- wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Turning the tables on “Windows Support” scammers by compromising their PCs
by Peter Reutemann 15 Sep '14

15 Sep '14

"Matt Weeks is one of the developers who contributes code to the open source Metasploit Project, a sprawling and continually updated security framework that functions as a repository for software vulnerabilities and is frequently used as a Swiss Army Knife for penetration testing. Weeks has published a long report on his site detailing how he was able to reverse-engineer the encrypted communications protocol used by Ammyy Admin, one of the most popular remote control apps used by tech support scammers, and then use that knowledge to ferret out a vulnerability in the Ammyy Admin application. Because Ammyy Admin uses the same binary on both the remote computer being controlled and the source computer doing the controlling, an exploit with the application has the potential to affect not just the target but also the source. Weeks figured that if he could sniff out a vulnerability in the application’s communications stack, he could use that vulnerability to execute code on the remote computer—in other words, to gain the same level of access on the scammer’s PC that the scammer tries to gain on the victim’s." -- source: http://bit.ly/X4faGL Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

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KDevelop 4.7.0 Released
by Peter Reutemann 14 Sep '14

14 Sep '14

"KDevelop team is proud to announce the final release of KDevelop 4.7.0. This release is special, as it marks the end of the KDE4 era for us. As such, KDevelop 4.7.0 comes with a long-term stability guarantee. The CMake support was improved and extended to ensure that all idioms needed for KF5 development are available. The unit test support UI was polished and several bugs fixed. In the same direction, some noteworthy issues with the QtHelp integration were addressed. KDevelop's PHP language support now handles namespaces better and can understand traits aliases. Furthermore, some first fruits of the Google summer of code projects are included in this release. These changes pave the path toward better support for cross compile toolchains. Feature-wise, KDevelop now officially supports the Bazaar (bzr) version control system. On the performance front, it was possible to greatly reduce the memory footprint when loading large projects with several thousand files in KDevelop. Additionally, the startup should now be much faster." -- source: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/09/14/1347203 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

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OCRmyPDF
by Peter Reutemann 13 Sep '14

13 Sep '14

Just came across this (haven't tried, but seemed worth sharing). OCRmyPDF combines several Linux tools to generate PDF/A files (PDF format intended for long term archiving) from PDF files that contain just bitmaps with text, e.g., of scanned document pages. The generated PDF/A files are then searchable. Original article in German describing the tool: http://www.heise.de/open/artikel/Toolbox-Texterkennung-mit-OCRmyPDF-2356670… Google translation: http://www.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2F… Project homepage on github: https://github.com/fritz-hh/OCRmyPDF Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

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Chrome OS Can Now Run Android Apps With No Porting Required
by Peter Reutemann 12 Sep '14

12 Sep '14

'On Thursday, Google launched "App Runtime for Chrome (Beta)" which allows Android apps to run on Chrome OS without the need for porting. At the moment, only Duolingo, Evernote, Sight Words, and Vine are available on the platform with the rest of the Play Store's offerings to come later. Google "built an entire Android stack into Chrome OS using Native Client" in order to achieve this.' -- source: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/09/12/0050206 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

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The State of ZFS On Linux
by Peter Reutemann 11 Sep '14

11 Sep '14

'Richard Yao, one of the most prolific contributors to the ZFSOnLinux project, has put up a post explaining why he thinks the filesystem is definitely production-ready. He says, "ZFS provides strong guarantees for the integrity of [data] from the moment that fsync() returns on a file, an operation on a synchronous file handle is returned or dirty writeback occurs (by default every 5 seconds). These guarantees are enabled by ZFS' disk format, which places all data into a Merkle tree that stores 256-bit checksums and is changed atomically via a two-stage transaction commit.. ... Sharing a common code base with other Open ZFS platforms has given ZFS on Linux the opportunity to rapidly implement features available on other Open ZFS platforms. At present, Illumos is the reference platform in the Open ZFS community and despite its ZFS driver having hundreds of features, ZoL is only behind on about 18 of them."' -- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/14/09/11/1421201 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

