- wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Firefox Multi-Account Containers
by Peter Reutemann 11 Sep '23

11 Sep '23

Hi everyone Just came across this Firefox plugin: The Firefox Multi-Account Containers extension lets you carve out a separate box for each of your online lives – no more opening a different browser just to check your work email! Under the hood, it separates website storage into tab-specific Containers. Cookies downloaded by one Container are not available to other Containers. You can even integrate individual Containers with Mozilla VPN to protect your browsing and location. With the Firefox Multi-Account Containers extension, you can... - Sign in to two different accounts on the same site (for example, you could sign in to work email and home email in two different Container tabs. - Keep different kinds of browsing far away from each other (for example, you might use one Container tab for managing your Checking Account and a different Container tab for searching for new songs by your favorite band) - Avoid leaving social-network footprints all over the web (for example, you could use a Container tab for signing in to a social network, and use a different tab for visiting online news sites, keeping your social identity separate from tracking scripts on news sites) - Protect your browsing activity in individual Containers using Mozilla VPN, so you can shop while travelling abroad but check your bank account from a server in your home country. -- source: https://discuss.systems/@ricci/111024736570863186 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Connected cars are a “privacy nightmare,” Mozilla Foundation says
by Peter Reutemann 07 Sep '23

07 Sep '23

'Today, the Mozilla Foundation published its analysis of how well automakers handle the privacy of data collected by their connected cars, and the results will be unlikely to surprise any regular reader of Ars Technica. The researchers were horrified by their findings, stating that "cars are the worst product category we have ever reviewed for privacy." Mozilla looked at 25 car brands and found that all of them collected too much personal data, and from multiple sources—monitoring not just which buttons you push or what you do in any of the infotainment system's apps but also data from other sources like satellite radio or third-party maps. Or even when you connect your phone—remember that prompt asking you if you wanted to share all your contacts and notes with your car when you connected it via Bluetooth? While some gathered data seems innocuous or even helpful—feedback to improve cabin ergonomics and UIs, for example—some data is decidedly not. For example, Nissan's privacy policy says it can collect "sensitive personal information, including driver’s license number, national or state identification number, citizenship status, immigration status, race, national origin, religious or philosophical beliefs, sexual orientation, sexual activity, precise geolocation, health diagnosis data, and genetic information," although it's unlikely your car knows whether you're getting busy in the back seat. While this might be technically possible with a car fitted with a camera-based driver-monitoring system, Nissan's privacy policy notes the data source for the quoted paragraph as "direct contact with users and Nissan employees." (Although more sophisticated driver-monitoring systems that claim to detect emotional states have been demonstrated at shows like CES, we're unaware of any that are in production.) Mozilla found plenty more to worry about. Eighty-four percent of the brands they analyzed said they can share your data, and 76 percent said they can sell it. And more than half say they'll share data with the government and law enforcement by request. Users have very little control over what those brands do with their data. Only two of the 25 brands (Renault and Dacia) tell users they have the right to have their data deleted, and neither sell cars in the United States.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/09/connected-cars-are-a-privacy-nightmare… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

ArcaOS 5.1.0 (OEM OS/2 Warp Operating System) Now Available
by Peter Reutemann 04 Sep '23

04 Sep '23

'ArcaOS 5.1.0 is an OEM distribution of IBM's discontinued OS/2 Warp operating system. This new version of ArcaOS offers UEFI compatibility allowing it to run in modern x86 hardware and also includes the ability to install to GPT-based disk layouts. At OS2World the OS/2 community has been called upon to report supported hardware, open source any OS/2 software, make public as much OS/2 documentation as possible and post the important platform links. OS2World insists that open source has helped OS/2 in the past years and it is time to look under the hood to try to clone internal components like Control Program, Presentation Manager, SOM and Workplace Shell.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/09/02/1912223 The one and only time I came across OS/2 was in the late 90s (at a bank)... Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

2 1

ReiserFS is now “obsolete” in the Linux kernel and should be gone by 2025
by Peter Reutemann 01 Sep '23

