- wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Hi, I have parcels going missing. Does anyone know of technology to trace parcels?
by Michelle 18 Sep '21

18 Sep '21

It would presumably use GPS. It would involve a very small device put in the parcel that a thief would very possibly not even see when the parcel is scanned at customs. The icing on the cake would be if the route of the parcel was able to be recorded as evidence. I will give more details later like it going on for 3 months and involving parcels posted in NZ as well. But this is trial run email because I haven't posted in a long time and I want to make sure I am doing it right. I am hoping that if anyone replies to this that there is a convenient reply to button or link that I can reply back to. Oh well, after I send this email I want to go to the site and see if it has posted. Thanks for any help.

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Ransomware Scammers Preying On Krita Users
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 16 Sep '21

16 Sep '21

Some ne’er-do-wells are targeting users of the open-source paint app Krita, purporting to offer payment for advertising the app on their YouTube channels. But when they download the referenced media “asset” pack, they get a ransomware attack instead. <https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/14/krita_users_targeted_by_ransomware/>

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UN Calls For Moratorium On AI That Threatens Human Rights
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 16 Sep '21

16 Sep '21

The UN human rights office has released a report <https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/9/15/warning-of-risk-un-rights-chief…> on the risks of AI technologies to human rights. Its head, Michelle Bachelet, wants safeguards against the abuse of such technologies before they get too widely deployed. Such technologies are increasingly being used for automated decision making by both companies and governments, in ways that can impact people’s lives in a major way: for example, to control access to social security benefits, health, education, or to identify criminal suspects for arrest. When mistakes are made in these areas, the consequences can be catastrophic for the individuals concerned. And the tendency to secrecy on the part of those using such technologies doesn’t help.

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More On The NZ Reserve Bank Breach
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 15 Sep '21

15 Sep '21

Seems hackers broke into a secure file-sharing service called Accellion, based in California. The RBNZ was using that to exchange documents with the likes of banks and insurance companies. <https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/123911764/reserve-bank-reveals-more-detail…>

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Travis CI flaw exposed secrets of thousands of open source projects
by Peter Reutemann 15 Sep '21

15 Sep '21

'A security flaw in Travis CI potentially exposed the secrets of thousands of open source projects that rely on the hosted continuous integration service. Travis CI is a software-testing solution used by over 900,000 open source projects and 600,000 users. A vulnerability in the tool made it possible for secure environment variables—signing keys, access credentials, and API tokens of all public open source projects—to be exfiltrated. Worse, the dev community is upset about the poor handling of the vulnerability disclosure process and the brief "security bulletin" it had to force out of Travis.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/09/travis-ci-flaw-expos… 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/

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Another Day, Another DDoS ...
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 14 Sep '21

14 Sep '21

A bunch of NZ banks, also NZ Post and MetService, are currently having online trouble <https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/live-cyber-attack-fears-kiwibank-anz-nz…>. For Kiwibank, this is about the second or third outage this week.

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PHP maintains an enormous lead in server-side programming languages
by Peter Reutemann 14 Sep '21

14 Sep '21

'The venerable web programming language PHP is a source of frequent complaints and frustration, but according to a report W3Techs released today, it doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon. W3Techs' web server survey looks for technologies in use by sites in Alexa's top 10 million list; today's report includes a year-on-year chart beginning with January 2010, running all the way through 2021. The survey only includes top sites not out of elitism, but as one part of its effort to avoid data-skewing returns from domain-parking services and spammers, which would otherwise dominate legitimate websites through sheer volume. Within that dataset, the story told is clear. Apart from PHP—which held a 72.5 percent share in 2010 and holds a 78.9 percent share as of today—only one other server-side language ever broke a 10 percent share. That one competitor is ASP.NET, which held an impressive 24.4 percent share in 2010 but was down to 9.3 percent in January and 8.3 percent this month. Amongst the small fry, the only truly impressive growth to be seen is in Ruby—which at 5.2 percent this month is still seeing continued, uninterrupted growth in W3Techs' survey. This might come as a shock if you're mostly familiar with Ruby on Rails, which itself remains viable but seems to be on the decline in popularity.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/php-maintains-an-enormous-lead-in-s… 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/

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EU Study On Impact Of Open Source
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 14 Sep '21

14 Sep '21

The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology has released a report <https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/13/eu_open_source_study_highlights/> on the economic impact of open source, both software and hardware, within the EU. The report’s authors talked to companies and developers, looked at existing research, surveyed repos on GitHub and ran economic analyses, among other things. Conclusion: there is economic value in open source, but corresponding business investment in it is lacking (though smaller companies tend to be better at this). Also adoption in the public sector can be quite difficult. Further conclusion: if businesses are happy to take but not so keen to give back, then it may be up to Government to give them a nudge in the right direction. One of the authors offered this encouragement: "There are companies that do see the value of contributing back, and some less so… those companies that contribute a lot and are very active in communities see that as an advantage, because when you contribute to it, you can also steer it, know how to fix it… if you have standing in that community, you are more likely to have the community respond to your need."

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Facebook’s Special Rules For VIPs
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 14 Sep '21

14 Sep '21

A report on some leaked documents <https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/09/leaked-documents-reveal-the-spe…> detailing Facebook’s “XCheck” system for exempting certain user accounts from its normal content-moderation rules. The sole reason for the exemption is that, regardless of the rights and wrongs of what they are saying, such users (e.g. politicians, celebrities) can raise a PR storm that can make Facebook look bad, and of course the company wants to avoid that. Except that the list of such special users has now grown to about 5.8 million accounts, which is getting a bit unwieldy. Note this: In the meantime, Facebook plans to assume “good intent” on the part of high-profile users in the program and take an approach of “innocent until proven guilty,” a product manager on Facebook’s Mistakes Prevention Team wrote. Does that sound like basic fairness, rather than arbitrary treatment, to you? If only all their users were treated that way ...

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Mozilla Has Defeated Microsoft's Default Browser Protections in Windows
by Peter Reutemann 14 Sep '21

14 Sep '21

'Mozilla has quietly made it easier to switch to Firefox on Windows recently. From a report: While Microsoft offers a method to switch default browsers on Windows 10, it's more cumbersome than the simple one-click process to switch to Edge. This one-click process isn't officially available for anyone other than Microsoft, and Mozilla appears to have grown tired of the situation. In version 91 of Firefox, released on August 10th, Mozilla has reverse engineered the way Microsoft sets Edge as default in Windows 10, and enabled Firefox to quickly make itself the default. Before this change, Firefox users would be sent to the Settings part of Windows 10 to then have to select Firefox as a default browser and ignore Microsoft's plea to keep Edge. Mozilla's reverse engineering means you can now set Firefox as the default from within the browser, and it does all the work in the background with no additional prompts. This circumvents Microsoft's anti-hijacking protections that the company built into Windows 10 to ensure malware couldn't hijack default apps. Microsoft tells us this is not supported in Windows.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/09/13/1527222 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/

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