- wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Ubuntu 19.04: The Disco Dingo arrives and will really make your IT dept. happy
by Peter Reutemann 12 May '19

12 May '19

'Canonical recently released Ubuntu 19.04, the latest version of its flagship GNOME-based Linux desktop. But if you're a desktop user, you might be feeling a little left out. The big points of emphasis in this latest release are on Ubuntu as a tool for infrastructure development, server deployment, and the good old Internet of Things. For the server version of Ubuntu, the OS ships with all the latest cloud computing tools. In fact, that's already available in optimized builds on the major cloud services. Elsewhere, the latest version of the venerable Ubuntu desktop packs quite a few additional, tempting reasons to upgrade for Linux gamers. Ubuntu 19.04 makes the leap to the Linux kernel 5.x series, for instance, which offers much improved graphics support. Despite all the talk of developer tools and enterprise deployment stacks—Canonical has even taken to calling Ubuntu the "leading OS for cloud operations" lately—Ubuntu 19.04 is ultimately a worthwhile upgrade for all. After spending some time with it recently, we found some nice updates to the desktop, too. So no matter your Ubuntu use case, 19.04 seems to offer users a faster, more polished desktop than its predecessors.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/05/ubuntu-19-04-review-the-disco-dingo… 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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ImageMagick "not authorized" PDF errors
by Peter Reutemann 12 May '19

12 May '19

Hi there I was trying to convert some images into PDFs using ImageMagick's "convert" tool and encountered a "not authorized" error, something similar to the following: convert-im6.q16: not authorized `scan.pdf' @ error/constitute.c/WriteImage/1037. Took me a while figuring that one out. As it turns out, this is due to ImageMagick's security policy being tightened up (no default rights for PDF/PS): /etc/ImageMagick-6/policy.xml You can, of course, re-enable support for PDF/PS. See the following post: https://cromwell-intl.com/open-source/pdf-not-authorized.html 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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Firefox 66.0.3 disabled all your plugins?
by Peter Reutemann 11 May '19

11 May '19

Hi there I just updated my Firefox to 66.0.3 and all of a sudden, all my installed plugins were disabled (eg uBlock). Turns out that the release was buggy and they are working on a fix. In the meantime, you can get things going again through a trick: by enabling "participating in studies" you can get access to their hotfix to remedy this problem (though it can take some time before you get notified once you enabled this option - up to 6 hours; it only took a minute for me). For more information, see the official blog post: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2019/05/04/update-regarding-add-ons-in-fire… If you haven't updated to 66.0.3, then I'd strongly advice to wait for the next version to become available. Will safe you some pain. 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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New Intel Firmware Boot Verification Bypass Enables Low-Level Backdoors
by Peter Reutemann 11 May '19

11 May '19

'At the Hack in the Box conference in Amsterdam this week, researchers Peter Bosch and Trammell Hudson presented a new attack against the Boot Guard feature of Intel's reference UEFI implementation, known as Tianocore. The attack, which can give an attacker full, persistent access, involves replacing a PC's SPI flash chip with one that contains rogue code, reports Lucian Constantin for CSO. "Even though such physical attacks require a targeted approach and will never be a widespread threat, they can pose a serious risk to businesses and users who have access to valuable information," writes Constantin. Intel has patches available for Tianocore, but as we all remember from the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, distributing UEFI patches isn't an easy process.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/05/10/2335225 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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Google Is Starting To Reveal the Secrets of Its Experimental Fuchsia OS
by Peter Reutemann 10 May '19

10 May '19

'At Google's I/O developer conference this past week, Android and Chrome chief Hiroshi Lockheimer offered some rare insight into Fuchsia, albeit at a very high level, in front of public audiences. The Verge reports: What we do know about Fuchsia is that it's an open source project, similar to AOSP, but could run all manner of devices, from smart home gadgets to laptops to phones. It's also known to be built on an all-new, Google-built kernel called "zircon," formerly known as "magenta," and not the Linux kernel that forms the foundation of Android and Chrome OS. "We're looking at what a new take on an operating system could be like. And so I know out there people are getting pretty excited saying, 'Oh this is the new Android,' or, 'This is the new Chrome OS,'" Lockheimer said. "Fuchsia is really not about that. Fuchsia is about just pushing the state of the art in terms of operating systems and things that we learn from Fuchsia we can incorporate into other products." He says the point of the experimental OS is to also experiment with different form factors, a hint toward the possibility that Fuchsia is designed to run on smart home devices, wearables, or possibly even augmented or virtual reality devices. "You know Android works really well on phones and and you know in the context of Chrome OS as a runtime for apps there. But Fuchsia may be optimized for certain other form factors as well. So we're experimenting." Lockheimer provided some additional details at a separate Android fireside chat held at Google I/O today. "It's not just phones and PCs. In the world of [the Internet of Things], there are increasing number of devices that require operating systems and new runtimes and so on. I think there's a lot of room for multiple operating systems with different strengths and specializations. Fuchsia is one of those things and so, stay tuned," he told the audience.' -- source: https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/19/05/10/0021243 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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Don Norman: I wrote the book on user-friendly design. What I see today horrifies me
by Peter Reutemann 10 May '19

10 May '19

'The world is designed against the elderly, writes Don Norman, 83-year-old author of the industry bible Design of Everyday Things and a former Apple VP. ' -- source: https://www.fastcompany.com/90338379/i-wrote-the-book-on-user-friendly-desi… 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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Computerphile YouTube Channel
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 10 May '19

10 May '19

For those who are interested in short (10-minute or so) videos introducing various computing topics as discussed by lecturers at the University of Nottingham, have a look at the “Computerphile” channel <https://www.youtube.com/user/Computerphile> produced by Sean Riley. He also runs a sister channel which delves into mathematical topics, called “Numberphile” <https://www.youtube.com/user/numberphile>.

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Open source bug poses threat to sites running multiple CMSes
by Peter Reutemann 09 May '19

09 May '19

'Websites running the Drupal, Joomla, or Typo3 content-management systems are vulnerable to attacks that could possibly execute malicious code until administrators install just-released patches, developers and security researchers warned. The vulnerability resides in the PharStreamWrapper, a PHP component developed and open-sourced by CMS maker Typo3. Indexed as CVE-2019-11831, the flaw stems from a path-traversal bug that allows hackers to swap a site's legitimate phar archive with a malicious one. A phar archive is used to distribute a complete PHP application or library in a single file, in much the way a Java archive file bundles many Java files into a single file.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/05/open-source-bug-pose… 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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All Chromebooks Will Also Be Linux Laptops Going Forward
by Peter Reutemann 09 May '19

09 May '19

'At Google I/O in Mountain View, Google said "all devices [Chromebook] launched this year will be Linux-ready right out of the box." From a report: In case you've missed it, last year, Google started making it possible to run desktop Linux on Chrome OS. Since then, more Chromebook devices are able to run Linux. Going forward, all of them will be able to do so, too. Yes. All of them. ARM and Intel-based.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/05/09/1724228 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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WordPress Finally Gets the Security Features a Third of the Internet Deserves
by Peter Reutemann 08 May '19

08 May '19

' The WordPress content management system (CMS) is set to receive an assortment of new security features today that will finally add the protection level that many of its users have desired for years. From a report: These features are expected to land with the official release of WordPress 5.2, expected for later today. Included are support for cryptographically-signed updates, support for a modern cryptography library, a Site Health section in the admin panel backend, and a feature that will act as a White-Screen-of-Death (WSOD) protection -- letting site admins access their backend in the case of catastrophic PHP errors. With WordPress being installed on around 33.8 percent of all internet sites, these features are set to put some fears at ease in regards to some attack vectors. Probably the biggest and the most important of today's new security features is WordPress' offline digital signatures system. Starting with WordPress 5.2, the WordPress team will digitally sign its update packages with the Ed25519 public-key signature system so that a local installation will be able to verify the update package's authenticity before applying it to a local site.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/05/07/1930208 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 Q Gets Dark Mode, Live Video Captioning, Better Gestures and More
by Peter Reutemann 07 May '19

07 May '19

'At its annual I/O developer event, Google announced a bunch of new features available in the latest Android Q beta. Engadget reports: The most obvious new feature is dark mode, which will be released system-wide in Android Q. It's accessible via a toggle switch in the quick settings area and it'll also be activated when you turn on battery saver mode. We just saw a quick screenshot of it, but it looks like it'll apply to any apps you're using regardless of whether they're Google-made or from other developers. Another notable new feature is called Live Caption. If you're watching a video, Google's machine-learning algorithms can now add captions on the fly by just pressing the volume button and then a "live caption" button that'll show up on on the onscreen volume slider. From there, you can expand and contract the panel as you see fit, and move it up and down on the screen so it doesn't obscure your video. Google is also able to do all of this on-device, so it's more secure and also doesn't need a network connection. [T]he company says that there are 50 new privacy and security settings in Android Q. Perhaps most notable are new location services settings that let you limit location tracking to only when the app is running. It'll also give you notifications to let users see when apps are using your location in the background. New settings also let you keep apps from accessing media on your phone and collecting information about your device like its IMEI and serial number. [...] Google's adding a new "focus mode" to help shut down various distractions. It'll block most app alerts and notifications while allowing important contacts like your family members to reach you. There are also more tools for parents to manage their kids' phone time -- it'll let you review how they're using their phone from your own device, set daily time limits, review app requests and more. There are also tweaks to the gesture-based navigation bar to make it more closely resemble the navigation gestures first introduced in the iPhone X. Google's also adding a new chat-focused interface called "bubbles" that lets users keep messaging conversations accessible regardless of what they're doing with the phone. We can expect the final desert-themed name and release date later in the summer. The Q beta 3 is currently available on 21 devices, including all Pixel devices.' -- source: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/19/05/07/2050236 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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Cray, AMD to build 1.5 exaflops supercomputer for US government
by Peter Reutemann 07 May '19

07 May '19

'AMD and Cray have announced that they're building "Frontier," a new supercomputer for the Department of Energy at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The goal is to deliver a system that can perform 1.5 exaflops: 1.5×1018 floating point operations per second. By way of comparison, a single Nvidia RTX 2080 GPU manages about 14 teraflops of compute performance with 32-bit numbers. Frontier will achieve 100,000 times more. The fastest supercomputer in the Top 500 list weighs in at 200 petaflops, or 0.2 exaflops. As things stand, it'd take the top 160 machines on the list to match Frontier's performance. Frontier will use custom versions of AMD's Epyc processors (likely Zen 3 or Zen 4), matched with 4 GPUs, all connected using AMD's Infinity Fabric. Between nodes, Cray's Slingshot interconnect will be used, which has transfer rates of up to 200Gb/s per port. The GPUs will have their own stacked HBM (High Bandwidth Memory). It'll be housed in 100 cabinets, taking about 7,300 square feet of floor space. Power consumption will be 30-40MW. The plan is for Frontier to be delivered in 2021, at a cost of about $500 million for the hardware and $100 million for research and development. It should be the fastest supercomputer in the world when it's delivered, and it will be the US government's second exaflops-capable system; the first will be the 1 exaflops Aurora, built using Intel Xeon SP processors and Intel Xe GPUs.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/05/cray-amd-to-build-1-5-exaflops-supe… 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 5.1 Released
by Peter Reutemann 07 May '19

07 May '19

'Linux 5.1 released has been released. The main feature in this release is io_uring, a high-performance interface for asynchronous I/O; there are also improvements in fanotify to provide a scalable way of watching changes on large file systems; it also adds a method to allow safe delivery of signals in presence of PID reuse; persistent memory can be used now as hot-plugabble RAM; Zstd compression levels have been made configurable in Btrfs; there is a new cpuidle governor that makes better power management decisions than the menu governor; all 32 bit architectures have added the necessary syscalls to deal with the y2038 problem; and live patching has added support for creating cumulative patches. There are many other features and new drivers in the changelog.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/05/06/1436248 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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Windows 10 will soon ship with a full, open source, GPLed Linux kernel
by Peter Reutemann 06 May '19

06 May '19

'Earlier today, we wrote that Microsoft was going to add some big new features to the Windows Subsystem for Linux, including native support for Docker containers. It turns out that that ain't the half of it. The current Windows Subsystem for Linux uses a Microsoft-authored kernel component that provided the same kernel API as the Linux kernel but written from scratch by Microsoft. Essentially, it translated from Linux APIs to Windows NT kernel APIs. That worked pretty well, but the current subsystem had a few shortcomings: there was no ability to use Linux drivers, in particular file system drivers. Its file system performance, layered on top of Windows' own NTFS, was often 20 times slower than a real Linux kernel. It was also a relatively old version of the kernel; it offered approximately the set of APIs that Linux 4.4 did, and that was released in 2016. Some APIs aren't implemented at all, and others are only partially implemented to meet the needs of specific applications. All is changing with Windows Subsystem for Linux 2. Instead of emulating the Linux kernel APIs on the NT kernel, WSL 2 is going to run a full Linux kernel in a lightweight virtual machine. This kernel will be trimmed down and tailored to this particular use case, with stripped-down hardware support (since it will defer to the host Windows OS for that) and faster booting.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/05/windows-10-will-soon-ship-with-a-fu… 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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Second Firefox Fix Repairs Broken Browser Extensions For More People
by Peter Reutemann 05 May '19

05 May '19

'An anonymous reader quotes CNET: "Mozilla on Sunday began distributing new Firefox updates to fix a problem that broke extensions for many browser users on Friday," reports CNET: Mozilla had released an update Saturday, but Sunday's fix should help more people who were still affected. "There are some issues we're still working on, but we wanted to get this release out and get your add-ons back up & running before Monday," Mozilla said in a tweet Sunday... "No active steps need to be taken to make add-ons work again. In particular, please do not delete and/or reinstall any add-ons as an attempt to fix the issue," Kev Needham, Mozilla's product manager for add-ons, said in a blog post about the problem.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/05/05/2315224 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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Does Open Source Have a 'Working For Free' Problem?
by Peter Reutemann 05 May '19

05 May '19

'"Let's abandon the notion that open source is exclusively charity," writes Havoc Pennington, a free software engineer (and former Red Hat engineer) who's now a co-founder of Tidelift: Look around. We do have a problem, and it's time we do something about it.... The lack of compensation isn't just bad for individual developers -- it also creates social problems, by amplifying existing privilege.... The narrative around open source is that it's completely OK -- even an expectation -- that we're all doing this for fun and exposure; and that giant companies should get huge publicity credit for throwing peanuts-to-them donations at a small subset of open source projects. There's nothing wrong with doing stuff for fun and exposure, or making donations, as an option. It becomes a problem when the free work is expected and the donations are seen as enough... What would open source be like if we had a professional class of independent maintainers, constantly improving the code we all rely on? The essay suggests some things consider, including asking people to pay for: * Support requests * Security audits/hardening and extremely good test coverage * Supporting old releases * License-metadata-annotation practices that are helpful for big companies trying to audit the code they use, but sort of a pain in the ass and nobody cares other than these big companies. "Right now many users expect, and demand, that all of this will be free. As an industry, perhaps we should push back harder on that expectation. It's OK to set some boundaries..." "Of course this relates to what we do at Tidelift -- the company came out of discussions about this problem, among others... In our day-to-day right now we're specifically striving to give subscribers a way to pay maintainers of their application dependencies for additional value, through the Tidelift Subscription. But we hope to see many more efforts and discussions in this area.... [I]n between a virtual tip jar and $100 million in funding, there's a vast solution space to explore."' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/04/28/0459236 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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Hard Drive Reliability At Backblaze
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 05 May '19

05 May '19

This article <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/05/03/backblaze_drive_reliability_stats/> on the latest disk reliability report from backup business Backblaze led me to following up some interesting links. In this older item <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/17/backblaze_how_not_to_evaluate_disk…>, they were criticized for making misleading claims about consumer-grade drives being more reliable than enterprise-grade ones. But I do think it is clear that the difference between them is not worth the cost. One important point I got from the latter is “replacing one drive takes about 15 minutes of work”. That quote ends with “Moral of the story: design for failure and buy the cheapest components you can”. Which seems the logical thing to do anyway. That sentence is followed by a smiley, but as far as I’m concerned, who needs the smiley? I also like this article <https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-smart-stats/> from their blog, where they go into which SMART statistics are worth looking at. The one that stands out is counter 187, uncorrectable read errors. If that goes above zero, then the disk is bad and should be replaced.

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Security Lapse Exposed a Chinese Smart City Surveillance System
by Peter Reutemann 04 May '19

04 May '19

'Smart cities are designed to make life easier for their residents: better traffic management by clearing routes, making sure the public transport is running on time and having cameras keeping a watchful eye from above. But what happens when that data leaks? One such database was open for weeks for anyone to look inside. Security researcher John Wethington found a smart city database accessible from a web browser without a password. He passed details of the database to TechCrunch in an effort to get the data secured. The database was an Elasticsearch database, storing gigabytes of data -- including facial recognition scans on hundreds of people over several months. The data was hosted by Chinese tech giant Alibaba. The customer, which Alibaba did not name, tapped into the tech giant's artificial intelligence-powered cloud platform, known as City Brain. "This is a database project created by a customer and hosted on the Alibaba Cloud platform," said an Alibaba spokesperson. "Customers are always advised to protect their data by setting a secure password." "We have already informed the customer about this incident so they can immediately address the issue. As a public cloud provider, we do not have the right to access the content in the customer database," the spokesperson added. The database was pulled offline shortly after TechCrunch reached out to Alibaba. But while Alibaba may not have visibility into the system, we did.' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/05/04/0235239 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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After Seven Years, The Gnu Project Releases GNU Guix 1.0.0
by Peter Reutemann 04 May '19

04 May '19

'LWN.net: Version 1.0.0 of the GNU Guix package manager has been released. "This 1.0 release is a major milestone for Guix. It represents 7 years of hard work with more than 40,000 commits by 260 people, 19 releases, and an equally amazing amount of work on documentation, translation, artwork, web design, mentoring, outreach, and many other activities that together have made it a thriving project." See this blog entry for more information. >From the announcement: Whether you're a software developer, a user, or a free software enthusiast, we hope GNU Guix will provide you with the tools to deploy and manage software with confidence and ease, qualities that are not usually associated with software deployment... GNU Guix is a transactional package manager and an advanced distribution of the GNU system that respects user freedom. Guix can be used on top of any system running the kernel Linux, or it can be used as a standalone operating system distribution for i686, x86_64, ARMv7, and AArch64 machines.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/05/03/2326215 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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DuckDuckGo Proposes 'Do-Not-Track Act of 2019'
by Peter Reutemann 04 May '19

04 May '19

'"When you turn on the setting in your browser that says 'Do Not Track', you probably expect to no longer be tracked on most websites you visit. Right? Well, you would be wrong," explains DuckDuckGo's blog. Their recent study found "a quarter of people have turned on this setting" -- representing hundreds of millions of web surfers -- and that most of them were unaware that in fact, "no law requires websites to respect your Do Not Track signals, and the vast majority of sites, including most all of the big tech companies, sadly choose to simply ignore them." Now they've written draft legislation -- "the Do-Not-Track Act of 2019" -- to "serve as a starting point" for legislators to close this loophole. SearchEngineLand reports: If the act picks up steam and passes into law, sites would be required to cease certain user tracking methods, which means less data available to inform marketing and advertising campaigns. The impact could also cascade into platforms that leverage consumer data, possibly making them less effective. For example, one of the advantages of advertising on a platform like Google or Facebook is the ability to target audiences. If a user enables DNT, the ads displayed to them when browsing those websites won't be informed by their external browsing history... This proposal is quite far from being signed into law, but the technology is already built into Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Edge and Internet Explorer. With the adoption of GDPR just a year behind us and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren's proposed legislation to regulate "big tech companies" drawing more attention to digital privacy issues in Washington, the Do-Not-Track Act could be a realistic outcome. DuckDuckGo says they're announcing their draft legislation because "It is extremely rare to have such an exciting legislative opportunity like this, where the hardest work -- coordinated mainstream technical implementation and widespread consumer adoption -- is already done.... "We hope the Do-Not-Track Act of 2019 serves as a useful guide to start thinking seriously about this amazing legislative opportunity."' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/05/03/2316223 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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Don’t Try To Claim That Public Wi-Fi Is “Inherently Insecure”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 04 May '19

04 May '19

NordVPN has been told off by the UK Advertising Standards Authority about its misleading claims on the security of public wi-fi <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/05/01/nordvpn_tv_ad_rapped_advertising_s…>: Justifying its claims, NordVPN told the ASA that HTTPS encryption of webpages "did not mean the site was legitimate, nor was it any proof that the site had been security-hardened against intrusion from hackers". Yes, HTTPS encryption *is* supposed to mean that the site is legitimate. As for whether the site is security-hardened, it’s going to be just as insecure whether you access it via a VPN or not, isn’t it?