01 Sep '23

'When Apple was about to introduce Time Machine in Mac OS X Leopard, John Siracusa wrote in the summer of 2006 about how a new file system should be coming to Macs (which it did, 11 years later). The Mac, Siracusa wrote, needed something that could efficiently handle lots of tiny files, volume management with pooled storage, checksum-based data integrity, and snapshots. It needed something like ZFS or, perhaps, ReiserFS, file systems “notable for their willingness to reconsider past assumptions about file system design.” Two months later, the name Reiser would lose most of its prestige and pick up a tragic association it would never shake. Police arrested the file system’s namesake, Hans Reiser, and charged him with murder in connection with the disappearance of his estranged wife. Reiser’s work on Linux file systems was essentially sentenced to obscurity from that point on. Now that designation has been made official, as the file system that was once the default on systems like SUSE Linux has been changed from “Supported” to “Obsolete” in the latest Linux 6.6 kernel merge process (as reported by Phoronix). While a former employee of Reiser’s company, Namesys, continues out-of-source work on later versions of ReiserFS, it is likely to disappear from the kernel entirely in a matter of years, likely 2025. It's an ignoble end for a filesystem that, at one time, could have been the next big thing for Linux file systems.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/the-torrid-saga-of-reiserfs-nears-i… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Google Removes Fake Signal and Telegram Apps Hosted on Play
by Peter Reutemann 01 Sep '23

01 Sep '23

'Researchers say they have found fake apps in Google Play that masqueraded as legitimate ones for the Signal and Telegram messaging platforms. The malicious apps could pull messages or other sensitive information from legitimate accounts when users took certain actions. ArsTechnica: An app with the name Signal Plus Messenger was available on Play for nine months and had been downloaded from Play roughly 100 times before Google took it down last April after being tipped off by security firm ESET. It was also available in the Samsung app store and on signalplus[.]org, a dedicated website mimicking the official Signal.org. An app calling itself FlyGram, meanwhile, was created by the same threat actor and was available through the same three channels. Google removed it from Play in 2021. Both apps remain available in the Samsung store. Both apps were built on open source code available from Signal and Telegram. Interwoven into that code was an espionage tool tracked as BadBazaar. The Trojan has been linked to a China-aligned hacking group tracked as GREF. BadBazaar has been used previously to target Uyghurs and other Turkic ethnic minorities. The FlyGram malware was also shared in a Uyghur Telegram group, further aligning it to previous targeting by the BadBazaar malware family. Signal Plus could monitor sent and received messages and contacts if people connected their infected device to their legitimate Signal number, as is normal when someone first installs Signal on their device. Doing so caused the malicious app to send a host of private information to the attacker, including the device IMEI number, phone number, MAC address, operator details, location data, Wi-Fi information, emails for Google accounts, contact list, and a PIN used to transfer texts in the event one was set up by the user.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/08/31/1655233 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

With Version 117, Firefox Finally Speaks Chrome's Translation Language
by Peter Reutemann 01 Sep '23

01 Sep '23

'The latest version of the flagship FOSS browser is out, and it's picked up one of the main features for which we keep Chrome around. >From a report: The Firefox version 117 feature list might not look all that impressive, but it does have a big-ticket feature that may tempt people back: automatic translation. The snag is it's disabled by default in the release version, and you'll have to manually enable it. Although it was enabled in the betas, Mozilla has decided to go for a staged rollout and not enable it for everyone until Firefox 118 in six weeks or so. The new feature is integrated, privacy-respecting machine translation between multiple languages. This was already possible in older versions, but it needed an extension, and that had two side effects. One is that the extension hooked deep into the core of the browser in ways that Mozilla wasn't comfortable about, and the other is that once your text had been sent out to a third-party website, it could be snooped upon -- but the victims of any snooping would blame the browser, even if it wasn't the browser's fault. To enable it, go to the configuration page (enter about:config in the address bar), and search for a setting called browser.translations.enable.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/08/31/1658259 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

FreeBSD Can Now Boot in 25 Milliseconds
by Peter Reutemann 31 Aug '23

31 Aug '23

'Replacing a sort algorithm in the FreeBSD kernel has improved its boot speed by a factor of 100 or more... and although it's aimed at a micro-VM, the gains should benefit everyone. From a report: MicroVMs are a hot area of technology R&D in the last half decade or so. The core idea is a re-invention of some of concepts and technology that IBM invented along with the hypervisor in the 1960s: designing OSes specifically to run as guests under another OS. This means building the OS specifically to run inside a VM, and to talk to resources provided by a specific hypervisor rather than to fake hardware. This means that the guest OS needs next to no support for real hardware, just VirtIO drivers which talk directly to facilities provided by the host hypervisor. In turn, the hypervisor doesn't have to provide an emulated PCI bus, emulated power management, emulated graphics card, emulated network interface cards, and so on. The result is that the hypervisor itself can be much smaller and simpler. The result of ruthlessly chopping down both the hypervisor, and the OS that runs inside it, is that both ends can be much smaller and simpler. That means that VMs can use much fewer resources, and start up much quicker.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/08/30/1525238 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Nautilus File Manager Gets New Features in Upcoming GNOME 45
by Peter Reutemann 29 Aug '23

