- wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Building Your Own Internet Router
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 19 Jan '16

19 Jan '16

<http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/01/numbers-dont-lie-its-time-to-build-y…>: A lot of you are probably muttering, "right, pfSense, sure." Some of you might even be thinking about smoothwall or untangle NG. I played with most of the firewall distros out there, but I decided to go more basic, more old school: a plain, CLI-only install of Ubuntu Server and a few iptables rules. His benchmarks show his homebrew router handily beating off-the-shelf products in wired performance. In wireless performance, however, he feels available PC cards are way behind what dedicated router boxes can do.

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Serious Linux Kernel Vulnerability Patched
by Peter Reutemann 19 Jan '16

19 Jan '16

"A patch for a critical Linux kernel flaw, present in the code since 2012, is expected to be pushed out today. The vulnerability affects versions 3.8 and higher, said researchers at startup Perception Point who discovered the vulnerability. The flaw also extends to two-thirds of Android devices, the company added. An attacker would require local access to exploit the vulnerability on a Linux server. A malicious mobile app would get the job done on an Android device. The vulnerability is a reference leak that lives in the keyring facility built into the various flavors of Linux. The keyring encrypts and stores login information, encryption keys and certificates, and makes them available to applications." -- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/16/01/19/1326212 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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WLUG meeting next Monday
by Peter Reutemann 19 Jan '16

19 Jan '16

Hi everyone We have a WLUG meeting coming up next Monday: "Lawrence D'Oliveiro and Ian Stewart will demo RAID 1 configurations and also using rsync for backups." More details: http://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/228022101/ 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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Mr “Linux Software RAID” Stepping Down
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 18 Jan '16

18 Jan '16

Neil Brown, the guy who has been mostly responsible for the software RAID subsystem on Linux since he created it over a decade and a half ago, has decided to hand over the reins <http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Neil-Brown-Last-MD>. No drama involved, he just seems to have lost interest.

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Fedora Linux Might Drop Incremental Upgrades
by Peter Reutemann 17 Jan '16

17 Jan '16

"As you might know, Fedora and many other GNU/Linux distributions require users to do an incremental upgrade when attempting to move from an older version of the operating system to the most recent one. For example, if you want to upgrade from Fedora 21 to Fedora 23, you will have first to upgrade to Fedora 22. Lately, Fedora upgrades have become more stable and reliable, mostly because of some brand-new technologies, such as the DNF package manger. Fedora's Adam Williamson theorizes about an innovative method that might support official upgrade of the Fedora Linux operating system across two releases in the future." -- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/16/01/16/2156219 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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Bug that can leak crypto keys just fixed in widely used OpenSSH
by Peter Reutemann 17 Jan '16

17 Jan '16

'A critical bug that can leak secret cryptographic keys has just just been fixed in OpenSSH, one of the more widely used implementations of the secure shell (SSH) protocol. The vulnerability resides only in the version end users use to connect to servers and not in versions used by servers. A maliciously configured server could exploit it to obtain the contents of the connecting computer's memory, including the private encryption key used for SSH connections. The bug is the result of code that enables an experimental roaming feature in OpenSSH versions 5.4 to 7.1 "The matching server code has never been shipped, but the client code was enabled by default and could be tricked by a malicious server into leaking client memory to the server, including private client user keys," OpenSSH officials wrote in an advisory published Thursday. "The authentication of the server host key prevents exploitation by a man-in-the-middle, so this information leak is restricted to connections to malicious or compromised servers." The advisory said that anyone using a vulnerable version should update right away. Those who are unable to update should disable roaming by adding the string UseRoaming no to the global ssh_config(5) file or to the user configuration in ~/.ssh/config, or by entering -UseRoaming=no on the command line.' -- source: http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/01/bug-that-can-leak-crypto-keys-just-… 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: Global Game Jam and Unity Game Engine Introductory Course.
by William Mckee 15 Jan '16

15 Jan '16

Attached an Email I got from Bill Rogers regarding Global Game Jam and some Unity3d training. http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/08/26/unity-comes-to-linux-experimental-build… cheers, William. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Bill Rogers <coms0108(a)cs.waikato.ac.nz> Date: Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 11:44 PM Subject: Global Game Jam and Unity Game Engine Introductory Course. To: Bill Rogers <coms0108(a)cs.waikato.ac.nz> Hi Everyone, I'm sending this to all CS and CGD students, 2015 GGJ participants and High School Entrants in the NZ Programming Contest. If you are interested, good. If not feel free to pass it on to anyone you know who might be. If it is unwelcome spam, sorry about that. Global Game Jam is just over two weeks away. As usual we are running a site at Waikato University. On Friday 29th we kick off at 5pm with the 2016 Jam. We are also running an introductory session on using the Unity Game Engine prior to the jam on Thursday 21st January (just over one week away). For those who are new to the idea, GGJ is an international game (computer and board) development festival. For 48 hours (Friday 5pm to Sunday 5pm) people gather and develop games following a theme announced at the start. Almost anyone can take part (at Waikato we have an age limit of 16 or over). If you can program, design, develop artwork, have game ideas, or can game test, or would just like to watch, come and participate. To find out more about this year's event at Waikato and to register go to globalgamejam.org.nz The entry fee at Waikato is $25 - for that you get a t-shirt and meals for the weekend. You can come with friends or come alone and join a team formed at the event. So, if you would like ... 1. ... to attend the Unity Training Session on Thursday Jan 21st (from 1pm) please reply to this email. 2. ... to take part at the Waikato Site for Global Game Jam 2016, please register at globalgamejam.org.nz. (We will ask you for the $25 in due course.) 3. ... to know more about GGJ and see games developed in previous years, visit the global site at www.globalgamejam.org. (Please register to take part at our site, not at the global one.) Bill Rogers and Brian Cole Waikato GGJ Site 2016

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Another Advantage Of Linux Software RAID
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 11 Jan '16

11 Jan '16

I am a long-time fan of Linux software RAID. But in reading an online discussion which happened to mention variations in actual sizes of storage devices (disks or flash) of supposedly identical capacity, I realized that there is yet another advantage of Linux software RAID: the fact that it can build arrays out of disk partitions, not necessarily entire disks. This means you can create the partitions to be a standard size, slightly smaller than the maximum capacity of the disk. (Each disk will have just one partition on it, the rest of the disk being unused.) Then if you have to replace a failed disk, you can create a new partition of the same size on the replacement. Otherwise, if you use the entire disk, you run the risk that the new disk is a bit smaller than the old one, and trying to add it to the RAID container may fail.

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X.Org Might Lose Its Domain Name
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 11 Jan '16

11 Jan '16

Seems like the ownership of the x.org domain was not properly handed over during the reorg of the organization into a nonprofit. So now it is likely to expire in a matter of days, unless some (unspecified) back-room maneouvring succeeds... <http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=X.Org-Domain-Woes>

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a quad core Atom from Intel with added Windows 10
by Ian Young 09 Jan '16

09 Jan '16

Anyone got a use case? http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/01/07/2218254/intels-next-gen-compute… What on earth is Core-M you may possibly ask? 'Delving a little deeper into exactly what Core M offers, its headline figure is a Thermal Deisgn Power (TDP - read max power consumption) of just 4.5W. This compares to around 10-15W for a typical laptop processor and 50-100W for desktop processors. Previously this level of power draw was only possible in severely under-powered Atom processors, such as the Bay-Trail line, which were really only good for more simple tablet-type devices. Core M really is the first processor to bridge the gap between ultra-low TDP and acceptable laptop performance. Read more at http://www.trustedreviews.com/opinions/intel-core-m-everything-you-need-to-…'

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Programmers’ Note-To-Selves
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 08 Jan '16

08 Jan '16

An Ubuntu kernel engineer has done an analysis of how many instances there are in the Linux kernel of comments saying “FIXME” or “TODO”. The total numbers of these are increasing with the size of the code, but at least the number of FIXMEs per source line seems to be going down. <http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Kernel-FIXME-TODO>

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Elementary OS' Freya Dumbs Down Linux
by Peter Reutemann 07 Jan '16

07 Jan '16

'The release last month of Elementary OS Freya version 0.3.2 showed little has changed in this new-style Linux distro that wraps its own lightweight desktop design around the Ubuntu core. Elementary OS first appeared in 2011. I last looked at its Freya beta release in 2014. I liked its fresh, new look and simplified approach to desktop management. However, my hopes for more features and a faster-evolving desktop environment in the latest release went unfulfilled.' -- source: http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/elementary-os-freya-dumbs-down-lin… 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 N switches to OpenJDK, Google tells Oracle it is protected by the GPL
by Peter Reutemann 07 Jan '16

07 Jan '16

'The Oracle v. Google legal battle over the use of Java in Android keeps on going, but this week Google made a change to Android that it hopes will let the company better navigate its current legal trouble. Google told VentureBeat that it in "Android N," the next major version of Android, it is swapping Android's Java libraries from its own Apache Harmony-based implementation to one based on Oracle's OpenJDK—yes that Oracle, the same company suing Google. OpenJDK is the "official" open source version of the Java Platform, and Oracle makes it available under the GPL with a linking exception.' -- source: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/01/android-n-switches-to-openjdk-go… 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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Murdock On The Birth Of Debian
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 06 Jan '16

06 Jan '16

Noted Free Culture rapporteur Glyn Moody recalls his 1999 interview with late Debian founder Ian Murdock about the genesis of the project: <http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/the-birth-of-debian-i…>. As Murdock told me in 1999, the problems arose from the fact that "the fellow who was doing [SLS] was trying to do everything himself. And so I looked on that and I thought, well, you know, if Linux has taught us anything it's that that kind of model is sub-optimal. What we really ought to do is we ought try to take the model that Linux has pioneered, intentionally or not, and try to get the same benefits from that for building the system around it."

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Microsoft's Latest Patent Aggression Comes Under Fire From the EFF, Former GNU/Linux Company the Patent's Target
by Peter Reutemann 04 Jan '16

04 Jan '16

'MICROSOFT, which is connected to many patent trolls (includingIntellectual Ventures, the world’s biggest), is still busy suing companies. Microsoft has a long history of patent aggression, including patent litigation against Linux (not just threats thereof). As longtime readers of this site may know, this and only this was the raison d’être of this Web site. “…since winning a case for infringement of design patents can lead to a damage analysis based on “lost profits,” which can theoretically lead to a patent owner getting all of a defendant’s profits.” –Joe MullinAs we noted the other day, referring tothe original from the EFF, Microsoft is now attacking a company that once dominated word processing. Microsoft allegedly engaged in competition crimes against this company, leading to decades of expensive litigation. This company also pioneered some important GNU/Linux efforts until Microsoft shut these down with a mysterious deal (which we wrote about on several occasions around 2007). Well, Microsoft is now trying to drive this company into bankruptcy, using patents. What’s the name of this company? Corel. We have a whole category about Corel (with 51 articles, as well as leaked court documents). History is important here and it’s imperative that people properly study Corel to truly grasp how severe this situation really is.' -- source: http://techrights.org/2015/12/31/patent-aggression-against-corel/ 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 Leap of Faith -- Replacing Ubuntu Server with openSUSE Leap
by Peter Reutemann 04 Jan '16

04 Jan '16

"I run a local file and media server, which is a very important part of my digital life -- it hosts all of my files. Everything. I have been using an Ubuntu 14.04 server running on a self-assembled PC. But, it’s a big, noisy system and generates too much heat. So, I planned to move to smaller form factor, such as System76's Meerkat." -- source: http://www.linux.com/news/enterprise/systems-management/874378 -- Meerkat link: https://system76.com/desktops/meerkat Cheers, Peer -- 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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Debian mourns the passing of Ian Murdock
by Peter Reutemann 31 Dec '15

31 Dec '15

"With a heavy heart Debian mourns the passing of Ian Murdock, stalwart proponent of Free Open Source Software, Father, Son, and the 'ian' in Debian." source: https://bits.debian.org/2015/12/mourning-ian-murdock.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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Inside Red Star OS
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 30 Dec '15

30 Dec '15

North Korea has developed its own Linux distro, chock-full of features to allow every action of its users to be tracked. Some researchers have been taking it apart to see how these features work. <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/12/29/north_korea_red_star_os/>

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The Guardian Project
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 25 Dec '15

25 Dec '15

Just been watching the latest in the “Rebel Geeks” series on Al Jazeera. Today the episode was called “A Bigger Brother” <http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/rebelgeeks/2015/12/bigger-brother-15121…>, centred around the use of an open-source Android app called CameraV. The aim of this app is to record video along with a whole heap of corroborating metadata (GPS coordinates, local wi-fi networks etc) to make the footage credible enough, in particular proof enough against accusations of tampering, to be used as evidence in court. This is particularly important where the video is documenting crimes committed by people in positions of power and trust, such as the police. They used a nice term for this: “sousveillance” (watching done by ordinary people from below), as compared to the more usual “surveillance” (watching by those in privileged positions from above). One interesting comment made in the program was that the phone needs to look like it is not capturing video while the app is running, because in a place like Rio De Janeiro, the cops will grab phones away from people who they think are filming them. I did some digging around on GitHub, and found that this app is part of the Guardian Project, and they have a whole bunch of other useful-looking tools related to encryption, privacy and so on <https://github.com/guardianproject> They also have a website <https://guardianproject.info/>.

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HTTP Error Code 451 Approved For Censored Web Pages
by Peter Reutemann 21 Dec '15

21 Dec '15

'The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) has finally approved the new 451 status code for HTTP error messages involving web pages which have been repressed or removed for legal or political reasons. The initiative was proposed in 2013, and gained interest from various groups, such as Lumen (formerly Chilling Effects), who see the potential of the Bradbury-inspired code to help develop comprehensive indexes of censorship on the internet. Mark Nottingham, chair the IETF HTTP Working Group, says, "It'll be an RFC after some work by the RFC Editor and a few more process bits, but effectively you can start using it now."' -- source: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/12/21/1549258 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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Raspbian Levels the Field With Latest Update
by Peter Reutemann 18 Dec '15

18 Dec '15

"During all the Pi Zero hype and showcasing, most of us probably didn't realize that the Raspbian OS got a much needed update. While this update isn't a major release, it still contained some amazing features. If you are running Raspbian Jessie, then take a moment to read over this article so you won't be left out in the cold. I'll go over the best parts of the update and also provide install instructions on how to get all this on your current Raspbian install." -- source: http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/raspbian-levels-the-field-with-lat… 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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Items From Blender Conference 2015
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 17 Dec '15

17 Dec '15

I saw from Peter’s posting that Blender got one of the “top 10 open source projects” awards on opensource.com this year. And they had their Blender Conference 2015 about a month ago. A couple of notable related articles I found on opensource.com are “Teaching Teens 3D Animation With Blender” <https://opensource.com/life/15/12/blender-interview-tom-haines-3dami> where this nonprofit called 3Dami offers a free, intensive 7-day course to selected students. Quote on the (much-maligned) Blender interface: Many do prefer to use Blender outside our events. Once you have got over the bump of its interface being different to other software, you soon learn just how insanely fast it is—its interface is different for a very good reason, and its hard to accept the slow down of using other software. Some students actually learn that lesson during our event: More than a few have turned up moaning that we aren't using a certain piece of software beginning with "M," but they usually get why we use Blender by the time they leave. I do know that one of our students is making money using Blender, and I expect others to join them given time. Another one, relevant to a University research setting, is “Visualize Astrophysics Data With Blender” <https://opensource.com/life/15/11/blender-conference-interview-jill-naiman-…>. Besides Blender, this also builds on a Python-based astrophysics simulation framework called “yt”. (Aside: the more we become accustomed to being able to use keyword searches to find everything online, the more annoyed some of us become with short names that are hard to search for. Is this good or bad? Discuss.) I suspect there are bits there that could be adapted to other kinds of physical simulation. More presentations to see here: <https://www.youtube.com/user/BlenderFoundation/videos>

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end of year: best of open source
by Peter Reutemann 16 Dec '15

16 Dec '15

Top 10 open source projects of 2015 https://opensource.com/business/15/12/top-10-open-source-projects-2015 Bossies 2015: The Best of Open Source Software Awards http://www.infoworld.com/article/2984437/open-source-tools/bossies-2015-the… 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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AMD Goes Open Source, Announces GPUOpen Initiative, Linux Compiler, Drivers
by Peter Reutemann 15 Dec '15

15 Dec '15

'AMD announced today that the company is releasing a slew of open-source software and tools to give game developers, heterogeneous applications, and HPC applications deeper access to the GPU and GPU resources. AMD and their Radeon Technologies Group (RTG) are looking for ways to ease game development, so developers can more easily re-use code and port their games from consoles over to the PC. With GPUOpen, game developers will have direct access to GPU hardware, as well as access to a large collection of open source effects, tools, libraries and SDKs, which are being made available on GitHub under an MIT open-source license. As part of the effort, the company is also releasing a new HCC C++ compiler which will be a tool in enabling developers to more easily leverage the resources of discrete GPU hardware in heterogeneous systems. The HCC complier also allows developers to convert CUDA code to portable C++. According to AMD, internal testing shows that in many cases 90 percent or more of CUDA code can be automatically converted into C++ with the final 10 percent converted manually in the widely popular C++ language. An early access program for the "Boltzmann Initiative" tools is planned for Q1 2016.' -- source: http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/12/15/1429257 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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Collabora and OwnCloud Announce LibreOffice Online
by Peter Reutemann 15 Dec '15

15 Dec '15

'Collabora Productivity, a UK-based consulting company, has collaborated with ownCloud Inc. to release a developer edition of online LibreOffice, which they call CODE (Collabora Online Development Edition). "The office suite implementation runs on ownCloud server. That's where all the processing and heavy lifting is done. The rendering happens at the client side. Currently there are three apps: writer (equivalent to MS Word), spreadsheet (Excel) and presentation (PowerPoint). At the moment users can create new documents and edit them. Other functionality, such as collaborative editing, is in the pipeline."' -- source: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/12/15/1849234 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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Finding Differences Between Binary Files
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 14 Dec '15

14 Dec '15

Hi folks. As mentioned in passing last night, diff(1) isn’t much help for tracking down differences between two non-text files: all it will say is the files differ. However, there is a way to get detail on the differences, and that is to use a hex dump command like xxd(1) to produce text output from those binary files, and diff that text output instead. Thus, instead of diff binfile1 binfile2 you do diff <(xxd binfile1) <(xxd binfile2) This will quickly narrow down runs of changed bytes, and possibly even small sections of inserted or deleted bytes as well.