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Putin Signs Law To Create an Independent Russian Internet
by Peter Reutemann 02 May '19

02 May '19

'Russia is one step closer to creating its own, independent internet -- at least legally speaking. Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed into law new measures that would enable the creation of a national network, able to operate separately from the rest of the world, according to documents posted on a government portal this week. >From a report: For now, the network remains largely theoretical though, with few practical details disclosed. In concept, the new law aims to protect Russia from foreign online restrictions by creating what the Kremlin calls a "sustainable, secure and fully functioning" local internet. The legislation takes effect in November, state news agency RIA-Novosti reported. According to a summary from RIA-Novosti, the law calls for the creation of a monitoring and a management center supervised by Roskomnadzor, Russia's telecoms agency. The state agency will be charged with ensuring the availability of communication services in Russia in extraordinary situations. During such situations, it would also be empowered to cut off external traffic exchange, creating a purely Russian web' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/05/02/1535237 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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Mozilla Says It Will Ban Firefox Add-ons With Obfuscated Code
by Peter Reutemann 02 May '19

02 May '19

'As Mozilla continues to try to make it safer than ever to use Firefox, the organization has updated its Add-on Policy so that any updates that include obfuscated code are explicitly banned. Mozilla has also set out in plain terms its blocking process for add-ons and extensions. While there is nothing surprising here, the clarification should mean that there are fewer causes for disputes when an add-on is blocklisted. The updated Add-on policy comes into force on June 10, so add-on developers have a little more than a month to take note of the changes and comply. Mozilla says that the move is designed to help it better deal with malicious extensions. Mozilla also plans to be more aggressive towards taking down extensions that break its policies, with a heavy focus on security issues. ZDNet adds: [...] Starting with June 10, Mozilla's team will also be more aggressive in blocking and disabling Firefox add-ons in users' browsers that are found to be violating one of the company's policies."We will continue to block extensions for intentionally violating our policies, critical security vulnerabilities, and will also act on extensions compromising user privacy or circumventing user consent or control," Nieman said.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/05/02/1653228 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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Hamster Time Tracker on Ubuntu 18.04/Bionic
by Peter Reutemann 02 May '19

02 May '19

Hi everyone I've been using the Hamster Time Tracking applet (https://github.com/projecthamster/hamster) for many years, keeping track of my time spent on commercial projects. However, this project is undergoing a major refactoring and is no longer available available from the Ubuntu repositories. Sadly, a fact that I discovered after upgrading my Laptop from Linux Mint 18.2 to 19.1. Using instructions from a github comment (https://github.com/projecthamster/hamster/issues/356#issuecomment-385093502) I was able to get it installed and working on my Ubuntu 18.04 (which underpins Linux Mint 19.1), using packages from 17.10: Install some dependencies first: sudo apt-get install python-gnome2 python-gconf python-pyorbit liborbit2 libidl-2-0 Download the following libraries - python-wnck_2.32.0+dfsg-4_amd64.deb http://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/g/gnome-python-desktop/… - hamster-applet_2.91.3+git20120514.b9fec3e1-1ubuntu2_all.deb https://launchpadlibrarian.net/202355025/hamster-applet_2.91.3+git20120514.… Install the downloaded debian packages: sudo dpkg -i python-wnck_2.32.0+dfsg-4_amd64.deb hamster-applet_2.91.3+git20120514.b9fec3e1-1ubuntu2_all.deb Since this was a fresh install, I had to copy my old Hamster database across. The database is located in: $USER/.local/share/hamster-applet/hamster.db And we're back in business! :-) 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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Blender Developers Find Old Linux Drivers Are Better Maintained Than Windows
by Peter Reutemann 01 May '19

01 May '19

'To not a lot of surprise compared to the world of proprietary graphics drivers on Windows where once the support is retired the driver releases stop, old open-source Linux OpenGL drivers are found to be better maintained. From a report: Blender developers working on shipping Blender 2.80 this July as the big update to this open-source 3D modeling software today rolled out the Linux GPU requirements for this next release. The requirements themselves aren't too surprising and cover NVIDIA GPUs released in the last ten years, AMD GCN for best support, and Intel Haswell graphics or newer. In the case of NVIDIA graphics they tend to do a good job maintaining their legacy driver branches. With the AMD Radeon and Intel graphics, Blender developers acknowledge older hardware may work better on Linux. ' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/05/01/191257 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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Mark Shuttleworth Sees Increased Demand For Enterprise Ubuntu Linux Desktop
by Peter Reutemann 01 May '19

01 May '19

'Canonical's real money comes from the cloud and Internet of Things, but AI and machine learning developers are demanding -- and getting -- Ubuntu Linux desktop with enterprise support. From a report: In a wide-ranging conversation at Open Infrastructure Summit, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu Linux and its corporate parent Canonical, said: "We have seen companies signing up for Linux desktop support, because they want to have fleets of Ubuntu desktop for their artificial intelligence engineers." This development caught Shuttleworth by surprise. "We're starting actually now to commercially support the desktop in a way that we've never been asked to before," he said. Of course, Ubuntu has long been used by developers, but Shuttleworth explained, "Previously, those were kind of off the books, under the table. You know, 'Don't ask don't tell deployments.' "But now suddenly, it's the AI team and they've got to be supported."' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/04/30/1641242 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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Vodafone Denies Bloomberg Report on Security Flaws in Huawei Equipment
by Peter Reutemann 30 Apr '19

30 Apr '19

'Vodafone denied a Bloomberg report on Tuesday that stated it had found "backdoors" hidden in Huawei equipment supplied to its Italian business dating back years, per BBC . From a report: What they're saying: Vodafone said the "backdoors" in the report were actually a common industry protocol: "The 'backdoor' that Bloomberg refers to is Telnet, which is a protocol that is commonly used by many vendors in the industry for performing diagnostic functions. It would not have been accessible from the internet. Bloomberg is incorrect in saying that this 'could have given Huawei unauthorised access to the carrier's fixed-line network in Italy.' In addition, we have no evidence of any unauthorised access. This was nothing more than a failure to remove a diagnostic function after development."' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/04/30/1542202 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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Fedora 30 Linux Distro Is Here
by Peter Reutemann 30 Apr '19

30 Apr '19

'Fedora 30, the newest release of the venerable Linux distribution that serves (in part) as the staging environment for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, was released Tuesday, bringing with it a number of improvements and performance optimizations. From a report: The most exciting aspect, for workstation/desktop users at least, is the update to GNOME 3.32. Of course, that is hardly the only notable update -- the DNF package manager is getting a performance boost, for instance. In other words, this is a significant operating system upgrade that should delight both existing Fedora users and beginners alike. "Fedora 30 brings enhancements to all editions with updates to the common underlying packages, from bug fixes and performance tweaks to new versions. In Fedora 30, base updates include Bash shell 5.0, Fish 3.0, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 9 and Ruby 2.6. Fedora 30 also now uses the zchunk format for data compression within the DNF repository. When metadata is compressed using zchunk DNF will only download the differences between earlier copies of metadata and the current versions, saving on resources and increasing efficiency," says The Fedora Project.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/04/30/1742231 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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Apache Software Foundation joins GitHub open source community
by Peter Reutemann 30 Apr '19

30 Apr '19

'Today we’re excited to welcome the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) to GitHub. Apache is the world’s largest open source foundation, with over 200 million lines of code managed by an all-volunteer community of 730 members and 7,000 code contributors. Over their 20 year history, one billion lines of code have been committed across three million code commits. In 2016, Apache made the decision to start integrating GitHub’s repository and tooling with their own services. After solidifying the integration over the years, they decided to simplify how they work and move all Git projects to GitHub. As of February 2019, Apache’s migration to GitHub was complete, enabling all these projects with a simple platform to host and review code, collaborate on projects, and build software alongside 31 million developers around the world.' -- source: https://github.blog/2019-04-29-apache-joins-github-community/ 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 an Obsolete Medical Device With a Security Flaw Became a Must-Have For Some Patients With Type 1 Diabetes
by Peter Reutemann 30 Apr '19

30 Apr '19

'In 2014, a few hackers realized that the security flaw in certain Medtronic pumps could be exploited for a DIY revolution. Type 1 diabetes is a disease where the pancreas is unable to produce insulin to control blood sugar. For years, Boss (the anecdote in the story who purchased used insulin pumps from some dealer on Craiglist) had counted, down to the gram, the carbohydrates in every meal and told his pump how much insulin to dispense. [...] By 2014, the hardware components of a DIY artificial pancreas -- a small insulin pump that attaches via thin disposable tubing to the body and a continuous sensor for glucose, or sugar, that slips just under the skin -- were available, but it was impossible to connect the two. That's where the security flaw came in. The hackers realized they could use it to override old Medtronic pumps with their own algorithm that automatically calculates insulin doses based on real-time glucose data. It closed the feedback loop. They shared this code online as OpenAPS, and "looping," as it's called, began to catch on. Instead of micromanaging their blood sugar, people with diabetes could offload that work to an algorithm. In addition to OpenAPS, another system called Loop is now available. Dozens, then hundreds, and now thousands of people are experimenting with DIY artificial-pancreas systems -- none of which the Food and Drug Administration has officially approved. And they've had to track down discontinued Medtronic pumps. It can sometimes take months to find one. Obviously, you can't just call up Medtronic to order a discontinued pump with a security flaw. "It's eBay, Craigslist, Facebook. It's like this underground market for these pumps," says Aaron Kowalski, a DIY looper and also CEO of JDRF, a nonprofit that funds type 1 diabetes research. This is not exactly how a market for lifesaving medical devices is supposed to work. And yet, this is the only way it can work -- for now.' -- source: https://science.slashdot.org/story/19/04/29/2051257 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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Finally ... The Vertical TV
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 29 Apr '19

29 Apr '19

I’ve been wondering when this was going to happen. Just as widescreen TVs and computer monitors have become standard, more and more video footage is being shared, whether on broadcast TV, social media or whatever, that was captured on mobile phones in *portrait* mode. So you get the awkward problem of filling in the gaps on the sides of the screen with something useless but unobtrusive (heavily-blurred portions of the actual content seems popular right now), and wasting all that display resolution to boot. Seems like going back to 4:3 monitors, or even an orientation-neutral square 1:1 shape, is not an option. But Samsung has the solution: a TV that can rotate to portrait mode! <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/04/samsung-embraces-vertical-videos-wi…>

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Designers Release 'Aweigh', An Open Source Alternative to GPS
by Peter Reutemann 28 Apr '19

28 Apr '19

'"A team of student designers and engineers from the RCA and Imperial College have designed an open-source alternative to GPS, called Aweigh, that does not rely on satellites," reports the design magazine Dezeen. It's similar to the sextant, calculating positions by measuring the angular distances between the horizon and the sun.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/04/27/1813237 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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The Mysterious History of the MIT License
by Peter Reutemann 28 Apr '19

28 Apr '19

'Red Hat technology evangelist Gordon Haff explains why it's hard to say exactly when the MIT license created. Citing input from both Jim Gettys (author of the original X Window System) and Keith Packard (a senior member on the X Windows team), he writes that "The best single answer is probably 1987. But the complete story is more complicated and even a little mysterious."' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/04/28/0326207 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 the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 27 Apr '19

27 Apr '19

The author of this article <https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/how-the-boeing-737-max-disaste…> (archive.org copy at <https://web.archive.org/web/20190418200057/https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerosp…>) is both a pilot and a software developer. He looks into the root causes of the Boeing 737 MAX crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia. Basic points: * The new aircraft has sufficiently different airframe handling characteristics to be classified as a new model. * Boeing didn’t want it to be treated as a new model, because of the extra regulatory costs, pilot training etc this would entail. * So they implemented software (“MCAS”) that actively managed the handling characteristics to make it behave to pilots like previous 737 models. * They neglected to tell the pilots about the software. * It also turns out that correct operation of this software depends on a hardware component that is known to be unreliable. Commentary from Bruce Schneier <https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/04/excellent_analy.html> and Glyn Moody <https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190424/06571442075/shoddy-software-is-e…>.

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Inside the Team at Facebook That Dealt with the Christchurch Shooting
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 27 Apr '19

27 Apr '19

Interesting backgrounder <https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/inside-the-team-at-facebook-that-d…> on what went on at Facebook in the aftermath of Shooty McShootFace posting his “manifesto” rant and live-streaming his murderous rampage. Note that it took Facebook about an hour to determine that the video should be taken down. Was this too slow? Is there ever a time when leaving footage of such carnage up can serve a constructive purpose? Yes, surprisingly, there is. Further commentary: <https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190425/15315242087/behind-scenes-look-h…>

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Vodafone’s “Free E-Mail Forwarding For Life” Comes To End Of Life
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 26 Apr '19

26 Apr '19

When Vodafone shut down its e-mail services in 2017, it promised to continue autoforwarding e-mail to customers’ new addresses indefinitely. Well, now that “indefinitely” is coming to a definite end. It is just becoming too hard to maintain the service, particularly when other e-mail services start treating such auto-forwarded messages as spam or blocking them altogether. <https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=122233…>

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encrypted hard drive laptop
by Ian Young 25 Apr '19

25 Apr '19

Excuse me if not on topic ... Was somewhat bemused on looking through this article about trying to purchase a laptop with encryption. Partly because it mentions hardware aspects hitherto unknown to me. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2019/apr/25/how-do-i-buy-a-l… Is this sort of thing easier with Linux?

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When Is Hate Speech Not Hate Speech?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 23 Apr '19

23 Apr '19

Is it “hate speech” to tell NRA supporters to “f*** off”? One high-profile user got banned (supposedly permanently) by Twitter for doing this sort of thing ... only to have the ban reversed, simply because there was so much support for his position. Seems like, when it comes to social media services clamping down on hate speech, they are simultaneously doing “not enough” and “too much”... <https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190421/16313642055/twitter-permanently-…>

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Copies Of Mueller Report Taken Down Because Of ... Copyright Infringement?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 23 Apr '19

23 Apr '19

For those pushing for mandatory copyright filtering, here’s yet another cautionary tale: copies of the (redacted) Mueller Report were taken down from PDF-hosting site Scribd, even though it is in the public domain. It seems clear this was an inadvertent result of automatic filtering policies; one of the many big-name publishers who had put out for-sale copies of the report had used automated processes to pass the information to Scribd, and these processes had blocked everybody’s attempts to upload copies of the report, even though it didn’t own the copyright. <https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190420/23233942052/scribds-takedown-pub…>

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Streaming TV Has Become An Expensive, Complicated Mess
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 22 Apr '19

22 Apr '19

<https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=122224…>: But this entertainment nirvana never actually arrived. First came pricey broadband services required to stream Internet video, often delivered by the same cable wires consumers longed to cut. Then came a proliferation of services - offered by Netflix, Amazon, Hulu plus and more - each with a bill of its own. Then came more boxes, wires and remotes. And finally came the question: How exactly do I get my Star Wars fix? Maybe a bit US-centric, but I think that also reflects the situation for streaming here as well. The article talks about “cord-cutting” -- as you may know, most people in the US have been watching conventional TV stations through cable connections, not through broadcasts. “Cord-cutting” is the increasing tendency of customers to terminate their cable TV accounts. But those same cable companies are also ISPs, and given the limitations on competition between ISPs in the US (thanks to the current regime’s allergy to enforcing meaningful net-neutrality legislation), those same companies will get the money from customers wanting to watch streaming video.

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Why are you still using Excel? Is it time to up your game and move to Python and Pandas or R?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 19 Apr '19

19 Apr '19

A heartfelt plea to habitual spreadsheet-wielders in favour of more advanced data-analysis tools <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8wO4ppE9L8>. Also mentions some of the more notorious cases of Excel bugs/misfeatures impacting the correctness of scientific research results.

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Olive Video Editor
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 17 Apr '19

17 Apr '19

Came across this tryout <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AvfMMjHX-M> of yet another open-source video editor, called Olive. The project is only about a year old, but it’s looking very promising. I recall Thomas wanting the ability to enable/disable clips in the timeline; I believe this one can do that. It may still be under development, but for what it’s worth, the reviewer didn’t suffer a single crash or loss of work during the video. ;)

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DARPA Wants To Make a Better, More Secure Version of WhatsApp
by Peter Reutemann 15 Apr '19

15 Apr '19

'The Defense and Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) appears to be in the process of developing its own ultra secure communication platform. The program is called "Resilient Anonymous Communication for Everyone," or RACE, and it will be similar to WhatsApp in that it will be for everyone to use. Trusted Reviews reports: The objectives of the program are to create a distributed messaging system that can do three things: Exist completely within a network; Provide confidentiality, integrity and availability of messaging; and Preserve privacy to any participant in the system. DARPA seem to be putting security front and center, and the description of the project claims that "compromised system data and associated networked communications should not be helpful for comprising any additional parts of the system," meaning that DARPA are keen that one breach shouldn't also give them a leg up on access to other parts of the system. So, will we soon be using a U.S government branded DARPA? Probably not, but the chances are that RACE will go some way to creating a messaging app that's resilient to attacks, with the protocol and security they find no doubt dripping through to consumer tech and features in the coming years. ' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/04/15/2052250 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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Hackers Could Read Your Hotmail, MSN, and Outlook Emails by Abusing Microsoft Support
by Peter Reutemann 15 Apr '19

15 Apr '19

'On Saturday, Microsoft confirmed that some users of the company's email service had been targeted by hackers. A hacker or group of hackers had first broken into a customer support account for Microsoft, and then used that to gain access to information related to customers' email accounts such as the subject lines of their emails and who they've communicated with. But the issue is much worse than previously reported, with the hackers able to access email content from a large number of Outlook, MSN, and Hotmail email accounts, according to a source who witnessed the attack in action and described it before Microsoft's statement, as well as screenshots provided to Motherboard. Microsoft confirmed to Motherboard that hackers gained access to the content of some customers' emails.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/04/15/1554226 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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A Hacker Has Dumped Nearly One Billion User Records Over the Past Two Months
by Peter Reutemann 15 Apr '19

15 Apr '19

'A hacker who spoke with ZDNet in February about wanting to put up for sale the data of over one billion users is getting dangerously close to his goal after releasing another 65.5 million records last week and reaching a grand total of 932 million records overall. From a report: The hacker's name is Gnosticplayers, and he's responsible for the hacks of 44 companies, including last week's revelations. Since mid-February, the hacker has been putting batches of hacked data on Dream Market, a dark web marketplace for selling illegal products, such as guns, drugs, and hacking tools. He's released data from companies like 500px, UnderArmor, ShareThis, GfyCat, and MyHeritage, just to name the bigger names. Releases have been grouped in four rounds -- Round 1 (620 million user records), Round 2 (127 million user records), Round 3 (93 million user records), and Round 4 (26.5 million user records).' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/04/15/1920217 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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Former Firefox VP on What It's Like To Be Both a Partner of Google and a Competitor via Google Chrome
by Peter Reutemann 15 Apr '19

15 Apr '19

'Sidewalk Labs, the urban innovation arm of Google's parent company Alphabet, plans to build a $1 billion high-tech neighborhood in Toronto. The problem? It is facing an opposition from residents who have called for its demise. As the backlash gains momentum, it could force Sidewalk Labs to abandon or alter its vision. On paper, Sidewalk Labs' idea arguably has some merits: It wishes to "set new standards" for how cities are designed and built. But some are apprehensive of Google's plans, because the company has a knack for assuming more control over things and killing local competition. Johnathan Nightingale, a former VP of Firefox, has seen such behavior first hand. He draws some parallels: I spent 8 years at Mozilla working on Firefox and for almost all of that time Google was our biggest partner. Our revenue share deal on search drove 90% of Mozilla's income. When I started at Mozilla in 2007, there was no Google Chrome and most folks we spoke with inside were Firefox fans. They were building an empire on the web, we were building the web itself. I think our friends inside Google genuinely believed that. At the individual level, their engineers cared about most of the same things we did. Their product and design folks made many decisions very similarly and we learned from watching each other. But Google as a whole is very different than individual Googlers. Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. Gmail and Google Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as "incompatible." All of this is stuff you're allowed to do to compete, of course. But we were still a search partner, so we'd say "hey what gives?" And every time, they'd say, "oops. That was accidental. We'll fix it in the next push in 2 weeks." Over and over. Oops. Another accident. We'll fix it soon. We want the same things. We're on the same team. There were dozens of oopses. Hundreds maybe? I'm all for "don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" but I don't believe Google is that incompetent. This is not a thread about blaming Google for Firefox troubles though. We at Mozilla wear that ourselves, me more than anyone for my time as Firefox VP. But I see the same play happening here in my city and I don't like it. And for me it means two things: 1. The question is not whether individual Sidewalk Labs people have pure motives. I know some of them, just like I know plenty on the Chrome team. They're great people. But focus on the behavior of the organism as a whole. At the macro level, Google/Alphabet is very intentional. When Google wants to get a thing done, it is very effective. Mistakes happen, but when you see a sustained pattern of "oops" and delays from this organization -- you're being outfoxed. Get there faster than I did.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/04/15/0326208 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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Is The Linux Desktop In Trouble?
by Peter Reutemann 14 Apr '19

14 Apr '19

'"I believe that, as Microsoft keeps moving Windows to a Desktop-as-a-Service model, Linux will be the last traditional PC desktop operating system standing," writes ZDNet contributing editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. "But that doesn't mean I'm blind to its problems." First, even Linus Torvalds is tired of the fragmentation in the Linux desktop. In a recent [December 2018] TFiR interview with Swapnil Bhartiya, Torvalds said, "Chromebooks and Android are the path toward the desktop." Why? Because we don't have a standardized Linux desktop. For example, better Linux desktops, such as Linux Mint, provide an easy way to install applications, but under the surface, there are half-a-dozen different ways to install programs. That makes life harder for developers. Torvalds wishes "we were better at having a standardized desktop that goes across the distributions." Torvalds thinks there's been some progress. For software installation, he likes Flatpak. This software program, like its rival Snap, lets you install and maintain programs across different Linux distros. At the same time, this rivalry between Red Hat (which supports Flatpak) and Canonical (which backs Snap) bugs Torvalds. He's annoyed at how the "fragmentation of the different vendors have held the desktop back." None of the major Linux distributors -- Canonical, Red Hat, SUSE -- are really all that interested in supporting the Linux desktop. They all have them, but they're focused on servers, containers, the cloud, and the Internet of Things (IoT). That's, after all, is where the money is. Linux desktop distros "tend to last for five or six years and then real life gets in the way of what's almost always a volunteer effort..." the article argues. "It is not easy building and supporting a Linux desktop. It comes with a lot of wear and tear on its developers with far too little reward." His solution? Having a foundation create a common desktop for all Linux distros, so the Linux world could finally reap the benefits of standardization. "This would mean that many more Linux desktop developers could make a living from their work. That would improve the Linux desktop overall quality. "It's a virtuous cycle, which would help everyone."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/04/13/0151256 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 browsers rated
by Ian Young 14 Apr '19

14 Apr '19

Saw this while looking at the Exton Linux website. May be of interest to those with recent Android phones. https://joyofandroid.com/fastest-browsers-for-android/ ~ Ian Y

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Internet Explorer Exploit Steals Data From Windows Users-- Even If They Never Use Internet Explorer
by Peter Reutemann 14 Apr '19

14 Apr '19

'Security researcher John Page has revealed a new zero-day exploit that allows remote attackers to exfiltrate Local files using Internet Explorer. "The craziest part: Windows users don't ever even have to open the now-obsolete web browser for malicious actors to use the exploit," reports Mashable. "It just needs to exist on their computer..." [H]ackers are taking advantage of a vulnerability using .MHT files, which is the file format used by Internet Explorer for its web archives. Current web browsers do not use the .MHT format, so when a PC user attempts to access this file Windows opens IE by default. To initiate the exploit, a user simply needs to open an attachment received by email, messenger, or other file transfer service... Most worrisome, according to Page, is that Microsoft told him that it would just "consider" a fix in a future update. The security researcher says he contacted Microsoft in March before now going public with the issue. As ZDNet points out, while Internet Explorer usage makes up less than 10 percent of the web browser market, it doesn't particularly matter in this case as the exploit just requires a user to have the browser on their PC.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/04/14/2232252 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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Does Wi-Fi Security Really Matter?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 11 Apr '19

11 Apr '19

Seems the Wi-Fi Alliance is having yet another crack at coming up with a really secure protocol, this time to be called WPA3 <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/09/wi_fi_wpa3/>. Does anybody care? Remember that on the Internet, security is implemented between the endpoints, the protocols are designed not to care that everything in-between might be pawed through by eavesdroppers, or even active attackers trying to inject fake data.

