- wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Finding, viewing, downloading, and saving videos from the web
by Roderick Aldridge 11 Aug '16

11 Aug '16

Anybody got good tips for this, particularly good sources (as well as Youtube) of free videos on all subjects, not just news, movies and technical subjects. OS independent options for downloading and saving sought - the best downloaders and browser extensions. I have used Firefox extension Video DownloadHelper and William put me on to youtube-dl, but there are lots of others, some possibly better and/or with special uses. This is the topic for the Hamilton Computer Club meeting tomorrow, so any Windows-friendly options welcome, or you could join us to 60A Sare Crescent and show us yourself. Roderick Aldridge

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Microsoft Leaks Its Golden Backdoor Keys
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 10 Aug '16

10 Aug '16

Seems Microsoft has inadvertently published “golden” master keys that will allow installation of third-party OSes on supposedly locked-down devices <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/10/microsoft_secure_boot_ms16_100/>.

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Major Qualcomm chip security flaws expose 900M Android users
by Peter Reutemann 09 Aug '16

09 Aug '16

"Four major security holes in the Qualcomm chips which power modern Android devices have left as many as 900 million users vulnerable to a range of attacks. According to Israel-based security firm Checkpoint, the flaws—dubbed "Quadrooter"—found in the firmware which governs the chips, could allow potential attackers to "trigger privilege escalations for the purpose of gaining root access to a device" using malware which wouldn't require special permissions, allowing it to pass under suspicious users' radars." -- source: http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/08/qualcomm-chip-flaws-expose-900-mill… 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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Howdy, Ubuntu on Windows! How Fast Is It?
by Peter Reutemann 09 Aug '16

09 Aug '16

"My primary laptop is a Lenovo x250, with an Intel i7-5600U CPU, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB Transcend SSD, and a 2TB Samsung SSD. Let’s run some benchmarks on the CPU, Memory, Disk, and Network. We’ll first run each test in Ubuntu running natively on the hardware, and then reboot, and run the same benchmarks on the same machine running Ubuntu on Windows. We’ll use the utilities sysbench, dd and iperf, as well as compile the Linux kernel to do our benchmarking." -- source: https://www.linux.com/learn/howdy-ubuntu-windows-how-fast-it 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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SQLite 3.14 Does CSV
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 09 Aug '16

09 Aug '16

The latest release of SQLite now lets you load a CSV file as a “virtual” database table, and do the usual sorts of queries on it <http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=SQLite-3.14-Released>. More details about the new extension here <http://www.sqlite.org/csv.html>.

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Linux Abandoning DocBook For Its Documentation?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 08 Aug '16

08 Aug '16

Just came across this <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/08/linux_48_rc1_lands_with_surface_3_s…>: Torvalds has also pointed out that while progress on v 4.8 is “fairly normal … the patch itself looks somewhat unusual: over 20% of the patch is documentation updates, due to conversion of the drm and media documentation from docbook to the Sphinx doc format. There are other doc updates, but that's the big bulk of it.” DocBook is an open-source implementation of SGML, which is a pretty heavyweight, official-international-standard, 1980s, big-company way of writing documentation. Sphinx, on the other hand, is commonly used for Python documentation, including on python.org itself <https://docs.python.org/3/index.html>. If you were putting together the documentation set for a passenger liner or a chemical factory, you’ll probably use SGML (in fact, there is very likely a legal requirement to do so). But for the rest of us, more lightweight markup systems like Sphinx/ReST and Markdown are much more convenient.

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The Murky (Under)World Of Pay-Per-Install
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 07 Aug '16

07 Aug '16

A research group has released a paper <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/05/payperinstall_study/> studying those “free” software installs that bring along a host of uninvited guests with them. While not actually illegal (yet), they resort to sneaky tactics, like lying low for a few weeks before taking over your browser search bar or injecting ads, to try to obscure their origin. They even actively defeat blocking attempts, by jumping between domain names as often as in a matter of hours.

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Old server hardware
by Daniel Lawson 04 Aug '16

04 Aug '16

Hi all Endace is getting rid of a lot of old server hardware. Some of it is still in reasonable condition, and I can make it available to WLUG members if they are interested. It's all offered as-is, on a first-come-first-serve basis, and if you say you want it you have to take it away ( we are sending it to an e-waste recycler very soon) There's two types of system, multiple units of each: 1U, non-redundant PSU (SMC 6015X-TB system), Supermicro X7DBX-i motherboard, dual Xeon X5440 (quad-core, 2.5GHz), 16 or 32 GB (depending on unit) DDR2 667MHz FB DIMMs, IPMI controller, dual gige LAN, 3x SATA disk in hotswap drive bays 3U, 2+1 redundant PSU (Chenbro Chassis), Supermicro X7DBE Motherboard, dual Xeon X5540 (quad-core, 2.5GHz), 16 or 32 GB (dependint on unit) DDR2 667MHz FB DIMMs, IPMI controller, dual gige LAN, 2x 3Ware 9650SE-8LPML RAID controllers, 16 x SATA disk in hotswap drive bays In both cases, any disks inside them will need to be scrubbed. If anyone is interested, based on a firm commitment to pick up, please let me know by Friday 5pm. Email to daniel.lawson(a)endace.com or daniel(a)meta.net.nz please Thanks

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FTC Stops Requiring Regular Password Changes
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 04 Aug '16

04 Aug '16

Lorrie Cranor, new chief technologist at the US Federal Trade Commission, has managed to persuade them to drop their policy of requiring regular password changes <http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/08/frequent-password-changes-are-the-e…>: Frequent password changes do little to improve security and very possibly make security worse by encouraging the use of passwords that are more susceptible to cracking.

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Beware Of User-Interface Experts
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 04 Aug '16

04 Aug '16

The nice thing about GUIs is that there are so many to choose from. And everybody has an opinion about them. Particularly UI experts, who are always ready to point to things that any particular GUI does wrong. Even the platform developers themselves are prone to keep redesigning things from time to time. And then not even following their own rules. There was a famous map of the New York subway, released in 1972 <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/06/arts/design/the-subway-map-that-rattled-n…>, that represented the network in such a stylized fashion that the city’s residents got mightily confused. Was it the people’s fault? Was the designer’s brilliance simply misunderstood? Sometimes I think UI designers themselves lose track of how users actually do things outside their labs...

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