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Raspberry π As A Thin Client?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 14 Dec '15

14 Dec '15

Citrix has posted a demo of a Raspberry π giving smooth performance running a thin client OS. <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/12/14/vdi_comes_to_the_raspberry_pi/> A game-changer for VDI?

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MIT Creates Tor Alternative That Floods Networks With Fake Data
by Peter Reutemann 13 Dec '15

13 Dec '15

"An anonymous reader writes with word that MIT researchers "created an alternative to Tor, a network messaging system called Vuvuzela that pollutes the network with dummy data so the NSA won't know who's talking to who." Initial tests show the systems overhead adding a 44-second delay, but the network can work fine and preserve anonymity even it has more than 50% of servers compromised." -- source: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/12/13/1522224 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 OS smartphones are dead
by Peter Reutemann 12 Dec '15

12 Dec '15

The phone ecosystem just got smaller: "Mozilla is ending its plan to build an OS for smartphones. Today at Mozilla's "Mozlando" developer event, the company announced that it would stop developing and selling Firefox OS smartphones. " -- source: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/12/firefox-os-smartphones-are-dead/ Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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How To Win Friends And Influence People
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 12 Dec '15

12 Dec '15

And show your appreciation to open-source developers. <https://github.com/JuliaLang/IJulia.jl/issues/398> Or not...

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Is Your Son A Computer Hacker?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 10 Dec '15

10 Dec '15

A guide for the perplexed. As in, if you weren’t perplexed before reading this, you will be after <http://www.adequacy.org/stories/2001.12.2.42056.2147.html>. Watch out for that nasty Lunix and that devil incarnate, Linyos Torovoltos! Seems like there are some other similar gems to be found on that site, all dating from the early ’00s. Nice that they keep it online.

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Let's Encrypt Is Now In Public Beta
by Peter Reutemann 03 Dec '15

03 Dec '15

"As of today, Let's Encrypt is in Public Beta. If you're comfortable running beta software that may have a few bugs and rough edges, you can use it to instantly obtain and install certificates for any HTTPS website or TLS service." -- source: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/12/03/2016238 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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It’s Here: The Internet Of Wrongs
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 03 Dec '15

03 Dec '15

One of the presentations at the upcoming Kiwicon in Wellington is going to be about a device built out of a Raspberry π Zero using “nothing more than off-the-shelf components and "questionable life choices"”. It looks for attempts to connect to Instagram and other “social-media vanity” sites (including rugby), and blocks them by returning bogus responses. Quote: “It is exceptionally effective at selfie-drenched "music" festivals and coffee shops”. <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/12/02/british_hacker_turns_raspberry_pi_z…>

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Why Algebraic Eraser may be the riskiest cryptosystem you’ve never heard of
by Peter Reutemann 30 Nov '15

30 Nov '15

"A potential standard for securing network-connected pacemakers, automobiles, and other lightweight devices has suffered a potentially game-over setback after researchers developed a practical attack that obtains its secret cryptographic key. Known as Algebraic Eraser, the scheme is a patented way to establish public encryption keys without overtaxing the limited amounts of memory and computational resources that often constrain so-called Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Developed by scientists from Shelton, Connecticut-based SecureRF, it's similar to the Diffie-Hellman key exchange in that it allows two parties who have never met to securely establish a key over an insecure channel." -- source: http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/11/why-algebraic-eraser-may-be-the-mos… 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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When Is “Free Software” Not Free?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 30 Nov '15

30 Nov '15

Linux kernel developer Matthew Garrett has posted some criticisms of projects like Mozilla, Red Hat and Ubuntu that develop or redistribute Free software, but tack on an “intellectual property rights policy”. Basically that means they claim ownership of certain logos and trademarks, so if you want to fully exercise your Four Freedoms, you have to strip those out before you are allowed to redistribute what you receive from them. <http://lwn.net/Articles/665175/> One particularly worrying thing is this comment from Garrett (mjg59) on the above article: Canonical refuse to tell you what changes you need to make to the packages in order to do so.

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Pi Zero: A full Raspberry Pi for just $5
by Peter Reutemann 28 Nov '15

28 Nov '15

"Have you ever wanted a Raspberry Pi but thought that £16/$25—roughly three packs of cigarettes—was a little exorbitant for a complete computer capable of running Linux? Well, I have good news: the Raspberry Pi Foundation has just released the Pi Zero, a single-board computer that costs just £4/$5." -- source: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/11/pi-zero-a-full-raspberry-pi-for-just… 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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Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Will Ship With Linux Kernel 4.4 LTS
by Peter Reutemann 27 Nov '15

27 Nov '15

"The current daily build of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) remains based on the Linux 4.2 kernel packages of the stable Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system, while the latest and most advanced Linux 4.3 kernel is tracked on the master-next branch of the upcoming operating system. In the meantime, the Ubuntu Kernel Team announced plans for moving to Linux kernel 4.4 for the final release of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system." -- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/11/26/1920204 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

20 Years of GIMP
by Peter Reutemann 24 Nov '15

24 Nov '15

'Back in 1995, University of California students Peter Mattis and Kimball Spencer were members of the eXperimental Computing Facility, a Berkeley campus organization. In June of that year, the two hinted at their intentions to write a free graphical image manipulation program as a means of giving back to the free software community. On November 21st, 20 years ago today, Peter Mattis announced the availability of the "General Image Manipulation Program" on Usenet (later "GNU Image Manipulation Program"). Over the years, GIMP amassed a huge amount of new features designed for all kinds of users and practical applications: general image editing, retouching and color grading, digital painting, graphic design, science imaging, and so on. To celebrate the 20th anniversary, there is an update of the current stable branch of GIMP. The newly released version 2.8.16 features support for layer groups in OpenRaster files, fixes for layer groups support in PSD, various user interface improvements, OSX build system fixes, translation updates, and more.' -- source: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/11/22/2019259 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 2

Fwd: [Roundcube Announce] Roundcube Webmail 1.2-beta out now
by Simon Green 23 Nov '15

23 Nov '15

Good morning all, Roundcube 1.2-beta has been released, Among other enhancements, this release supports either server side or client side PGP encryption. As far as I know, this is the first open source web based e-mail client that does so. -- Simon -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [Roundcube Announce] Roundcube Webmail 1.2-beta out now Date: 24/11/2015 5:15 am From: Thomas Bruederli <thomas(a)roundcube.net> We're proud to announce that the beta release of the next major version 1.2 of Roundcube webmail is out now for download and testing. With this milestone we introduce new features primarily focusing on security and PGP encryption: * PHP7 compatibility * PGP encryption * Drag-n-drop attachments from mail preview to compose window * Mail messages searching with predefined date interval * Improved security measures to protect from brute-force attacks And of course plenty of small improvements and bug fixes. The PGP encryption support in Roundcube comes with two options: Mailvelope -------------- The integration of this browser plugin [1] for Firefox and Chrome comes out of the box in Roundcube 1.2 and is enabled if the Mailvelope API is detected in a user's browser. See the Mailvelope documentation [2] how to enable it for your site. Read more about the Mailvelope integration and how this looks like in Alec's blog [3]. Enigma plugin ------------------- This Roundcube plugin adds server-side PGP encryption features to Roundcube. Enabling this means that users need to fully trust the webmail server as encryption is done on the server GnuPG and private keys are also stored there. In order to activate server-side PGP encryption for all your users, the 'enigma' plugin, which is shipped with this package, has to be enabled in the Roundcube config. See the plugin's README for details. Also read Alec's blogpost about the Enigma plugin and how it works [4]. Both encryption features are pretty new and not yet perfectly documented. We'd much appreciate your feedback and your contribution to the end-user documentation [5] or our wiki page [6]. IMPORTANT: with this version, we finally deprecate some old Roundcube library functions [7]. Plugin developers, please test your plugins thoroughly and look for deprecation warnings in the logs. These function will be removed in the final 1.2.0 release and can therefore render plugins dysfunctional. See the full changelog on trac.roundcube.net [8] and download the new packages from https://roundcube.net/download Please note that this is a beta release and we recommend to test it on a separate environment. And don't forget to backup your data before installing it! Enjoy and please share your experience either through our mailing lists or as comments in the blog posts mentioned above. Kind regards, Thomas [1] https://www.mailvelope.com [2] https://www.mailvelope.com/en/help#watchlist [3] https://kolabian.wordpress.com/2015/10/10/mailvelope-integration-pgp-encryp… [4] https://kolabian.wordpress.com/2015/10/13/enigma-plugin-pgp-encryption/ [5] http://trac.roundcube.net/wiki/Online_Help [6] http://trac.roundcube.net/wiki/Dev_Encryption [7] https://github.com/roundcube/roundcubemail/blob/master/program/include/bc.p… [8] http://trac.roundcube.net/wiki/Changelog

2 1

Rebel Geeks: Meet Your Maker
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 20 Nov '15

20 Nov '15

Some on this list should be interested in this series on Al Jazeera called “Rebel Geeks”. The episode this week featured Massimo Banzi, one of the founders of Arduino, at the Maker Faire in Shenzhen, China. It also talks about the Safecast project, which was a volunteer group that came together in the wake of the Fukushima disaster to provide radiation data more extensive than anything the Government was able to offer. You can watch it on-line here <http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/rebelgeeks/2015/11/technology-maker-mov…>.

1 0

Linux Mint 1.73 BETA
by Peter Reutemann 18 Nov '15

18 Nov '15

Linux Mint 17.3 "Rosa" BETA is out, using Cinnamon and MATE: http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2937 http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2938 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

Open source projects rely on donated time—what motivates participants?
by Peter Reutemann 18 Nov '15

18 Nov '15

"Open source software packages like WordPress and Firefox have been major influences on modern computing. In statistics, open source software known as “R” has become the most popular environment for statistical computation and data analysis. A recent paper in PNAS studied the developers who make this software so successful to understand what motivates them and why they find contributing satisfying." -- source: http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/11/open-source-projects-rely-on-donated… 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 Dirk And Linus Show Comes To Seoul
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 17 Nov '15

17 Nov '15

Snippets from <http://lwn.net/Articles/662106/>: Is there anybody out there who understands the entire kernel? Linus said that nobody does. There are some people who have a good overview of the whole kernel, and Linus, at least, generally knows who to blame for any specific problem. But with a project the size of the kernel it's not possible for anybody to have a deep understanding of the whole thing. ... With regard to how an aspiring kernel developer should start, Linus has always said the same thing: he can't tell developers what to do. It is important, instead, that developers work on things they *want* to do. ... How many kernel compiles has he done? It used to take about twelve minutes to compile a kernel; over time, the kernel has gotten bigger, but the hardware has gotten faster; the current time is about 22 minutes for an allmodconfig kernel. He does about ten builds per day during the merge window, a couple otherwise. Kernel development has been happening for about 8800 days; the bottom line, Linus guessed, was about 100,000 compiles. ... What about the Git project — what made that project successful? Linus gave a lot of credit to BitKeeper which, despite its licensing issues, changed how the kernel community did development. Git, of course, is an [Linus Torvalds] improvement on BitKeeper, but BitKeeper showed the benefits of distributed development when nobody else was working in that area. Once Git was around, its use by the kernel community helped it to spread quickly. Its immutable object model turned out to make it easy for service providers to use, enabling companies like GitHub. Ten years ago, developers were resistant to thinking about source-code management issues; Git forced them to look at it and to realize how much better distributed source-code management is. Git was not the first in this area, but it was the one that created wide awareness of a better way of doing things.

1 0

WLUG AGM next Monday
by Peter Reutemann 17 Nov '15

17 Nov '15

Hi everyone Our Annual General Meeting (AGM) is next week on Monday. Agenda (preliminary) - President's Report - Treasurer's Report - Election of 2016 Committee - Consumption of pizza http://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/226192341/ 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

Calibrate your Monitor with these Open Source Tools
by Peter Reutemann 17 Nov '15

17 Nov '15

"What is seen on your display and what the image should look like can be two quite different things. If you value image quality and accuracy, calibration of your monitor will be important. Anyone involved in digital photography, graphic design or artwork will recognise the importance that their monitor is producing the best results, showing true colors and black levels. The following open source tools are invaluable for anyone looking for accurate color reproduction." -- source: http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/calibrate-your-monitor-with-these-… 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

Sourceforge going mubar?!
by Ian Young 17 Nov '15

17 Nov '15

Anyone happen to know whether Sourceforge is more than usually impaired at the moment (messed up beyond all recognition)? Any download I attempt is extremely slow, this from two networks. And Australia seems to been excised from the map of mirrors. Don't even get me started on the wall to wall advertising, and the cumbersome process of displaying info on whatever project one is trying to d/l after a d/l has commenced.

2 1

Linux 4.4 Kernel To Bring Raspberry Pi Graphics Driver, Open-Channel SSD Support
by Peter Reutemann 16 Nov '15

16 Nov '15

"Linux 4.4-rc1 has been released. New features of Linux 4.4 include a Raspberry Pi kernel mode-setting driver, support for 3D acceleration by QEMU guest virtual machines, AMD Stoney APU support, Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 support, expanded eBPF virtual machine programs, new hardware peripheral support, file-system fixes, faster SHA crypto support on Intel hardware, and LightNVM / Open-Channel SSD support." -- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/11/16/0313205 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

SUSE LEAP 421 live versions
by Ian Young 16 Nov '15

16 Nov '15

This looks interesting and not a large download. http://geckolinux.github.io/ And the inimitable man from Sweden has been at it again in a break from brewing up his Android and Pi versions. http://opsus.exton.net/

1 0

Non-Copyleft Licences “Put The FOSS Community At Risk Of Collapse”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 12 Nov '15

12 Nov '15

HP’s CTO Martin Fink gave the closing keynote at the recent LinuxCon Europe conference. He argued that the proliferation of open-source software licences is (once again) having a bad effect on the health of software projects <http://lwn.net/Articles/660428/>. That much would not be so controversial, except he also claims that the use of non-copyleft “permissive” licences is adding to the problem. He justifies his argument thus: The Apache 2.0 license is currently the most widely used "permissive" license. But the thing that developers overlook when adopting it, he said, is that by using Apache they are also making a choice about how much work they will have to put into building any sort of community around the project. If you look at Apache-licensed projects, he noted, "you'll find that they are very top-heavy with 'governance' structures." Technical committees, working groups, and various boards, he said, are needed to make such projects function. But if you look at copyleft projects, he added, you find that those structures simply are not needed. The difference stems from the fact that in Apache-licensed projects, "you've always got people who are trying to go off and do their own proprietary thing." That makes their contributions to the open-source project difficult to integrate and often at odds with other participants. In a copyleft project, such as the kernel, "there is no incentive to try and carve out your own little area." As a result, contributors just do their work and the project advances. Certainly this statement of his is beyond dispute: “Copyleft is a simple, good thing: share and share alike.”