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Dragonblood Vulnerabilities Disclosed in Wi-Fi WPA3 Standard
by Peter Reutemann 11 Apr '19

11 Apr '19

'Two security researchers disclosed details this week about a group of vulnerabilities collectively referred to as Dragonblood that impact the Wi-Fi Alliance's recently launched WPA3 Wi-Fi security and authentication standard. From a report: If ever exploited, the vulnerabilities would allow an attacker within the range of a victim's network to recover the Wi-Fi password and infiltrate the target's network. In total, five vulnerabilities are part of the Dragonblood ensemble -- a denial of service attack, two downgrade attacks, and two side-channel information leaks. While the denial of service attack is somewhat unimportant as it only leads to crashing WPA3-compatible access points, the other four are the ones that can be used to recover user passwords. Both the two downgrade attacks and two side-channel leaks exploit design flaws in the WPA3 standard's Dragonfly key exchange -- the mechanism through which clients authenticate on a WPA3 router or access point. In a downgrade attack, Wi-Fi WPA3-capable networks can be coerced in using an older and more insecure password exchange systems, which can allow attackers to retrieve the network passwords using older flaws.' -- source: https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/19/04/11/1431219 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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Gmail Becomes First Major Email Provider To Support MTA-STS and TLS Reporting
by Peter Reutemann 11 Apr '19

11 Apr '19

'Google announced this week that Gmail has become the first major email provider to support two new security standards, namely MTA-STS and TLS Reporting. From a report: Both are extensions to the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), the protocol through which all emails are sent today. The purpose of MTA-STS and TLS Reporting is to help email providers establish cryptographically secure connections between each other, with the main goal of twarthing SMTP man-in-the-middle attacks. SMTP man-in-the-middle attacks are a major problem for today's email landscape, where rogue email server operators can intercept, read, and modify the contents of people's emails. The two new standards will prevent this by allowing legitimate email providers to create a secure channel for exchanging emails.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/04/11/1822228 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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Amazon Workers Are Listening To What You Tell Alexa
by Peter Reutemann 11 Apr '19

11 Apr '19

'Amazon reportedly employs thousands of people around the world to help improve its Alexa digital assistant. "The team listens to voice recordings captured in Echo owners' homes and offices," reports Bloomberg. "The recordings are transcribed, annotated and then fed back into the software as part of an effort to eliminate gaps in Alexa's understanding of human speech and help it better respond to commands." From the report: The team comprises a mix of contractors and full-time Amazon employees who work in outposts from Boston to Costa Rica, India and Romania, according to the people, who signed nondisclosure agreements barring them from speaking publicly about the program. They work nine hours a day, with each reviewer parsing as many as 1,000 audio clips per shift, according to two workers based at Amazon's Bucharest office, which takes up the top three floors of the Globalworth building in the Romanian capital's up-and-coming Pipera district. The modern facility stands out amid the crumbling infrastructure and bears no exterior sign advertising Amazon's presence. The work is mostly mundane. One worker in Boston said he mined accumulated voice data for specific utterances such as "Taylor Swift" and annotated them to indicate the searcher meant the musical artist. Occasionally the listeners pick up things Echo owners likely would rather stay private: a woman singing badly off key in the shower, say, or a child screaming for help. The teams use internal chat rooms to share files when they need help parsing a muddled word -- or come across an amusing recording. Sometimes they hear recordings they find upsetting, or possibly criminal. Two of the workers said they picked up what they believe was a sexual assault. When something like that happens, they may share the experience in the internal chat room as a way of relieving stress. Amazon says it has procedures in place for workers to follow when they hear something distressing, but two Romania-based employees said that, after requesting guidance for such cases, they were told it wasn't Amazon's job to interfere. [...] Amazon, in its marketing and privacy policy materials, doesn't explicitly say humans are listening to recordings of some conversations picked up by Alexa. "We use your requests to Alexa to train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems," the company says in a list of frequently asked questions. In Alexa's privacy settings, the company gives users the option of disabling the use of their voice recordings for the development of new features. A screenshot reviewed by Bloomberg shows that the recordings sent to the Alexa auditors don't provide a user's full name and address but are associated with an account number, as well as the user's first name and the device's serial number. An Amazon spokesperson said in a statement to Bloomberg: "We take the security and privacy of our customers' personal information seriously. We only annotate an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings in order [to] improve the customer experience. For example, this information helps us train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems, so Alexa can better understand your requests, and ensure the service works well for everyone." They added: "We have strict technical and operational safeguards, and have a zero tolerance policy for the abuse of our system. Employees do not have direct access to information that can identify the person or account as part of this workflow. All information is treated with high confidentiality and we use multi-factor authentication to restrict access, service encryption and audits of our control environment to protect it."' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/04/10/2340251 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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You Can Now Use Your Android Phone as a 2FA Security Key for Google Accounts
by Peter Reutemann 10 Apr '19

10 Apr '19

'Google said today it will now enable Android users to use their smartphones as a Fast Identity Online (FIDO) security key (for two-step authentication) for their Google accounts, thereby addressing one of the biggest challenges that has slowed the adoption of this security measure: convenience. A report adds: You can thus use your Android phone to protect your personal Google account, and your G Suite, Cloud Identity, and Google Cloud Platform work accounts. (Android tablets aren't supported -- Google specifically limited the functionality since users are more likely to have phones with them.) This means Android phones can move from two-step verification (2SV) to two-factor authentication (2FA). 2SV is a method of confirming a user's identity using something they know (password) and a second thing they know (a code sent via text message). 2FA is a method of confirming a user's identity by using a combination of two different factors: something they know (password), something they have (security key), or something they are (fingerprint). The feature is coming only to Android devices versions 7 and up.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/04/10/1621253 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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Google Chrome Wants To Block Some HTTP File Downloads
by Peter Reutemann 10 Apr '19

10 Apr '19

'Google wants to block some file downloads carried out via HTTP on websites that use HTTPS. The plan is to block EXE, DMG, CRX, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP, TAR, RAR, and 7Z file downloads when the download is initiated via HTTP but the website URL shows HTTPS. Google said it's currently not thinking of blocking all downloads started from HTTP sites, since the browser already warns users about a site's poor security via the "Not Secure" indicator in the URL bar. The idea is to block insecure downloads on sites that appear to be secure (loaded via HTTPS) but where the downloads take place via plain ol' HTTP.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/04/10/1758206 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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Mysterious safety-tampering malware infects a second critical infrastructure site
by Peter Reutemann 10 Apr '19

10 Apr '19

'Sixteen months ago, researchers reported an unsettling escalation in hacks targeting power plants, gas refineries, and other types of critical infrastructure. Attackers who may have been working on behalf of a nation caused an operational outage at a critical-infrastructure site after deliberately targeting a system that prevented health- and life-threatening accidents. Game-changing attack on critical infrastructure site causes outage There had been compromises of critical infrastructure sites before. What was unprecedented in this attack—and of considerable concern to some researchers and critical infrastructure operators—was the use of an advanced piece of malware that targeted the unidentified site’s safety processes. Such safety instrumented systems (SIS) are a combination of hardware and software that many critical infrastructure sites use to prevent unsafe conditions from arising. When gas fuel pressures or reactor temperatures rise to potentially unsafe thresholds, for instance, a SIS will automatically close valves or initiate cooling processes to prevent health- or life-threatening accidents. Russia was likely behind dangerous critical infrastructure attack, report says By focusing on the site’s SIS, the malware carried the threat of physical destruction that depending on the site and the type of accident had the potential to be serious if not catastrophic. The malware was alternately named Triton and Trisis, because it targeted the Triconex product line made by Schneider Electric. It’s development was ultimately linked to a Russian government-backed research institute.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/04/mysterious-safety-ta… 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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Windows XP Dies Final Death As Embedded POSReady 2009 Reaches End of Life
by Peter Reutemann 10 Apr '19

10 Apr '19

'Extended support for Windows Embedded POSReady 2009 -- the last supported version of Windows based on Windows XP -- ended on April 9, 2019, marking the final end of the Windows NT 5.1 product line after 17 years, 7 months, and 16 days. Counting this edition, Windows XP is the longest-lived version of Windows ever -- a record which is unlikely to be beaten. Despite the nominal end of support for Windows XP five years ago, the existence of POSReady 2009 allowed users to receive security updates on Windows XP Home and Professional SP3 through the use of a registry hack. Microsoft dissuaded users from doing this, stating that they "do not fully protect Windows XP customers," though no attempt was apparently made to prevent users from using this hack. With POSReady reaching the end of support, the flow of these security updates will likewise come to an end.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/04/10/0017208 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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The Most Public Windows Error-Message Screen Ever?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 09 Apr '19

09 Apr '19

There has long been a history of Windows error messages popping up in the most embarrassing public places, like on status displays in train stations, shopping malls and the like. Could this example be some kind of record for being the most public? Being wrapped right round the top of one of the tallest buildings in London, after all. <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/08/bt_tower_broadcasts_error_message_…>

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meeting next Monday
by Peter Reutemann 09 Apr '19

09 Apr '19

Hi everyone Due to Easter falling on our usual WLUG meeting slot on the 22nd and the university no longer allowing rooms to be used on public holidays, this month's meeting will happen next Monday, a week earlier. At this stage, I'm still looking for a speaker. A talk on Wayland was suggested, but I never received a confirmation/blurb, unfortunately. https://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/257884273/ 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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Opera Adds Crypto Wallet To Its Desktop Browser, Launches Anti-Chrome Campaign in Europe
by Peter Reutemann 09 Apr '19

09 Apr '19

'Opera has updated its eponymous web browser for the desktop with a crypto-makeover and a number of additional features. From a report: The Norway-headquartered browser maker has also launched a marketing campaign to cash in on the EU regulatory order that requires Google to give Android users in Europe more options to choose their preferred browser. Dubbed 'Reborn 3,' the latest version of Opera for Windows, macOS, and Linux includes a native cryptocurrency wallet, which follows Opera's Android app getting this feature in December. The wallet keys and transactions are synced between the desktop and mobile browsers with the latter also serving as a way for the user to authenticate their identity, the company said. [...] Additionally, Opera is speeding up the free VPN feature, after adding this feature to its Android app last month.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/04/09/1356246 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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Mozilla is Launching Curated Recommended Extensions Program This Summer
by Peter Reutemann 09 Apr '19

09 Apr '19

'However much you love your chosen web browser, you have probably enhanced its capabilities through the use of add-ons. Finding decent, reliable add-ons can be tricky, and this is why Mozilla is launching the Recommended Extensions program. This editor-curated program will surface the very best vetted extensions for Firefox, and it is due to roll out in stages later this summer. Mozilla says that any extensions it recommends through the program will be highlighted across its portfolio of websites and products, including addons.mozilla.org (AMO) and on Firefox's Get Add-Ons page. The company is already identifying extensions it likes the look of, and will soon be reaching out to developers. Changes should be seen on AMO around June.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/04/09/1444248 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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Several Major Browsers to Prevent Disabling of Click-Tracking 'Hyperlink Auditing'
by Peter Reutemann 08 Apr '19

08 Apr '19

'A HTML standard called hyperlink auditing that allows sites to track link clicks is enabled by default on Safari, Chrome, Opera, and Microsoft Edge, but will soon have no way to disable it. As it is considered a privacy risk, browsers previously allowed you to disable this feature. Now they are going in the opposite direction. Hyperlink auditing is an HTML standard that allows the creation of special links that ping back to a specified URL when they are clicked on. These pings are done in the form of a POST request to the specified web page that can then examine the request headers to see what page the link was clicked on. The article concludes that "Firefox and Brave win the award" for people who want this click-tracking capability disabled -- since "only Brave and Firefox currently disable it by default, and do not appear to have any plans on enabling it in the future."' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/04/07/2338244 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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Why Aren't People Abandoning Windows For Linux?
by Peter Reutemann 08 Apr '19

08 Apr '19

'This weekend SlashGear published "Reasons to Abandon Windows For Linux," making their case to "Windows users who are curious about the state of Linux for mainstream computing." It tries to enumerate specific reasons why Linux might be the better choice, arguing among other things that: * Updates on Linux are fast and "rarely call for a restart" -- and are also more complete. "Updates are typically downloaded through a 'Software Updater' application that not only checks for operating system patches, but also includes updates for the programs that you've installed from the repository." * Windows "tries to serve a variety of markets...cramming in a scattered array of features" -- and along those lines, that Microsoft "has gradually implemented monetization schemes and methods for extracting user data." And yet you're still paying for that operating system, while Linux is less bloated and "free forever." * "Because less people use Linux, the platform is less targeted by malware and tends to be more secure than Windows" The article also touches on a few other points (including battery life), and predicts that problems with Windows are "bound to get worse over time and will only present more of a case for making the switch to Linux." Long-time Slashdot reader shanen shared the article, along with some new thoughts on why people really stay with Windows: I think the main "excuse" is the perception of reliability, which is really laughable if you've actually read the EULA. Microsoft certainly doesn't have to help anyone at all. I would argue that Windows support is neither a bug nor a feature, but just a marketing ploy. Their original submission suggests that maybe Linux needs to buttress the perception of its reliability with a better financial model -- possibly through a new kind of crowd funding which could also be extended to all open source software, or even to journalism).' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/04/07/2111218 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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Provably unbreakable encryption
by Wolf 07 Apr '19

07 Apr '19

Is this something fit for this list? https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-evercrypt-library-creates-hacker-pro… Wolf

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Ongoing DNS hijackings target unpatched consumer routers
by Peter Reutemann 05 Apr '19

05 Apr '19

'A wave of DNS hijacking attacks that abuse Google's cloud computing service is causing consumer routers to connect to fraudulent and potentially malicious websites and addresses, a security researcher has warned. By now, most people know that Domain Name System servers translate human-friendly domain names into the numeric IP addresses that computers need to find other computers on the Internet. Over the past four months, a blog post published Thursday said, attackers have been using Google cloud service to scan the Internet for routers that are vulnerable to remote exploits. When they find susceptible routers, the attackers then use the Google platform to send malicious code that configures the routers to use malicious DNS servers.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/04/ongoing-dns-hijackin… 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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The End of the Desktop?
by Peter Reutemann 04 Apr '19

04 Apr '19

'Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, writing for ComputerWorld : Of course, at one time, to get any work done with a computer, you first had to learn a lot, about computers, operating systems, commands and more. Eventually, "friendly" became the most important adverb in computing circles, and we've reached the point in user-friendliness that people don't even talk about it anymore. Today, Google has shown with its Chrome OS that most of us can pretty much do anything we need to do on a computer with just a web browser. But Google's path is not Microsoft's path. Instead, it's moving us first to Windows as desktop as a service (DaaS) via Microsoft Managed Desktop (MMD). This bundles Windows 10 Enterprise, Office 365 and Enterprise Mobility + Security and cloud-based system management into Microsoft 365 Enterprise. The next step, Windows Virtual Desktop, enables companies to virtualize Windows 7 and 10, Office 365 ProPlus apps and other third-party applications on Azure-based virtual machines. If all goes well, you'll be able to subscribe to Windows Virtual Desktop this fall. Of course, Virtual Desktop is a play for business users -- for now. I expect Virtual Desktop to be offered to consumers in 2020. By 2025, Windows as an actual desktop operating system will be a niche product. Sound crazy? Uh, you do know that Microsoft already really, really wants you to "rent" Office 365 rather than buy Office 2019, don't you? But what about games, you say? We'll always have Windows for games! Will we? Google, with its Google Stadia gaming cloud service, is betting we're ready to move our games to the cloud as well. It's no pipe dream. Valve has been doing pretty well for years now with its Steam variation on this theme. So where is all this taking us? I see a world where the PC desktop disappears for all but a few. Most of us will be writing our documents, filling out our spreadsheets and doing whatever else we now do on our PCs via cloud-based applications on smart terminals running Chrome OS or Windows Lite. If you want a "real" PC, your choices are going to be Linux or macOS.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/04/04/1724248 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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Microsoft and Canonical Launch Visual Studio Code Snap For Linux
by Peter Reutemann 04 Apr '19

04 Apr '19

'Following the release of Visual Studio 2019 for Windows and Mac platforms, Microsoft today is releasing a snap version of Visual Studio Code. A report adds: No, the source-code editor is not the Windows-maker's first snap -- it also released one for Skype, for instance. "As of today, Visual Studio Code is available for Linux as a snap, providing seamless auto-updates for its users. Visual Studio Code, a free, lightweight code editor, has redefined editors for building modern web and cloud applications, with built-in support for debugging, task running, and version control for a variety of languages and frameworks," says Canonical. Joao Moreno, Software Development Engineer, Microsoft Visual Studio Code offers the following statement: "The automatic update functionality of snaps is a major benefit. It is clear there is a thriving community around snaps and that it is moving forward at great pace. The backing of Canonical ensures our confidence in its ongoing development and long-term future."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/04/04/1854252 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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'SPURV' Project Brings Windowed Android Apps To Desktop Linux
by Peter Reutemann 04 Apr '19

04 Apr '19

'A new "experimental containerized Android environment" from a company called Collabora allows Android apps to run in floating windows alongside native applications on desktop Linux. You can read all the technical details at the source link, but put simply, 'SPURV' creates a virtual Android device on your Linux computer, much like Bluestacks and other similar tools. There are various components of SPURV that allow the Android environment to play audio, connect to networks, and display hardware-accelerated graphics through the underlying Linux system. The most interesting part is 'SPURV HWComposer,' which renders Android applications in windows, alongside the windows from native Linux applications. This is what sets SPURV apart from (most) other methods of running Android on a computer. For this to work, the Linux desktop has to be using the Wayland display server (some Linux-based OSes use X11). Pre-built binaries for SPURV are not currently available -- you have to build it yourself from the source code. Still, it's an interesting proof-of-concept, and hopefully someone turns it into a full-featured product. ' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/04/03/2222207 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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Serious Apache server bug gives root to baddies in shared host environments
by Peter Reutemann 04 Apr '19

04 Apr '19

'The Apache HTTP Server, the Internet’s most widely used Web server, just fixed a serious vulnerability that makes it possible for untrusted users or software to gain unfettered control of the machine the software runs on. CVE-2019-0211, as the vulnerability is indexed, is a local privilege escalation, meaning it allows a person or software that already has limited access to the Web server to elevate privileges to root. From there, the attacker could do just about anything. The vulnerability makes it possible for unprivileged scripts to overwrite sensitive parts of a server’s memory, Charles Fol, the independent researcher who discovered the bug, wrote in a blog post. A malicious script could exploit the vulnerability to gain root. The vulnerability poses the most risk inside Web-hosting facilities that offer shared instances, in which a single physical machine serves content for more than one website. Typically, such servers prevent an administrator of one site from accessing other sites or from accessing sensitive settings of the machine itself.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/04/serious-apache-serve… 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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Millions of Facebook Records Found on Amazon Cloud Servers
by Peter Reutemann 03 Apr '19

03 Apr '19

'Researchers at UpGuard, a cybersecurity firm, found troves of Facebook user information hiding in plain sight, inadvertently posted publicly on Amazon.com's cloud computing servers. From a report: The discovery shows that a year after the Cambridge Analytica scandal exposed how unsecure and widely disseminated Facebook users' information is online, companies that control that information at every step still haven't done enough to seal up private data, Bloomberg News reports. In one instance, Mexico City-based media company Cultura Colectiva openly stored 540 million records on Facebook users, including identification numbers, comments, reactions and account names. That database was closed on Wednesday after Bloomberg alerted Facebook to the problem and Facebook contacted Amazon. Facebook shares pared their gains after the Bloomberg News report. UpGuard adds: The data sets vary in when they were last updated, the data points present, and the number of unique individuals in each. What ties them together is that they both contain data about Facebook users, describing their interests, relationships, and interactions, that were available to third party developers. As Facebook faces scrutiny over its data stewardship practices, they have made efforts to reduce third party access. But as these exposures show, the data genie cannot be put back in the bottle. Data about Facebook users has been spread far beyond the bounds of what Facebook can control today. Combine that plenitude of personal data with storage technologies that are often misconfigured for public access, and the result is a long tail of data about Facebook users that continues to leak' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/04/03/182215 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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Linus Torvalds on Social Media: 'It's a Disease. It Seems To Encourage Bad Behavior.'
by Peter Reutemann 03 Apr '19

03 Apr '19

'From a wide-ranging interview of Linus Torvalds with Linux Journal on the magazine's 25th anniversary: Linux Journal: If you had to fix one thing about the networked world, what would it be? Linus: Nothing technical. But, I absolutely detest modern "social media" -- Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. It's a disease. It seems to encourage bad behavior. I think part of it is something that email shares too, and that I've said before: "On the internet, nobody can hear you being subtle". When you're not talking to somebody face to face, and you miss all the normal social cues, it's easy to miss humor and sarcasm, but it's also very easy to overlook the reaction of the recipient, so you get things like flame wars, etc., that might not happen as easily with face-to-face interaction. But email still works. You still have to put in the effort to write it, and there's generally some actual content (technical or otherwise). The whole "liking" and "sharing" model is just garbage. There is no effort and no quality control. In fact, it's all geared to the reverse of quality control, with lowest common denominator targets, and click-bait, and things designed to generate an emotional response, often one of moral outrage. Add in anonymity, and it's just disgusting. When you don't even put your real name on your garbage (or the garbage you share or like), it really doesn't help. I'm actually one of those people who thinks that anonymity is overrated. Some people confuse privacy and anonymity and think they go hand in hand, and that protecting privacy means that you need to protect anonymity. I think that's wrong. Anonymity is important if you're a whistle-blower, but if you cannot prove your identity, your crazy rant on some social-media platform shouldn't be visible, and you shouldn't be able to share it or like it. Linux Journal: Is there any advice you'd like to give to young programmers/computer science students? Linus: I'm actually the worst person to ask. I knew I was interested in math and computers since an early age, and I was largely self-taught until university. And everything I did was fairly self-driven. So I don't understand the problems people face when they say "what should I do?" It's not where I came from at all.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/04/03/1829244 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 (Not) To Damage A Flash Storage Device
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 02 Apr '19

02 Apr '19

Came across this article <http://wiki.laptop.org/go/How_to_Damage_a_FLASH_Storage_Device> on the OLPC wiki about some of the things to beware of when reformatting a flash device (USB stick or SD card -- what about SSDs?). Basically, if there is a mismatch between the blocking of data at the filesystem level and the device page size, then you could be increasing the number of hardware-level writes by a factor of 2 or more. This leads to a corresponding reduction in the life of the device.

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Mozilla Will Run Two Experiments This Month With Firefox To Explore Ways To Fight Push Notification Permission Spam
by Peter Reutemann 02 Apr '19

02 Apr '19

'Mozilla said this week that it intends to run two experiments over the course of this month to determine the most adequate way of dealing with push notification spam, a growing problem that is slowly deteriorating the web experience for everyone. From a report: The experiments will run in Firefox Nightly (v68) and Firefox Beta (v67). The Firefox Nightly experiment will run from April 1 to April 29. During this time, Mozilla said Firefox Nightly would only allow websites to show a push notification permission only after the user has clicked or pressed a key while on a website. All attempts to show a push notification permission request before a click or key press will be blocked by default. [...] In the last two weeks of the experiment, Firefox will show an icon in the URL bar, but with no visible popup on the page. Users can click this icon and accept any push notification permission requests if they wish so.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/04/02/1941232 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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Introducing Google Tulip
by Ian Stewart 02 Apr '19

02 Apr '19

For those of you with two minutes to spare, here<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsPQvZm_rgM> is a video clip introducing the Google Tulip product which was released on 1st April 2019.