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Learning About Enea's Real Time Linux Embedded OS (Video)
by Peter Reutemann 10 Sep '14

10 Sep '14

'Jon Aldama is the Product Marketing Manager for Enea A.B., but he prides himself on being a developer first and a marketer second -- a point he stresses early in today's video. Enea is behind Operating System Embedded, whose Wikipedia page, some say, "appears to be written like an advertisement," which an unkind person could also say about the Enea A.B. Wikipedia page. In any case, Enea works with the Linux Foundation's Yocto Project workgroup, whose main webpage says, "It's not an embedded Linux distribution – it creates a custom one for you." This is all open source, which Jon says is a big corporate principle at Enea -- and he should know, since his previous job was as an Open Source Compliance Officer and Software Analyst at Ericsson.' -- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/14/09/10/1638243 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

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Running Your Business on Linux (No, You Don't Need Windows)
by Peter Reutemann 08 Sep '14

08 Sep '14

"Believe it or not, my dear Linux friends, a lot of IT pros still believe they need Windows servers. They have this goofy idea that Active Directory, SharePoint, Exchange, Windows Server, SQL Server, and all the other members of the lardy malware vector family are the only proper business backends. They have this funny notion that Microsoft servers are easier to run. I must refute this odd notion with reality: they are not. They are expensive, troublesome, less-capable, and pointy-clicky does not equal easier to use, nor does it negate having to possess actual skills and knowledge." -- source: http://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/786721 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

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Fedora To Get a New Partition Manager
by Peter Reutemann 07 Sep '14

07 Sep '14

"Developer Vratislav Podzimek has announced the next-gen partition manager for Fedora, blivet-gui. It is eventually going to replace GParted, the most popular GUI based partition manager, found in all major distros. The new tool is named blivet-gui after the blivet python library (originally Anaconda's storage management and configuration tool). The need of a new partition manager stems from the fact that none of the existing GUI partitioning tools supports all modern storage technologies. Fedora's Anaconda base supports all, though, and is hence chosen as the back-end for this new tool. The application is only a few months old but is already looking nice and useful. Features like RAID and BTRFS support are being worked on. Vojtech Trefny is the other developer working with Vratislav on blivet-gui." -- source: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/14/09/07/2218229 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

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Mozilla 1024-Bit Cert Deprecation Leaves 107, 000 Sites Untrusted
by Peter Reutemann 05 Sep '14

05 Sep '14

"Mozilla has deprecated 1024-bit RSA certificate authority certificates in Firefox 32 and Thunderbird. While there are pluses to the move such as a requirement for longer, stronger keys, at least 107,000 websites will no longer be trusted by Mozilla. Data from HD Moore's Project Sonar, which indexes more than 20 million websites, found 107,535 sites using a cert signed by what will soon be an untrusted CA certificate. Grouping those 107,000-plus sites by certificate expiration date, the results show that 76,185 certificates had expired as of Aug. 25; of the 65 million certificates in the total scan, 845,599 had expired but were still in use as of Aug. 25, Moore said." -- source: http://it.slashdot.org/story/14/09/05/2120246 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

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Why Munich Will Stick With Linux
by Peter Reutemann 05 Sep '14

05 Sep '14

"There are many solved problems in open source. Groupware is not one of them," Georg Greve, co-founder and CEO of Kolab System starts off his post highlighting recent features of the latest release of the Kolab groupware project. He calls out a few newly elected politicians that don't like the current set-up, but says that thousands of users don't have the same experience. "Until today, the city of Munich is using the same stand-alone calendaring and email systems it had used when it was still fully operating on Windows. Updating these systems had a lower priority than the migration to LiMux then. But an upgrade is underway now. And, the solution they chose is agnostic to the desktop platform and will service LiMux and Windows alike. The primary difference made by another migration would likely be due to the perils that come with any migration, such as additional costs and delays. In other words: The very problem used to criticize the LiMux desktop is already being solved." -- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/14/09/05/1711243 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

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