1 0

Multics vs Unix
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 12 Nov '15

12 Nov '15

I’ve been reading the introductory “Multics Concepts and Utilization” book <http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/honeywell/multics/F01_multicsIntroCo…> over at Bitsavers. Multics (the “MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service”) was, for its time, an extremely ambitious operating system project. It was first introduced in 1965, in the form of a series of papers at the AFIPS Fall Joint Computer Conference of that year <http://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/afips/1965/5066/00/index.html>. Of course, it took far too long (7 years) to reach production quality. In that time, a small group of researchers at AT&T Bell Labs grew tired of waiting, and decided to create their own, less ambitious system, which they called “UNIX” as a tongue-in-cheek homage to “Multics”. And the rest, as they say, is history. But, nevertheless, Multics remained an influential system. There are even some present-day fans of it gathered at <http://multicians.org/>. Apparently they have got the OS booting on an emulator of the original GE 645 hardware. Though it was mostly written in a high-level language (PL/I), Multics was never a portable OS; to support its advanced virtual-memory and security features, it required special processor hardware support which was not common in those days. Even today, Multics has some features which can be considered innovative and uncommon. It may be true that, for example, SELinux can match all of its security capabilities and more. But some aspects of its file-protection system seem, to me, to make sharing of data between users a bit easier than your typical Linux/POSIX-type system. For a start, there seems to be no concept of file “ownership” as such. Or even of POSIX-style file protection modes (read/write/execute for owner/group/world). Instead, all file and directory access is controlled via access-control lists (ACLs). Directories have a permission called “modify”, which effectively gives a matching entity (user, group, process) owner-type rights over that directory; except that more than one entity can have that permission at once. Thus, a group of users working on a common project can all be given this “modify” access to a shared directory for that project, allowing them all to put data there, read it back again, control access to it, delete it etc on a completely equal basis. Contrast this with POSIX/Linux, where every file has to have exactly one owner; even if they create that file in a shared directory, it still gives the creating user a special status over that file, that others with write access to the containing directory do not have. (Multics also offers a separate “append” permission, that allows the possessor to create an item in a directory, without having the ability to remove an item once it’s there.) One radical idea introduced in Unix was its profligate use of multiple processes. Every new command you executed (except for the ones built into the shell) required the creation of a new process, often several processes. Other OSes tended to look askance at this; it seemed somehow wasteful, perhaps even sinful to spawn so many processes so readily and discard them so casually. The more conventional approach was to create a single process at user login, and execute nearly all commands within the context of that. There were special commands for explicitly creating additional processes (e.g. for background command execution), but such process creation did not simply happen as a matter of course. Gradually, over time, the limitations of the single-process approach became too much to ignore, and the versatility of the Unix approach won over (nearly) everybody. Multics, however, is of the old school. More than that, the process even preserves global state, including static storage, in-between runs of programs, and this applies across different programs, not just reruns of the same one. For example, in FORTRAN, there is the concept of a “common block”. If you run two different programs that both refer to the same common block, then the second one will see values left in the block by the first one. To completely reinitialize everything, you need to invoke the “new_proc” command, which effectively deletes your process and gives you a fresh one. One common irritation I find on POSIX/Linux systems is the convention that every directory has to have an entry called “.”, pointing to itself, and one called “..”, pointing to its parent. This way these names can be used in relative pathnames to reach any point in the directory hierarchy. But surely it is unnecessary to have explicit entries for these names cluttering up every directory; why not just build their recognition as a special case into the pathname-parsing logic in the kernel, once and for all? That way, directory-traversal routines in user programs don’t have to be specially coded to look for, and skip these entries, every single time. Multics doesn’t seem to have this problem. An absolute pathname begins with “>” (which is the separator for pathname components, equivalent to POSIX “/”), while a relative pathname doesn’t. Furthermore, a relative pathname can begin with one or more “<” characters, indicating the corresponding number of steps up from the current working directory. Unlike POSIX “..”, you can’t have “<” characters in the middle of the pathname, which is probably not a big loss. It is interesting to see other features which are nearly, but not quite, the same as, corresponding features in Unix. For example, there is a search path for executables, to save you typing the entire pathname to run the program. However, this does not seem as flexible as the $PATH environment-variable convention observed by Unix/POSIX shells. In particular, it does not seem possible to remove the current directory from the search path, which we now know can be a security risk. Another one is the concept of “active functions” and “active strings”. These allow you to perform substitutions of dynamically-computed values into a command line. However, they are not as general as the Unix/POSIX concept of “command substitution”, where an entire shell command can supply its output to be interpolated into another command. Instead of having a completely separate vocabulary of “active functions” which can only be used for such substitutions, Unix/POSIX unifies this with the standard set of commands, any of which can be used in this way. There are other features of Multics that others more familiar with it might want to see mentioned (the single-level store concept, where “everything is a memory segment”, versus Unix “everything is a file”? I/O redirection based on “switches”—symbolic references to files, versus Unix integer “file descriptors”?). But then, this long-winded essay would become even longer-winded :). So if you are interested in this particular piece of computing history, feel free to follow up the links above. In summary, Multics is very much a museum piece, not something you would want to use today for regular work—not in its original form. But I think there are still one or two ideas there that we could usefully copy and adapt to a present-day OS, particularly a versatile one like Linux.

1 1

Does The TPP Allow Prohibition Of The GPL?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 12 Nov '15

12 Nov '15

Some are suggesting that article 14.17 of the TPP, which begins “No Party shall require the transfer of, or access to, source code of software owned by a person of another Party...”, could be interpreted to override the requirement of the GPL to provide source code. <http://lwn.net/Articles/663817/>

1 0

File-encrypting ransomware starts targeting Linux Web servers
by Peter Reutemann 12 Nov '15

12 Nov '15

"Malware researchers from Russian antivirus vendor Doctor Web have recently discovered a new malware program for Linux-based systems that they've dubbed Linux.Encoder.1." -- source: http://www.linuxtoday.com/security/file-encrypting-ransomware-starts-target… 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 3

Unhashable: Why Fingerprints Are Weaker Security Than Passwords
by Peter Reutemann 11 Nov '15

11 Nov '15

"Fingerprints aren't terribly secure; you leave them on almost everything you touch. Many people won't realize that fingerprints can be captured and reproduced from casual photographs. It's actually worse than that. The very method with which fingerprints are stored is much weaker than passwords. Fingerprints cannot be hashed. By their very nature, each read of your fingerprint will be a little different, which breaks the hashing method. They can only be stored using encryption, which requires the same master password each time a new print read is compared to the stored key — a much weaker method than salted hashes. This more easily opens fingerprint credentials up to theft and brute forcing." -- source: http://it.slashdot.org/story/15/11/10/228223 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 5

SUSE Leap reviewed
by Ian Young 10 Nov '15

10 Nov '15

Thanks for the interesting review. But you didn't say whether NetworkManager was functional. Just joshing :) I'm going to assume it does work because lightning couldn't strike twice right? And you didn't mention Fluxbox. I seem to recall it was once an option. Or am I thinking of FVWM?

1 0

OpenSUSE Leap 42.1 Released
by Peter Reutemann 09 Nov '15

09 Nov '15

"In what they're calling the first "hybrid" distribution release, the openSUSE project have announced the availability of openSUSE Leap 42.1. Built on a core of SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 SP1 packages but including an up-to-date userspace (KDE Plasma 5.4.2, GNOME 3.16, and many other DEs), Leap aims to provide a stable middle ground between enterprise releases which are quickly out of date, and the sometimes unstable community distros. DVD/USB or Network Install ISOs are available for download now. For those who do prefer the bleeding edge, the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling-release distribution is also available." -- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/11/05/0246248 Sounds like an interesting concept... 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

Creative Commons case study on William Mckee
by William Mckee 06 Nov '15

06 Nov '15

Hello, Creative Commons NZ did a case study on me. It mentions my Linux usage for creating artwork. Here is the article: http://nzcommons.org.nz/artist-william-mckee-discusses-creative-commons-ope… Cheers, William.

2 1

Latest SUSE
by Ian Young 06 Nov '15

06 Nov '15

This sounds good -- but does NetworkManager work? It would be interesting to find out. I had problems with an earlier SUSE version as I mentioned at a LUG meeting. If anyone has an iso I would like a copy. ~ Ian Y

2 1

unbreakable encryption may be illegal
by Ian Young 03 Nov '15

03 Nov '15

Some may not have seen this, presumably by now as seen on TV and across the web. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/11970391/Interne…

3 2

The World’s Most Frustrating Linux Install
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 03 Nov '15

03 Nov '15

Following on from their attempt to crowdsource a Pokemon game session, video-streaming site Twitch has now tried the same for an installation of Arch Linux. Guess which was the most popular command people tried to enter? <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/02/crowdsourced_linux_installation_cri…>

1 0

Hacking tool swipes encrypted credentials from password manager
by Peter Reutemann 02 Nov '15

02 Nov '15

"Using a password manager is one of the biggest ways that average computer users can keep their online accounts secure, but their protection is pretty much meaningless when an end user's computer is compromised. Underscoring this often ignored truism is a recently released hacking tool that silently decrypts all user names, passwords, and notes stored by the KeePass password manager and writes them to a file. KeeFarce, as the tool has been dubbed, targets KeePass, but there's little stopping developers from designing similar apps that target virtually every other password manager available today. Hackers and professional penetration testers can run it on computers that they have already taken control of. When it runs on a computer where a logged in user has the KeePass database unlocked, KeeFarce decrypts the entire database and writes it to a file that the hacker can easily access." -- source: http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/11/hacking-tool-swipes-encrypted-crede… 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 4.3 Released As Stable; Improves On Open-Source Graphics, SMP Performance
by Peter Reutemann 02 Nov '15

02 Nov '15

"The Linux 4.3 kernel was released as stable today. The Linux 4.3 kernel brings Intel Skylake support, reworked NVIDIA open-source graphics support, and many other changes with the code count hitting 20.6 million lines of code." -- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/11/02/0130233 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

EFF Asks Appeals Court To "Shut Down the Eastern District of Texas"
by Peter Reutemann 02 Nov '15

02 Nov '15

'The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge have asked a federal appeals court to make big changes to the rules governing venue in patent cases. The two public interest groups are seeking to file an amicus brief (PDF) which attacks the Eastern District of Texas as being one of the "most notorious situations of forum shopping in recent history."' -- source: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/11/01/0239203 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

GNU Hurd 0.7 and GNU Mach 1.6 Released
by Peter Reutemann 02 Nov '15

02 Nov '15

"Halloween brought us GNU Hurd 0.7, GNU Mach 1.6, and GNU MIG 1.6. The new Hurd comes with filesystem driver improvements, provides a new rpcscan utility, and the Hurd code has been ported to work with newer versions of GCC and GNU C Library. The Mach microkernel has updates for compiler compatibility, improvements to the lock debugging infrastructure, the kernel now lets non-privileged users write to a small amount of memory, timestamps are now kept relative to boot time, and there are various bugfixes. MIG 1.6 is a small update which improves compatibility with newer dialects of C programming language. Specific details on all of the updates can be found in the full release announcement." -- source: http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/11/01/1333247 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

This 11-year-old is selling cryptographically secure passwords for $2 each
by Peter Reutemann 29 Oct '15

29 Oct '15

"We now live in a world where a New York City sixth grader is making money selling strong passwords. Earlier this month, Mira Modi, 11, began a small business at dicewarepasswords.com, where she generates six-word Diceware passphrases by hand." -- source: http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/10/this-11-year-old-is-selling-cryptog… 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

Official, Customized Raspberry Pi Versions Coming Soon
by Peter Reutemann 27 Oct '15

27 Oct '15

"The immensely popular Raspberry Pi will soon be offered in customized versions, through an exclusive arrangement between Raspberry Pi Trading and Element14. According to the companies' announcement, Element14 will provide design and manufacturing services to OEM customers to create 'bespoke designs' based upon the Raspberry Pi technology platform. That's weird U.K. English for saying that contracts for creating customized Raspberry Pi SBCs will entail substantial NRE fees and 3,000 to 5,000 unit orders, depending on the nature of the customization. The tweaked Pi's are likely to have revised board layouts, additional or alternative functions, interfaces, connectors, and memory configurations, and more. A handful of unsanctioned Raspberry Pi knock-offs have already appeared over the past couple of years, including various Orange Pi and Banana Pi flavors, which certainly didn't involve any 'bespeaking.' More info is at Element14's CustomPi page." -- source: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/10/27/1211234 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

FSF-certified laptop
by Ian Young 27 Oct '15

27 Oct '15

This may be of interest to some. Not sure I want to try this at home except with a machine I don't mind turning into a brick. http://www.fsf.org/news/now-fsf-cerified-to-respect-your-freedom-taurinus-x…

2 1

Intel Develops Linux 'Software GPU' That's ~29-51x Faster
by Peter Reutemann 20 Oct '15

20 Oct '15

"Intel is open-sourcing their work on creating a high-performance graphics software rasterizer that originally was developed for scientific visualizations. Intel is planning to integrate this new OpenSWR project with Mesa to deploy it on the Linux desktop as a faster software rasterizer than what's currently available (LLVMpipe). OpenSWR should be ideal for cases where there isn't a discrete GPU available or the drivers fail to function. This software rasterizer implements OpenGL 3.2 on Intel/AMD CPUs supporting AVX(2) (Sandy Bridge / Bulldozer and newer) while being 29~51x faster than LLVMpipe and the code is MIT licensed. The code prior to being integrated in Mesa is offered on GitHub." -- source: http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/10/20/2213215 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

Use GNURoot to install a GNU/Linux distribution on your Android device
by Peter Reutemann 20 Oct '15

20 Oct '15

"How many times have you been on the go and discovered that you needed to pull off some Linux-fu, but the only piece of tech you had was an Android device? Imagine if you were able to fire up a Linux command prompt on that device and make use of apt-get to install whatever command line tool you needed. Wget? No problem. Traceroute? Yes. Ssh? Absolutely. Just about any tool you can install on Linux, you can install within Android. Even some graphical apps will work (even though command line tools work best)." -- source: http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/use-gnuroot-to-install-a-gnulinux-… 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 Publishes OpenSSH For Windows Code
by Peter Reutemann 20 Oct '15

20 Oct '15

"Microsoft has published early source code for its OpenSSH-for-Windows port for developers to pick apart and improve. In a blog post on Monday, Steve Lee – the PowerShell team's principal software engineer manager – said Redmond has finished early work on a Windows port of OpenSSH 7.1, built in a joint-effort with NoMachine. Their rough roadmap from here: 1) Leverage Windows crypto APIs instead of OpenSSL/LibreSSL and run as Windows Service. 2) Address POSIX compatibility concerns. 3) Stabilize the code and address reported issues. 4) Production quality release." -- source: http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/10/20/1925226 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

AGM?
by Peter Reutemann 20 Oct '15

20 Oct '15

Hi everyone I'm proposing this year's AGM to take place on November 23rd, usual place at uni, MS4.G.02. Agenda: - President's Report - Treasurer's Report - Election of 2016 Committee - Consumption of pizza Any comments or things to add to the agenda? 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 1

meeting next Monday
by Peter Reutemann 20 Oct '15

20 Oct '15

Hi everyone Due to exams starting next week, we don't have access to our usual meeting room up at uni. Therefore we'll just meet at the The Cook for a drink next Monday to discuss all things Linux and Open-Source! More details here: http://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/225544297/ 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

Fwd: [NZLUG] Linux Lite banned from TradeMe
by Peter Reutemann 20 Oct '15

20 Oct '15

Apologies, if you've received this already. Cheers, Peter ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: philip Date: Tue, Oct 20, 2015 at 12:09 AM Subject: Re: [NZLUG] Linux Lite banned from TradeMe To: nzlug(a)lists.nzoss.org.nz On Wed, 2015-10-14 at 08:32 +1300, Volker Kuhlmann wrote: > In Europe there is a good chance that it would be recognised that a > business like trademe is practically a monopoly, and anti-competitive > behaviour does not go down well with authorities with company > policies > not carrying much weight. E.g. google is permanently under > investigation > for something. > > In New Zealand trademe is essentially a monopoly, and they are > hindering > legitimate local businesses. (Isn't Johnny keen on local business, or > is > that only when overseas companies grease him up first?) You could try > complaining on those grounds, but the commerce commission is not > often > useful. > > Until things change use a better trading platform than tardme, and > don't > waste your time discussing anything with them, their back pockets are > far too fat to need to pay attention to you. > > Volker >From Jerry. Got a call from TradeMe today and they are happy to allow linux distributions to be listed again. This of course goes hand in hand with a pending policy wording review/change. Phil. _______________________________________________ NZLUG mailing list NZLUG(a)lists.nzoss.org.nz http://lists.nzoss.org.nz/mailman/listinfo/nzlug -- 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