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Linux Mint 19.2 'Tina' is On the Way, But the Developers Seem Defeated and Depressed
by Peter Reutemann 02 Apr '19

02 Apr '19

'Brian Fagioli, reporting for BetaNews: Today should be happy times for the Linux Mint community, as we finally learn some new details about the upcoming version 19.2! It will be based on Ubuntu 18.04 and once again feature three desktop environments -- Xfce, Mate, and Cinnamon. We even found out the code name for Linux Mint 19.2 -- "Tina." And yet, it is hard to celebrate. Why? Because the developers seem to be depressed and defeated. They even appear to be a bit disenchanted with Free Software development overall. Clement Lefebvre, leader of the Linux Mint project, shared a very lengthy blog post today, and it really made me sad. He wrote, "For a team to work, developers need to feel like heroes. They want the same things as users, they are users, they were 'only' users to start with. At some stage they decide to get involved and they start investing time, efforts and emotions into improving our project. What they're looking for the most is support and happiness. They need feedback and information to understand bugs or feature requests and when they're done implementing something, they need to feel like heroes, they literally do, that's part of the reason they're here really." Upon publication of the article, Jason Hicks, Muffin maintainer and member of the Linux Mint team, corroborated the claims made by others.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/04/02/1359246 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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SUSE Will Soon Be the Largest Independent Linux Company
by Peter Reutemann 02 Apr '19

02 Apr '19

'At SUSECon in Nashville, Tennessee, European Linux power SUSE CEO Nils Brauckmann said his company would soon be the largest independent Linux company. "That's because, of course, IBM is acquiring Red Hat," reports ZDNet. "But, simultaneously, SUSE has continued to grow for seven-straight years." From the report: Brauckmann said, "We believe that makes our status as a truly independent open source company more important than ever. Our genuinely open-source solutions, flexible business practices, lack of enforced vendor lock-in, and exceptional service are more critical to customer and partner organizations, and our independence coincides with our single-minded focus on delivering what is best for them." Practically speaking, SUSE has been growing by focusing on delivering high-quality Linux and open-source programs and services to enterprise customers. Looking ahead Brauckmann said, "SUSE is better positioned to bring more innovation to customers and partners faster through both organic growth and acquisitions, keeping us on track to provide them with the open solutions that keep them ahead with their own customers in their own markets. We continue to adapt so our customers and partners can succeed." Last year SUSE's revenue grew by 15 percent in fiscal year 2018, and the business is about to surpass the $400 million revenue mark for the first time. SUSE, which sees not quite half of its business in Europe, is also seeing revenue growth around the world. North America, for example, now accounts for almost 40 percent of SUSE's revenues. The company is also expanding. SUSE added more than 300 employees in the last 12 months. For the most part this has been in engineering followed by sales and services. SUSE staff is now approaching 1,750 globally and its plans on continuing to hire aggressively. ' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/04/01/222245 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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Sway – Tiling Window Manager Specially Crafted for Wayland
by Peter Reutemann 01 Apr '19

01 Apr '19

'Tiling window managers are popular lightweight alternatives to full desktop environments, especially among power users. Recently, a newer window manager reached its 1.0 release. This window manager, named Sway, is designed solely for systems that can use Wayland).' -- source: https://itsfoss.com/sway-window-manager/ Funny that, only came across Sway at the last meeting. :-) 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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Devuan.org Now Points To 'Pwned' Page With Gopher URLs
by Peter Reutemann 31 Mar '19

31 Mar '19

'"DEVUAN.ORG HAS BEEN PWNED" reads a new message at the home page for Devuan (a fork of Debian without systemd) -- which re-redirects to a new page named pwned.html, reports Slashdot reader DevNull127: In all capital letters, its carefully-indented message (complete with an ascii-art logo) now informs visitors that "the web sucks -- JavaScript sucks -- browsers suck." Posting the URLs to several gopher sites, it adds that "Gopher is the way -- gopher is the future." "Kiss port 80 goodbye. Join the revolution on port 70." The attackers identify themselves as "Green Hat Hackers," a term generally understood to mean ambitious newbie hackers who want to improve their skills. "Stop the madness," continues their message, which appeared just hours before the first day of April. "Get yourself a gopher client."' -- source: https://idle.slashdot.org/story/19/03/31/212227 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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File-transfer Android to Linux using rsync
by tom butz 31 Mar '19

31 Mar '19

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Fwd: File-transfer between Android amd Linux using rsync
by tom butz 31 Mar '19

31 Mar '19

HOW TO TRANSFER FILES FROM ANDROID-PDA TO LINUX-LAPTOP ====================================================== I'm running Android 7.1 on an OPPO A73 phone/PDA, and sometimes need to transfer photos and other files to a laptop running Linux Mint 19.1. Steps required on the PDA: 1) install termux from Android PlayStore 2) install rsync (in termux, type: pkg install rsync) 3) install perl (in termux, type: pkg install perl) 4) in termux, type: termux-setup-storage (also automatically creates links) 5) in termux, type: cd storage, then type: ls to see the following directories: dcim: photos/videos taken with the PDA downloads: stuff you downloaded movies: music: pictures: shared: everything (includes the above directories) In the following examples we will use /dcim/ and /downloads/: oppopictures.prl ================ In termux, type: perl system "rsync -av /sdcard/DCIM/ username_on_laptop\@1.2.3.4:/oppo_pictures/" This will transfer photos (*.jpg) and videos (*.mp4) to /oppo_pictures/Camera/, and screenshots to /oppo_pictures/Screenshots/. Directory /oppo/pictures/ must exist on the laptop and grant world-access (chmod 777). Ignore rsync error-messages regarding file-attributes. oppodownloads.prl ================= In termux, type: perl system "rsync -av /storage/downloads/ username_on_laptop\@1.2.3.4:/oppo_downloads/" This will transfer files to /oppo_downloads/. Directory /oppo_downloads/ must exist on laptop and grant world-access (chmod 777). Ignore rsync error-messages regarding file-attributes. NOTE: REPLACE the numbers 1.2.3.4 in the above examples with your laptop's IP-address (as provided by your IP-router). Get them using ifconfig. Theoretically you could do the above using the /shared/ directory to get a copy of Android-files.

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Researchers Find 36 New Security Flaws In LTE Protocol
by Peter Reutemann 28 Mar '19

28 Mar '19

'A group of academics from South Korea have identified 36 new vulnerabilities in the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) standard used by thousands of mobile networks and hundreds of millions of users across the world. The vulnerabilities allow attackers to disrupt mobile base stations, block incoming calls to a device, disconnect users from a mobile network, send spoofed SMS messages, and eavesdrop and manipulate user data traffic. They were discovered by a four-person research team from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology Constitution (KAIST), and documented in a research paper they intend to present at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in late May 2019. The Korean researchers said they found 51 LTE vulnerabilities, of which 36 are new, and 15 have been first identified by other research groups in the past. They discovered this sheer number of flaws by using a technique known as fuzzing --a code testing method that inputs a large quantity of random data into an application and analyzes the output for abnormalities, which, in turn, give developers a hint about the presence of possible bugs. The resulting vulnerabilities, see image below or this Google Docs sheet, were located in both the design and implementation of the LTE standard among the different carriers and device vendors. The KAIST team said it notified both the 3GPP (industry body behind LTE standard) and the GSMA (industry body that represents mobile operators), but also the corresponding baseband chipset vendors and network equipment vendors on whose hardware they performed the LTEFuzz tests.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/03/28/2035257 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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ASUS Releases Fix For ShadowHammer Malware Attack
by Peter Reutemann 26 Mar '19

26 Mar '19

'ASUS may have inadvertently pushed malware to some of its computers through its update tool, but it at least it has a fix ready to go. The PC maker has released a new version of its Live Update software for laptops that addresses the ShadowHammer backdoor attack. It also promised "multiple security verification mechanisms" to reduce the chances of further attacks, and started using an "enhanced end-to-end encryption mechanism." There are upgrades to the behind-the-scenes server system to prevent future attacks, ASUS added. The company simultaneously reiterated the narrow scope of ShadowHammer, noting that the malware targeted a "very small and specific user group." It's believed to be an Advanced Persistent Threat -- that is, a state-backed assault against organizations rather than everyday users. Other ASUS devices weren't affected, according to a notice. While the fix is reassuring, it also raises questions as to why the systems weren't locked down earlier. Update tools are prime targets for hackers precisely because they're both trusted and have deep access to the operating system -- tight security is necessary to prevent an intruder from hijacking the process.' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/19/03/26/2025229 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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Refuse To Be Terrorized
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 26 Mar '19

26 Mar '19

I have written up some thoughts about those horrible happenings in Christchurch today. You can read them here <https://default-cube.deviantart.com/journal/Refuse-To-Be-Terrorized-Christc…>. I hope we learn the right lessons from others who have been here before us, and not repeat too many of their mistakes.

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Firefox Lockbox Comes To Android To Ease Password Pain
by Peter Reutemann 26 Mar '19

26 Mar '19

'If you're a Firefox true believer, or even just a Firefox user, your password struggles just got a little easier with the release of Firefox Lockbox for Android devices. From a report: The password manager, based on login information already in Firefox, makes it easier to sign into apps as well. It integrates with login autocomplete systems in both Apple's iOS and Google's Android software, Mozilla said. It's not as fancy as password managers like LastPass, BitWarden, 1Password and Dashlane, and the only browser it works with is Firefox. On the other hand, if you're already in the Firefox world, it's basically already set up for you. There's no migration process as with dedicated password managers.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/03/26/1559243 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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Google Makes Emails More Dynamic With AMP For Email
by Peter Reutemann 26 Mar '19

26 Mar '19

'Google today officially launched AMP for Email, its effort to turn emails from static documents into dynamic, web page-like experiences. >From a report: AMP for Email is coming to Gmail, but other major email providers like Yahoo Mail, Outlook and Mail.ru will also support AMP emails. It's been more than a year since Google first announced this initiative. Even by Google standards, that's a long incubation phase, though there's also plenty of backend work necessary to make this feature work. The promise of AMP for Email is that it'll turn basic messages into a surface for actually getting things done. "Over the past decade, our web experiences have changed enormously -- evolving from static flat content to interactive apps -- yet email has largely stayed the same with static messages that eventually go out of date or are merely a springboard to accomplishing a more complex task," Gmail product manager Aakash Sahney writes. "If you want to take action, you usually have to click on a link, open a new tab, and visit another website." With AMP for Email, those messages become interactive. That means you'll be able to RSVP to an event right from the message, fill out a questionnaire, browse through a store's inventory or respond to a comment -- all without leaving your web-based email client.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/03/26/1838254 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 Users' Security and Privacy At Risk From Shadowy Ecosystem of Pre-Installed Software, Study Warns
by Peter Reutemann 25 Mar '19

25 Mar '19

'Researchers behind a large-scale independent study of pre-installed Android apps "unearthed a complex ecosystem of players with a primary focus on advertising and 'data-driven services' -- which they argue the average Android user is likely to be unaware of (while also likely lacking the ability to uninstall/evade the baked in software's privileged access to data and resources themselves)," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The study, which was carried out by researchers at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) and the IMDEA Networks Institute, in collaboration with the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at Berkeley (USA) and Stony Brook University of New York (US), encompassed more than 82,000 pre-installed Android apps across more than 1,700 devices manufactured by 214 brands, according to the IMDEA institute. "The study shows, on the one hand, that the permission model on the Android operating system and its apps allow a large number of actors to track and obtain personal user information," it writes. "At the same time, it reveals that the end user is not aware of these actors in the Android terminals or of the implications that this practice could have on their privacy. Furthermore, the presence of this privileged software in the system makes it difficult to eliminate it if one is not an expert user." In all 1,200 developers were identified behind the pre-installed software they found in the data-set they examined, as well as more than 11,000 third party libraries (SDKs). Many of the preloaded apps were found to display what the researchers dub potentially dangerous or undesired behavior. The data-set underpinning their analysis was collected via crowd-sourcing methods -- using a purpose-built app (called Firmware Scanner), and pulling data from the Lumen Privacy Monitor app. The latter provided the researchers with visibility on mobile traffic flow -- via anonymized network flow metadata obtained from its users. They also crawled the Google Play Store to compare their findings on pre-installed apps with publicly available apps -- and found that just 9% of the package names in their dataset were publicly indexed on Play. Another concerning finding relates to permissions. In addition to standard permissions defined in Android (i.e. which can be controlled by the user) the researchers say they identified more than 4,845 owner or "personalized" permissions by different actors in the manufacture and distribution of devices. So that means they found systematic user permissions workarounds being enabled by scores of commercial deals cut in a non-transparency data-driven background Android software ecosystem. The researchers address the lack of transparency and accountability in the Android ecosystem by suggesting the introduction and use of certificates signed by globally-trusted certificate authorities, or a certificate transparency repository "dedicated to providing details and attribution for certificates used to sign various Android apps, including pre-installed apps, even if self-signed." They also suggest Android devices should be required to document all pre-installed apps, plus their purpose, and name the entity responsible for each piece of software -- and do so in a manner that is "accessible and understandable to users."' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/03/25/2058215 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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Google Fixes Chrome 'Evil Cursor' Bug Abused by Tech Support Scam Sites
by Peter Reutemann 25 Mar '19

25 Mar '19

'Google has patched a Chrome bug that was being abused in the wild by tech support scammers to create artificial mouse cursors and lock users inside browser pages by preventing them from closing and leaving browser tabs. From a report: The trick was first spotted in September 2018 by Malwarebytes analyst Jerome Segura. Called an "evil cursor," it relied on using a custom image to replace the operating system's standard mouse cursor graphic. A criminal group that Malwarebytes called Partnerstroka operated by switching the standard OS 32-by-32 pixels mouse cursor with one of 128 or 256 pixels in size. A normal cursor would still appear on screen, but in the corner of a bigger transparent bounding box. [...] The "evil cursor" fix is currently live for Google Canary users, and is scheduled to land in the Chrome 75 stable branch, to be released later this spring.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/03/25/210220 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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Telegram Adds 'Delete Everywhere' Nuclear Option -- Killing Chat History
by Peter Reutemann 25 Mar '19

25 Mar '19

'Instant messaging service Telegram has added a feature that lets a user delete messages in one-to-one and/or group private chats, after the fact, and not only from their own inbox. From a report: The new 'nuclear option' delete feature allows a user to selectively delete their own messages and/or messages sent by any/all others in the chat. They don't even have to have composed the original message or begun the thread to do so. They can just decide it's time. Let that sink in. All it now takes is a few taps to wipe all trace of a historical communication -- from both your own inbox and the inbox(es) of whoever else you were chatting with (assuming they're running the latest version of Telegram's app).' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/03/25/1641204 Something that WhatsApp could add as well... 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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Hackers Hijacked ASUS Software Updates To Install Backdoors on Thousands of Computers
by Peter Reutemann 25 Mar '19

25 Mar '19

'ASUS is believed to have pushed malware to hundreds of thousands of customers through its trusted automatic software update tool after attackers compromised the company's server and used it to push the malware to machines. From a report: Researchers at cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab say that ASUS, one of the world's largest computer makers, was used to unwittingly to install a malicious backdoor on thousands of its customers' computers last year after attackers compromised a server for the company's live software update tool. The malicious file was signed with legitimate ASUS digital certificates to make it appear to be an authentic software update from the company, Kaspersky Lab says. ASUS, a multi-billion dollar computer hardware company based in Taiwan that manufactures desktop computers, laptops, mobile phones, smart home systems, and other electronics, was pushing the backdoor to customers for at least five months last year before it was discovered, according to new research from the Moscow-based security firm. The researchers estimate half a million Windows machines received the malicious backdoor through the ASUS update server, although the attackers appear to have been targeting only about 600 of those systems. The malware searched for targeted systems through their unique MAC addresses. Once on a system, if it found one of these targeted addresses, the malware reached out to a command-and-control server the attackers operated, which then installed additional malware on those machines. Kaspersky Lab said it uncovered the attack in January after adding a new supply-chain detection technology to its scanning tool to catch anomalous code fragments hidden in legitimate code or catch code that is hijacking normal operations on a machine. The company plans to release a full technical paper and presentation about the ASUS attack, which it has dubbed ShadowHammer, next month at its Security Analyst Summit in Singapore' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/03/25/144248 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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topic for meeting this month?
by Peter Reutemann 24 Mar '19

24 Mar '19

Hi everyone Anyone got a topic that they'd like to present on? Any interesting open-source software that they've come across and would like to demo for a few minutes? Linux distro roundup? 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/

2 3

Two serious WordPress plugin vulnerabilities are being exploited in the wild
by Peter Reutemann 24 Mar '19

24 Mar '19

'Attackers have been actively exploiting serious vulnerabilities in two widely used WordPress plugins to compromise websites that run the extensions on top of the content management system. The two affected plugins are Easy WP SMTP with 300,000 active installations and Social Warfare, which has about 70,000 active installations. While developers have released patches for both exploited flaws, download figures indicate many vulnerable websites have yet to install the fixes. Figures for Easy WP SMTP, which was fixed five days ago, show the plugin has just short of 135,000 downloads in the past seven days. Figures for Social Warfare show it has been downloaded fewer than 20,000 times since a patch was published on WordPress on Friday. Sites that use either plugin should disable them immediately and then ensure they have been updated to version 1.3.9.1 of Easy WP SMTP and 3.5.3 of Social Warfare.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/03/two-serious-wordpres… 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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Stallman Suggests Install Fest 'Deals With Devil' Include Actual Man Dressed As Devil
by Peter Reutemann 24 Mar '19

24 Mar '19

'This weekend's annual LibrePlanet conference, hosted by the Free Software Foundation, prompted a new essay about "install fests" from Richard Stallman: Install fests invite users to bring their computers so that experts can install GNU/Linux on them... The problem is that most computers can't run with a completely free GNU/Linux distro. They contain peripherals, or coprocessors, that won't operate unless the installed system contains some nonfree drivers or firmware... This presents the install fest with a dilemma. If it upholds the ideals of freedom, by installing only free software from 100%-free distros, partly-secret machines won't become entirely functional and the users that bring them will go away disappointed. However, if the install fest installs nonfree distros and nonfree software which make machines entirely function, it will fail to teach users to say no for freedom's sake. They may learn to like GNU/Linux, but they won't learn what the free software movement stands for.... In effect, the install fest makes the deal with the devil, on the user's behalf, behind a curtain so the user doesn't recognize that it is one. I propose that the install fest show users exactly what deal they are making. Let them talk with the devil individually, learn the deal's bad implications, then make a deal -- or refuse! As always, I call on the install fest itself to install only free software, taking a strict stance. In this way it can set a clear moral example of rejecting nonfree software. My new idea is that the install fest could allow the devil to hang around, off in a corner of the hall, or the next room. (Actually, a human being wearing a sign saying "The Devil," and maybe a toy mask or horns.) The devil would offer to install nonfree drivers in the user's machine to make more parts of the computer function, explaining to the user that the cost of this is using a nonfree (unjust) program... Those users that get nonfree drivers would see what their moral cost is, and that there are people in the community who refuse to pay that cost. They would have the chance to reflect afterwards on the situation that their flawed computers have put them in, and about how to change that situation, in the small and in the large. Stallman adds that the Free Software Foundation itself would never let a devil near its events. "But given the fact that most install fests quietly play the role of the devil, I think that an explicit devil would be less bad. "It would convert the install-fest dilemma from a debilitating contradiction into a teaching experience."' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/03/23/1624242 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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Google Play Store Mistakenly Removed KDE Connect
by Peter Reutemann 24 Mar '19

24 Mar '19

'Google's Play Store made a bad mistake on Tuesday, long-time Slashdot reader sombragris writes: KDE Connect, a project designed to enable seamless communcation and control between a desktop computer and a mobile phone, was suddenly removed from Android's Google Play store. According to a Twitter thread by Albert Vaca, KDE Connect's maintainer, the removal was allegedly because the app was in breach of Google's new SMS policy. There's an exemption which applies to KDE Connect, but the maintainer was unable to contact anyone at Google to provide support. "There is simply no way to talk to a human being at @Google", he said. Cintora also announced on Twitter that while trying to comply with the Play Store's new policy, he'd initially been stopped again by technical problems. "The @GooglePlay console gives me an internal error, so I can't upload the version without SMS support." But on Thursday Cintora tweeted that KDE Connect "finally got approved, and SMS support is back in version 1.12.4, both on the Play Store and F-Droid!" Cintora credits this resolution partly to his Twitter thread, which got over half a million impressions. Its last tweet now features a picture of a celebrating parrot.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/03/23/1852220 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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Share Buybacks
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 23 Mar '19

23 Mar '19

Seems that Oracle has been buying back its own shares to keep its share price high <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/22/oracle_buyback_programme/>. On its own, this is not automatically a bad thing. I remember reading about a conversation between Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett some years ago, along the lines of: WB: You think your company shares are undervalued? SJ: Yes. WB: You have plenty of spare cash on hand? SJ: Yes. WB: Then use some of that cash to buy back some of your own shares. If you can spend 80¢ and get a dollar, why wouldn’t you? However, the warning sign in the above article is this: The overall effect is that Oracle is now in a net debt position for the first time since 2008, the Wall Street Journal reported this week. In other words, it seems to be borrowing in order to boost its share price. This might not end well ...

