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Mozilla Thunderbird Outlines Plans For 2019: Addressing UI Lags, Performance Issues; Improved 3rd-Party Email Integration, Encryption Usability
by Peter Reutemann 02 Jan '19

02 Jan '19

'For years, Mozilla has largely neglected development of Thunderbird, an email client it owns. But the company, which grew its team to eight staff last year, says it plans to address most of the issues that users have complained about and add six more people to Thunderbird staff this year, it said in a blog post. In the blog post Wednesday, the company said: Our hires are already addressing technical debt and doing a fair bit of plumbing when it comes to Thunderbird's codebase. Our new hires will also be addressing UI-slowness and general performance issues across the application. This is an area where I think we will see some of the best improvements in Thunderbird for 2019, as we look into methods for testing and measuring slowness -- and then put our engineers on architecting solutions to these pain points. Beyond that, we will be looking into leveraging new, faster technologies in rewriting parts of Thunderbird as well as working toward a multi-process Thunderbird. [...] For instance, one area of usability that we are planning on addressing in 2019 is integration improvements in various areas. One of those in better Gmail support, as one of the biggest email providers it makes sense to focus some resources on this area. We are looking at addressing Gmail label support and ensuring that other features specific to the Gmail experience translate well into Thunderbird. We are looking at improving notifications in Thunderbird, by better integrating with each operating system's built-in notification system. By working on this feature Thunderbird will feel more "native" on each desktop and will make managing notifications from the app easier. The UX/UI around encryption and settings will get an overhaul in the coming year, whether or not all this work makes it into the next release is an open question â" but as we grow our team this will be a focus. It is our hope to make encrypting Email and ensuring your private communication easier in upcoming releases, we've even hired an engineer who will be focused primarily on security and privacy.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/01/02/165204 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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GIMP Developers Outline Plan For 2019
by Peter Reutemann 02 Jan '19

02 Jan '19

'The GIMP developers on Wednesday published a blog post in which they look back at the year 2018 (release of GIMP 2.10) and outline the things that they intend to get around this year. From the post: We expect to be shipping 2.10.x updates throughout 2019, starting with the version 2.10.10 currently expected in January/February. This version will feature faster layer groups rendering, smart colorization with the Bucket Fill tool, and various usability improvements. We are also planning the first unstable release of GIMP that will have version 2.99.2, eventually leading up to version 3.0. The prerequisite for releasing that version will be the completion of the space invasion. ZeMarmot project (which can be supported on Patreon or Tipeee) is also planning to focus a bit more on better canvas interactions, as well as animation support improvements, starting from merging existing work. On the GEGL and babl front, we expect to continue working towards better CMYK support and performance.' -- source: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/19/01/02/1655210 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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USB Type-C Authentication Program Launched
by Peter Reutemann 02 Jan '19

02 Jan '19

'With the arrival of USB-C a few years back, plugging into laptops, tablets and smartphones became even easier than before. But there are potential security risks. The USB Type-C Authentication Program launched today aims to address such issues. From a report: The new protocol from the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) can be used to validate the authenticity of a cable, charger or hardware at the moment of connection, and stop attacks in their tracks. The USB-IF has chosen DigiCert to operate registrations and certificate authority services for the new specification, which makes use of 128-bit cryptographic-based authentication for certificate format, digital signing, hash and random number generation. "USB Type-C Authentication gives OEMs the opportunity to use certificates that enable host systems to confirm the authenticity of a USB device or USB charger, including such product aspects as the descriptors, capabilities and certification status," said DigiCert in a press release. "This protects against potential damage from non-compliant USB chargers and the risks from maliciously embedded hardware or software in devices attempting to exploit a USB connection."' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/01/02/2025207 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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wget Command Stores Extended Attributes
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 02 Jan '19

02 Jan '19

Here’s something I didn’t know: the “wget” command saves the URL where it got a downloaded file as an extended attribute of the file. This behaviour isn’t mentioned anywhere in the man page or in the info file, that I can find. Unfortunately, this can lead to a security issue where the URL includes confidential password details. And it appears other apps, like Chrome, do a similar thing. <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/02/wget_bug_fix/>

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Banana Pi 24-Core ARM Server Running Ubuntu Breaks Cover
by Peter Reutemann 27 Dec '18

27 Dec '18

'ARM-based server processors have threatened to take on Intel in the data center for some time but not much has materialized thus far in terms of significant deployments. However, a new breed of low cost ARM server implementations may be in the works with a many-core platform called Banana Pi. The latest Banana Pi device being teased is something very different in the form of a 24-core ARM server that speculation suggests might be sold as a Banana Pi server board or as a finished server product. A video has surfaced that reportedly shows a 24-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor with 32GB of RAM, though the OS only sees 29.4GB of that RAM. The OS is Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS with MATE desktop. Unless the processor used in this device is something unannounced, and that seems unlikely, the chip itself would likely be a SocioNext SC2A11. The same processor is used in the Linaro Developer Box. The demo shows the server fully loaded at 100% CPU utilization building a Linux kernel and reportedly the system also supports NVMe storage as well as TensorFlow workloads for machine learning. Not much else is known about the system at this time but it's an interesting development in the Linux server space to be sure.' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/18/12/27/0556243 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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Requesting The Data You’ve Left Online
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 26 Dec '18

26 Dec '18

Article from a correspondent for the Otago Daily Times <https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12182555> about what he discovered when he asked Google, Facebook, the NZ Police, the NZSIS and various credit ratings companies what information they had on him. All except one responded with rather sobering amounts of personal detail.

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LibreHunt: The Linux Distro Counsellor
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 23 Dec '18

23 Dec '18

Here’s a site <https://www.librehunt.org/> which purports to suggest a suitable Linux distro for you, based on your answers to questions about your ability, needs etc. The selection is made from a “curated” list of just 44 distros, to simplify things.

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Word For The Week: “Kaomoji”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 20 Dec '18

20 Dec '18

For those who might previously have gone “(＠_＠)” or “¯\_(ツ)_/¯” when they heard this word, here it is all explained: <http://kaomoji.ru/en/>. So now you can be all “\(^ヮ^)/” instead. Actually I came across that word in this article <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/windows-10-will-make-it-easier-to-%…>, which reports that Windows 10 will make it easier to enter these character sequences.

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Bye bye Mongo, Hello Postgres
by Peter Reutemann 20 Dec '18

20 Dec '18

'In April the Guardian switched off the Mongo DB cluster used to store our content after completing a migration to PostgreSQL on Amazon RDS. This post covers why and how' -- source: https://www.theguardian.com/info/2018/nov/30/bye-bye-mongo-hello-postgres 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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Facebook Does Not “Sell” Your Data, But ...
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 20 Dec '18

20 Dec '18

... they sure as hell have been rather free and easy in sharing it with others <https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20181219/10370941268/facebooks-latest-pri…>. Seems a bunch of companies have had extra-privileged access to user data on Facebook, and they in turn supplied information about those users back to Facebook. This is how the “People You May Know” feature is able to make links like between different patients of the same psychiatrist, and other things equally dodgy ethically, if not downright illegal (or at least they should be). And this may be how Amazon was able to make a (spurious) association between a book reviewer and the book author, and disallow the review on that basis, just because the reviewer had previously followed the author on Facebook.

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