Celebrating 20 Years of OpenBSD With Release 5.8
by Peter Reutemann 19 Oct '15

19 Oct '15

"20 years to the day after the OpenBSD source tree was created for the new project, the project has released OpenBSD 5.8, the 38th release on CD-ROM (and 39th via FTP/HTTP). This release comes with four release songs instead of the usual one, and a long list of improvements over the last releases." "(Probably a good time to donate to the project, too, even if you don't use it directly, because of all the security improvements that OpenBSD programmers contribute to the world.)" -- source: http://bsd.slashdot.org/story/15/10/18/1617256 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

GDrive - opens-source and command-line to the rescue
by Peter Reutemann 18 Oct '15

18 Oct '15

Hi everyone For some reason, my GDrive no longer allows me to download files, it simply doesn't do anything beyond the "scanning for viruses" screen. Fed up with that, I had a look around and came across the following open source project (Apache 2 licensed): https://github.com/odeke-em/drive There are instructions on how to install it straight from source: http://www.howopensource.com/2015/01/google-drive-for-ubuntu-linux/ But you can also install it from a repository, which I came across here: https://github.com/odeke-em/drive/wiki/PPA-Download-Stats Install ppa and tool: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:twodopeshaggy/drive sudo apt-get install drive One-off initialization of the synchronization directory (choose whatever location you like): drive init ~/gdrive cd gdrive gdrive pull Check out the command-line help: drive or drive help 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

Pbtech selling intel compute stick with Ubuntu
by William Mckee 16 Oct '15

16 Oct '15

Today I recieved an email from pbtech and was happy to see an ad for an intel compute stick running Ubuntu. It's cheaper than the windows model! Here's a link to the product - http://www.pbtech.co.nz/index.php?z=p&p=MBDINT10000&name=Intel-Compute-Stic… Of course the first thing I would do is remove Ubuntu and install Debian. Cheers, William

4 3

Comments On “Junk your IT. Now. Before it drags you under”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 16 Oct '15

16 Oct '15

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/15/junk_your_it_now_before_it_drags_yo…> says: “Our computers, he argued, have become more complex and less reliable.” Yes, they have become more complex, but no, they haven’t become less reliable. Consider this paper <https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/retro.ps> from 1977 by Dennis Ritchie, entitled “The UNIX Time-sharing System—A Retrospective”: it says “the typical period between software crashes (depending somewhat on how much tinkering with the system has been going on recently) is well over a fortnight of continuous operation”. Today, our Linux servers can have uptimes measured in months or even years. I can remember in the 1990s, there was a big gulf between the hardware reliability of commodity PCs and more expensive “workstations” or “servers”. Remember, those were the days when powerful, multitasking, multiuser OSes with proper memory protection, like Linux, the BSDs, the ones carrying the “Unix” brand, and Windows NT, were just starting to be able to run on commodity PC hardware. And the result was a lot of hardware crashes. Nowadays, there is no longer this great difference in hardware reliability. The main difference with servers is inclusion of management features (e.g. hot-swap bays, remote consoles), not the quality of the hardware.

1 0

Walmart To Open-Source Its Cloud-Portability Code
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 16 Oct '15

16 Oct '15

Walmart has developed a middleware layer, called “OneOps”, which apparently allows it to move its applications between different cloud service providers. It now says it is going to offer that software as Open Source <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/15/walmart_opensources_its_cloudhoppin…>. When? “before the end of the year”.

2 1

The Kool Desktop Environment (KDE) Turns 19, Happy Birthday!
by Peter Reutemann 15 Oct '15

15 Oct '15

"Believe it or not, the KDE desktop environment turned 19 years old on October 14, 2015. Yes, it has been 19 long years since Matthias Ettrich announced his new project, the Kool Desktop Environment (KDE)." -- source: http://linux.softpedia.com/blog/the-kool-desktop-environment-kde-turns-19-h… 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

BeagleBoard-x15 to arrive in time for holiday hacking
by Peter Reutemann 15 Oct '15

15 Oct '15

"BeagleBoard.org has provided some new details, including PCIe support, for its dual-core Cortex-A15 BeagleBoard-X15 SBC, which is due by December for $239." -- source: http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/beagleboard-x15-to-arrive-in-time-… 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

Is There Space For Open Hardware In Networking?
by Peter Reutemann 14 Oct '15

14 Oct '15

"Open hardware has got much attention with the advent of Raspberry Pi, Arduino and their respective clones. But most of the devices are focused either on tinkerers (Arduino) or most notably multimedia (Raspberry Pi). However, there is not much happening in other areas such as home routers where openness might help improve security and drive progress. Our company (non-profit) is trying to change this with Turris Omnia but we still wander if there is in fact demand for such devices. Is the market large enough and the area cool enough? Are there enough people who would value open hardware running open software even with a higher price tag? Any feedback would be most valued." -- source: http://ask.slashdot.org/story/15/10/13/191202 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

Geriatric Linux: How an 'old geezer' came to terms with computers
by Peter Reutemann 14 Oct '15

14 Oct '15

"I was born in 1933, so computers weren't something I grew up with. In fact, neither was TV, atomic energy, or even jet planes. For my first 70 years I had neither the need nor the desire to become involved with computers." -- source: http://opensource.com/life/15/9/my-linux-story-emery-fletcher 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

Wayland Ported To DragonFlyBSD
by Peter Reutemann 13 Oct '15

13 Oct '15

"Wayland 1.9 and the reference Weston compositor have been ported to DragonFlyBSD. Significant changes were made to get Wayland/Weston running, and you must either already be running an X.Org Server or be using the Linux-ported Radeon and Intel kernel mode-setting drivers, plus jump through a few setup steps." -- source: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/10/13/1859232 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

Fwd: [NZLUG] Linux Lite banned from TradeMe
by Peter Reutemann 12 Oct '15

12 Oct '15

Apologies, if you've received this already. Cheers, Peter ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: philip Date: Mon, Oct 12, 2015 at 6:31 PM Subject: [NZLUG] Linux Lite banned from TradeMe To: nzlug <nzlug(a)lists.nzoss.org.nz> Hi folks, Jerry Bezencon, the author of the Linux Lite distribution has had his distribution banned from TradeMe. Jerry has put the correspondence on the Linux Lite forums. https://www.linuxliteos.com/forums/on-topic/linux-lite-banned-as-free-s oftware-from-trademe Jerry has been given the same run around that Copyleft was given a few years ago when it was thrown off TradeMe. I had explained about Free Software, Project Gutenberg, and that eBay allowing Linux sales. All I got was "it was against policy blah blah blah" – despite the fact that TradeMe's policy did not cover FLOSS. A burnt Official Debian Disc is the original disc. Or worse, in Jerry's case he is selling his own work and that he owns the original copyright on his work. Applying Hanlon's razor. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". eBay.com.au runs Apache (FLOSS), so management has been educated by its techies about free software, how it works and the environment in which it works. So Linux sales are permitted. IMHO the root of the problem lies in the techie area of TradeMe. When I checked a few years ago I found that TradeMe was a Microsoft shop (os info is not available now). TradeMe has Microsoft techies and so management remains ignorant and open to FUD about FLOSS. OnOffer is also a Microsoft shop and has similar restrictions. Let's make waves. Phil. -- Philip Charles; 39a Paterson Street, Abbotsford, Dunedin, New Zealand +64 3 488 2818 Fax +64 3 488 2875 Mobile 027 663 4453 philipc(a)copyleft.co.nz - personal. info(a)copyleft.co.nz - business _______________________________________________ NZLUG mailing list NZLUG(a)lists.nzoss.org.nz http://lists.nzoss.org.nz/mailman/listinfo/nzlug -- 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

android-x86 marches onward in v5 alpha
by Ian Young 07 Oct '15

07 Oct '15

For anyone who may like this sort of thing and not seen this announcement. Sounds like some interesting progress. https://sites.google.com/a/android-x86.org/web/releases/releasenote-5-1-rc1 Key Features The 5.1-rc1 release is based on the Android 5.1.1_r24. We added many x86 specified code and fixed issues to let the system runs smoothly on x86 platforms, especially for netbooks or tablets. The key features contain Supports 64-bit kernel and userspace, as well as 32-bit system. Update kernel to 4.0.9. Enable OpenGL ES hardware acceleration for Intel/AMD(radeon/radeonsi)/Nvidia(nouveau) chipsets. Support booting from UEFI and installing to UEFI disk. Be able to install to ext4/ext3/ext2/ntfs/fat32 filesystems via a text based GUI installer. Support Multi-touch, Audio, Wifi, Bluetooth, Sensors, Camera and Ethernet (DHCP only). Auto-mount external usb drive and sdcard with filesystem vfat/ntfs/exfat/ext4. Support VM including Qemu, VirtualBox and VMware. Support foreign archs (arm / arm64) via the native bridge mechanism. (Settings -> Apps Compatibility)

1 0

Ubuntu Plans To Make ZFS File-System Support Standard On Linux
by Peter Reutemann 07 Oct '15

07 Oct '15

'Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth revealed today that they're planning to make ZFS standard on Ubuntu. They are planning to include ZFS file-system as "standard in due course," but no details were revealed beyond that. However, ZFS On Linux contributor Richard Yao has said they do plan on including it in their kernel for 16.04 LTS and the GPL vs. CDDL license worries aren't actually a problem. Many Linux users have been wanting ZFS on Linux, but aside from the out of tree module there hasn't been any luck in including it in the mainline kernel or with tier-one Linux distributions due to license differences.' -- source: http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/10/06/210202 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

Matthew Garrett Forks the Linux Kernel
by Peter Reutemann 07 Oct '15

07 Oct '15

'Just like Sarah Sharp, Linux developer Matthew Garrett has gotten fed up with the unprofessional development culture surrounding the kernel. "I remember having to deal with interminable arguments over the naming of an interface because Linus has an undying hatred of BSD securelevel, or having my name forever associated with the deepthroating of Microsoft because Linus couldn't be bothered asking questions about the reasoning behind a design before trashing it," Garrett writes. He has chosen to go his own way, and has forked the Linux kernel and added patches that implement a BSD-style securelevel interface. Over time it is expected to pick up some of the power management code that Garrett is working on, and we shall see where it goes from there.' -- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/10/06/1553233 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

Ditch Linux For Windows 10 On Your Raspberry Pi With Microsoft's IoT Kit
by Peter Reutemann 29 Sep '15

29 Sep '15

'Partnering with Adafruit, Microsoft has announced the Windows IoT Core Starter Kit. The $75 kit comes comes with an SD card preloaded with Windows 10 IoT. According to the Raspberry Pi blog: "The pack is available with a Pi 2 for people who are are new to Raspberry Pi or who'd like a dedicated device for their projects, or without one for those who'll be using a Pi they already own. The box contains an SD card with Windows 10 Core and a case, power supply, wifi module and Ethernet cable for your Pi; a breadboard, jumper wires and components including LEDs, potentiometers and switches; and sensors for light, colour, temperature and pressure. There's everything you need to start building."' -- source: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/09/28/1949211 Looks like it wasn't vaporware after all. But I'm not gonna replace the Linux on my RPis. Especially not since I can have a full-blown Linux OS on it rather than some stripped down Windows version. :-) 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 Life And Death Of A Laptop Battery
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 27 Sep '15

27 Sep '15

<http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_life_and_death_of_a_laptop_batte…> “Why are my laptop batteries always dying in a year or two, while the batteries of space probes and satellites keep working year after year. If we are to believe Battery University, the cause is me charging the battery whenever I have a chance, and the fix is to not charge the Lithium-ion batteries to 100% all the time, but to stay below 90% of full charge most of the time.” ... “Is there a good and generic way with Linux to tell the battery to stop charging at 80%, unless requested to charge to 100% once in preparation for a longer trip?”

1 0

LibreSSL Gets Rid Of SSL
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 25 Sep '15

25 Sep '15

LibreSSL (a fork of OpenSSL created after the security scandals over the latter) has now got rid of all versions of the protocol called “SSL” (“Secure Sockets Layer”) <http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LibreSSL-2.3-Released>. The official name of current versions of the protocol used for secure HTTP connections (among other things) is “TLS” (“Transport Layer Security”).

1 0

Why Ad Blockers Could Be A Good Thing
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 25 Sep '15

25 Sep '15

A posting <https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/golden/has-apple-doomed-ads-on-the-web-w…> on “Freedom To Tinker”, which is part of my regular reading, talks about the potential implications of more widespread use of ad-blocker plugins in Web browsers. Not quite triggering an “arms race” of ad-blocker-blockers, and so on: If the use of these plugins becomes ubiquitous, only one thing would have to change – the publishers would have to insert the line of code in some way on the server side, and the ad would just look as though it came with the rest of the page. At that point, the browser plugin is useless. What would be the knock-on effects of this? The ad companies no longer have any way to track users as they move around the web. Absent some way on the ad companies’ part to implement a cross-site evercookie (which would be considered unethical and would quickly be blocked by browser authors if discovered), the ad companies will no longer have a way to connect users on one site to users on another. The ads you’d see on a given site could be based solely on the interactions you’ve had with that one site – which would be a boon to privacy. So rather than becoming worse, the ads would actually take on a less creepy form.

1 0

PatchSee Ethernet Cables
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 23 Sep '15

23 Sep '15

The unique selling point is the special LED tool that, when plugged in to one end, lights up the other end. So you can tell where your cables run without having to colour-code or label them. But is it worth the cost? <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PETJpmxiyOY>

1 0

Copying from a pdf, removing EOL and spaces
by Roderick Aldridge 23 Sep '15

23 Sep '15

Hi everyone I want to copy an extract from a .pdf file. When I select some text to copy and paste it puts each word followed by two spaces on a separate line. Do you know a better way to extract some text from a .pdf? Alternatively what is an easy way to remove the space and EOL to reformat the text in a readable format? I am sure there are several, but I would appreciate a really easy one. TIA Roderick

2 3

WLUG meeting next Monday
by Peter Reutemann 22 Sep '15

22 Sep '15

Hi everyone We have a WLUG meeting coming up next Monday: "Hieu Trinh will talk about how to use a Raspberry Pi for sorting fruit." More details: http://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/223612685/ According to Hieu, his presentation will be a short one, so if you have something else from the world of Linux/Open Source, then please let me know and I'll add it. Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 1

Keith Packard On X11
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 19 Sep '15

19 Sep '15

A half-hour talk from “Mr X11” himself, Keith Packard <http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KeithP-Sustaining-X>. Notable points: * The original MIT X Consortium was dominated by the proprietary UNIX workstation vendors, who were all trying to lock in their own customers into their own ways of doing things. These “UNIX Wars” led to the whole workstation market imploding, letting Microsoft take over with Windows NT. * XFree86 was, in the beginning, like a “rebel alliance”, trying to bring X11 to commodity PC hardware. They were shunned for many years by the X Consortium. Of course this changed after all the UNIX vendors went under. Later, the revitalized X Consortium became a home for the X11 developer community which left the inflexibilities of the XFree86 corporate organization behind. * Over the last decade, the X server has become less and less of an operating system in its own right. Hardware-specific graphics drivers have been moved into the Linux kernel, leaving the X userland code to focus on the hardware-independent implementation layers. * Programs written to work with X11 nearly thirty years ago still work today. Even with all the reorganization and rewrites, X11 still remains fully backward-compatible. Which is more than Microsoft Windows can manage. * Keith made it clear he prefers GPL-style (copyleft/sharealike) licences to MIT/BSD style ones. Net contributors of code tend to prefer the former, while net consumers of code (those who don’t want to give back to the community) tend to favour the latter. In other words, freeloaders.

1 0

Microsoft Linux
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 18 Sep '15

18 Sep '15

Microsoft’s “Azure Cloud Switch” is a “a cross-platform modular operating system for data center networking built on Linux”. <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/18/microsoft_has_developed_its_own_lin…>

1 0

Dell Reportedly Shipping Ubuntu-Based Linux On 40%+ Of PCs In China
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 15 Sep '15

15 Sep '15

<http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Dell-China-40-Linux> As the article admits, it is common for a pirated copy of Windows to be installed on such machines after the fact. However, as a commenter points out, these machines still officially count as sales of desktop Linux regardless.