2 1

Tor-Powered Tails 3.13 Anonymous Linux OS Adds Extra Security and Latest Updates
by Peter Reutemann 21 Mar '19

21 Mar '19

'Powered by the Linux 4.19.28 kernel, the Tails 3.13 operating system is now available with latest TOR technologies to help you stay hidden while surfing the Internet, including the Tor Browser 8.0.7 anonymous web browser and Tor 0.3.5.8 client and server for the anonymous Tor network. However, probably the most important addition in the Tails 3.13 release is the updated Intel microcode to version 3.20180807a.2, which adds an extra security measure against more variants of the well-known Spectre, Meltdown, and L1TF (Level 1 Terminal Fault) security vulnerabilities. Furthermore, Tails 3.13 updates the Mozilla Thunderbird email and news client to version 65.1.0, adds support for the Bopomofo input method and improves support for the Pinyin input method for Chinese users, and implements automatic backup of the persistent storage's configuration whenever a change occurs.' -- source: https://news.softpedia.com/news/tor-powered-tails-3-13-ethical-hacking-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/

1 0

For Years, Hundreds of Millions of Facebook Users Had Their Account Passwords Stored in Plain Text and Searchable By Thousands of Facebook Employees
by Peter Reutemann 21 Mar '19

21 Mar '19

'Hundreds of millions of Facebook users had their account passwords stored in plain text and searchable by thousands of Facebook employees -- in some cases going back to 2012, KrebsOnSecurity reported Thursday. From the report: Facebook says an ongoing investigation has so far found no indication that employees have abused access to this data. Facebook is probing the causes of a series of security failures in which employees built applications that logged unencrypted password data for Facebook users and stored it in plain text on internal company servers. That's according to a senior Facebook employee who is familiar with the investigation and who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press. The Facebook source said the investigation so far indicates between 200 million and 600 million Facebook users may have had their account passwords stored in plain text and searchable by more than 20,000 Facebook employees. The source said Facebook is still trying to determine how many passwords were exposed and for how long, but so far the inquiry has uncovered archives with plain text user passwords in them dating back to 2012.' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/03/21/1525243 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/

1 0

SGM next week
by Peter Reutemann 19 Mar '19

19 Mar '19

Hi everyone Just a reminder for our (paying) society members that our SGM is on next Monday at 7pm: https://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/259341905/ 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/

1 0

How a wireless keyboard lets hackers take full control of connected computers
by Peter Reutemann 19 Mar '19

19 Mar '19

'There’s a critical vulnerability in a model of Fujitsu wireless keyboard that makes it easy for hackers to take full control of connected computers, security researchers warned on Friday. Anyone using the keyboard model should strongly consider replacing it immediately. The Fujitsu Wireless Keyboard Set LX901 uses a proprietary 2.4 GHz radio communication protocol called WirelessUSB LP from Cypress Semiconductor. While the keyboard and mouse send input that’s protected with the time-tested Advanced Encryption Standard, the USB dongle that accepts the input accepts unencrypted packets as well, as long as they’re in the proper format. Researchers with the Germany-based penetration-testing firm SySS developed a proof-of-concept attack that exploits the insecure design. Using a small hardware device, they are able to send commands to vulnerable Fujitsu keyboard receiver dongles that are within range. As the video below demonstrates, the researchers were able to send input of their choice that’s automatically funneled to the connected computer.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/03/how-a-wireless-keybo… 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/

1 0

Are Large Cloud Providers a Threat To Open Source Vendors?
by Peter Reutemann 18 Mar '19

18 Mar '19

'Stephen O'Grady, co-founder of the industry analyst firm RedMonk, asks whether open source vendors are marching towards an inevitable and damaging war with big cloud providers: In the last twelve to eighteen months...a switch has been flipped. Companies have gone from regarding cloud providers like Amazon, Google or Microsoft as not even worth mentioning as competition to dreadful, existential threat. The fear of these cloud providers has become so overpowering, in fact, that commercial open source vendors have chosen -- against counsel, in many cases -- to walk down strategic paths that violate open source cultural norms, trigger massive and sustained negative PR and jeopardize relationships with developers, partners and customers. Specifically, commercial open source providers have increasingly turned to models that blur the lines between open source and proprietary software in an attempt to access the strengths of both, with the higher probability outcome of ending up with their weaknesses instead. That commercial open source providers took these actions having been advised of these and other risks in advance says everything about how these businesses view their prospects in a world increasingly dominated by massive providers of cloud infrastructure and an expanding array of services that sit on top of that. The strategic decisions inarguably have major, unavoidable negative consequences, but commercial open source providers -- or their investors, at least -- believe that a lack of action would be even more damaging.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/03/16/0118259 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/

2 1

How Debian Almost Failed to Elect a Project Leader
by Peter Reutemann 17 Mar '19

17 Mar '19

'Five candidates now are running to be Debian's project leader for the coming year. But earlier this week, Slashdot reader Seven Spirals shared LWN's story about what a difficult election it's been: This year, the call for nominations was duly sent out by project secretary Kurt Roeckx on March 3. But, as of March 10, no eligible candidates had put their names forward... There is nobody there to do any campaigning. This being Debian, the constitution naturally describes what is to happen in this situation: the nomination period is extended for another week... Should this deadline also pass without candidates, it will be extended for another week; this loop will repeat indefinitely until somebody gives in and submits their name... In the absence of a project leader, the chair of the technical committee and the project secretary are empowered to make decisions -- as long as they are able to agree on what those decisions should be. Since Debian developers are famously an agreeable and non-argumentative bunch, there should be no problem with that aspect of things... One might well wonder, though, why there seems to be nobody who wants to take the helm of this project for a year. The fact that it is an unpaid position requiring a lot of time and travel might have something to do with it. If that were indeed to prove to be part of the problem, Debian might eventually have to consider doing what a number of similar organizations have done and create a paid position to do this work' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/03/16/2317214 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/

1 0

F5 Acquired NGINX For $670M
by Peter Reutemann 17 Mar '19

17 Mar '19

'F5 Networks on Monday announced that it will acquire NGINX, which provides popular open-source software of the same name, for $670 million. The deal advances F5's aim of capitalizing on the trend toward multi-cloud deployments. F5 plans to enhance NGINX's current offerings with F5 security solutions and will integrate F5 cloud-native technology with NGINX's software load balancing technology. This should accelerate F5's time to market of application services for containerized applications. Meanwhile, NGINX will benefit from F5's global salesforce, channel infrastructure and partner ecosystem. The acquisition adds "the power of NGINX's open source innovation to F5's ADC leadership and enterprise reach," NGINX CEO Gus Robertson said in a statement ' -- source: https://slashdot.org/story/19/03/16/1957241 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/

1 0

Two-Thirds of Android Antivirus Apps Are Total BS
by Peter Reutemann 14 Mar '19

14 Mar '19

'Austrian antivirus-testing lab AV-Comparatives tested 250 antivirus apps in Google Play against 2,000 malware samples. They found that only 80 of the apps could stop even a minimal amount of malware. "Less than one in 10 of the apps tested defended against all 2,000 malicious apps, while over two-thirds failed to reach a block rate of even 30 percent," the lab said in a press release. To make sure you're protecting your Android device properly, stick to apps from well-known antivirus companies. Basically, AV-Comparatives said, most Android antivirus apps are phony, and many of them seemed to have been created only to display ads or promote a developer's career. "The main purpose of these apps seems to be generating easy revenue for their developers, rather than actually protecting their users," the AV-Comparatives report said' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/03/13/213255 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/

3 2

Amazon May Finally Get .amazon Domain
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 14 Mar '19

14 Mar '19

Amazon has been trying to register the .amazon top-level domain for years, but the governments of Brazil and Peru have been trying to stall this, just ignoring the established procedures for resolving domain disputes, which keep going against them. But it seems ICANN has finally lost patience and is going to stop bending over backwards to placate those governments, and grant the registration <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/12/amazon_domain_spat/>.

1 0

Google Quietly Adds DuckDuckGo as a Search Engine Option for Chrome Users in About 60 Markets
by Peter Reutemann 13 Mar '19

13 Mar '19

'In an update to the chromium engine, which underpins Google's popular Chrome browser, the search giant has quietly updated the lists of default search engines it offers per market -- expanding the choice of search product users can pick from in markets around the world. Most notably it's expanded search engine lists to include pro-privacy rivals in more than 60 markets globally. The changes, which appear to have been pushed out with the Chromium 73 stable release yesterday, come at a time when Google is facing rising privacy and antitrust scrutiny and accusations of market distorting behavior at home and abroad' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/03/13/1521235 Including NZ! 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/

1 0

Google Launches Android Q Beta 1
by Peter Reutemann 13 Mar '19

13 Mar '19

'Google said today it is rolling out the first beta version of Android Q, the newest version of its mobile operating system. The company will roll out a stable version of Android Q later this year. From a report: The first beta includes a preview SDK for developers with system images for the Pixel, Pixel XL, Pixel 2, Pixel 2 XL, Pixel 3, Pixel 3 XL, and the official Android Emulator. This is the fourth year running that Google has released the first developer preview of the next Android version in March -- Android N (later named Android Nougat), Android O (Android Oreo), and Android P (Android Pie). For the past two years, Google did not use the Android Beta Program, which lets you get early Android builds via over-their-air updates on select devices. That changes with Android Q -- Google is making the first preview available as a beta, not just as a developer preview. That signals that it is ready for early adopters to try, in addition to developers. As before, this preview version will be referred to as Android Q until Google picks a name starting with that letter.' -- source: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/19/03/13/196215 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/

1 0

Firefox Send Lets You Share 1GB Files With No Strings Attached
by Peter Reutemann 13 Mar '19

13 Mar '19

'In 2017, Mozilla experimented with a service that let you transfer 1GB files by sharing a web address with the recipient. Firefox Send is now out of testing and boasts a magnified 2.5GB file-size limit if you log into your Firefox account. From a report: Firefox Send is handy for those moments when you need to share video, audio or photo files that can be too big to squeeze into an email attachment. [...] Firefox Send, which will also be available as an Android app, illustrates one of Mozilla's efforts to diversify beyond the Firefox browser. Mozilla touts Firefox Send as focusing on privacy and uses encryption to protect files. Firefox Send files are available for up to seven days and can be password-protected. You can also limit the number of times they're downloaded.' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/19/03/12/1439222 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/

1 0

Russia Blocks Encrypted Email Provider ProtonMail
by Peter Reutemann 12 Mar '19

12 Mar '19

'Russia has told internet providers to enforce a block against encrypted email provider ProtonMail, the company's chief has confirmed. The block was ordered by the state Federal Security Service, formerly the KGB, according to a Russian-language blog, which obtained and published the order after the agency accused the company and several other email providers of facilitating bomb threats. Several anonymous bomb threats were sent by email to police in late January, forcing several schools and government buildings to evacuate. In all, 26 internet addresses were blocked by the order, including several servers used to scramble the final connection for users of Tor, an anonymity network popular for circumventing censorship. Internet providers were told to implement the block "immediately," using a technique known as BGP blackholing, a way that tells internet routers to simply throw away internet traffic rather than routing it to its destination. But the company says while the site still loads, users cannot send or receive email. The way the KGB blocked ProtonMail is "particularly sneaky," ProtonMail chief executive Andy Yen said. "ProtonMail is not blocked in the normal way, it's actually a bit more subtle. They are blocking access to ProtonMail mail servers. So Mail.ru -- and most other Russian mail servers -- for example, is no longer able to deliver email to ProtonMail, but a Russian user has no problem getting to their inbox." "That's because the two ProtonMail servers listed by the order are its back-end mail delivery servers, rather than the front-end website that runs on a different system," adds TechCrunch.' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/03/12/0329259 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/

1 0

Knoppix 8.5 iso?
by Ian Young 12 Mar '19

12 Mar '19

Anyone have an iso file for Knoppix 8.5, or know of a source for download? This appears to be the latest version, but so far is apparently only available with a copy of Linux Magazine linked with a Linux event in Germany. ~ Ian Y

2 1

Samsung Galaxy S10 Facial Recognition Fooled by a Video of the Phone Owner
by Peter Reutemann 11 Mar '19

11 Mar '19

'Experts have proven once again that facial recognition on modern devices remains hilariously insecure and can be bypassed using simple tricks such as showing an image or a video in front of a device's camera. From a report: The latest device to fall victim to such attacks is Samsung Galaxy S10, Samsung's latest top tier phone and considered one of the world's most advanced smartphones to date. Unfortunately, the Galaxy S10's facial recognition feature remains just as weak as the one supported in its previous versions or on the devices of its competitors, according to Lewis Hilsenteger, a smartphone reviewer better known as Unbox Therapy on YouTube. Hilsenteger showed in a demo video uploaded on his YouTube channel last week how putting up a video of the phone owner in front of the Galaxy S10 front camera would trick the facial recognition system into unlocking the device.' -- source: https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/19/03/11/166239 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/

1 0

EU's Plan To Ban Sale of User-Moddable RF Devices Draws Widespread Condemnation
by Peter Reutemann 11 Mar '19

11 Mar '19

'The Register is reporting that the EU is looking to block users from tinkering the firmware/software of their RF devices. This seems to have been very under reported, with a fairly short consultation period that has now expired. It could force manufacturers to lock down phones and routers etc to stop you from installing the likes of Lineage OS or OpenWRT. The way this is written it could stop devices like laptops or Raspberry Pi's having their software changed. >From the report: The controversy centres on Article 3(3)(i) of the EU Radio Equipment Directive, which was passed into law back in 2014. However, an EU working group is now about to define precisely which devices will be subject to the directive -- and academics, researchers, individual "makers" and software companies are worried that their activities and business models will be outlawed. Article 3(3)(i) states that RF gear sold in the EU must support "certain features in order to ensure that software can only be loaded into the radio equipment where the compliance of the combination of the radio equipment and software has been demonstrated." If the law is implemented in its most potentially harmful form, no third-party firmware could be installed onto something like a home router, for example.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/03/11/1835239 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/

1 0

Debian Package Maintainer Steps Down, Complaining About 'Old Infrastructure'
by Peter Reutemann 11 Mar '19

11 Mar '19

'Michael Stapelberg, maintains "a bunch" of Debian packages and services, and says the free software Linux distro "has been in my life for well over 10 years at this point." Today he released a 2,255-word essay explaining why he's "winding down" his involvement in Debian to a minimum, citing numerous complaints including Debian's complicated build stack, waits of up to seven hours before package uploads can be installed, leading to "asynchronous" feedback -- and Debian's lack of tooling for large changes. The closest to "sending out a change for review" is to open a bug report with an attached patch... Culturally, reviews and reactions are slow. There are no deadlines. I literally sometimes get emails notifying me that a patch I sent out a few years ago (!!) is now merged. This turns projects from a small number of weeks into many years, which is a huge demotivator for me. Interestingly enough, you can see artifacts of the slow online activity manifest itself in the offline culture as well: I don't want to be discussing systemd's merits 10 years after I first heard about it. Lastly, changes can easily be slowed down significantly by holdouts who refuse to collaborate. My canonical example for this is rsync, whose maintainer refused my patches to make the package use debhelper purely out of personal preference. Granting so much personal freedom to individual maintainers prevents us as a project from raising the abstraction level for building Debian packages, which in turn makes tooling harder. There's also several complaints about old infrastructure -- for example, "I dread interacting with the Debian bug tracker. debbugs is a piece of software (from 1994) which is only used by Debian and the GNU project these days." Stapelberg also complains that the "painful" experience of developing using Debian "leaves a lot to be desired," and adds that "It baffles me that in 2019, we still don't have a conveniently browsable threaded archive of mailing list discussions." "My frustration level ultimately exceeded the threshold," Stapelberg writes in the essay, adding "I hope this post inspires someone, ideally a group of people, to improve the developer experience within Debian." He'll soon transition packages to be team-maintained "where it makes sense," but also "orphan packages where I am the sole maintainer... For all intents and purposes, please treat me as permanently on vacation..." "I will try to keep up best-effort maintenance of the manpages.debian.org service and the codesearch.debian.net service, but any help would be much appreciated."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/03/10/2245221 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/

1 0

The Fine And Ancient Art Of Letterlocking
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 07 Mar '19

07 Mar '19

Came across this linked from computer security expert Bruce Schneier’s blog: how did people in pre-industrial times protect paper letters from prying eyes? There were no mass-produced envelopes in those days, so they resorted to “letterlocking” -- intricate ways of folding and sealing a letter to form its own envelope <https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-did-people-do-before-envelopes-l…>. And yes, there is a whole website devoted to this: <http://letterlocking.org/>.

1 0

Researchers Uncover Ring of GitHub Accounts Promoting 300+ Backdoored Apps
by Peter Reutemann 05 Mar '19

05 Mar '19

'A security researcher has uncovered a ring of malicious GitHub accounts promoting over 300 backdoored Windows, Mac, and Linux applications and software libraries. The malicious apps contained code to gain boot persistence on infected systems and later download other malicious code -- which appeared to be a "sneaker bot," a piece of malware that would add infected systems to a botnet that would later participate in online auctions for limited edition sneakers. All the GitHub accounts that were hosting these files -- backdoored versions of legitimate apps -- have now been taken down. One account, in particular, registered in the name of Andrew Dunkins, hosted 305 backdoored ELF binaries. Another 73 apps were hosted across 88 other accounts. ' -- source: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/19/03/05/1351217 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/

2 1

Firefox Fears UAE Government's Cybersecurity Company 'DarkMatter' May Be Tied To a Cyber Espionage Program
by Peter Reutemann 05 Mar '19

05 Mar '19

'Firefox browser-maker Mozilla is considering whether to block cybersecurity company DarkMatter from serving as one of its internet security gatekeepers after a Reuters report linked the United Arab Emirates-based firm to a cyber espionage program. Reuters reported in January that DarkMatter provided staff for a secret hacking operation, codenamed Project Raven, on behalf of an Emirati intelligence agency. The unit was largely comprised of former U.S. intelligence officials who conducted offensive cyber operations for the UAE government. Former Raven operatives told Reuters that many DarkMatter executives were unaware of the secretive program, which operated from a converted Abu Dhabi mansion away from DarkMatter's headquarters. Those operations included hacking into the internet accounts of human rights activists, journalists and officials from rival governments, Reuters found. DarkMatter has denied conducting the operations and says it focuses on protecting computer networks. While Mozilla had been considering whether to grant DarkMatter the authority to certify websites as safe, two Mozilla executives said in an interview last week that Reuters' report raised concerns about whether DarkMatter would abuse that authority. Mozilla said the company has not yet come to a decision on whether to deny the authority to DarkMatter, but expects to decide within weeks.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/03/05/0424249 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/

1 0

All Intel Chips Open To New 'Spoiler' Non-Spectre Attack
by Peter Reutemann 05 Mar '19

05 Mar '19

'Spoiler is the newest speculative attack affecting Intel's micro-architecture. From a report: Like the Spectre and Meltdown attacks revealed in January 2018, Spoiler also abuses speculative execution in Intel chips to leak secrets. However, it targets a different area of the processor called the Memory Order Buffer, which is used to manage memory operations and is tightly coupled with the cache. Researchers from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Massachusetts, and the University of Lubeck in north Germany detail the attack in a new paper, 'Spoiler: Speculative load hazards boost Rowhammer and cache attacks'. The paper [PDF] was released this month and spotted by The Register. The researchers explain that Spoiler is not a Spectre attack, so it is not affected by Intel's mitigations for it, which otherwise can prevent other Spectre-like attacks such as SplitSpectre.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/03/05/1524251 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/

1 0

Linux 5.1 Continues The Years-Long Effort Preparing For Year 2038
by Peter Reutemann 05 Mar '19

05 Mar '19

'Linux 5.1 continues the massive undertaking in preparing the kernel for the Year 2038 problem. Phoronix: The Linux kernel has been seeing "Y2038" work for years and the effort is far from over. Thomas Gleixner (a Linux kernel developer who serves as a member of the technical advisory board at The Linux Foundation) sent in the latest Y2038 work for the Linux 5.1 kernel, which after a lot of ground work in previous kernels has introduced the first set of syscalls that are Year 2038 safe.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/03/05/1929233 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/

1 0

Why 'ji32k7au4a83' is a Remarkably Common Password
by Peter Reutemann 05 Mar '19

05 Mar '19

'A seemingly complex set of characters like "ji32k7au4a83" is a very common password among users, it turns out. From a report: This interesting bit of trivia comes from self-described hardware/software engineer Robert Ou, who recently asked his Twitter followers if they could explain why this seemingly random string of numbers has been seen by Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) over a hundred times. Have I Been Pwned is an aggregator that was started by security expert Troy Hunt to help people find out if their email or personal data has shown up in any prominent data breaches. One service it offers is a password search that allows you to check if your password has shown up in any data breaches that are on the radar of the security community. In this case, "ji32k7au4a83" has been seen by HIBP in 141 breaches. Several of Ou's followers quickly figured out the solution to his riddle. The password is coming from the Zhuyin Fuhao system for transliterating Mandarin. The reason it's showing up fairly often in a data breach repository is because "ji32k7au4a83" translates to English as "my password."' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/03/05/203253 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/

1 0

Linux 5.0 Released
by Peter Reutemann 04 Mar '19

04 Mar '19

'Linus Torvalds has released Linux 5.0 in kicking off the kernel's 28th year of development. Linux 5.0 features include AMD FreeSync support, open-source NVIDIA Turing GPU support, Intel Icelake graphics, Intel VT-d scalable mode, NXP PowerPC processors are now mitigated for Spectre Variant Two, and countless other additions. eWeek adds: Among the new features that have landed in Linux 5.0 is support for the Adiantum encryption system, developed by Google for low power devices. Google's Android mobile operating system and ChromeOS desktop operating system both rely on the Linux kernel. "Storage encryption protects your data if your phone falls into someone else's hands," Paul Crowley and Eric Biggers, Android Security and Privacy Team at Google wrote in a blog post. "Adiantum is an innovation in cryptography designed to make storage encryption more efficient for devices without cryptographic acceleration, to ensure that all devices can be encrypted. Memory management in Linux also gets a boost in the 5.0 kernel with a series of improvements designed to help prevent memory fragmentation, which can reduce performance.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/03/04/1329227 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/

1 0

News articles on privacy...
by Peter Reutemann 03 Mar '19

03 Mar '19

"Leaked Documents Reveal Facebook's Global War On Data Privacy Laws" -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/03/03/1623229 "Massive Database Leak Exposes China's 'Digital Surveillance State'" -- source: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/19/03/03/053253 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/

1 0

Researchers Break Digital Signatures For Most Desktop PDF Viewers
by Peter Reutemann 26 Feb '19

26 Feb '19

'A team of academics from the Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany say they've managed to break the digital signing system and create fake signatures on 21 of 22 desktop PDF viewer apps and five out of seven online PDF digital signing services. This includes apps such as Adobe Acrobat Reader, Foxit Reader, and LibreOffice, and online services like DocuSign and Evotrust --just to name the most recognizable names. The five-person research team has been working since early October 2018 together with experts from Germany's Computer Emergency Response Team (BSI-CERT) to notify impacted services. The team went public with their findings over the weekend after all affected app makers and commercial companies finished patching their products. In research published today, the Ruhr-University Bochum team described three vulnerabilities that they found in the digital signing process used by several desktop and web-based PDF signing services. Summarized, they are: 1. Universal Signature Forgery (USF) -- vulnerability lets attackers trick the signature verification process into showing users a fake panel/message that the signature is valid. 2. Incremental Saving Attack (ISA) -- vulnerability lets attackers add extra content to an already signed PDF document via the "incremental saving (incremental update)" mechanism, but without breaking the already-existing signature. 3. Signature Wrapping (SWA) -- vulnerability is similar to ISA, but the malicious code also contains extra logic to fool the signature validation process into "wrapping" around the attacker's extra content, effectively digitally signing the incremental update.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/02/25/2126208 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/

1 0

“Netflix Is Killing Piracy In NZ”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 25 Feb '19

25 Feb '19

<https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=122073…>: Independent research commissioned by Vocus indicates "piracy is dying a natural death," ... ... Peer-to-peer services, usually associated with piracy, used to be "the dominant source of traffic on our network." Today, about 80 per cent of Vocus' peak-time traffic is for legal streaming sites like Netflix and YouTube. Ah, don’t you just love that simplistic conflation: P2P ≡ piracy, YouTube ≡ legit. I wonder when they will discover youtube-dl...

