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Tesla Remotely Extends The Range Of Some Cars To Help With Hurricane Irma
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 12 Sep '17

12 Sep '17

Tesla sometimes sells cars with more hardware battery capacity than is initially available for use by customers, offering the additional capacity as a subsequent software update. ... But last week, Tesla decided to temporarily make this extra capacity available even to Floridians who hadn't paid for the upgrade to ensure they had enough range to get out of Florida ahead of Hurricane Irma. ... Presumably, their vehicles will get a downgrade once hurricane season is over. <https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/09/tesla-remotely-extends-the-range-of-so…>

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Google Chrome Will Soon Detect Man-in-the-Middle Attacks
by Peter Reutemann 10 Sep '17

10 Sep '17

'Google Chrome 63 will include a new security feature that will detect when third-party software is performing a Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack that hijacks the user's Internet connection.... Most MitM toolkits fail to correctly rewrite the user's encrypted connections, causing SSL errors that Chrome will detect. The new Chrome 63 feature is in the form of a new warning screen. This new error will appear whenever Chrome detects a large number of SSL connection errors in a short timespan, a sign that someone is trying -- and failing -- to intercept the user's web traffic. This includes both malware and legitimate applications, such as antivirus and firewall applications. The new Chrome error won't show up for all antivirus and firewall software, but only for those that do not rewrite SSL connections in a proper way, resulting in SSL errors. Chrome 63 is set for release on December 5, but users can already test it by enabling it in the Google Chrome dev branch' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/17/09/10/1928232 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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OBS Studio – Record and Live Stream Videos from Linux Desktop
by Peter Reutemann 10 Sep '17

10 Sep '17

'OBS Studio is a free and open source cross-platform app with which you can create video records of your desktop screen and also live stream directly. You can use it to conveniently share your gaming, art, entertainment activities with Twitch.tv, YouTube, Hitbox.tv, DailyMotion, Connectcast.tv, CyberGame.tv, CashPlay.tv along with custom streaming servers free of charge! It comes with many in-house features that allow you to produce professional videos e.g. Studio Mode lets you live preview and adjust your scenes and sources before making them available for public viewing; you can choose to set any combo of hotkeys to start/stop streams or recordings, switch between scenes, mute audio sources, e.t.c.' -- source: https://www.fossmint.com/obs-studio-record-and-live-stream-videos-from-linu… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Document Liberation Project Announces Initial QuarkXPress Support
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 10 Sep '17

10 Sep '17

Libre Graphics World may not update very often, but its articles are usually worth reading. Like this one <http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/document-liberation-project-announ…>: Initially, Scribus was pretty much modeled after QuarkXPress, and the two projects still share some similarities. Early in the history of Scribus, it made a lot of sense to introduce support for QXP files. Users got mad with Quark's continuous quirks and bad user support, they would jump ship at the very next opportunity. Paul Johnson, former Scribus contributor, actually started working on support for QXP files in 2004. But after he had posted to a public mailing list about his progress, he reportedly received a cease and desist letter from Quark. Scribus was nowhere near its current fame at the time, and even now it would not be able to handle legal expenses (save for a theoretical FSF intervention). Back then Paul just stopped working on that project. The good news is, Quark no longer seems to be in a position to be such a bully.

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Vodafone Ending Its E-Mail Service
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 08 Sep '17

08 Sep '17

Vodafone will no longer be offering e-mail service to its customers after November <http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11919531>. It doesn’t seem to have notified some of its customers; certainly I didn’t receive any notification. Of course, I just have to figure out where to get a new server to handle my existing address. The real headache is for those who have been using the ISP’s domain for their address; that has been a bad idea for the last 20 years.

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How to hurricane-proof a Web server
by Peter Reutemann 08 Sep '17

08 Sep '17

'I had enough to worry about as Hurricane Harvey plowed into the Texas Gulf Coast on the night of August 25 and delivered a category 4 punch to the nearby city of Rockport. But I simultaneously faced a different kind of storm: an unexpected surge of traffic hitting the Space City Weather Web server. This was the first of what would turn into several very long and restless nights.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/09/how-to-hurricane-pro… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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How to use speedtest on a Linux server to check, store and report internet speeds graphically
by Peter Reutemann 08 Sep '17

08 Sep '17

'Following on from a set of problems of poor broadband connectivity I was experiencing I decided that I wanted to monitor the Mbps speed I was getting from my provider on a regular basis. I was seeing especially poor figures when trying to download files in the evening, with much faster speeds achieved very early in the morning. I have a Linux Debian server sitting in a corner, which is my test and development machine for ISPConfig-hosted websites, as well as some Let's Encrypt code I like to play around with, so I looked for some software that would enable bandwidth testing, runnable from a linux command line, which could form the basis of an automated shell script system to produce the raw data I needed. I wanted to store the data in a SQL database to make querying simple (I could then easily gather more data and just extract a smaller subset for time periods I was interested in) and to have a web front-end that could produce a simple chart to visualise the data and help highlight the connectivity issues.' -- source: https://www.howtoforge.com/tutorial/how-to-use-speedtest-on-a-linux-server-… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Android Oreo Bug Eats Up Mobile Data Even When On Wi-Fi
by Peter Reutemann 07 Sep '17

07 Sep '17

'An apparent bug with Android Oreo has been discovered which means Google's mobile operating system could be munching its way through your data allowance, even if you're connected to a wireless network. A thread on Reddit highlighted the issue, with many people pointing out that it could prove expensive for anyone not using an unlimited data plan. Google is apparently aware of the problem and is working on a patch, but in the meantime Oreo users are being warned to consider disabling mobile data when they are at home or using a wireless connection elsewhere.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/17/09/06/2240208 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Linux Kernel 4.13 Officially Released
by Peter Reutemann 06 Sep '17

06 Sep '17

'As expected, the Linux 4.13 kernel series was made official this past weekend by none other than its creator, Linus Torvalds, which urges all Linux users to start migrating to this version as soon as possible. Work on Linux kernel 4.13 started in mid-July with the first Release Candidate (RC) milestone, which already gave us a glimpse of the new features coming to this major kernel branch. There are, of course, numerous improvements and support for new hardware through updated drivers and core components. Highlights of Linux kernel 4.13 include Intel's Cannon Lake and Coffee Lake CPUs, support for non-blocking buffered I/O operations to improve asynchronous I/O support, support for "lifetime hints" in the block layers and the virtual filesystem, AppArmor enhancements, and better power management. There's also AMD Raven Ridge support implemented in the AMDGPU graphics driver, which received numerous improvements, support for five-level page tables was added in the s390 architecture, and the structure randomization plugin was added as part of the build system.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/17/09/05/1637226 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Use Aircrack-ng To Test Your WiFi Password
by Peter Reutemann 05 Sep '17

05 Sep '17

'Most people have terrible passwords, and WiFi is no exception. Your WiFi password is your primary line of defense against unwanted access to your network. That access can result in a whole host of other nasty things because an attacker can monitor the traffic on your network and even gain direct access to your computers. The best way to prevent such an intrusion is to use the same tools an attacker would to test the security of your WiFi password. [...] Remember this process should only ever be used to test your own security. Using it on someone else's network is illegal.' -- source: https://linuxconfig.org/use-aircrack-ng-to-test-your-wifi-password Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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