2 1

fxload - EZ USB loading firmware
by Peter Reutemann 14 Sep '15

14 Sep '15

Hi everyone I'm currently playing around with a Digilent Atlys Board for recording video: http://code.timvideos.us/home/ However, I've hit a snag in flashing the device, mainly because I can't find an up-to-date "fxload" executable. According to the documentation, the one that comes with Ubuntu is too old. But, the alternative downloads mentioned below for fxload and fx2loader no longer exist: https://github.com/timvideos/HDMI2USB/wiki/Digilent-Atlys-Board:-Loading-Fi… https://github.com/timvideos/HDMI2USB/wiki/Digilent-Atlys-Board:-Loading-Fi… Anyone an idea where to get an fxload of at least this version? Mar 12 2013 (development) Thanks. 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 2

Linux 4.3 Bringing Stable Intel Skylake Support, Reworked NVIDIA Driver
by Peter Reutemann 13 Sep '15

13 Sep '15

'Mr. Torvalds has released Linux 4.3-rc1 this weekend. He characterized the release as "not particularly small — pretty average in size, in fact. Everything looks fairly normal, in fact, with about 70% of the changes being drivers, 10% architecture updates, and the remaining 20% are spread out." There are a number of new user-facing features including stabilized Intel "Skylake" processor support, initial AMD R9 Fury graphics support, SMP scheduler optimizations, file-system fixes, a reworked open-source NVIDIA driver, and many Linux hardware driver updates.' -- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/09/13/1521216 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

Stopping A Command-Line Loop
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 12 Sep '15

12 Sep '15

I was playing a bunch of several dozen MP3 files in sequence using a command like for f in *.mp3; do ffplay -autoexit "$f"; done Then half-way through I decided to stop it. Trouble was, every time I hit CTRL/C, it killed the playback of the current MP3 file, but the loop just went on to the next one. Finally I hit CTRL/Z. This suspended the entire command, putting it in the background, and returned me to the command prompt. Then I was able to type kill %1 to kill the background job. In future, I will remember to use a command more like for f in *.mp3; do ffplay -autoexit "$f" || break; done This terminates the loop if the playback of a file aborts with an error.

1 0

LibreOffice 5.0.2 to Feature a Lot of DOCX Fixes
by Peter Reutemann 11 Sep '15

11 Sep '15

"Usually, maintenance releases are all about fixes, and the same can be said about the 5.0.2 version. From the looks of it, it's going to be bigger than the 5.0.1 version, which landed just last week. The first RC in the series incorporates a huge number of changes and various fixes that will definitely make this office suite even better." -- source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/libreoffice-5-0-2-to-feature-a-lot-of-docx-f… Article also contains info on how to install this version (ppa + download). 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

UK Government Offering Detailed Guides On ODF Adoption
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 10 Sep '15

10 Sep '15

After selecting ODF 1.2 last year as its standard format for editable documents, the UK Government has gone a step further to explain exactly how this standard is going to be implemented <http://arstechnica.co.uk/business/2015/09/uk-government-backs-away-from-mic…>. A long way from the days when the US state of Massachusetts tried to do something similar, only to have its IT division outmaneouvred by backroom dealing <http://www.computerworld.com/article/2553645/enterprise-applications/inside…>.

1 0

“Linux PC Repair”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 09 Sep '15

09 Sep '15

Clicked on one of those “You may need to fix Windows errors” ad links, just for fun. Took me to a page that says “System Information: Your machine is currently running: Linux. Reimage PC Repair is compatible with your operating system”. And there is a link to download an .exe file... And on the rest of the page: “Designed for: Windows XP, Vista , 7 , 8 , 8.1 & 10”, “Using Microsoft Technologies”, “McAfee Secure”, “Norton Secured”, blah-blah-blah...

4 3

Raspberry Pi now has a $60 7-inch touchscreen display
by Peter Reutemann 09 Sep '15

09 Sep '15

"The Raspberry Pi Foundation today announced a touchscreen display for the small computer, on sale for $60 (or £48 in the UK). The display has an 800×480 resolution, 10-finger capacitive touch capability, and an adapter board that is used both to power the display and connect to the Raspberry Pi with a DSI ribbon cable. Using DSI keeps the Pi's HDMI port free, so people can use both the small touchscreen display and a big monitor or TV simultaneously. Some assembly is required, but later versions will come fully assembled." -- source: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/09/raspberry-pi-now-has-… 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: data stolen from hacked bug database was used to attack Firefox
by Peter Reutemann 09 Sep '15

09 Sep '15

"An attacker stole security-sensitive vulnerability information from the Mozilla's Bugzilla bug tracking system and probably used it to attack Firefox users, the maker of the open-source Firefox browser warned Friday." -- source: http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/09/mozilla-data-stolen-from-hacked-bug… 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 Release of the Trinity Desktop Environment
by Peter Reutemann 06 Sep '15

06 Sep '15

'A new release of the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) is out. TDE is "a computer desktop environment for Unix-like operating systems with a primary goal of retaining the function and form of traditional desktop computers" which translates into a fully functional KDE 3 style Desktop. Something is missing in the new generation of desktop environments, since some people (perhaps more than "some") feel at home with Gnome 2 or KDE i3. They have repositories for Debian and Ubuntu-based distros. I'm now using it on Ubuntu 15.04, amazed about how well-planned things were in the previous generation of DE. We may have gained some things with Gnome 3 and Plasma 5, but we lost a lot of good features too. TDE brings them back' -- source: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/09/06/030222 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

Automating the 3270 part of a Debian System z install
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 04 Sep '15

04 Sep '15

From <http://debblog.philkern.de/2015/08/automating-3270-part-of-debian-system-z.…>: “This will load the alternate kernel parameters file into the card reader, while still loading the original kernel and initrd files.” “(note the 80 character column limit)” Nope, not from the last century, but from the last month. This is how you run Linux on a “modern” IBM mainframe.

1 1

Where to Download the Best Linux Games Without Any Hassle
by Peter Reutemann 02 Sep '15

02 Sep '15

"Not even a decade ago, native gaming on Linux was barely a conceivable reality save for a few open source cross-platform games. Today, it’s clear that the “no games on Linux” myth is dead. Sure, hardcore gamers will probably still choose Windows over Linux, but there’s more than enough evidence that many high-quality games can be played on Linux, and the number of available games is just going to keep increasing." -- source: http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/where-to-download-the-best-linux-g… 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, Google, Amazon, others, aim for royalty-free video codecs
by Peter Reutemann 01 Sep '15

01 Sep '15

"Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Cisco, Intel, Netflix, and Amazon today launched a new consortium, the Alliance for Open Media. The group plans to develop next-generation media formats—including audio and still images, but with video as the top priority—and deliver them as royalty-free open source, suitable for both commercial and noncommercial content." -- source: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/09/microsoft-google-amaz… 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

LILO Development Coming To An End
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 01 Sep '15

01 Sep '15

<http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LILO-Bootloader-EOY> Is anybody still using LILO (the “LInux LOader”)? That was the Linux-specific bootloader from the early days, before GRUB (the “GRand Unified Bootloader”) came on the scene. I remember one difference was that LILO compiled its configuration into the bootloader binary at installation time. That way, if you made any errors in the configuration, you usually discovered that immediately. Whereas with GRUB, you only found this out when your machine failed to boot. Though with GRUB 2 commonplace nowadays, I haven’t felt the need to configure anything as yet. It seems smart enough to figure it out all by itself. :)

1 0

"Hack" Typeface Is Open Source, Easy On the IDEs
by Peter Reutemann 31 Aug '15

31 Aug '15

"Ars Technica writes that "At SourceFoundry.org this week, programmer Chris Simpkins debuted the 2.0 version of Hack, an open-source typeface designed specifically for use in source code." The revamped font is" characterized by a large x-height, wide aperture, and low contrast design in order to be "highly legible" at common coding text sizes," and the font specimen shows how legible it is right down to downright tiny sizes, though Simpkins says the sweet spot is between 8 and 12 pixels. " -- source: http://developers.slashdot.org/story/15/08/30/1733217 Very subtle differences in comparison to "monospace", from a quick comparison: - the dash "-" is longer - the "*" has five points rather than six - the "i" looks more like an "l" (not so sure about this change, though) - the stroke inside the zero is more pronounced Using Hack in a terminal seems a bit clearer than monospace. Here's a howto for Mint on installing a new font: http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/29 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/

4 10

Fake EFF site serving espionage malware was likely active for 3+ weeks
by Peter Reutemann 31 Aug '15

31 Aug '15

"A spear-phishing campaign some researchers say is linked to the Russian government masqueraded as the Electronic Frontier Foundation in an attempt to infect targets with malware that collects passwords and other sensitive data." -- source: http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/08/fake-eff-site-serving-espionage-mal… 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 MAGPI ISSUE 37 - SEPTEMBER 2015
by Peter Reutemann 30 Aug '15

30 Aug '15

Featured in The MagPi Issue 37: * Build a Raspberry Pi digital home Eight projects to build tomorrow’s home, today * Stream live from your PC Use the hottest PC software anywhere in your house * Build a fridge monitor Everyday engineering brought to life with your Pi * Build a computer vision sequencer Mike Cook continues his Pi Bakery project series * The Fallout Pip-Boy How one man made sci-fi fact, just in time for Fallout 4! -- source: https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/issues/37/ PDF can be downloaded for free. 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 NZ Herald’s Data Blog
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 30 Aug '15

30 Aug '15

Discovered this through a mention on the “Media Watch” program on RNZ National <http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch/audio/201762824/min…>. Harkanwal Singh is a “data journalist”, who uses data analysis techniques to put together news stories. His group has already published some interesting analyses, such as broadband affordability, school deciles, traffic crashes and other things. <http://www.nzherald.co.nz/data-blog/news/headlines.cfm?c_id=1503710>

2 1

Linux Kernel 4.2 Released
by Peter Reutemann 30 Aug '15

30 Aug '15

"The Linux 4.2 kernel is now available. This kernel is one of the biggest kernel releases in recent times and introduces rewrites of some of the kernel's Intel Assembly x86 code, new ARM board support, Jitter RNG improvements, queue spinlocks, the new AMDGPU kernel driver, NCQ TRIM handling, F2FS per-file encryption, and many other changes to benefit most Linux users." -- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/08/30/1949211 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

KDE Is Broken In Debian Unstable
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 29 Aug '15

29 Aug '15

Looks like KDE is in the middle of a major transition in Debian Unstable at the moment. Yesterday I did an update on my backup machine, and found that I had no window manager after logging into the GUI. This morning I did another update, and was presented with a new “flat” look after a GUI login. Checking my package versions, I believe I have some parts of KDE 5, but not all (yet). I might do another update this evening. Luckily my backup machine can still fulfil most of its functions without a GUI...

3 10

Learn FPGAs With a $25 Board and Open Source Tools
by Peter Reutemann 27 Aug '15

27 Aug '15

"Hackaday has a 3 part tutorial with videos of using open source tools with a cheap ($25) FPGA board. The board isn't very powerful, but this could be the 'gateway drug' to FPGAs for people who don't want to spend hundreds of dollars and install 100s of megabytes of software and license keys just to get their feet wet. The videos are particularly good--like watching them over their shoulder. As far as I know, this is the only totally open source FPGA toolchain out there." -- source: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/08/27/226232 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

Ddrescue-GUI: Front-End for Ddrescue Command-line Tool
by Peter Reutemann 27 Aug '15

27 Aug '15

"DDRescue-GUI is a simple GUI application written in Python 2 and designed to provide users with an easy-to-use GUI (Graphical User Interface) front-end for the awesome GNU ddrescue command-line tool which dedicated to recovering data from hard drive, USB flash drive, cd, dvd corrupt." -- source: http://ubuntuportal.com/2015/08/ddrescue-gui-ubuntu.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

was: Engaging Newbies In Email Encryption and Network Privacy
by Peter Reutemann 26 Aug '15

26 Aug '15

Hi everyone Great to see people discussing topics on the mailing list! How about we have a discussion about email encryption (incl signing) and network privacy at the next meeting? If I remember correctly, Hieu's Pi presentation will be relatively short, so we should have plenty of time. 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

Happy Birthday, Linux! An OS At 24
by Peter Reutemann 26 Aug '15

26 Aug '15

"It has been 24 long years since the first ever release of the Linux project on August 25, 1991, which is the core component of any GNU/Linux distribution. With this occasion we want to remind everyone that Linux is everywhere, even if you don't see it. You use Linux when you search on Google, when you use your phone, when buy metro tickets, actually the whole Internet is powered by Linux. Happy Birthday, Linux!" -- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/08/25/1333201 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

Major Android remote-access vulnerability is now being exploited
by Peter Reutemann 25 Aug '15

25 Aug '15

"Based on anonymized data collected from users of an app designed to check for a newly revealed vulnerability in many Android devices, Check Point discovered that one application in the Google Play store is exploiting the vulnerability to gain a high level of access to the Android OS, bypassing user permissions—and bypassing Google’s security scans of Play applications to do so. Update: A Google spokesperson told Ars that the offending app has been suspended in the Play store. While the app was discovered installed on an infinitesimal percentage of devices checked by Check Point, it shows that the vulnerability caused by insecure OEM and cell carrier software meant to provide remote access to devices for customer service engineers has already been exploited by “legitimate” phone applications—and the method used to bypass Google’s security checks could be used for more malicious purposes on millions of devices. And there’s no easy way for Google or phone manufacturers alone to patch the problem." -- source: http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/08/major-android-remote-access-vulnera… 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

Engaging Newbies In Email Encryption and Network Privacy
by Peter Reutemann 25 Aug '15

25 Aug '15

"All six parts of my series introducing beginners to PGP encryption and network privacy are now freely available. I hope it's useful for Slashdot readers to share with their less-technical acquaintances. There's an introduction to PGP, a guide to email encryption on the desktop, smartphone and in the browser, an introduction to the emerging key sharing and authentication startup, Keybase.io, and an intro to VPNs. There's a lot more work for us to do in the ease of use of communications privacy but this helps people get started more with what's available today." -- source: http://it.slashdot.org/story/15/08/20/2041235 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/

5 11

Which Other OS...
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 25 Aug '15

25 Aug '15

After my latest laptop update: ldo(a)vodell:~> conv-date now '' Asia/Seoul Asia/Pyongyang Pacific/Auckland........: Tue Aug 25 17:58:22 NZST 2015 Asia/Seoul..............: Tue Aug 25 14:58:22 KST 2015 Asia/Pyongyang..........: Tue Aug 25 14:28:22 KST 2015 North Korea only announced its new time zone two weeks ago. What other OS could be this quick without any actual code patches?

1 0

Mozilla sets plan to dump Firefox add-ons, move to Chrome-like extensions
by Peter Reutemann 23 Aug '15

23 Aug '15

"Back in July, Mozilla disclosed plans to modernize its Firefox browser. Today, the organization made those plans more concrete, with a tentative timeline for introducing long-desired improvements such as the creation of a process per tab—and with it, a timeline for the end of support for traditional Firefox add-ons. Mozilla has been working on a multi-process architecture for years. Called the Electrolysis project, work started in 2009, but was put on hold in 2011. Work was resumed in 2013, and it's finally getting near to a release. Over the next few months, Mozilla plans to flip the switch and enable Electrolysis in its various release channels. Tentatively, it'll be an opt-in feature in the beta channel from September 22nd, on-by-default in the beta channel from November 3rd, and on-by-default in the release channel from December 15th." -- source: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/mozilla-sets-plan-to-… 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

Ubuntu Core Gets Support For Raspberry Pi 2 GPIO and I2C
by Peter Reutemann 23 Aug '15

23 Aug '15

"Ubuntu Core is a tiny Ubuntu distribution aimed at the Internet of Things, using a new transactional packaging format called Snappy rather than the venerable Debian packaging format. It recently gained support for I2C and GPIO on the Raspberry Pi 2, and a quick demo is given here." "Ubuntu's Core support site says that the support for Raspberry Pi 2 isn't yet official, but provides some handy tips for anyone who wants to try it out." -- source: http://build.slashdot.org/story/15/08/22/2214256 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

Please, OpenOffice, Die Already
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 20 Aug '15

20 Aug '15

Well, maybe not in so many words, but some are saying <http://lwn.net/Articles/654776/> that OpenOffice has reached (i.e. declined) to the stage where it is getting in the way of people looking for a powerful Free Software office suite. They never hear of LibreOffice, find OpenOffice instead, and are disappointed with its (lack of) capabilities.