1 0

Android Is Helping Kill Passwords on a Billion Devices
by Peter Reutemann 25 Feb '19

25 Feb '19

'The FIDO Alliance -- a consortium that develops open source authentication standards -- has been pushing to expand its secure login protocols to make seamless logins a reality for several years. Today, it has hit the jackpot: Google. From a report: On Monday, Google and the FIDO Alliance announced that Android has added certified support for the FIDO2 standard, meaning that the vast majority of devices running Android 7 or later will now be able to handle password-less logins in mobile browsers like Chrome. Android already offered secure FIDO login options for mobile apps, where you authenticate using a phone's fingerprint scanner or with a hardware dongle like a YubiKey. But FIDO2 support will make it possible to use these easy authentication steps for web services in a mobile browser instead of laboriously typing in your password every time you want to log in. Web developers can now design their sites to interact with Android's FIDO2 management infrastructure.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/02/25/1440241 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/

2 1

Australian Email Service FastMail Says It is Losing Customers and Facing Calls To Move Operations Outside of the Country Over Local Anti-Encryption Laws
by Peter Reutemann 25 Feb '19

25 Feb '19

'Email provider FastMail says it has lost customers and faces "regular" requests to shift its operations outside Australia following the passage of anti-encryption laws. The Victorian company, which offers ad-free email services to users in 150 countries, told a senate committee that the now-passed laws were starting to bite. "The way in which [the laws] were introduced, debated, and ultimately passed ... creates a perception that Australia has changed - that we are no longer a country which respects the right to privacy," FastMail CEO Bron Gondwana said. "We have already seen an impact on our business caused by this perception. Our particular service is not materially affected as we already respond to warrants under the Telecommunications Act." "Still, we have seen existing customers leave, and potential customers go elsewhere, citing this bill as the reason for their choice. We are [also] regularly being asked by customers if we plan to move.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/02/25/1329204 That's what the tech community had to say earlier about this bill: https://alp.fail/ 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/

1 0

Mozilla and Scroll Partner To Test Alternative Funding Models for the Web
by Peter Reutemann 25 Feb '19

25 Feb '19

'News subscription service Scroll, which is yet to launch to consumers but has received the backing of several top publishers, courted another major player today: Mozilla. The browser maker says it will work with Scroll to better understand how consumers react to ad-free experiences on the web and subscription-based funding models. As part of the deal, Mozilla said it would test features and product ideas provided by Scroll, which itself has been conducting internal tests with a number of outlets. Small groups of Firefox users will be invited at random to share feedback and also respond to surveys, Mozilla said.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/02/25/1819244 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/

1 0

Drupal 7 Will Reach End-of-Life in November of 2021
by Peter Reutemann 25 Feb '19

25 Feb '19

'Drupal 7, which was first released in January 2011, will reach end of life (EOL) in November of 2021, the Drupal Association said today. What this means for your Drupal 7 sites is, as of November 2021: 1. Drupal 7 will no longer be supported by the community at large. The community at large will no longer create new projects, fix bugs in existing projects, write documentation, etc. around Drupal 7. 2. There will be no more core commits to Drupal 7. 3. The Drupal Security Team will no longer provide support or Security Advisories for Drupal 7 core or contributed modules, themes, or other projects. Reports about Drupal 7 vulnerabilities might become public creating 0 day exploits. 4. All Drupal 7 releases on all project pages will be flagged as not supported. Maintainers can change that flag if they desire to. 5. On Drupal 7 sites with the update status module, Drupal Core will show up as unsupported. 6. After November 2021, using Drupal 7 may be flagged as insecure in 3rd party scans as it no longer gets support. 7. Best practice is to not use unsupported software, it would not be advisable to continue to build new Drupal 7 sites. 8. Now is the time to start planning your migration to Drupal' -- source: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/19/02/25/1953224 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/

1 0

holding packages
by Peter Reutemann 25 Feb '19

25 Feb '19

Hi everyone If you want to keep a certain package at a fixed version, you can "hold" that package on a debian system like this: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PinningHowto#Introduction_to_Holding_Pack… 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/

1 0

Experts Find Serious Problems With Switzerland's Online Voting System
by Peter Reutemann 22 Feb '19

22 Feb '19

'Switzerland made headlines this month for the transparency of its internet voting system when it launched a public penetration test and bug bounty program to test the resiliency of the system to attack. But after source code for the software and technical documentation describing its architecture were leaked online last week, critics are already expressing concern about the system's design and about the transparency around the public test. Cryptography experts who spent just a few hours examining the leaked code say the system is a poorly constructed and convoluted maze that makes it difficult to follow what's going on and effectively evaluate whether the cryptography and other security measures deployed in the system are done properly. "Most of the system is split across hundreds of different files, each configured at various levels," Sarah Jamie Lewis, a former security engineer for Amazon as well as a former computer scientist for England's GCHQ intelligence agency, told Motherboard. "I'm used to dealing with Java code that runs across different packages and different teams, and this code somewhat defeats even my understanding." She said the system uses cryptographic solutions that are fairly new to the field and that have to be implemented in very specific ways to make the system auditable, but the design the programmers chose thwarts this. "It is simply not the standard we would expect," she told Motherboard. [...] It isn't just outside attackers that are a concern; the system raises the possibility for an insider to intentionally misconfigure the system to make it easier to manipulate, while maintaining plausible deniability that the misconfiguration was unintentional. "Someone could wire the thing in the wrong place and suddenly the system is compromised," said Lewis, who is currently executive director of the Open Privacy Research Society, a Canadian nonprofit that develops secure and privacy-enhancing software for marginalized communities. "And when you're talking about code that is supposed to be protecting a national election, that is not a statement someone should be able to make." "You expect secure code to be defensively written that would prevent the implementers of the code from wiring it up incorrectly," Lewis told Motherboard. But instead of building a system that doesn't allow for this, the programmers simply added a comment to their source code telling anyone who compiles and implements it to take care to configure it properly, she said. The online voting system was developed by Swiss Post, the country's national postal service, and the Barcelona-based company Scytl. "Scytl claims the system uses end-to-end encryption that only the Swiss Electoral Board would be able to decrypt," reports Motherboard. "But there are reasons to be concerned about such claims."' -- source: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/19/02/21/2227234 At least they had a public test to figure that out, rather than an actual election... 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/

1 0

Millions of websites threatened by highly critical code-execution bug in Drupal
by Peter Reutemann 22 Feb '19

22 Feb '19

'Millions of sites that run the Drupal content management system run the risk of being hijacked until they're patched against a vulnerability that allows hackers to remotely execute malicious code, managers of the open source project warned Wednesday. CVE-2019-6340, as the flaw is tracked, stems from a failure to sufficiently validate user input, managers said in an advisory. Hackers who exploited the vulnerability could, in some cases, run code of their choice on vulnerable websites. The flaw is rated highly critical. "Some field types do not properly sanitize data from non-form sources," the advisory stated. "This can lead to arbitrary PHP code execution in some cases."' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/millions-of-websites… 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/

1 0

Netflix..
by John 22 Feb '19

22 Feb '19

Does anyone know how to get Netflix to work in Firefox?? Cheers John..

1 0

Severe Vulnerabilities Uncovered In Popular Password Managers
by Peter Reutemann 21 Feb '19

21 Feb '19

Not sure whether this also applies to the Linux/cross-platform versions... 'Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) published an assessment on Tuesday with the results of testing with several popular password managers, including LastPass and KeePass. The team said that each password management solution "failed to provide the security to safeguard a user's passwords as advertised" and "fundamental flaws" were found that "exposed the data they are designed to protect." The vulnerabilities were found in software operating on Windows 10 systems. In one example, the master password which users need to use to access their cache of credentials was stored in PC RAM in a plaintext, readable format. ISE was able to extract these passwords and other login credentials from memory while the password manager in question was locked. It may be possible that malicious programs downloaded to the same machine by threat actors could do the same. The report has summarized the main findings based on each password management solution. Here's what ISE had to say about LastPass and KeePass -- two of the most popular password managers available: "LastPass obfuscates the master password while users are typing in the entry, and when the password manager enters an unlocked state, database entries are only decrypted into memory when there is user interaction. However, ISE reported that these entries persist in memory after the software enters a locked state. It was also possible for the researchers to extract the master password and interacted-with password entries due to a memory leak." "KeePass scrubs the master password from memory and is not recoverable. However, errors in workflows permitted the researchers from extracting credential entries which have been interacted with. In the case of Windows APIs, sometimes, various memory buffers which contain decrypted entries may not be scrubbed correctly."' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/02/21/070204 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/

1 0

Oracle Claims a Fighter of Pirated Apps is a Front For Ad Fraud
by Peter Reutemann 21 Feb '19

21 Feb '19

'A company that claims to combat app piracy is a pirate itself, according to a report Oracle released this week. From a report: Oracle claims the company, Tapcore, has been perpetrating a massive ad fraud on Android devices by infecting apps with software that ring up fake ad impressions and drain people's data. Based in The Netherlands, Tapcore works with developers to identify when apps are pirated and then enables developers to make money from those bootleg copies by serving ads. Oracle says that Tapcore's anti-piracy code was a Trojan horse that was generating fake mobile websites to trick ad serving platforms into paying them for non-existent ad inventory. "The code is delivering a steady stream of invisible video ads and spoofing domains," Dan Fichter, VP of software development at Oracle Data Cloud, tells Ad Age. "On all those impressions it looked like the advertiser was running ads on legitimate mobile websites. Not only were they not on a website, they were on an invisible web browser." On its website, Tapcore says it works with more than 3,000 apps, serving 150 million ad impressions a day. The apps whose pirated versions it has worked with include titles like "Perfect 365," "Draw Clash of Clans," "Vertex" and "Solitaire: Season 4," according to Oracle's report.' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/02/21/1238254 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/

1 0

Google Researchers Say Software Alone Can't Mitigate Spectre Chip Flaws
by Peter Reutemann 21 Feb '19

21 Feb '19

'A group of researchers say that it will be difficult to avoid Spectre bugs in the future unless CPUs are dramatically overhauled. From a report: Google researchers say that software alone is not enough to prevent the exploitation of the Spectre flaws present in a variety of CPUs. The team of researchers -- including Ross McIlroy, Jaroslav Sevcik, Tobias Tebbi, Ben L Titzer and Toon Verwaest -- work on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine. The researchers presented their findings in a paper distributed through ArXiv and came to the conclusion that all processors that perform speculative execution will always remain susceptible to various side-channel attacks, despite mitigations that may be discovered in future. ' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/19/02/21/1630210 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/

1 0

Linux Foundation Launches ELISA, an Open Source Project For Building Safety-Critical Systems
by Peter Reutemann 21 Feb '19

21 Feb '19

'The Linux Foundation today launched Enabling Linux in Safety Applications (ELISA), an open source project comprising tools intended to help companies build and certify Linux-based systems whose failure could result in loss of human life, significant property damage, or environmental damage. From a report: In partnership with British chip designer Arm, BMW, autonomous platforms company Kuka, Linutronix, and Toyota, ELISA will work with certification and standardization bodies in "multiple industries" to establish ways Linux can form the foundation of safety-critical systems across industries.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/02/21/1559217 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/

1 0

A Psion Palmtop Successor Has Arrived and It Runs Android and Linux
by Peter Reutemann 21 Feb '19

21 Feb '19

'A lot of people probably remember the 1990s palmtop computers made by Psion fondly. The clamshell-design palmtops were pocketable, black and white, but had a working stylus and a fantastic tactile foldout QWERTY keyboard that you could type pretty substantial documents on or even write code with. A different company -- Planet Computers -- has now produced a spiritual successor to the old Psion palmtops called the Gemini PDA that is much like an old Psion but with the latest Android smartphone hardware in it and a virtually identical tactile keyboard. It can also dual boot to Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Sailfish) alongside Android. The technical specs are a MediaTek deca-core processor, 4GB RAM, 64GB storage (plus microSD slot), 4G, 802.11c Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, eSIM support, and 4,220mAh battery. The screen measures in at 5.99-inches with a 2,160 x 1,080 (403ppi) resolution. The only thing missing seems to be the stylus -- but perhaps that would have complicated manufacturing of this niche-device in its first production r' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/19/02/20/2241216 Yes, it's back! :-) 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/

2 1

Blu-Ray On The Way Out?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 20 Feb '19

20 Feb '19

Samsung has given up developing new Blu-Ray players, and is going to stop selling them in the US altogether <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/02/samsung-says-it-will-stop-making-ne…>. Seems like downloads and streaming are taking over from physical discs, and UHD was never a big part of the latter anyway. One surprising fact is that DVD-Video still accounts for over half of such sales, at least in the US.

1 0

Why Do You Need A 4GHz Quadcore To Run Facebook?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 20 Feb '19

20 Feb '19

An example <https://twitter.com/themikepan/status/1093035372186034176> of how Facebook obfuscates its HTML rendering to defeat ad blockers. (Link found from this article <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/02/19/cern_browser_reawakened/> on a resurrection of the first Web browser from CERN).

1 0

Linux Subsystem Files To Become Accessible via Windows File Explorer
by Peter Reutemann 19 Feb '19

19 Feb '19

'One of Windows Subsystem for Linux's more annoying tricks is it's hard to get at your Linux files from Windows. From a report: Oh, you can do it, but you take a real chance of ruining the files. To quote Microsoft, "DO NOT, under ANY circumstances, access, create, and/or modify files in your distro's filesystem using Windows apps, tools, scripts, consoles, etc." In the forthcoming Windows 10 April 2019 Update, aka Windows 10 19H1, this Linux file problem will finally be fixed. According to Craig Loewen, a Microsoft programming manger working on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), "The next Windows update is coming soon and we're bringing exciting new updates to WSL with it! These include accessing the Linux file system from Windows, and improvements to how you manage and configure your distros in the command line."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/02/19/2119226 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/

2 1

How Not To Build A PC, And How Not To Respond To Those Criticizing You For It
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 19 Feb '19

19 Feb '19

About four months ago, The Verge posted a video on its YouTube channel explaining the basics of building your own PC. Unfortunately, the video was full of mistakes, some small, some potentially more troublesome. Naturally this was pointed out in the comments. Also several other more techie-oriented channels responded with their own critique videos, some quite scathing. Rather than admit its mistake, the company decided to simply block comments for that video, and eventually take it down altogether. (Though not before it had accumulated a few thousand downvotes.) Now, within the last week or so, it has suddenly decided to go after those critique videos, and force them to be taken down on the basis of copyright infringement, because they contain extracts from the original item. Extracts which, under US fair use law, it was perfectly legal for them to include. Naturally, these heavy-handed attempts at censorship provoked a great deal of anger and protest, and the company has had to relent. If it was trying to downplay any lingering evidence of its previous embarrassment, this was absolutely not the way to do it. The phrase “Streisand Effect” immediately comes to mind, where an attempt by the eponymous celebrity to suppress pictures of the outside of her home, taken from public property, only caused them to be spread more widely. <https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+verge+pc+build+takedown> Origin of the Streisand Effect: <https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20030624/1231228.shtml>

1 0

Inside the DNSpionage hacks that hijack domains at an unprecedented scale
by Peter Reutemann 18 Feb '19

18 Feb '19

'Since the beginning of the year, the US government and private security companies have been warning of a sophisticated wave of attacks that’s hijacking domains belonging to multiple governments and private companies at an unprecedented scale. On Monday, a detailed report provided new details that helped explain how and why the widespread DNS hijackings allowed the attackers to siphon huge numbers of email and other login credentials. The article, published by KrebsOnSecurity reporter Brian Krebs, said that, over the past few months, the attackers behind the so-called DNSpionage campaign have compromised key components of DNS infrastructure for more than 50 Middle Eastern companies and government agencies. Monday’s article goes on to report that the attackers, who are believed to be based in Iran, also took control of domains belonging to two highly influential Western services—the Netnod Internet Exchange in Sweden and the Packet Clearing House in Northern California. With control of the domains, the hackers were able to generate valid TLS certificates that allowed them to launch man-in-the-middle attacks that intercepted sensitive credentials and other data.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/inside-the-dnspionag… 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/

1 0

SGM next Monday
by Peter Reutemann 18 Feb '19

18 Feb '19

Hi society members For those paying/active society members that are not on meetup.com, here is the link to our SGM next week: https://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/258276544/ It is just a very short one, before the actual WLUG meeting, to go through some charter stuff. (Apologies, I thought I sent out a reminder last month, but I can't seem to find that email, so probably got lost in work stress) 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/

1 0

Meeting next Monday
by Peter Reutemann 18 Feb '19

18 Feb '19

Hi everyone We have a meeting coming up next Monday: 'Ian Stewart will talk about his experience of attempting to give an old Huawei router a new lease of life using OpenWRT (https://openwrt.org/)' https://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/257884258/ 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/

1 0

Researcher Scans All IP Addresses of Austria, Finds a Ton of Things That Shouldn't Be Online
by Peter Reutemann 18 Feb '19

18 Feb '19

'Christian Haschek scanned the entire Austrian IP space and found IP cameras, printers, and industrial control systems and a range of other devices that should not be online.' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/02/18/0017246 -- blog: https://blog.haschek.at/2019/i-scanned-austria.html 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/

1 0

Re: [wlug] RNZ Mediawatch--Geeks’ Gathering Goes Under The Radar
by Ian Stewart 17 Feb '19

17 Feb '19

In the Mediawatch Radio NZ broadcast Geeks' gathering goes under the media radar, David Lane, president of the NZ Open Source Society<https://nzoss.org.nz/>, stated that all the talks [given at the Linux Conference in Christchurch] are all available for anyone to watch on youtube right now. The following link takes you to the youtube summary page with the links to videos of all the presentations... https://www.youtube.com/user/linuxconfau2019/videos There are over 160 videos, and the average video is about 40 minutes, so there is over one hundred hours of viewing. An alternative to using youtube is to go to... http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2019/ ... select the presentation room, the day of the week, and the presentation can be downloaded in either mp4 or webm format. It's good to see in the list of credits<http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2019/README.md> for the core team that helped to make the videos there is a Waikato man that we haven't seen for a while, William McKee. cheers, Ian.

1 0

RNZ Mediawatch--Geeks’ Gathering Goes Under The Radar
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 15 Feb '19

15 Feb '19

Did you know that the annual linux.conf.au gathering was held in Christchurch last month? And that Linus Torvalds was there, wandering around the Canterbury University campus? Neither did I. Radio New Zealand’s Mediawatch program from a couple of weeks ago goes into the reasons why there was no media coverage of the event. Partly they might have been put off by some of the more esoteric and technical subjects being discussed. But in among them were some topics that should be considered more relevant to the “mainstream”, such as how automation could be doing away with many jobs being done by humans, leaving only the low-paying ones. The item includes an interview with NZOSS president Dave Lane, in which he incidentally mentions that Radio New Zealand’s online presence is built on Open Source, and that stuff.co.nz was, until recently, doing the same, and was also the one part of the Fairfax online media empire that was making money. Until that system was replaced with one based on expensive and proprietary Adobe products. And now they are not making nearly as much money. Coincidence? You be the judge. <https://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch/audio/2018680533/g…> By the way, it seems they have stopped making Ogg versions of items like these available for playback or download -- the links for the above one are only for an MP3 version. Also, I don’t agree that the distinction between “artificial intelligence” and “machine learning” is that clear-cut. I did a graduate course on AI back in the day, and it was already a pretty fuzzy concept back then. Except for one quite concise, mathematically-based definition I came across that appealed to me: “solving NP problems in polynomial time”.

2 2

Open Source Project Aims To Make Ubuntu Usable on Arm-Powered Windows Laptops
by Peter Reutemann 14 Feb '19

14 Feb '19

'A group of programmers and device hackers are working to bring proper support for Ubuntu to Arm-powered Windows laptops, starting with first-generation Snapdragon 835 systems, like the HP Envy x2 and Asus NovaGo. From a report: The aarch64-laptops project provides prebuilt images for the aforementioned notebook PCs, as well as the Lenovo Miix 630. Although Ubuntu and other Linux distributions support aarch64 (ARMv8) by default, various obstacles including the design and configuration of Qualcomm Snapdragon processors make these default images not practically usable. The aarch64-laptops project developers are aiming to address these difficulties, though work is still ongoing. Presently, the TouchPad does not work properly on the Asus, with all three lacking proper support for on-board storage and Wi-Fi, which rely on UFS support. According to their documentation, this is being worked on upstream.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/02/14/1448221 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/

1 0

R-Pi manufacturing moving out of UK.
by Ian Stewart 14 Feb '19

14 Feb '19

David Cleevely is an entrepreneur based in Cambridge, England. In 2014 he became Chairman of the Raspberry Pi Foundation and of Raspberry Pi Trading. Earlier this week he sent out the twitter: With a heavy heart I have sent the first email laying the ground for moving manufacturing out of the UK because of Brexit and the tariff and certification problems it will cause. Real businesses. Real employment. Real taxes. Lost. The twitter discussion is here<https://twitter.com/DavidCleevely/status/1094916009276919808>. ...Your next R-Pi may be Irish or Dutch. cheers, Ian.

2 1

The BuzzFeed Bubble Bursts: Mass Layoffs Across Digital Media
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 14 Feb '19

14 Feb '19

Facebook and Google are not only sucking the oxygen out of advertising revenues for newspapers, they are also doing the same for online news outlets, such as BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, and Vice. <https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2019/02/buzzfeed-bubble-…>

1 0

The Second Navstar GPS Rollover Approaches
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 12 Feb '19

12 Feb '19

The US GPS* protocol represents times using a 10-bit field for the week number. This has already rolled over once, from 1023 back to 0, back in 1999, which broke some devices that hadn’t been designed to cope with it. A second rollover is now approaching, as of April 6th (the first Saturday in April). Guess what’s going to happen this time ... <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/02/12/current_gps_epoch_ends/> *Seems the original official name “Navstar” has been dropped, and “GPS”, instead of being a generic term for such satellite-based navigation systems, is now the specific name of the US one.

1 0

Bruce Schneier: Blockchain And Trust
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 12 Feb '19

12 Feb '19

Another thoughtful essay <https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/02/blockchain_and_.html> from the well-known computer-security guru: Trust is essential to society. As a species, humans are wired to trust one another. Society can't function without trust, and the fact that we mostly don't even think about it is a measure of how well trust works. .... Most blockchain enthusiasts have a unnaturally narrow definition of trust. They're fond of catchphrases like "in code we trust," "in math we trust," and "in crypto we trust." This is trust as verification. But verification isn't the same as trust. .... Any blockchain system will have to coexist with other, more conventional systems. Modern banking, for example, is designed to be reversible. Bitcoin is not. That makes it hard to make the two compatible, and the result is often an insecurity. Steve Wozniak was scammed out of $70K in bitcoin because he forgot this. .... Honestly, cryptocurrencies are useless. They're only used by speculators looking for quick riches, people who don't like government-backed currencies, and criminals who want a black-market way to exchange money.

