nov '23

'Security researchers are tracking what they say is the “mass exploitation” of a security vulnerability that makes it possible to take full control of servers running ownCloud, a widely used open source file-sharing server app. The vulnerability, which carries the maximum severity rating of 10, makes it possible to obtain passwords and cryptographic keys allowing administrative control of a vulnerable server by sending a simple Web request to a static URL, ownCloud officials warned last week. Within four days of the November 21 disclosure, researchers at security firm Greynoise said, they began observing “mass exploitation” in their honeypot servers, which masqueraded as vulnerable ownCloud servers to track attempts to exploit the vulnerability. The number of IP addresses sending the web requests has slowly risen since then. At the time this post went live on Ars, it had reached 13. “We're seeing hits to the specific endpoint that exposes sensitive information, which would be considered exploitation,” Glenn Thorpe, senior director of security research & detection engineering at Greynoise, said in an interview on Mastodon. “At the moment, we've seen 13 IPs that are hitting our unadvertised sensors, which indicates that they are pretty much spraying it across the internet to see what hits.” CVE-2023-49103 resides in versions 0.2.0 and 0.3.0 of graphapi, an app that runs in some ownCloud deployments, depending on the way they’re configured. A third-party code library used by the app provides a URL that, when accessed, reveals configuration details from the PHP-based environment. In last week’s disclosure, ownCloud officials said that in containerized configurations—such as those using the Docker virtualization tool—the URL can reveal data used to log in to the vulnerable server. The officials went on to warn that simply disabling the app in such cases wasn’t sufficient to lock down a vulnerable server.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/11/owncloud-vulnerability-with-a-maxi… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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FFmpeg 6.1 “Heaviside”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 29 Nov '23

29 Nov '23

Seems there is another numbered-version release of FFmpeg <https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/24/ffmpeg_6_1/>. I didn’t even notice: I did a fresh build a few days ago, and I fetch my upstream from <git://source.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg>, and it appears that repo now actually points to <http://git.videolan.org/?p=ffmpeg.git>. And I just build whatever happens to be at the head of the master branch at the time. This FFmpeg version is named “Heaviside”, after Oliver Heaviside, a major figure in the whole 19th-century ferment over electromagnetic theory, Maxwell’s equations, the development of the associated mathematical techniques of vector analysis, quaternions and all that jazz. If you are interested, here <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M12CJIuX8D4> is an entertaining exposition on the very human figures involved in these developments, from a presenter who combines an enthusiasm for the subject with the patience to dig up a remarkable amount of detail (including personal foibles, naturally) about what went on. Why build FFmpeg yourself? Because then you can enable combinations of options that are not legally allowed in any prebuilt binary package. For example, you can have both “--enable-gpl” and “--enable-nonfree”, and end up with a build that is marked “unredistributable”. FFmpeg is both a set of command-line tools, and a set of libraries underlying them, that can also be built into other custom applications. For those intimidated by the truly breathtaking array of options in the command-line tools, there are GUI front-ends to make the functionality more approachable. I hear HandBrake is quite popular. Though I was disappointed to discover that, instead of being a simple GUI wrapper around the command-line tools, it builds its own application directly around the libraries. The downsides of this are that it limits the functionality it can make available, and also makes it harder to keep up with changes to that functionality.

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Roll On The ARM-Based Supers
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 29 Nov '23

29 Nov '23

Report on the status of ARM-based supercomputing <https://www.nextplatform.com/2023/11/28/hpc-pioneers-pave-the-way-for-a-flo…>. The Fugaku machine was top of the Top500 list from June 2020 to November 2021, which was a pretty decent run. That Fujitsu A64FX chip also powers other supers on the list. But now more entrants are on the way. In terms of user experience, the article reports quite a mixed bag. Some apps are yet to be tuned to wring maximum performance out of ARM hardware, while others build and run nicely without any drama at all. And of course, at some point we should see the first RISC-V machine(s) enter the list.

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