1 1

Why Linux-Based Steam Machines Won’t Have A “Suspend” Function
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 19 Aug '15

19 Aug '15

Current proprietary game consoles typically have a “sleep” mode, to allow faster startups than booting from a complete power-off. It turns out <http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/08/steam-machines-wont-have-a-suspend-fu…> that Valve’s Steam machines are unable to offer such a facility, for quite a subtle technical reason <http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=7855261&cid=50329207>: it’s because, when the Linux kernel wakes up from sleep, it forgets about all the USB devices it saw before, and rediscovers them all as though for the first time. This prevents applications (i.e. games) from preserving the state of devices like game controllers.

1 0

No Meeting On 24th?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 19 Aug '15

19 Aug '15

Is there a WLUG meeting on the fourth Monday of this month?

2 3

IBM’s New “LinuxONE” Ubuntu Mainframe
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 18 Aug '15

18 Aug '15

<http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/ubuntu-coming-to-main…> ... can "scale up to 8,000 virtual machines or hundreds of thousands of containers—currently the most of any single Linux system" ... And it won’t be limited to 26 drive letters.

1 0

Windows 10 From a Linux User's Perspective
by Peter Reutemann 13 Aug '15

13 Aug '15

"I've spent quite a bit of time testing out Windows 10 on a secondary computer. And like any operating system upgrade, the change takes a bit to get used to. Since I feel more comfortable with Linux distributions than with Windows, I thought it would be interesting to see what Microsoft has done since Windows 7 and 8. In this article, I'll walk you through how I see Windows 10. What it did well, where it falls flat on its face and how this appears to a hardcore Linux enthusiast." -- source: http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/windows-10-from-a-linux-users-pers… 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

Te Whare O Te ATA (Fairfield) computer lab
by Roderick Aldridge 11 Aug '15

11 Aug '15

Disappointing news about the computer lab in the annexe at Te Whare O Te Ata Fairfield/Chartwell Community House. The trustees have decided to use the annexe as a classroom. Manager Mike Rarere says the only practical option for the lab machines is for some of them (probably 6 or fewer) to be in the main lounge. The lounge schedule means that we could only have regular scheduled sessions on Monday and Friday mornings. Do you want to be involved in running this? It should be easier to do, although it is only a fraction of the former setup. Roderick Aldridge.

3 2

LibreOffice under the hood: progress to 5.0
by Peter Reutemann 08 Aug '15

08 Aug '15

"Today we release LibreOffice 5.0.0, a new foundation for ongoing work over the next months and years. It also has a fine suite of new features for people to enjoy - you can read and enjoy all the great news about the user visible features from so many great hackers, but there are, as always, many contributors whose work is primarily behind the scenes, and a lot of work that is more technical than user-facing. That work is, of course, still vitally important to the project." -- source: https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2015-08-05-under-the-hood-5-0.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/

3 2

EFF Releases Privacy Badger an Addon That Algorithmically Blocks Online Trackers
by Peter Reutemann 07 Aug '15

07 Aug '15

"Online tracking has become a pervasive invisible reality of the modern web. Most sites you load are likely to be full of ads, tracking pixels, social media share buttons, and other invisible trackers all harvesting data about your web browsing. These trackers use cookies and other methods to read unique IDs associated with your browser, the result being that they record all the sites you visit as you browse around the internet. This sort of tracking is invisible to most web users, meaning they never get the option to agree to or opt-out of it. Today the EFF has launched the 1.0 version of Privacy Badger, an extension designed to prevent these trackers from accessing unique info about you and your browsing." -- source: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/08/07/0139241 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

Bye-Bye 32 Bits?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 06 Aug '15

06 Aug '15

The Fedora project <http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-i686-Non-Blocking> has noticed that very few of its users seem to be on 32-bit systems nowadays. This was shown by a kernel bug that went undetected for two months, that prevented 32-bit x86 systems from even booting. Time to relegate 32-bit machines to the junk pile?

2 2

New attack on Tor can deanonymize hidden services with surprising accuracy
by Peter Reutemann 03 Aug '15

03 Aug '15

"Computer scientists have devised an attack on the Tor privacy network that in certain cases allows them to deanonymize hidden service websites with 88 percent accuracy. Such hidden services allow people to host websites without end users or anyone else knowing the true IP address of the service. The deanonymization requires the adversary to control the Tor entry point for the computer hosting the hidden service. It also requires the attacker to have previously collected unique network characteristics that can serve as a fingerprint for that particular service. Tor officials say the requirements reduce the effectiveness of the attack. Still, the new research underscores the limits to anonymity on Tor, which journalists, activists, and criminals alike rely on to evade online surveillance and monitoring." -- source: http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/07/new-attack-on-tor-can-deanonymize-h… 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

Maybe don't smash your phone just yet
by Ian Young 30 Jul '15

30 Jul '15

Random browsing on the interwebs. Is this the year of a free cellphone OS? Alas I fear not. But we can dream. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/27/android_phone_text_flaw/ https://dot.kde.org/2015/07/25/plasma-mobile-free-mobile-platform Mentioned on the blog of Barry Kauler of Puppy Linux. Currently latest entry. http://bkhome.org/news/ Maybe you want an Android PC? http://www.slashgear.com/jide-tries-again-remix-mini-does-android-pc-153931… http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/07/17/jide-tech-is-back-on-kickstarter-wi…

2 2

How To Test LaTeXila 3.17.0 on Ubuntu Linux
by Peter Reutemann 30 Jul '15

30 Jul '15

"LaTeXila is an editor for GNOME desktop environment, it is an open source application and lets you compile, convert and view documents on GNOME desktop. It can work with LaTeX commands and provides easier navigation through the document. It can also be installed on other desktop environments like Unity, KDE etc. Over the passage of time, it has become an important part of GNOME desktop environment. As you might already aware that GNOME dev team is working actively to announce the upcoming release 3.17.4, so in this process, GNOME development team has announced the availability of LaTeXila 3.17 now." -- source: http://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/how-to-test-latexila-3.17.0-on-ubuntu-l… 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

950 million Android phones can be hijacked by malicious text messages
by Peter Reutemann 27 Jul '15

27 Jul '15

'Almost all Android mobile devices available today are susceptible to hacks that can execute malicious code when they are sent a malformed text message or the user is lured to a malicious website, a security researcher reported Monday. The vulnerability affects about 950 million Android phones and tablets, according to Joshua Drake, vice president of platform research and exploitation at security firm Zimperium. It resides in "Stagefright," an Android code library that processes several widely used media formats. The most serious exploit scenario is the use of a specially modified text message using the multimedia message (MMS) format. All an attacker needs is the phone number of the vulnerable Android phone. From there, the malicious message will surreptitiously execute malicious code on the vulnerable device with no action required by the end user and no indication that anything is amiss.' -- source: http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/07/950-million-android-phones-can-be-h… 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

WLUG meeting tomorrow
by Peter Reutemann 27 Jul '15

27 Jul '15

Hi everyone We have a WLUG meeting tomorrow: "Ian Stewart will talk about the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) and how to connect to it using thin clients and Raspberry Pi. Peter Reutemann will give the new Linux Mint release a quick spin." Details can be found here: http://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/223850397 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

SSH -> getting the originating IP of a client using RDP
by Eric Light 24 Jul '15

24 Jul '15

Hey all This is a total edge case, but I thought it may be interesting to some. We have thin clients, which RDP to a Windows Terminal Server, through which users SSH (using PuTTY) into our Linux server. This isn't flexible (for good reasons which I won't go into here). However, to talk properly to our new EFTPOS units, we need to know the IP of the thin client. Of course, through SSH you only get the IP of the client, which is the Terminal Server. Here's how I fixed it: 1) Add the following line to /etc/ssh/sshd_config, and restarted ssh: * AcceptEnv CLIENTNAME* 2) Added the following to the Windows login script: * REG ADD HKCU\Software\SimonTatham\PuTTY\Sessions\DG\ /v Environment /d "CLIENTNAME="%CLIENTNAME% /f* 3) Result: * ~ $ env | grep CLIENTNAME CLIENTNAME=eric-lmde* >From there, we can do what we needed with the EFTPOS! Eric -------------------------------------------- Q: Why is this email five sentences or less? A: http://five.sentenc.es

2 1

Troubleshooting Over The Phone
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 23 Jul '15

23 Jul '15

I just helped someone unbork their Ubuntu system over the phone. It was reporting “disk full”, without being more specific than that. I got him to open up a terminal window, and use the “df” and “du” commands to narrow down the directory that was filling up the disk. Sometimes /tmp gets filled up with stuff, but in this case it was /var/lib/apt/lists/partial/. I have had an instance of high disk usage on that directory myself, a while back. I think it’s where apt keeps partially-downloaded repo index files, though I’m not sure why—is it to retry downloading the rest? But when the problem hits, it just seems to fill up with failed downloads. So I carefully led him up to executing the command “sudo rm /var/lib/apt/lists/partial/*”, and that cleared the problem. The main thing I was careful with was spelling out the commands phonetically, and getting him to read them back to me. But imagine having to do this with a GUI, over the phone. I don’t think I would even try...

3 4

Why Debian Returned To FFmpeg
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 23 Jul '15

23 Jul '15

<http://lwn.net/Articles/650816/> What impresses me about this is, even though the Debian package maintainer is also a libav developer, he “...in the end, could not bring himself to say that he was sure libav was the better choice.” With regard to the commit statistics, it seems like much of the activity in FFmpeg commits is wholesale copying of code from libav. But so what? If sticking with FFmpeg gives you the best of both worlds, why bother separately including packages for libav at all?

1 0

meeting next Monday
by Peter Reutemann 22 Jul '15

22 Jul '15

Hi everyone We have a WLUG meeting coming up next Monday: "Ian Stewart will talk about the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) and how to connect to it using thin clients and Raspberry Pi. Peter Reutemann will give the new Linux Mint release a quick spin." Details can be found here: http://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/223850397 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

On Being Pro-GPL
by Peter Reutemann 22 Jul '15

22 Jul '15

'Christopher Allan Webber, recently returned from OSCON, shares his thoughts on the GPL and why he dislikes people pitting one type of software license against another. He says, "I am not only pro-copyleft, I am also pro-permissive licensing. The difference between these is tactics: the first tactic is towards guaranteeing user freedom, the second tactic is toward pushing adoption. I am generally pro-freedom, but sometimes pushing adoption is important, especially if you're pushing standards and the like. But let's step back for a moment. One thing that's true is that over the last many years we've seen an explosion of free and open source software... at the same time that computers have become more locked down than ever before! How can this be? And notice... the rise of the arguments for permissive/lax licensing have grown simultaneously with this trend. ...The fastest way to develop software which locks down users for maximum monetary extraction is to use free software as a base. And this is where the anti-copyleft argument comes in, because copyleft may effectively force an entity to give back at this stage... and they might not want to. ... Copyleft's strings say, 'you can use my stuff, as long as you give back what you make from it.' But the proprietary differentiation strategy's strings say, 'I will use your stuff, and then add terms which forbid you to ever share or modify the things I build on top of it.' Don't be fooled: both attach strings. But which strings are worse?"' -- source: http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/07/21/2256243 Personally, I'm a pro-GPL person. Simply because I don't like software getting locked down and nothing flowing back to the community. Especially, when open source is so community centred. 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

Open Document Format 1.2 Becomes ISO/IEC Standard
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 21 Jul '15

21 Jul '15

Only four years after its creation, ODF 1.2, the native format for the current version of LibreOffice, has been officially accepted as ISO/IEC standard 26300:2015 <https://blog.documentfoundation.org/2015/07/17/open-document-format-odf-1-2…>. By the way, if you try downloading the specs from the links on that page, you will be confronted by copyright warnings forcing you to click an “accept” button. You can get the same thing from here <http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=office#technical> without the nonsense.

2 2

Fwd: Re: Customs Minister Wants Right To Demand Passwords From Device Users
by Chris O'Halloran 20 Jul '15

20 Jul '15

On Tue, 14 Jul 2015 12:59:12 +1200, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo(a)geek-central.gen.nz> wrote: > I would say this relevant to everybody in New Zealand or visiting New > Zealand, Linux user or not. > > “Powers that would require a person to provide a password or access > to > their electronic device will be useless if their material is instead > stored online, Customs Minister Nicky Wagner admits. It's interesting in the sense that normally you're not obliged to say anything that might incriminate yourself. David Bain didn't have to give his version of events.

1 0

Customs Minister Wants Right To Demand Passwords From Device Users
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 19 Jul '15

19 Jul '15

I would say this relevant to everybody in New Zealand or visiting New Zealand, Linux user or not. “Powers that would require a person to provide a password or access to their electronic device will be useless if their material is instead stored online, Customs Minister Nicky Wagner admits. However, Ms Wagner insists such a change to legislation is necessary and will still enable Customs to catch people with illegal material.” <http://www.nzherald.co.nz/politics/news/article.cfm?c_id=280&objectid=11480…>

6 5

ARM Support Comes To SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
by Peter Reutemann 16 Jul '15

16 Jul '15

"SUSE announced partner program expansion to include support for 64-bit ARM server processors. This expansion makes available to partners a version of SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 that allows them to develop, test and deliver products to the market using 64-bit ARM chips. To simplify partner access, SUSE has also implemented support for ARM and AArch64 into its openSUSE Build Service. This allows the community to build packages against real 64-bit ARM hardware and the SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 binaries." -- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/07/15/1720216 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

What the GNOME Desktop Gets Right and KDE Gets Wrong
by Peter Reutemann 14 Jul '15

14 Jul '15

'Eric Griffith at Phoronix has provided a fresh perspective on the KDE vs. GNOME desktop debate after exclusively using GNOME for the past week while being a longtime KDE user. He concluded his five-page editorial (which raises some valid points throughout) by saying, "Gnome feels like a product. It feels like a singular experience. When you use it, it feels like it is complete and that everything you need is at your fingertips. It feels like the Linux desktop. ... In KDE, it's just some random-looking window popup that any application could have created. ... KDE doesn't feel like cohesive experience. KDE doesn't feel like it has a direction its moving in, it doesn't feel like a full experience. KDE feels like its a bunch of pieces that are moving in a bunch of different directions, that just happen to have a shared toolkit beneath them." However, with the week over and despite his criticism, he's back to using KDE.' -- source: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/07/13/1548237 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

Speed-Ups, Small Fixes Earn Good Marks From Ars For Mint 17.2
by Peter Reutemann 13 Jul '15

13 Jul '15

'Ars Technica reviews the newest release from Linux MInt -- version 17.2, offered with either the Cinnamon desktop, or the lighter-weight MATE, which feels like what Gnome 2 might feel in an alternate universe where Gnome 3 never happened. Reviewer Scott Gilbertson has mostly good things to say about either variety, and notes a few small drawbacks, too. The nits seem to be minor ones, though they might bite some people more than others: Mint, based on Ubuntu deep down, is almost perfectly compatible with Ubuntu packages, but not every one, and this newest version of Mint ships with the 3.16 kernel of Ubuntu 14.04, which means slightly less advanced hardware support. (Gilbertson notes, though, that going with 3.16 means Mint may be the ideal distro if you want to avoid systemd.) "This release sees the Cinnamon developers focusing on some of what are sometimes call "paper cut" fixes, which just means there's been a lot of attention to the details, particularly the small, but annoying problems. For example, this release adds a new panel applet called "inhibit" which temporarily bans all notifications. It also turns off screen locking and stops any auto dimming you have set up, making it a great tool for when you want to watch a video or play a game." More "paper cut" fixes include improved multi-panel options, graphics-refresh tweaks, a way to restart the Cinnamon desktop without killing the contents of a session, graphics-refresh tweaks, and other speed-ups that make this release "noticeably snappier than its predecessor on the same hardware."' -- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/07/12/1720236 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

Question - ping -f
by Eric Light 13 Jul '15

13 Jul '15

Hi guys I'm investigating a flaky printer, and was running ping -f to see when it went down. I got the following: PING prn37.forlongs.local (10.7.140.37) 56(84) bytes of data. ..................................................... ..................................................... ..................................................... .......E............................................. ... what the heck is the 'E'? I can't find it in the man pages. Eric -------------------------------------------- Q: Why is this email five sentences or less? A: http://five.sentenc.es

2 2

Automatically enabling numlock in an X11 session, *without* a window manager
by Eric Light 12 Jul '15

12 Jul '15

I just spent a whole day on this, so I wanted to share it with some people who would understand the struggle. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- The Scenario:You have some remote users who need to securely access your application, delivered in plaintext over SSH. To do this, they get a thin client delivered to them, fully set up. However, most of these users have very limited computer knowledge, so they need the application to be as simple and responsive as possible. The Solution: The thin client needn’t have Windows on it. Also Windows is slow (wimpy thin clients), prone to fickleness (“have you tried turning it off and on again?”), and insecure (no antivirus or even security updates are installed on the thin clients). In fact, these users are so limited they shouldn’t even have a window manager at all. No need to resize, copy & paste, or multitask – a single application window would be ample. So let’s install just a plain edition of Debian, then run sudo apt-get install xinit, to get the barest of essential graphical libraries. The Challenge: Set up our thin clients, based on a Linux install, such that it boots quietly and quickly, automatically logs in as the user, waits for the network, and launches a Putty window. When the user quits Putty, they should only have two options: launch a new Putty session, or shutdown the computer. The Yak: Because there’s no window manager, every Putty window is launched in its’ own session. A new X11 session has number lock disabled by default. The standard answer for controlling numlock, a program named “numlockx”, works just fine – however, because there’s no window manager, you can only send a single command to the X11 session. Thus, you can *either* turn on NumLock, *or *you can launch Putty. Shaving the Yak: 1) Create the file ~/putty This file contains the lines: numlockx on & putty -load {your saved session} 2) Launch the file with: xinit ~/putty $* -- The End: Now you can set up your silent boot (/etc/sysctl.conf -> kernel.printk), your automatic login (/etc/system/system/getty(a)tty1.service.d/autologin.conf), and your auto-start locked-down profile (~/.profile) with other tutorials available on the internet. (PS they boot in about ten seconds, and our guinea pig testers love them) Eric

5 12

Quote Of The Week
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 11 Jul '15

11 Jul '15

“I have the greatest respect for mathematicians, but we need a national conversation about their claims about the division by zero problem.” -- Matt Blaze >From this report <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/08/crap_crypto_enforcement_laws_coming…> on how various sectors of the US Government seem intent on re-fighting the “crypto wars” of the 1990s. Tip to those in power: the laws of nature haven’t changed since then. (And if it isn’t clear, Matt Blaze is one of those who is fully aware of that!)