1 0

Android Phones Can Be Hacked Remotely By Viewing Malicious PNG Image
by Peter Reutemann 12 Feb '19

12 Feb '19

'An innocent-looking image -- sent either via the internet or text -- could open your Android phone up to hacking. "While this certainly doesn't apply to all images, Google discovered that a maliciously crafted PNG image could be used to hijack a wide variety of Androids -- those running Android Nougat (7.0), Oreo (8.0), and even the latest Android OS Pie (9.0)," reports CSO Online. From the report: The latest bulletin lists 42 vulnerabilities in total -- 11 of which are rated as critical. The most severe critical flaw is in Framework; it "could enable a remote attacker using a specially crafted PNG file to execute arbitrary code within the context of a privileged process." Although Google had no report of the security flaws being actively exploited, it remains to be seen if and how long it will take before attackers use the flaw for real-world attacks. Android owners were urged to patch as soon as security updates becomes available. But let's get real: Even if your Android still receives security updates, there's no telling how long it will be (weeks or months) before manufacturers and carriers get it together to push out the patches. ' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/02/11/2338245 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/

1 0

Raspberry π Goes Retail
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 11 Feb '19

11 Feb '19

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has opened its first retail shop, in its home town of Cambridge <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/02/11/pi_shop/>. Some video here <https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-47143411>.

1 0

Raspberry Pi Gets Its Own Brick-and-Mortar Retail Store
by Peter Reutemann 08 Feb '19

08 Feb '19

'The Raspberry Pi, believe it or not, now has its very own retail store. From a report: Located on the first floor of the Grand Arcade in Cambridge, U.K., the Raspberry Pi Store is open through the day, every day, and sells everything from Raspberry Pi microcomputers and accessories, to branded coffee mugs, soft toys, and more. [...] Despite its popularity -- more than 19 million Raspberry Pi units have been sold since 2012 -- the Raspberry Pi still feels a little niche to merit its own dedicated retail store. Indeed, most people who would be interested in building their own electronic gadgets from scratch are likely well-versed in the wonders of online retail. But conversely, that is likely the same reason why the Raspberry Pi Foundation wants its own space in the physical retail realm: it needs a new audience.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/02/07/1332202 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/

1 0

LibreOffice 6.2 Brings New Interfaces, Performance Improvements To the Open Source Office Suite
by Peter Reutemann 08 Feb '19

08 Feb '19

'New interface styles and feature improvements are available in version 6.2 of LibreOffice -- the most popular open-source office suite -- released Thursday by The Document Foundation. As with any software update, bug fixes and feature enhancements are present, making this release a significant upgrade, particularly for users coming from Microsoft Office, or working with files created with those programs. LibreOffice now supports SVG-based icons for toolbars in the Breeze, Colibre, and Elementary icon sets as an experimental feature, to better support HiDPI displays increasingly found in notebook PCs. The Elementary icon set was also improved significantly, adding a 32px PNG version, and fixing inconsistencies between the 16, 24, and 32px versions, as well as adding more icons across the set to prevent reverting to defaults. In LibreOffice 6.2, the "Tabbed" interface is now available for Writer, Calc, Impress, and Draw, and is considered sufficiently stable to be a default option. This interface mimics the oft-maligned "Ribbon interface" in Office 2007. The "traditional" Office-style toolbar is default, though the Tabbed interface can be enabled through the "View > User Interface" menus.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/02/07/1737222 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/

1 0

Blender Wins Annie Award
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 06 Feb '19

06 Feb '19

The “Annies” are the annual awards given out by the International Animated Film Society, aka ASIFA-Hollywood. As part of these, there is a special prize known as the Ub Iwerks award for technical advancement in the art of animation, named for the Disney animator who so famously brought Mickey Mouse to life, back in the day. This is only given out in any particular year when the judges feel that somebody deserves it. Well, the latest winner is none other than Blender, the open-source CG software. Past winners have included software, companies and people, but this appears to be the first time that a piece of Free software has been so honoured. <http://www.cgchannel.com/2018/12/blender-creator-ton-roosendaal-wins-annie-…> <https://www.blender.org/news/ton-roosendaal-and-blender-to-receive-asifa-ho…>

1 0

Old Computer Gear
by Andrew Crosby 06 Feb '19

06 Feb '19

Hi Guys I'm moving cities shortly and have a couple of decades of old computer and electronic gear to pass along. Mainly periferals and parts from AT/ATX era, Also have some old laptops getting up core2duo era, and not sure what else I'll find while I pack. Anyone around here interested in that sort of stuff. Cheers

2 4

Attackers Can Track Kids' Locations Via Connected Watches
by Peter Reutemann 31 Jan '19

31 Jan '19

'A gamut of kids' GPS-tracking watches are exposing sensitive data involving 35,000 children -- including their location, in real time. Researchers from Pen Test Partners specifically took a look at the Gator portfolio of watches from TechSixtyFour. The Gator line had been in the spotlight in 2017 for having a raft of vulnerabilities, called out by the Norwegian Consumers Council in its WatchOut research. "A year on, we decided to have a look at the Gator watch again to see how their security had improved," said Vangelis Stykas, in a Tuesday posting. "Guess what: a train wreck. Anyone could access the entire database, including real-time child location, name, parents' details etc. Not just Gator watches either -- the same back end covered multiple brands and tens of thousands of watches." "At issue was an easy-to-exploit, severe privilege-escalation vulnerability: The system failed to validate that the user had the appropriate permission to take admin control," reports Threatpost. "An attacker with access to the watch's credentials simply needed to change the user level parameter in the backend to an admin designation, which would provide access to all account information and all watch information." ' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/01/30/2337239 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/

1 0

Hackers Are Passing Around a Megaleak of 2.2 Billion Records
by Peter Reutemann 31 Jan '19

31 Jan '19

'When hackers breached companies like Dropbox and LinkedIn in recent years -- stealing 71 and 117 million passwords, respectively -- they at least had the decency to exploit those stolen credentials in secret, or sell them for thousands of dollars on the dark web. Now, it seems, someone has cobbled together those breached databases and many more into a gargantuan, unprecedented collection of 2.2 billion unique usernames and associated passwords, and is freely distributing them on hacker forums and torrents, throwing out the private data of a significant fraction of humanity like last year's phone book. Earlier this month, security researcher Troy Hunt identified the first tranche of that mega-dump, named Collection #1 by its anonymous creator, a set of cobbled-together breached databases Hunt said represented 773 million unique usernames and passwords. Now other researchers have obtained and analyzed an additional vast database called Collections #2-5, which amounts to 845 gigabytes of stolen data and 25 billion records in all. After accounting for duplicates, analysts at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, found that the total haul represents close to three times the Collection #1 batch.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/01/31/1452201 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/

1 0

New Security Flaw Impacts 5G, 4G, and 3G Telephony Protocols
by Peter Reutemann 31 Jan '19

31 Jan '19

'A new vulnerability has been discovered in the upcoming 5G cellular mobile communications protocol. Researchers have described this new flaw as more severe than any of the previous vulnerabilities that affected the 3G and 4G standards. From a report: Further, besides 5G, this new vulnerability also impacts the older 3G and 4G protocols, providing surveillance tech vendors with a new flaw they can abuse to create next-gen IMSI-catchers that work across all modern telephony protocols. This new vulnerability has been detailed in a research paper named "New Privacy Threat on 3G, 4G, and Upcoming5G AKA Protocols," published last year. According to researchers, the vulnerability impacts AKA, which stands for Authentication and Key Agreement, a protocol that provides authentication between a user's phone and the cellular networks. The AKA protocol works by negotiating and establishing keys for encrypting the communications between a phone and the cellular network.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/01/31/1913237 Yeah, don't think so that I'm gonna upgrade from my stone tablets any time soon... 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/

1 0

Criminals Are Tapping Into the Phone Network Backbone to Empty Bank Accounts
by Peter Reutemann 31 Jan '19

31 Jan '19

'Sophisticated hackers have long exploited flaws in SS7, a protocol used by telecom companies to coordinate how they route texts and calls around the world. Those who exploit SS7 can potentially track phones across the other side of the planet, and intercept text messages and phone calls without hacking the phone itself. From a report: This activity was typically only within reach of intelligence agencies or surveillance contractors, but now Motherboard has confirmed that this capability is much more widely available in the hands of financially-driven cybercriminal groups, who are using it to empty bank accounts. So-called SS7 attacks against banks are, although still relatively rare, much more prevalent than previously reported. Motherboard has identified a specific bank -- the UK's Metro Bank -- that fell victim to such an attack. The news highlights the gaping holes in the world's telecommunications infrastructure that the telco industry has known about for years despite ongoing attacks from criminals. The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the defensive arm of the UK's signals intelligence agency GCHQ, confirmed that SS7 is being used to intercept codes used for banking. "We are aware of a known telecommunications vulnerability being exploited to target bank accounts by intercepting SMS text messages used as 2-Factor Authentication (2FA)," The NCSC told Motherboard in a statement. "Some of our clients in the banking industry or other financial services; they see more and more SS7- based [requests],â Karsten Nohl, a researcher from Security Research Labs who has worked on SS7 for years, told Motherboard in a phone call. "All of a sudden you have someone's text messages."' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/01/31/1925241 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/

1 0

Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+ Launches for the Tiny Linux Computers from $25
by Peter Reutemann 30 Jan '19

30 Jan '19

'Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+ follows on the footsteps of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 (CM3) series announced in January 2017, offering owners of the tiny Linux computers a general-purpose, cost-efficient, and much simpler SBC (Single-board Computer), allowing them to slot it in and out of any device. It comes with 10x the ARM performance, 8x the Flash capacity, and 2x the RAM capacity of CM3. While Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+ uses the same board as CM3, it brings improved thermal design, the Broadcom BCM2837B0 application processor from the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ single-board computer, but running at 1.2GHz instead of 1.4GHz, up to 32GB eMMC Flash memory, improved PCB thermal design to better support high loads without getting hot, and 1GB LPDDR2 SDRAM.' -- source: https://news.softpedia.com/news/raspberry-pi-compute-module-3-plus-launches… 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/

1 0

Get started with eDEX-UI, a Tron-influenced terminal program for tablets and desktops
by Peter Reutemann 30 Jan '19

30 Jan '19

'eDEX-UI is a cross-platform terminal program designed for tablets and desktops that was inspired by the user interface in Tron. It has five terminals in a tabbed interface, so it is easy to switch between tasks, as well as useful displays of system information.' -- source: https://opensource.com/article/19/1/productivity-tool-edex-ui 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/

1 0

Linux Mint 19.1: A sneaky popular distro skips upheaval, offers small upgrades
by Peter Reutemann 29 Jan '19

29 Jan '19

'While Ubuntu and Red Hat grabbed most of the Linux headlines last year, Linux Mint, once the darling of the tech press, had a relatively quiet year. Perhaps that's understandable with IBM buying Red Hat and Canonical moving back to the GNOME desktop. For the most part Linux Mint and its developers seemed to keep their heads down, working away while others enjoyed the limelight. Still, the Linux Mint team did churn out version 19, which brought the distro up to the Ubuntu 18.04 base. Mint 18.1 review: Forget about Wayland and get comfy with the command line While the new release may not have garnered mass attention, and probably isn't anyone's top pick for "the cloud," Linux Mint nevertheless remains the distro I see most frequently in the real world. When I watch a Linux tutorial or screen cast on YouTube, odds are I'll see the Linux Mint logo in the toolbar. When I see someone using Linux at the coffee shop, it usually turns out to be Linux Mint. When I ask fellow Linux users which distro they use, the main answers are Ubuntu... and Linux Mint. All of that is anecdotal, but it still points to a simple truth. For a distro that has seen little press lately, Linux Mint manages to remain popular with users. There's a good reason for that popularity: Linux Mint just works. It isn't "changing the desktop computer paradigm," or "innovating" in "groundbreaking" ways. The team behind Mint is just building a desktop operating system that looks and functions a lot like every other desktop operating system you've used, which is to say you'll be immediately comfortable and stop thinking about your desktop and start using it to do actual work. It's worth asking then, why switch from what I have now to Mint? Well, if you're happy with what you have now, stick with whatever it is. But if "it" happens to be Windows 10, well, hope you haven't tried to upgrade yet. Or if what you have now happens to be Ubuntu prior to 18.04 and you're dreading the upgrade to GNOME, suddenly Mint is worth a look. The project recently released version 19.1, which comes in three desktop flavors. There are two homegrown projects, Cinnamon (really Linux Mint's main desktop) and MATE, which started as a kind of Cinnamon light and has since become a very capable desktop in its own right. On top of those, there's also an XFCE version. Previously, there was also a KDE version of Linux Mint, but it was dropped last year because the KDE stack is different enough that all the bits that make Linux Mint, well, Minty, just didn't work with KDE. Diehard Mint and KDE fans can still get KDE working via a PPA, but it's not officially supported by Linux Mint.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/linux-mint-19-1-a-sneaky-popular-di… 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/

1 0

Firefox 66 blocks auto-playing sound by default
by Peter Reutemann 29 Jan '19

29 Jan '19

'Few things are more annoying when browsing the internet than media that plays automatically, particularly if it makes noise. Mozilla is hip to this, and beginning in version 66, its Firefox browser will block automatically-playing audio by default. Websites won't be able to play audio without user interaction. On desktop, a notification pops up asking whether you want the website to play media automatically, while on mobile, media will play silently until you interact with the player. The beta version of Firefox 66 for Android is hitting the Play Store today. The APK of the beta isn't available just yet, but you can grab a nightly version of Firefox 66 on APK Mirror. The stable release is expected to be available in March.' -- source: https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/01/29/firefox-66-blocks-auto-playing-sou… 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/

1 0

Microsoft Project Manager Says Mozilla Should Get Down From Its 'Philosophical Ivory Tower, ' Cease Firefox Development
by Peter Reutemann 29 Jan '19

29 Jan '19

'A Microsoft program manager has caused a stir on Twitter over the weekend by suggesting that Firefox-maker Mozilla should give up on its own rendering engine and move on with Chromium. "Thought: It's time for @mozilla to get down from their philosophical ivory tower. The web is dominated by Chromium, if they really 'cared' about the web, they would be contributing instead of building a parallel universe that's used by less than five percent?" wrote Kenneth Auchenberg, who builds web developer tools for Microsoft's Visual Studio Code. Auchenberg's post referred to Mozilla's response to Microsoft's announcement in December that it would scrap Edge's EdgeHTML rendering engine for Chromium's. The move will leave Firefox's Gecko engine as the only alternative to Chromium, which is used by Opera and dozens of other browsers. Few people agreed with Auchenberg, including engineers from both Mozilla and Chromium. Long-serving Mozillian Asa Dotzler was not impressed. "Just because your employer gave up on its own people and technology doesn't mean that others should follow," Dotzler replied to Auchenberg. Auchenberg clarified that he didn't want to see Mozilla vanish, but said it should reorganize into a research institution "instead of trying to to justify themselves with the 'protectors of the web' narrative."' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/01/29/0016211 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/

1 0

Firefox 65 Arrives With Content Blocking Controls, and Support for WebP and AV1
by Peter Reutemann 29 Jan '19

29 Jan '19

'Firefox 65, the latest version of Mozilla's web browser, is now available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android platforms. The release brings simplified Content Blocking controls for Enhanced Tracking Protection, support for WebP image support with the Windows client getting an additional feature: support for AV1 format. From a report: Across all platforms, Firefox can now handle Google's WebP image format. WebP supports both lossy and lossless compression and promises the same image quality as existing formats at smaller file sizes. Firefox 65 for desktop brings redesigned controls for the Content Blocking section to let users choose their desired level of privacy protection. You can access it by either clicking on the small "i" icon in the address bar and clicking on the gear on the right side under Content Blocking or by going to Preferences, Privacy & Security, and then Content Blocking. Next, Firefox now supports AV1, the royalty-free video codec developed by the Alliance for Open Media. AV1 improves compression efficiency by more than 30 percent over the codec VP9, which it is meant to succeed. Lastly, Firefox's new Task Manager page (just navigate to about:performance or find it under "Other" in the main menu) is complete. Introduced in Firefox 64, Task Manager now reports memory usage for tabs and add-ons.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/01/29/1442237 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/

1 0

Do Debian APT and PHP Pear Patches Highlight Vulnerability In Package Management Infrastructure?
by Peter Reutemann 27 Jan '19

27 Jan '19

'"Time and again, security experts and vendors alike will recommend to organizations and end users to keep software and systems updated with the latest patches," reports eWeek. "But what happens when the application infrastructure that is supposed to deliver those patches itself is at risk?" That's what open-source and Linux users were faced with this past week with a pair of projects reporting vulnerabilities. On January 22, the Debian Linux distribution reported a vulnerability in its APT package manager that is used by end users and organizations to get application updates. That disclosure was followed a day later, on January 23, with the PHP PEAR (PHP Extension and Application Repository) shutting down its primary website, warning that it was the victim of a data breach. PHP PEAR is a package manager that is included with many Linux distributions as part of the open-source PHP programming language binaries.... In the Debian APT case, a security researcher found a flaw, reported it, and the open-source project community responded rapidly, fixing the issue. With PHP PEAR issue, researchers with the Paranoids FIRE (Forensics, Incident Response and Engineering) Team reported that they discovered a tainted file on the primary PEAR website... Both PHP PEAR and Debian have issued updates fixing their respective issues. While both projects are undoubtably redoubling their efforts now with different security technologies and techniques, the simple fact is that the two issues highlight a risk with users trusting updating tools and package management systems. ' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/01/26/0350252 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/

1 0

Hope for Linux
by Ian Stewart 24 Jan '19

24 Jan '19

I am one of the volunteers that looks after the IT equipment at a community centre. The equipment includes 5 x PC's located in a room for the public to use. These PC's were originally donated with a single drive that has Windows 10. We add another drive which we make the Sata-0 drive, and move the cable for the Windows 10 drive so it is on the Sata-2 port. On the drive that we have added we install Ubuntu-Mate. By default, when the PC's power on, they boot up Ubuntu-Mate. Over the summer holidays the main users of these PC's are local children in the age range of 6 to 10 years old. I recently walked into the room which has the PC's and one of children recognised me as the IT repair man. The boy came over to me, and pointing at one of the PC's he said, "It's broken. It doesn't work." I looked across at the PC and saw that it was displaying a Windows 10 screen that appeared to be functioning OK, and noticed that there was nobody sitting using this computer. The other four PC's were running Ubuntu-Mate and children were busy using them. I said to the boy, "Yes it does look like its broken. I'll fix it." I proceeded to shutdown Windows 10, and found the Ubuntu-Mate drive had failed to the extent that it wasn't being recognised by the BIOS. I replaced the failed drive, installed Ubuntu-Mate from a USB stick, and told the boy it was fixed and he could use it again. I thought it was an encouraging sign that what these children perceive as a normal PC is one that is running Ubuntu-Mate and what they perceive as a broken PC is one that is running Windows 10. cheers, Ian

3 2

If you installed PEAR PHP in the last 6 months, you may be infected
by Peter Reutemann 24 Jan '19

24 Jan '19

'Officials with the widely used PHP Extension and Application Repository have temporarily shut down most of their website and are urging users to inspect their systems after discovering hackers replaced the main package manager with a malicious one. “If you have downloaded this go-pear.phar [package manager] in the past six months, you should get a new copy of the same release version from GitHub (pear/pearweb_phars) and compare file hashes,” officials wrote on the site’s blog. "If different, you may have the infected file.” The officials didn’t say when the hack of their Web server occurred or precisely what the malicious version of go-pear.phar did to infected systems. Initial indications, however, look serious. For starters, the advice applies to anyone who has downloaded the package manager in the past six months. That suggests the hack may have occurred in the timeframe of last July, and no one noticed either it or the tainted download until this week.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/01/pear-php-site-breach… 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/

1 0

How Web Apps Can Turn Browser Extensions Into Backdoors
by Peter Reutemann 24 Jan '19

24 Jan '19

'"Threatpost has a link to some recent research about ways web pages can exploit browser extensions to steal information or write files," writes Slashdot reader jbmartin6. "Did we need another reason to be deeply suspicious of any browser extension? Not only do they spy on us for their makers, now other people can use them to spy on us as well. The academic paper is titled 'Empowering Web Applications with Browser Extensions' (PDF)." From the report: "An attacker [uses] a script that is present in a web application currently running in the user browser. The script either belongs to the web application or to a third party. The goal of the attacker is to interact with installed extensions, in order to access user sensitive information. It relies on extensions whose privileged capabilities can be exploited via an exchange of messages with scripts in the web application," researchers wrote. They added, "Even though content scripts, background pages and web applications run in separate execution contexts, they can establish communication channels to exchange messages with one another... APIs [are used] for sending and receiving (listening for) messages between the content scripts, background pages and web applications." The researcher behind the paper focused on a specific class of web extension called "WebExtensions API," a cross-browser extensions system compatible with major browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Microsoft Edge. After analyzing 78,315 extensions that used the specific WebExtension API, it found 3,996 that were suspicious. While it seems voluminous, they noted that research found a small number of vulnerable extensions overall, and that concern should be measured. However, "browser vendors need to review extensions more rigorously, in particular take into consideration the use of message passing interfaces in extensions."' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/01/23/2256252 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/

1 0

Why Free Software Evangelist Richard Stallman is Haunted by Stalin's Dream
by Peter Reutemann 23 Jan '19

23 Jan '19

'Richard Stallman recently visited Mandya, a small town about 60 miles from Bengaluru, India, to give a talk. On the sidelines, Indian news outlet FactorDaily caught up with Stallman for an interview. In the wide-ranging interview, Stallman talked about companies that spy on users, popular Android apps, media streaming and transportation apps, smart devices, DRM, software backdoors, subscription software, and Apple and censorship. An excerpt from the interview: If you are carrying a mobile phone, it is always tracking your movements and it could have been modified to listen to the conversations around you. I call this product Stalin's dream. What would Stalin have wanted to hand out to every inhabitant of the former Soviet Union? Something to track that person's movements and listen to the person's conservations. Fortunately, Stalin could not do it because the technology didn't exist. Unfortunately for us, now it does exist and most people have been pressured or lured into carrying around such a Stalin's dream device, but not me. I am suspicious of new digital technology. I expect it to have new malicious functionalities. It has happened so many times that I have learned to expect this, so I have always checked before I start using some new digital technology. I asked to find out what is nasty about it and I found out these two things. It was something like 20 years ago, and I decided it was my duty as a citizen to refuse, regardless of whatever convenience it might offer me. To surrender my freedom in this way was failing to defend a free society. This is why I do not have a portable phone. I refuse to carry a portable phone. I never have one and unless things change, I never will. I do use portable phones, lots of different ones. If I needed to call someone right now, I would ask one of you, "Could you please make a call for me?" If I am on a bus and it is late and I need to tell somebody that I am going to arrive late, there is always some other passenger in the bus who will make a call for me or send a text for me. Practically speaking, it is not that hard.' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/01/23/1759203 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/

1 0

Google Proposes Changes To Chromium Browser That Will Break Content-Blocking Extensions, Including Various Ad Blockers
by Peter Reutemann 23 Jan '19

23 Jan '19

'"Google engineers have proposed changes to the open-source Chromium browser that will break content-blocking extensions, including various ad blockers," reports The Register. "The drafted changes will also limit the capabilities available to extension developers, ostensibly for the sake of speed and safety. Chromium forms the central core of Google Chrome, and, soon, Microsoft Edge." From the report: In a note posted Tuesday to the Chromium bug tracker, Raymond Hill, the developer behind uBlock Origin and uMatrix, said the changes contemplated by the Manifest v3 proposal will ruin his ad and content blocking extensions, and take control of content away from users. Manifest v3 refers to the specification for browser extension manifest files, which enumerate the resources and capabilities available to browser extensions. Google's stated rationale for making the proposed changes is to improve security, privacy and performance, and supposedly to enhance user control. But one way Google would like to achieve these goals involves replacing the webRequest API with a new one, declarativeNetRequest. The webRequest API allows extensions to intercept network requests, so they can be blocked, modified, or redirected. This can cause delays in web page loading because Chrome has to wait for the extension. In the future, webRequest will only be able to read network requests, not modify them. The declarativeNetRequest allows Chrome (rather than the extension itself) to decide how to handle network requests, thereby removing a possible source of bottlenecks and a potentially useful mechanism for changing browser behavior. The report notes that Adblock Plus "should still be available" since "Google and other internet advertising networks apparently pay Adblock Plus to whitelist their online adverts." ' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/01/23/0048202 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/

1 0

Wine 4.0 Released With Vulkan Support, Initial Direct3D 12 and Better HiDPI
by Peter Reutemann 23 Jan '19

23 Jan '19

'Michael Larabel writes via Phoronix: Wine 4.0 is now officially available as the new annual stable release to Wine for running Windows programs and games on Linux and other operating systems. Following seven weekly release candidates, Wine 4.0 was ready to ship today as judged by Wine founder Alexandre Julliard. Wine 4.0 is a big release bringing initial Vulkan graphics API support, Direct3D CSMT is enabled by default, early Direct3D 12 support via VKD3D, continued HiDPI work, various OpenGL improvements, multi-sample D3D texture support, 64-bit improvements, continued Android support, and much more.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/01/23/0124236 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/

1 0

meeting next Monday
by Peter Reutemann 21 Jan '19

21 Jan '19

Hi everyone I'm using 2D animation as theme for next Monday's meeting: "Let's pool our resources and figure out/discover software that can be used for 2D animations. Open-source candidates could be GIMP (https://www.gimp.org/) and Synfig Studio (https://www.synfig.org/)" https://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/257884244/ 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/

3 4

A Large Number of Top Free VPN Apps Either Have Chinese Ownership or Are Based in China
by Peter Reutemann 21 Jan '19

21 Jan '19

'William Chalk, reporting for HackerNoon: After big names like Whatsapp, Snapchat, and Facebook, VPNs are the most searched-for applications in the world. "VPN" is the second-highest non-branded search term behind "games", and free apps completely dominate the search results. The most popular applications have amassed hundreds of millions of installs between them worldwide, yet there seems to be very little attention paid to the companies behind them, and very little scrutiny done on behalf of the marketplaces hosting them. We investigated the top free VPN apps in the App Store and Google Play Store. We found that very few of these hugely popular apps do anywhere near enough to deserve the trust of those looking to protect their privacy online. We recorded the top 20 free apps in the search results for "VPN" in the App and Play Store for UK and US locales. In total, these applications have been downloaded 80 million times from Google and 4 million times each month from Apple. Our investigation discovered that over half of the top free VPN apps either have Chinese ownership or are actually based in China, which has aggressively clamped down on VPN services in recent years and maintains an iron grip on the internet within its borders. Furthermore, we found the majority of these apps have insufficient formal privacy protections and non-existent user support.' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/01/21/1425201 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/

1 0

Popular WordPress Plugin WPML Hacked By Angry Former Employee
by Peter Reutemann 20 Jan '19

20 Jan '19

'A very popular WordPress plugin was hacked over the weekend after a hacker defaced its website and sent a mass message to all its customers revealing the existence of supposed unpatched security holes. From a report: In a follow-up mass email, the plugin's developers blamed the hack on a former employee, who also defaced their website. The plugin in question is WPML (or WP MultiLingual), the most popular WordPress plugin for translating and serving WordPress sites in multiple languages. According to its website, WPML has over 600,000 paying customers and is one of the very few WordPress plugins that is so reputable that it doesn't need to advertise itself with a free version on the official WordPress.org plugins repository. But on Saturday, ET timezone, the plugin faced its first major security incident since its launch in 2007. The attacker, which the WPML team claims is a former employee, sent out a mass email to all the plugin's customers.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/01/20/2156231 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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The Quest For Free/Libre Non-Linear Video Editors
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 20 Jan '19

20 Jan '19

A good summary <http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/the-quest-for-sustainable-free-lib…> of the state of various efforts to create Free Software video editor apps, covering all the ones you have likely heard of, and maybe some you haven’t.

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Today Is The 110th Of October
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 17 Jan '19

17 Jan '19

Microsoft’s “October 2018” Windows 10 update takes another step towards general rollout: Select Windows 10 devices are now automatically downloading Microsoft’s troubled 1809 update, according to the support page for the operating system. <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/17/windows_10_roll_out/>

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Collection 1 Data Breach Exposes More Than 772 Million Email Addresses
by Peter Reutemann 17 Jan '19

17 Jan '19

'A collection of almost 773 million unique email addresses and just under 22 million unique passwords were exposed on cloud service MEGA. Security researcher Troy Hunt said the collection of data, dubbed Collection #1, totaled over 12,000 separate files and more than 87GB of data. ZDNet reports: "What I can say is that my own personal data is in there and it's accurate; right email address and a password I used many years ago," Hunt wrote. "In short, if you're in this breach, one or more passwords you've previously used are floating around for others to see." Some passwords, including his own, have been "dehashed", that is converted back to plain text. Hunt said he gained the information after multiple people reached out to him with concerns over the data on MEGA, with the Collection #1 dump also being discussed on a hacking forum. "The post on the forum referenced 'a collection of 2000+ dehashed databases and Combos stored by topic' and provided a directory listing of 2,890 of the files," Hunt wrote. The collection has since been removed. You can visit Hunt's Have I Been Pwned service to see if you are affected by this br' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/01/17/0552201 Link to have I been Pwned: https://haveibeenpwned.com/ 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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Mozilla Kills Its Experimental Firefox Test Pilot Program 3 Years After Launch
by Peter Reutemann 16 Jan '19

16 Jan '19

'Mozilla has announced that it is closing Firefox Test Pilot, an experimental program it launched three years ago. Firefox Test Pilot allowed users to try out potential new built-in Firefox features to understand if they are popular with users. The company says the program was used by an average of 100,000 daily users. A report adds: It's worth noting here that Test Pilot is separate from the various beta versions of Firefox, which are early iterations designed to fine-tune features intended for the prime-time Firefox. Test Pilot, on the other hand, is more about Mozilla dipping its toes in the water to see whether a new feature is worth pursuing at all in the main version of the app, or even as a standalone product. Ultimately, it allows Firefox developers to take bigger risks with their ideas.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/01/16/1752250 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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A Guy Made a Computer Mouse That is Also a Functional Laptop
by Peter Reutemann 14 Jan '19

14 Jan '19

'A YouTube user who goes by Electronic Grenade has designed a computer mouse that is also a functional laptop. From a report: As detailed in a video published on Sunday, the computer mouse computer consists of a 3d-printed mouse, a Raspberry Pi microcontroller, a small keyboard, and a handful of components that were taken from a normal computer mouse. "Even though the screen is attached to the mouse, the sensitivity of the mouse makes it not that hard to follow along with what is happening on the screen," Electronic Grenade said in the video. Nevertheless, the mouse does have its faults. According to Electronic Grenade, a few resource intensive applications will occasionally cause the mouse computer to crash.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/01/14/1656224 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 presentation
by John 14 Jan '19

14 Jan '19

Hi All, Is anyone prepared to share their knowledge on some of the aspects of Gimp at one of the meetings. My particular interests are: Working with layers. Creating and editing animations. Quick and dirty brush tips Air brush settings etc. Cheers John..

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GNOME Internet Radio Locator 1.6.0 Released
by Peter Reutemann 14 Jan '19

14 Jan '19

'GNOME Internet Radio Locator 1.6.0 is now freely available for GNOME systems. The 1.6.0 release is a stable release with Internet radio stations from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, England, Scotland, France and Belgium, as well as U.S.A., Canada, Mexico and Guatemala, mapped for GNOME Maps and city text search interface with auto-completion for 76 world cities that are featured in this release. You may download the 1.6.0 release of GNOME Internet Radio Locator here and download packages for Fedora 28 and 29 on x86_64 here' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/01/13/209247 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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Vga..
by John 12 Jan '19

12 Jan '19

Hi All, If anyone has a VGA cable that they do not love anymore could you please bring to the meeting for me as I just gave my one to my neighbor. Dumb I know but that is what I do all the time... Cheers John..

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Robocall -- New Kind Of Scammer?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 12 Jan '19

12 Jan '19

I just received an odd phone call which just played a (somewhat muffled and over-compressed) recorded message saying something like “This is Spark NZ informing you that your internet service is going to be terminated. For further information press 1, or press 2 for other queries.” After a few seconds, during which I did nothing, it hung up. I think I may have received a similar call maybe 2-3 weeks ago, because I heard a voice speaking on top of my recorded voice telling the caller to leave a message, but I was too far away at the time to make out what was being said.

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Malware Found Preinstalled On Some Alcatel Smartphones
by Peter Reutemann 11 Jan '19

11 Jan '19

'A weather app that comes preinstalled on Alcatel smartphones contained malware that surreptitiously subscribed device owners to premium phone numbers behind their backs. The app, named "Weather Forecast-World Weather Accurate Radar," was developed by TCL Corporation, a Chinese electronics company that among other things owns the Alcatel, BlackBerry, and Palm brands. The app is one of the default apps that TCL installs on Alcatel smartphones, but it was also made available on the Play Store for all Android users --where it had been downloaded and installed more than ten million times. But at one point last year, both the app included on some Alcatel devices and the one that was available on the Play Store were compromised with malware. How the malware was added to the app is unclear. TCL has not responded to phone calls requesting comment made by ZDNet this week. The app reportedly harvested users' data and sent it to China. It collected geographic locations, email addresses, and IMEI codes, which it sent back to TCL. Upstream, a UK-based mobile security firm, also found that "the malicious code hidden inside the app would also attempt to subscribe users to premium phone numbers that incurred large charges on users' phone bills," reports ZDNet. "All in all, the company says it detected and blocked over 27 million transaction attempts across seven markets, which would have created losses of around $1.5 million to phone owners if they hadn't been blocked." Upstream notes that most of the behavior they've seen originated only from two types of smartphones: Pixi 4 and A3 Max models.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/01/10/2117234 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 systemd Affected by Memory Corruption Vulnerabilities, No Patches Yet
by Peter Reutemann 10 Jan '19

10 Jan '19

'Major Linux distributions are vulnerable to three bugs in systemd, a Linux initialization system and service manager in widespread use, California-based security company Qualys said late yesterday. From a report: The bugs exist in 'journald' service, tasked with collecting and storing log data, and they can be exploited to obtain root privileges on the target machine or to leak information. No patches exist at the moment. Discovered by researchers at Qualys, the flaws are two memory corruption vulnerabilities (stack buffer overflow - CVE-2018-16864, and allocation of memory without limits - CVE-2018-16865) and one out-of-bounds error (CVE-2018-16866). They were able to obtain local root shell on both x86 and x64 machines by exploiting CVE-2018-16865 and CVE-2018-16866. The exploit worked faster on the x86 platform, achieving its purpose in ten minutes; on x64, though, the exploit took 70 minutes to complete. Qualys is planning on publishing the proof-of-concept exploit code in the near future, but they did provide details on how they were able to take advantage of the flaws.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/01/10/1759253 BTW This is an FYI, not a reason to start a flame war again... 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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New Tool Automates Phishing Attacks That Bypass 2FA
by Peter Reutemann 09 Jan '19

09 Jan '19

'A new penetration testing tool published at the start of the year by a security researcher can automate phishing attacks with an ease never seen before and can even blow through login operations for accounts protected by two-factor authentication (2FA). From a report: Named Modlishka --the English pronunciation of the Polish word for mantis -- this new tool was created by Polish researcher Piotr Duszynski. Modlishka is what IT professionals call a reverse proxy, but modified for handling traffic meant for login pages and phishing operations. It sits between a user and a target website -- like Gmail, Yahoo, or ProtonMail. Phishing victims connect to the Modlishka server (hosting a phishing domain), and the reverse proxy component behind it makes requests to the site it wants to impersonate. The victim receives authentic content from the legitimate site --let's say for example Google -- but all traffic and all the victim's interactions with the legitimate site passes through and is recorded on the Modlishka server.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/19/01/09/1817234 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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Bash-5.0 release available
by Peter Reutemann 08 Jan '19

08 Jan '19

'This release fixes several outstanding bugs in bash-4.4 and introduces several new features. The most significant bug fixes are an overhaul of how nameref variables resolve and a number of potential out-of-bounds memory errors discovered via fuzzing. There are a number of changes to the expansion of $@ and $* in various contexts where word splitting is not performed to conform to a Posix standard interpretation, and additional changes to resolve corner cases for Posix conformance. The most notable new features are several new shell variables: BASH_ARGV0, EPOCHSECONDS, and EPOCHREALTIME. The `history' builtin can remove ranges of history entries and understands negative arguments as offsets from the end of the history list. There is an option to allow local variables to inherit the value of a variable with the same name at a preceding scope. There is a new shell option that, when enabled, causes the shell to attempt to expand associative array subscripts only once (this is an issue when they are used in arithmetic expressions). The `globasciiranges' shell option is now enabled by default; it can be set to off by default at configuration time. There are a few incompatible changes between bash-4.4 and bash-5.0. The changes to how nameref variables are resolved means that some uses of namerefs will behave differently, though I have tried to minimize the compatibility issues. By default, the shell only sets BASH_ARGC and BASH_ARGV at startup if extended debugging mode is enabled; it was an oversight that it was set unconditionally and caused performance issues when scripts were passed large numbers of arguments.' -- source: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bash/2019-01/msg00063.html 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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Fwd: [NZOSS OpenChat] Linux.conf.au discount for NZOSS financial members!
by Peter Reutemann 08 Jan '19

08 Jan '19

Apologies for cross-posting... Cheers, Peter ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Dave Lane <president(a)nzoss.org.nz> Date: Tue, Jan 8, 2019 at 4:08 PM Subject: [NZOSS OpenChat] Linux.conf.au discount for NZOSS financial members! To: NZOSS Open Chat List <openchat(a)groups.nzoss.org.nz> Hello everyone, The organisers of 2019's Linux.conf.au (it's here in Christchurch in 2 weeks - 21-25 Jan!) have kindly extended a discount offer to full (financial) NZOSS members, which makes the hobbyist registration price $399 (discounted from $549, so $150 reduction!) for those wanting to attend! Given that the savings is substantially more than the cost of becoming an NZOSS member ($40 - https://members.nzoss.nz) seems quite worthwhile! If you haven't been to an LCA before (this'll be my 6th), they're superb. Go. I'll provide the discount code to any current (or recent 🙂 ) financial members requesting one... The window for registration closes on 15 January, so don't dilly-dally! Hope to see many of you there! Dave -- Dave Lane, President, New Zealand Open Source Society e: president(a)nzoss.org.nz m: 021 229 8147 w: http://nzoss.org.nz ―― View topic http://groups.nzoss.org.nz/r/topic/60OKMe2P8pajbBBtpNRr4L Leave group mailto:openchat(a)groups.nzoss.org.nz?subject=Unsubscribe Start groups https://OnlineGroups.net -- 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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DuckDuckGo Denies Using Fingerprinting To Track Its Users
by Peter Reutemann 08 Jan '19

08 Jan '19

'Responding to a forum post that accused it of 'fingerprinting users', privacy-centric search engine DuckDuckGo says that fears are unfounded and that it is not tracking its users. The allegation was made after the Firefox extension CanvasBlocker showed a warning to users. The suggestion of fingerprinting -- gathering as much information as possible about a user through their browser to create a unique identifier that can be used for tracking -- is clearly something that would seem to sit in opposition to what DuckDuckGo claims to stand for. The company CEO says the accusation is simply wrong.' -- source: https://search.slashdot.org/story/19/01/07/194206 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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Sony Appears To Be Blocking Kodi On Its Recent Android TVs
by Peter Reutemann 08 Jan '19

08 Jan '19

'Several reports indict that at least some of Sony's recent Android TVs are actively blocking Kodi, the open-source, cross-platform streaming and media player that allows you to access and play local, network, and remote content. Android Police reports: The official Kodi project Twitter account pointed out Sony's deficiency a couple of days ago, but reports on the Kodi forums of issues installing and running the app from the Play Store go even further back to last year. A handful of affected enthusiasts believe they have discovered the cause of the problem: Sony seems to be blocking the package ID for the app from being installed/run. Supporting this theory is the fact that recompiling the app from scratch with a different ID allows it to work. ' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/19/01/07/2211200 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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meetings for 2019
by Peter Reutemann 08 Jan '19

08 Jan '19

Hi everyone I finally have all the room bookings for 2019 sorted (the guys doing the bookings are overworked and understaffed due to holidays). The university changed its policy around providing rooms on holiday from a "we'll coordinate with security" to a "should not be allowed". Instead of going to the pub three times (Jan/Apr/Oct), listening to pub quizzes, I decided to break with our 4th Monday tradition for these months and have the meetings on the 3rd Monday instead. Here's the complete list of meetings for 2019, for those that don't use meetup.com: Jan 21 -- 3rd Monday Feb 25 Mar 25 Apr 15 -- 3rd Monday May 27 Jun 24 Jul 22 Aug 26 Sep 23 Oct 21 -- 3rd Monday Nov 25 Here is the link to our meetup.com community page: https://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/ 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 For Cars: Tesla Isn't The Only Automaker Running Linux Under the Hood
by Peter Reutemann 06 Jan '19

06 Jan '19

'ZDNet reports that by 2020, "many, if not most, new cars will be running with Linux." While some companies, like Tesla, run their own homebrew Linux distros, most rely on Automotive Grade Linux (AGL). AGL is a collaborative cross-industry effort developing an open platform for connected cars with over 140 members... Its membership includes Audi, Ford, Honda, Mazda, Nissan, Mercedes, Suzuki, and the world's biggest automobile company: Toyota. Why? "Automakers are becoming software companies, and just like in the tech industry, they are realizing that open source is the way forward," said Dan Cauchy, AGL's executive director, in a statement. Car companies know that while horsepower sells, customers also want smart infotainment systems, automated safe drive features, and, eventually, self-driving cars. Linux and open-source company can give them all of that. The AGL's goal is to develop an open-source, common platform for infotainment systems: The Unified Code Base (UCB). This is a Linux distribution and open-source software platform for car infotainment, telematics, and instrument cluster applications... The AGL's hope is that this will serve as a de facto industry standard. It's well on its way. Yesterday Hyundai announced that they were also joining both the AGL effort and the Linux Foundation.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/01/05/1928205 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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Eben Upton Remembers The Years Before the First Raspberry Pi
by Peter Reutemann 06 Jan '19

06 Jan '19

'Tech Republic re-visits the story of the earliest attempts to build the Raspberry Pi, and the dramatic launch of a quest "to rekindle the curiosity about computing in a generation immersed in technology but indifferent to how it worked." [T]he dominant computers -- games consoles and later tablets and smartphones -- no longer offered an invitation to create, but rather to consume. Eben Upton recalls a bonfire party in 2007 where an 11-year-old boy told him he wanted to be an electrical engineer, and his disappointment at realizing the boy didn't have access to a computer he could program on. "I said, 'Oh, what computer have you got?'. He said, 'I've got a Nintendo Wii'. And there was just that awful feeling about there being a kid who was excited, a kid who was showing concrete interest in our profession, and who didn't have access to a programmable computer, a computer of any sort. He just had a games console." At this time Upton was working as a system-on-a-chip architect at chip designer Broadcom, and realized he had the skills to try to halt this drift away from computers that encouraged users to code. Upton describes the Raspberry Pi as "a very conscious attempt" to bring back the easily programmable home computers that he remembered as a child in the 1980s -- and he was gratified at its success. "Even early on you started to see those pictures of kids lying on the living room floor, looking up at the TV with Raspberry Pi plugged into it, the same way we used to." It was named "Pi" because it booted into a version of Python, and Raspberry because "There's a lot of fruit-named computer companies, and the 'blowing a raspberry' thing was also deliberate." It's gone on to become the world's third best-selling general-purpose computer.' -- source: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/19/01/05/2031219 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 commands for measuring disk activity
by Peter Reutemann 04 Jan '19

04 Jan '19

'Linux systems provide a handy suite of commands for helping you see how busy your disks are, not just how full. In this post, we examine five very useful commands for looking into disk activity. Two of the commands (iostat and ioping) may have to be added to your system, and these same two commands require you to use sudo privileges, but all five commands provide useful ways to view disk activity.' -- source: https://www.networkworld.com/article/3330497/linux/linux-commands-for-measu… 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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DCP – Transfer Files Between Linux Hosts Using Peer-to-Peer Network
by Peter Reutemann 04 Jan '19

04 Jan '19

'People often need to copy or share files over the network. Many of us are used to using tools such as rsync or scp to transfer files between machines. In this tutorial, we are going to review another tool that can help you copy files between hosts in a network – Dat Copy (dcp). Dcp does not require SSH to be used or configured in order to copy your files. Furthermore it does not require any configuration to securely copy your files.' -- source: https://www.tecmint.com/dcp-copy-files-between-linux-servers/ 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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Mickey Mouse Will Be Public-Domain Soon; But What Will It Mean?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 03 Jan '19

03 Jan '19

Wonder of wonders, there has been no followup to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 <https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/01/a-whole-years-worth-of-works-ju…>. That means more and more interesting things are going to fall into the public domain from this year onwards. However, things are not going to be simple: the original incarnation of Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse will be in the public domain after 2024, but later versions will still be under copyright, and the trademarks will also continue to be in effect. How will that work? Probably in the same way that “intellectual property” usually works: the one with the biggest legal budget wins.

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Examples Of How Not To Code
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 03 Jan '19

03 Jan '19

Presenting the “Damn Vulnerable Serverless Application” <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/03/damn_vulnerable_serverless_applica…>, the latest in a line of “damn vulnerable” apps that are chock-full of deliberately-introduced security vulnerabilities. My worry about this sort of thing is the mindless-copy-and-paste crowd. We already see the effects of posting sample code with error-checking omitted “just to keep things simple”, along with exhortations to use it only as a guide, not to be slavishly copied; such exhortations are routinely ignored. From there, it seems only a small step to completely miss the context of such counterexample code, and actually use it as something to be followed.

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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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