1 0

Customizing The Compose Key
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 09 Jul '15

09 Jul '15

The Compose key <http://wiki.wlug.org.nz/ComposeKey> is probably the best way of typing less common characters available on any OS. It lets you use mnemonic sequences that actually bear some relationship to the character you are trying to enter, instead of having to remember numeric codes. You will find there a list of the characters that I found most useful, though the complete set will be in the Compose file for your chosen locale. You can even add your own compose sequences. This tutorial for KDE <https://userbase.kde.org/Tutorials/ComposeKey/en> covers the procedure. Basically, you create a file “.XCompose” in your home directory, include a system Compose file to inherit the standard sequences, and put in extra compose-key definitions using the same syntax as the system Compose files. I had got this far, but then was baffled as to why KDE seemed to pay no attention whatsoever to my custom compose-key sequences. It turns out you need to define additional environment variables to get Qt/KDE- and GTK-based apps to use the X11 input method that actually reads the .XCompose file. Put these in your .bashrc: export GTK_IM_MODULE=xim export QT_IM_MODULE=xim and when you logout and login again, it should all work. For example, in my .XCompose, I have the line <Multi_key> <p> <i> which lets me type compose-p-i to produce “π”.

1 0

Ah, The Memories...
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 09 Jul '15

09 Jul '15

In the wake of the latest round of Microsoft’s layoffs, it seems apropos to remember the time they held a mock funeral for their competition at the time of the Windows Phone 7 launch: <http://appleinsider.com/articles/10/09/10/microsoft_employees_hold_funeral_…>. “Research firm Gartner predicted ... Nokia Symbian and Google Android [would be] first and second with 30.2 percent and 29.6 percent [market share] respectively [in 2014].” Did anybody notice any Symbian phones still on sale? Android had more like 80%...

1 0

Debian To Switch From Libav Back To ffmpeg
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 09 Jul '15

09 Jul '15

I’ve been using FFmpeg for years. I always built it from source, because I was aware that prebuilt distro packages were 1) well behind the latest development tree, and 2) likely to leave out features because of patent issues. So I hardly noticed the whole Libav fork issue <https://lwn.net/Articles/433347/>. I was dimly aware that my Debian system had these “libav” packages on it, that looked and behaved just like FFmpeg in everything but name. But I hardly ever used them—not directly. Then, last year, I found out a bit more about what really happened <https://lwn.net/Articles/607591/>, and why Debian went with the fork. Can you say “conflict of interest”? (Well, that’s how it looks like to me.) So now, Debian has officially decided to return to the original FFmpeg project <http://lwn.net/Articles/650495/>.

1 0

your dishwasher is starting to discuss Sartre with you
by Ian Young 08 Jul '15

08 Jul '15

OK, vague relevance but it is Linus speaking, my excuse. http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2416607/linux-founder-says-you-mus…

1 0

BBC Micro Bit
by Ian Young 07 Jul '15

07 Jul '15

Stop me if you already are fully briefed on this -- I'd never heard of it. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33409311

3 2

Amazon's New SSL/TLS Implementation In 6,000 Lines of Code
by Peter Reutemann 01 Jul '15

01 Jul '15

'Amazon has announced a new library called "s2n," an open source implementation of SSL/TLS, the cryptographic security protocols behind HTTPS, SSH, SFTP, secure SMTP, and many others. Weighing in at about 6k lines of code, it's just a little more than 1% the size of OpenSSL, which is really good news in terms of security auditing and testing. OpenSSL isn't going away, and Amazon has made clear that they will continue to support it. Notably, s2n does not provide all the additional cryptographic functions that OpenSSL provides in libcrypto, it only provides the SSL/TLS functions. Further more, it implements a relatively small subset of SSL/TLS features compared to OpenSSL.' -- source: http://it.slashdot.org/story/15/07/01/0214248 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

GMT Versus UTC
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 01 Jul '15

01 Jul '15

It still seems to be common among groups outside the computing and scientific worlds to talk about “GMT” rather than “UTC”. The trouble with “GMT” is that it doesn’t seem to be clearly defined; it might or might not differ from UTC by up to 0.9 seconds. The (unadjusted) time reference defined by an official collection of atomic clocks worldwide is called “TAI”. This pays no heed to the slowing rotation of the Earth. Astronomers prefer a time reference called “UT1”, which is based on the actual rotation of the Earth (subject to some time-averaging, I think). The definition of “UTC” comes from TAI, adjusted by applying leap seconds. These accumulate as needed so as to keep UTC within 0.9 seconds of UT1, and we are currently up to 36 of them. That is, at 0:00:00 UTC today, TAI was actually 0:00:36. The trouble with GMT is that it is not officially clear whether it is the same as UT1, or the same as UTC. Given that it was originally defined at the Greenwich Observatory, which was (is?) run by astronomers, one would think they would make it the same as UT1. But the practical fact is, our usual everyday timekeeping is based on standard time zones, which are all defined as whole-second (indeed, whole multiples of a half-hour) offsets from UTC.

2 1

How Long Can A Filename Be?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 01 Jul '15

01 Jul '15

Allowed length of an individual file/directory name: ldo(a)theon:~> getconf NAME_MAX / 255 Allowed length of a full path name: ldo(a)theon:~> getconf PATH_MAX / 4096 The answers can be filesystem-specific; here “/” is an ext3 filesystem. But on my /home, which is ext4, I get the same numbers.

1 0

Reuters: Samsung won’t give up on Tizen OS, plans more phones this year
by Peter Reutemann 01 Jul '15

01 Jul '15

'Samsung still loves its home-grown operating system. A report from Reuters says the company is planning more Tizen phones for 2015, and they'll come in at "varying prices."' -- source: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/06/reuters-samsung-wont-give-up-on-tize… 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

So How Did Your Leap-Second Go?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 01 Jul '15

01 Jul '15

At noon today NZ time, an extra second was inserted into UTC, the time kept by the world’s atomic clocks. The time that was one second before midnight UTC (one second before noon NZST) became two seconds before intead: after 23:59:59 UTC came 23:59:60 UTC, before ticking over to 0:00:00 UTC. The previous time this happened, three years ago, several Linux-based systems malfunctioned. No word yet on how this one went... <http://lwn.net/Articles/648313/>

3 2

Doing For Video What PulseAudio Did For Audio
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 01 Jul '15

01 Jul '15

Pinos is a project to allow better handling of video input across multiple applications. Pinos will make it easier to switch cameras in applications and for the same camera source to be used by multiple apps simultaneously, there will be support for multiple types of video inputs, GStreamer integration, and some audio support. Pinos should allow better screencasting within GNOME 3, video support for desktop sandboxes, and many other potential use-cases. In an email, Christian mentioned why it didn't end up being called PulseVideo over name squatting. <http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-Pinos-Announced>

2 1

presentations/demos for next meeting
by Peter Reutemann 01 Jul '15

01 Jul '15

Hi everyone At the moment, we're still looking for a theme (read presenters) for this month's WLUG meeting on July 27. Any takers? As a fallback option, I was thinking of giving the new Linux Mint 17.2 a spin (MATE and Cinnamon) and Ian has plenty of Debian 8 installations on his machine to show off briefly. Thanks. 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 to upgrade Debian Wheezy to Jessie safely
by Peter Reutemann 01 Jul '15

01 Jul '15

"This tutorial explains how to upgrade your Debian system from Wheezy to Jessie in a few simple steps. Before you start with the upgrade, backup all critical data. Thats especially the config data in the /etc directory and the user data in /home. When you run a server then you should include the databases (MySQL, Postgresql, etc), web and email data in the backup as well." -- source: http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/how-to-upgrade-debian-wheezy-to-je… 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

SSH To Multiple Machines Simultaneously with DSH
by Peter Reutemann 01 Jul '15

01 Jul '15

"Once you grow beyond managing one or two servers, you???ll find yourself wasting a ton of time if you don't have a way to run commands on multiple Linux computers simultaneously. In this post, I'll explain how to quickly run commands on large numbers of Linux machines at once." -- source: http://www.linuxtoday.com/upload/ssh-to-multiple-machines-simultaneously-wi… 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

Win XP lives OK!??
by Ian Young 26 Jun '15

26 Jun '15

Sorry this is utterly off-topic but couldn't resist. Stranger than fiction. http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2414849/windows-xp-us-navy-throws-…

1 0

MAC Address Privacy Standard Coming
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 26 Jun '15

26 Jun '15

Every network interface (wired or wireless) on every networked device in the world is assigned a unique 48-bit identifier—the MAC address—burned into its ROM at manufacturing time. While it’s often (usually?) possible to change this via the software driver, nobody thought of it as a big deal. Until recently, when certain, ahem, spying revelations have woken people to the privacy implications of being able to track a machine, particularly on wi-fi networks, based on its unique MAC address. And so some folks at the Internet Engineering Task Force have been doing experiments to determine whether randomly changing these addresses would cause hiccups for any network protocols. The good news is that the answer so far seems to be “no”. <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/26/mac_address_privacy_inches_towards_…>

3 2

How Long Should Microsoft Be Forced To Provide Windows XP Support?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 26 Jun '15

26 Jun '15

Reading about how the US Navy <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/25/us_navy_windows_xp_support/> has signed a contract to get continuing support from Microsoft for Windows XP, led me to wonder how long is a “reasonable” interval for Microsoft to continue to provide patches and updates for this ancient OS. My reasoning is thus: Windows XP is still under copyright. Microsoft still considers it to be its “intellectual property”. The term “property” is deliberately used, to convey the idea of something owned by Microsoft, not by you, the customer. All you get when you buy it is a “licence”, not ownership. But with property rights come property responsibilities. If your property is causing harm or nuisance to others, the onus is on you to fix it. Therefore, Microsoft’s responsibilities over its “intellctual property” should continue just as long as it claims those property rights. If unmaintained Windows XP machines are being exploited as parts of botnets or spam relays or virus vectors or whatever, the onus for fixing those problems should be on the property owner, right? Under current US copyright law, that duration would be 90 years from when Windows XP was first published, or, by my reckoning, the year 2091.

1 0

F2FS Brings Per-File Encryption With Linux 4.2
by Peter Reutemann 25 Jun '15

25 Jun '15

"Based on the native encryption support added to EXT4 with the Linux 4.1 kernel, Linux 4.2 is bringing encryption support to the F2FS file-system. F2FS has been working on native encryption support in tandem with the EXT4 work and now it's been called for merging today into Linux 4.2. Jaegeuk Kim sent in the F2FS feature update for Linux 4.2 and it features per-file encryption support along with new capabilities for FALLOC_FL_ZERO_RANGE (converting a range of file to zeroes), FALLOC_FL_COLLAPSE_RANGE (removes a byte range from a file), and RENAME_WHITEOUT. The Flash-Friendly File-System for Linux 4.2 also has recovery for broken super-blocks, TRIM improvements, and various fixes. " -- source: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=F2FS-Encryption-Linux-4.2 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

Got Chrome? Google Just Silently Downloaded This Onto Your Computer
by Peter Reutemann 24 Jun '15

24 Jun '15

'On June 17th, Google did not announce (the news broke) that the DARPA affiliated corporation has been silently downloading audio listeners onto every computer that has Chrome. This effectively means that Google sees your privacy as piddly-squat, which does not necessarily come off as a surprise, when one considers Google’s censorship of We Are Change – this very organization as nothing. The website Private Internet Access‘s Rick Falkvinge reported how he came to understand this new policy: “It looked like just another bug report. “When I start Chromium, it downloads something.” Followed by strange status information that notably included the lines “Microphone: Yes” and “Audio Capture Allowed: Yes”. Without consent, Google’s code had downloaded a black box of code that – according to itself – had turned on the microphone and was actively listening to your room.”' -- source: http://wearechange.org/got-chrome-google-just-silently-downloaded-this-onto… Confirmed that on my box as well, when using the following URL: chrome://voicesearch/ Nice... 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 2

"Invite-Only" Ubuntu Mobile-Powered Meizu UX4 Goes On Sale
by Peter Reutemann 24 Jun '15

24 Jun '15

"Chinese manufacturer Meizu and Ubuntu developer Canonical have released the MX4 smartphone, but prospective owners will have to 'earn' an opportunity to buy the phone by playing an interactive origami game. Players are limited to three chances per day and this is the only way to buy the smartphone as it will no go on wider sale at a later date. The MX4 is the third Ubuntu Mobile smartphone to be released, following the BQ Aquaris E4.5 and E5 devices." -- source: http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/06/24/1642213 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 4.1 Kernel Released With EXT4 Encryption, Performance Improvements
by Peter Reutemann 22 Jun '15

22 Jun '15

"The Linux 4.1 kernel has been announced and its release brings expanded features for the Linux kernel including EXT4 file-system encryption, open-source GeForce GTX 750 support, performance improvements for Intel Atom / Bay Trail hardware, RAID 5/6 improvements, and other additions." -- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/06/22/1431243 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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Pi and BeagleBone for Dummies in library
by Ian Young 22 Jun '15

22 Jun '15

City libraries have titles in the Dummies series about the Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone. Much of the material is directed at providing information on Linux for beginners, covering much the same ground in both titles. There is also a primer on Python programming. Perhaps the most interesting information deals with hardware aspects of interfacing with the boards including several small projects. In related news the latest Distrowatch Weekly has an article on using a Raspberry Pi as a server for backups in a home network.

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Resurrecting The SuperH Architecture
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 18 Jun '15

18 Jun '15

I guess this is more of an embedded thing, but ... <http://lwn.net/Articles/647636/> “He then asked what constitutes the minimal system that can run Linux. All that is really needed, he said, is a flat, 32-bit memory address space, a CPU with registers to hold instructions, some I/O and storage (from which the kernel and initramfs can be loaded), and a timer for interrupts. That plus GCC is sufficient to get Linux running—although it may not be fast, depending on the specifics. One does not even need a cache, floating-point unit, SMP, or a memory-management unit (MMU).” “The other main advantage of the J2 project is that the work for implementing SuperH support is already done in the kernel, GCC, GDB, strace, and most other system components.” “The project has thus "inherited" an excellent ISA, and has even been in contact with many of the former Hitachi employees that worked on SuperH.” “...there are many ASIC vendors who are happy to produce low-cost chips on their older equipment because the cost of retooling a plant is exorbitant. A 180nm implementation of the J2 design, he said, costs around three cents per chip, with no royalties required. "That's disposable computing at the 'free toy inside' level."” “At the end of the talk, an audience member voiced concern that SuperH was old enough that support for it is unmaintained in a lot of projects. He suggested that the J2 team might need to act quickly to stop its removal. Landley noted that, indeed, the latest buildroot release did remove SuperH support, "but we're trying to get them to put it back now."”

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The South Pole Is On NZ Time!
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 17 Jun '15

17 Jun '15

ldo(a)theon:~> ls -l /usr/share/zoneinfo/Antarctica/ ... lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 5 Apr 27 10:36 South_Pole -> ../NZ ...

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Re: [wlug] The Fate Of The Fairfield Lab
by David Nicholls 17 Jun '15

17 Jun '15

So... What exactly is the Fairfield Lab? Where is it set up? a few details to elaborate on it's background might be helpful. I know someone with teaching (primary) and tech quals who might be useful. On 15 June 2015 at 11:56, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo(a)geek-central.gen.nz> wrote: > To bring up a (not entirely) unrelated subject, I was at Te Whare O Te > Ata last week, and I asked Mike Rarere what was going to happen to the > computer lab. > > It’s clear Bruce Kingsbury was instrumental in getting this lab set up > and running, and it was providing a useful service to the community. > All of which was shot completely to hell as a result of his criminality > and stupidity. > > I understood from Mike that, without somebody willing to provide > full-time support for free, as Bruce was, the lab cannot continue. This > seems a shame, but is there anything else we can do? Fundraise to pay > someone to provide support, even if only part-time? > _______________________________________________ > wlug mailing list | wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz > Unsubscribe: http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/wlug > -- *Cheers...David Nicholls* *Computer Support* *Faculty of Science and Engineering* *x5006, *fsen_csg(a)waikato.ac.nz

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Fwd: [NZLUG] Major Ubuntu Linux Vulnerability - all current versions
by Peter Reutemann 16 Jun '15

16 Jun '15

Apologies, if you've already received this. Cheers, Peter ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Mark Foster Date: Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 11:28 AM Subject: [NZLUG] Major Ubuntu Linux Vulnerability - all current versions To: NZ Linux Users Group <nzlug(a)lists.nzoss.org.nz>, aucklug(a)googlegroups.com, Wellington Linux Users Group <wellylug(a)lists.wellylug.org.nz> http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2015/q2/717 ... "allows a local root privilege escalation in the default configuration on all currently supported versions of Ubuntu. The overlayfs filesystem does not correctly check file permissions when creating new files in the upper filesystem directory. This can be exploited by an unprivileged process in kernels with CONFIG_USER_NS=y and where overlayfs has the FS_USERNS_MOUNT flag, which allows the mounting of overlayfs inside unprivileged mount namespaces. This is the default configuration of Ubuntu 12.04, 14.04, 14.10, and 15.04 [1]." This could be something requiring a bit of attention. Heads-up. There is a simple work-round if you're not using overlayfs, detailed at the above url. Mark. PS: Apol's for the cross-post. _______________________________________________ NZLUG mailing list NZLUG(a)lists.nzoss.org.nz http://lists.nzoss.org.nz/mailman/listinfo/nzlug -- 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 Says Linux Can Move On Without Him
by Peter Reutemann 16 Jun '15

16 Jun '15

'In a typically blunt interview, Linus Torvalds has said for the first time that if he were to die, Linux could safely continue on its own. Bloomberg has the report, which includes a video with Torvalds at his home office. Torvalds insists that people like Greg Kroah-Hartman have taken over huge parts of the day-to-day work maintaining Linux and that they've built up enough trust to be respected. This all comes as Torvalds has been irking more and more people with his aggressive attitude.' -- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/06/16/1630252 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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TRIM and Linux: Tread Cautiously, and Keep Backups Handy
by Peter Reutemann 16 Jun '15

16 Jun '15

'Algolia is a buzzword-compliant ("Hosted Search API that delivers instant and relevant results") start-up that uses a lot of open-source software (including various strains of Linux) and a lot of solid-state disk, and as such sometimes runs into problems with each of these. Their blog this week features a fascinating look at troubles that they faced with ext4 filesystems mysteriously flipping to read-only mode: not such a good thing for machines processing a search index, not just dishing it out. "The NGINX daemon serving all the HTTP(S) communication of our API was up and ready to serve the search queries but the indexing process crashed. Since the indexing process is guarded by supervise, crashing in a loop would have been understandable but a complete crash was not. As it turned out the filesystem was in a read-only mode. All right, let's assume it was a cosmic ray :) The filesystem got fixed, files were restored from another healthy server and everything looked fine again. The next day another server ended with filesystem in read-only, two hours after another one and then next hour another one. Something was going on. After restoring the filesystem and the files, it was time for serious analysis since this was not a one time thing. The rest of the story explains how they isolated the problem and worked around it; it turns out that the culprit was TRIM, or rather TRIM's interaction with certain SSDs: "The system was issuing a TRIM to erase empty blocks, the command got misinterpreted by the drive and the controller erased blocks it was not supposed to. Therefore our files ended-up with 512 bytes of zeroes, files smaller than 512 bytes were completely zeroed. When we were lucky enough, the misbehaving TRIM hit the super-block of the filesystem and caused a corruption." Since SSDs are becoming the norm outside the data center as well as within, some of the problems that their analysis exposed for one company probably would be good to test for elsewhere. One upshot: "As a result, we informed our server provider about the affected SSDs and they informed the manufacturer. Our new deployments were switched to different SSD drives and we don't recommend anyone to use any SSD that is anyhow mentioned in a bad way by the Linux kernel."' -- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/06/16/201217 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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meeting next Monday
by Peter Reutemann 16 Jun '15

16 Jun '15

Hi everyone We have a WLUG meeting coming up next Monday. Please note, that this is a social event taken place at The Cook and *not* at university as usual (the room wasn't available due to exams)! Details can be found here: http://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/222855181/ 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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computer lab Te Whare O Te Ata
by Bill Rosoman 16 Jun '15

16 Jun '15

fyi I have been working many voluntary hours at Te Whare with mike for several months restoring, improving, documenting, training and assisting Mike to get things back to normal with the computers and the websites. So a lot of documentation has been happening. I do not think it is a good idea to see Mike and try and reopen the lab at this time after such an horrific experience they have been thru. They need time to see what the future holds for them. Bill Rosoman

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Re: [wlug] The Fate Of The Fairfield Lab
by William Mckee 15 Jun '15

15 Jun '15

I have the time and knowledge to open the lab. I've emailed Mike regarding this but recieved no reply. Rod has expressed interest in help running also. I'm willing to open the lab twice a week from 9-12. With more people I would love to open it from 2:30 till 5pm for primary and intermediate. It's a great resource and it makes me sad to see it closed. Cheers, William Cheers, On 15/06/2015 11:56 AM, "Lawrence D'Oliveiro" <ldo(a)geek-central.gen.nz> wrote: > To bring up a (not entirely) unrelated subject, I was at Te Whare O Te > Ata last week, and I asked Mike Rarere what was going to happen to the > computer lab. > > It’s clear Bruce Kingsbury was instrumental in getting this lab set up > and running, and it was providing a useful service to the community. > All of which was shot completely to hell as a result of his criminality > and stupidity. > > I understood from Mike that, without somebody willing to provide > full-time support for free, as Bruce was, the lab cannot continue. This > seems a shame, but is there anything else we can do? Fundraise to pay > someone to provide support, even if only part-time? > _______________________________________________ > wlug mailing list | wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz > Unsubscribe: http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/wlug >

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Ubuntu-Based REMnux 6.0 Linux Distro for Malware Analysis Officially Released
by Peter Reutemann 09 Jun '15

09 Jun '15

"The hard working developers behind the REMnux Linux distribution, an Ubuntu derivative that promises a lightweight solution for assisting malware analysis with reverse-engineering malicious software, announced the release of REMnux 6.0." -- source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Ubuntu-Based-REMnux-6-0-Linux-Distro-for-Mal… 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 To Support SSH In Windows and Contribute To OpenSSH
by Peter Reutemann 03 Jun '15

03 Jun '15

'Microsoft has announced plans for native support for SSH in Windows. "A popular request the PowerShell team has received is to use Secure Shell protocol and Shell session (aka SSH) to interoperate between Windows and Linux – both Linux connecting to and managing Windows via SSH and, vice versa, Windows connecting to and managing Linux via SSH. Thus, the combination of PowerShell and SSH will deliver a robust and secure solution to automate and to remotely manage Linux and Windows systems." Based on the work from this new direction, they also plan to contribute back to the OpenSSH project as well.' -- source: http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/06/02/1950234 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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Broadcom worth 37 billion
by Ian Young 02 Jun '15

02 Jun '15

A company called Avago has paid 37 billion for Broadcom, makers of the system on a chip in the Raspberry Pi. http://www.cnet.com/news/chipmakers-avago-broadcom-join-forces-in-37b-megam… http://www.theplatform.net/2015/05/28/avago-broadcom-to-take-on-intel-in-th… Some interesting analysis http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/05/31/why-is-avago-technologies-…

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Indonesia Uses Linux, openSUSE for Pilot Project
by Peter Reutemann 27 May '15

27 May '15

"An estimated 45,000 students from a province in Indonesia have enhanced their education and computer-usage knowledge through a pilot program using Linux and openSUSEthat is expected to become a nationwide educational program. >From 2009 to 2014, the project called “Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Utilization for Educational Quality Enhancement in Yogyakarta Province” used openSUSE and created material with Linux to enhance educational quality and equality inYogyakarta Province schools." -- source: http://www.linux.com/news/software/applications/832417 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Should I get an Arduino or Raspberry Pi?
by Peter Reutemann 27 May '15

27 May '15

'I spend a lot of time at conferences and events like Maker Faires, and having co-authored a book on the Raspberry Pi, I spend a lot of time talking to people about things like small electronics and open hardware. Probably the most frequent question I hear is, "Should I get a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino?"' -- source: http://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/should-i-get-an-arduino-or-raspberry-pi… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Linux/Moose Worm Targets Routers, Modems, and Embedded Systems
by Peter Reutemann 27 May '15

27 May '15

'Security firm ESET has published a report on new malware that targets Linux-based communication devices (modems, routers, and other internet-connected systems) to create a giant proxy network for manipulating social media. It's also capable of hijacking DNS settings. The people controlling the system use it for selling "follows," "likes," and so forth on social media sites like Twitter, Instagram, Vine, Facebook, and Google+. Affected router manufacturers include: Actiontec, Hik Vision, Netgear, Synology, TP-Link, ZyXEL, and Zhone. The researchers found that even some medical devices were vulnerable to the worm, though it wasn't designed specifically to work with them.' -- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/05/26/1854207 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Mandriva Goes Out of Business
by Peter Reutemann 27 May '15

27 May '15

"After struggling for the past several years, Mandriva has finally gone out of business, and is in the process of being liquidated. The company was responsible for Mandriva Linux, itself a combination of Mandrake Linux and Conectiva Linux. When Mandriva fell upon hard times, many of the distro's developers migrated to Mageia Linux, which is still going strong and just putting the final touches on its next major version (5).' -- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/05/26/2157243 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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How to Develop Own Custom Linux Distribution From Scratch
by Peter Reutemann 26 May '15

26 May '15

"Have you ever thought of making your own Linux Distribution? Every Linux user in their journey to Linux thought of making their own Linux distribution, at-least once. Even I was not an exception as a newbie to Linux land and have given my considerable time developing my own Linux Distribution. Developing a Linux Distribution from scratch is called Linux From Scratch (LFS)." -- source: http://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/how-to-develop-own-custom-linux-distrib… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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How to Install Zimbra 8.6 on Ubuntu 14.04 Server
by Peter Reutemann 26 May '15

26 May '15

"The Zimbra Collaboration Server is a mail server, collaborative web application and a web based mail server admin console in a single application. It provides LDAP, antivirus, antispam, collaboration features and a ajax webmail client. Zimbra is easy to use for administrators as well as end users due to its fast Ajax based web interface." -- source: https://www.howtoforge.com/tutorial/ubuntu-14-04-zimbra-server/ Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Debian8 Gnome3 desktop - Debian Installer problem
by Ian Stewart 26 May '15

26 May '15

Hi, At last nights wlug meeting I did a show and tell of my recent adventures with downloading and installing Debian 8 Live + non-free. I had encountered a problem with the Gnome3 desktop in that the Debian Installer application, which displays itself in full-screen mode, was not positioned correctly. As a result the Debian Installer applications "continue" and "go back" buttons are off the bottom of the display. Today I bumped into Ian Young, who provided a solution to this Gnome3 / Debian Installer problem. The workaround is to type Alt+Spacebar to open up a menu. Then select "Move to Workspace Down". The debian installer is placed into the second display workspace and in full-screen mode it is now positioned correctly so all pushbuttons may be accessed. I've tested out the Debian8 Installer on the KDE, xfce, LXDE, and Mate desktop environments and they position the Debian Installer window correctly. Also at last nights meeting I suggested the following command to copy the .iso file to a USB stick as device sdc... $ sudo dd if="debian-live-8.0.0-amd64-gnome-desktop nonfree.iso" of=/dev/sdc bs=4M; sync An alternative to this, which I tested out OK today is... $ sudo cp "debian-live-8.0.0-amd64-gnome-desktop nonfree.iso" /dev/sdc ...wishing you all the best with Debian8. cheers, Ian.

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“*ERROR* pipe is still busy with an old pageflip”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 24 May '15

24 May '15

I’ve been hitting an occasional display freeze that matches this description <http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-7675146.html>. Looks like a known problem with the 3.16 kernel. I thought things had got better with a system update I did 11 days ago, but this afternoon the freeze recurred. Unlike the previous times, killing all my user processes succeeded in unfreezing the display, so I was able to log in again without rebooting.

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WLUG meeting tomorrow
by Peter Reutemann 24 May '15

24 May '15

Hi everyone We have a meeting tomorrow: "git - from novice to master. Lawrence D'Oliveiro will introduce you to the distributed revision control system git, demonstrating the basic commands and also more advanced actions." http://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/222463816 Unfortunately, due to work commitments, I won't be able to make it. Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Glitch Art
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 22 May '15

22 May '15

(From the Cairo mailing list.) A version of GIMP that produces glitch art (entertaining display bugs): <https://www.flickr.com/photos/hellocatfood/17336134091> How to build glitch-GIMP: <http://www.hellocatfood.com/glitch-gimp/>.

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Meeting next Monday
by Peter Reutemann 22 May '15

22 May '15

Hi everyone We have a meeting coming up next Monday: "git - from novice to master. Lawrence D'Oliveiro will introduce you to the distributed revision control system git, demonstrating the basic commands and also more advanced actions." http://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/222463816 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph.+64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.data-mining.co.nz

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'Logjam' Vulnerability Threatens Encrypted Connections
by Peter Reutemann 22 May '15

22 May '15

'A team of security researchers has revealed a new encryption vulnerability called 'Logjam,' which is the result of a flaw in the TLS protocol used to create encrypted connections. It affects servers supporting the Diffie-Hellman key exchange, and it's caused by export restrictions mandated by the U.S. government during the Clinton administration. "Attackers with the ability to monitor the connection between an end user and a Diffie-Hellman-enabled server that supports the export cipher can inject a special payload into the traffic that downgrades encrypted connections to use extremely weak 512-bit key material. Using precomputed data prepared ahead of time, the attackers can then deduce the encryption key negotiated between the two parties." Internet Explorer is the only browser yet updated to block such an attack — patches for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari are expected soon. The researchers add, "Breaking the single, most common 1024-bit prime used by web servers would allow passive eavesdropping on connections to 18% of the Top 1 Million HTTPS domains. A second prime would allow passive decryption of connections to 66% of VPN servers and 26% of SSH servers. A close reading of published NSA leaks shows that the agency's attacks on VPNs are consistent with having achieved such a break." Here is their full technical report (PDF).' -- source: http://it.slashdot.org/story/15/05/20/1258251 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Linux 4.0 Has a File-System Corruption Problem, RAID Users Warned
by Peter Reutemann 21 May '15

21 May '15

'For the past few days kernel developers and Linux users have been investigating an EXT4 file-system corruption issue affecting the latest stable kernel series (Linux 4.0) and the current development code (Linux 4.1). It turns out that Linux users running the EXT4 file-system on a RAID0 configuration can easily destroy their file-system with this newest "stable" kernel. The cause and fix have materialized but it hasn't yet worked its way out into the mainline kernel, thus users should be warned before quickly upgrading to the new kernel on systems with EXT4 and RAID0.' -- source: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/05/21/1324229 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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theregister.co.uk - Inkscape 0.91 review
by William Mckee 21 May '15

21 May '15

A very positive review of Inkscape 0.91 release. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/19/inkscape_review/?page=1 Most notable they talk about the speed and performance in the new release. I'm a heavy GIMP user but have been using Inkscape recently for website logos. Like the reviewer - I have been impressed with the improvements. Cheers, William.

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