29 Aug '23

'The upcoming release of GNOME 45 — expected September 20th — will bring new features to the Nautilus file manager (now in public beta testing). An anonymous reader shared this report from 9to5Linux: Nautilus in GNOME 45 already received a search performance boost, support for dropping images directly from web pages, an improved Grid View that now indicates starred files too, the ability to display bytes size as a tooltip for folder properties, and a more adaptive design for the sidebar. It also got an improved file opening experience while sandboxed (think Flatpak, Snap, etc.), a more consistent date and time format, a more simplistic definition of the Keyboard Shortcuts window, the ability to refocus the search bar using the Ctrl+F keyboard shortcut, and a better archiving experience. But there's room for more new features as Nautilus now received new "Search Everywhere" buttons to expand the search scope and a modern full-height sidebar layout, along with refined sidebar sizing and folding threshold. This is what Nautilus looks like in GNOME 45. The article includes some screenshots, adding that Nautilus "also received some performance improvements to more quickly generate multiple thumbnails, provide users with flickerless transition into and from search, and avoid DBus-activating other apps when it starts."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/08/27/2329227 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Linux What's New in Linux 6.5?
by Peter Reutemann 28 Aug '23

28 Aug '23

'9to5Linux: Just a couple of days after celebrating its 32nd anniversary , Linus Torvalds announced today the final release of the Linux 6.5 kernel series as a major update that introduces several new features, updated and new drivers for better hardware support, and other changes. After seven weeks of RCs, Linux kernel 6.5 is here with new features like MIDI 2.0 support in ALSA, ACPI support for the RISC-V architecture, Landlock support for UML (User-Mode Linux), better support for AMD "Zen" systems, as well as user-space support for the ARMv8.8 memcpy/memset instructions. Also new in Linux 6.5 is Intel TPMI (Topology Aware Register and PM Capsule Interface) support for the power capping subsystem and a TPMI interface driver for Intel RAPL, and the "runnable boosting" feature in the EAS balancer to improve CPU utilization for specific workloads. This release also improves SMP scheduling's load balancer to recognize SMT cores with more than one busy sibling and allows lower-priority CPUs to pull tasks to avoid superfluous migrations, and improves EXT4 file system's journalling, block allocator subsystems, and performance for parallel DIO overwrites.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/08/27/2316212 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

2 1

Can You Run Linux On a Commodore 64?
by Peter Reutemann 28 Aug '23

28 Aug '23

'llvm-mos adapts the popular LLVM compiler to target the MOS 6502 processor (the 1980s microprocessor used in early home computing devices like the Apple II and the Commodore 64). So developer Onno Kortman used it to cross-compile semu, a "minimalist RISC-V system emulator capable of running Linux the kernel and corresponding userland." And by the end of the day, Kortman has Linux running on a Commodore 64. Long-time Slashdot reader johnwbyrd shared the link to Kortman's repository. Some quotes: "But does it run Linux?" can now be finally and affirmatively answered for the Commodore C64...! It runs extremely slowly and it needs a RAM Expansion Unit (REU), as there is no chance to fit it all into just 64KiB. It even emulates virtual memory with an MMU.... The screenshots took VICE a couple hours in "warp mode" (activate it with Alt-W) to generate. So, as is, a real C64 should be able to boot Linux within a week or so. The compiled 6502 code is not really optimized yet, and it might be realistic to squeeze a factor 10x of performance out of this. Maybe even a simple form of JIT compilation? It should also be possible to implement starting a checkpointed VM (quickly precomputed on x86-64) to avoid the lengthy boot process... I also tested a minimal micropython port (I can clean it up and post it on github if there is interest), that one does not use the MMU and is almost barely remotely usable with lots of optimism at 100% speed. A key passage: I have not tested it on real hardware yet, that's the next challenge .. for you. So please send me a link to a timelapse video of an original unit with REU booting Linux :D Its GitHub repository has build and run instructions...' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/08/27/1532207 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Bloomberg Terminals Still Exist
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 27 Aug '23

27 Aug '23

Bloomberg still supplies special terminals for accessing the services it provides, and those services cost a pretty penny -- over $40,000 a year for each. And Kāinga Ora has seven of the things <https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/kainga-ora-spends-more-than-300000-a…>. These things have a long history. A look at some older versions: <https://www.bloomberg.com/professional/blog/look-back-bloomberg-keyboard/>.

1 0

When A Certificate Authority Is Too Big To Fail
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 26 Aug '23

26 Aug '23

Certificate authorities (CAs) have a crucial role in the chain of trust that binds the computing world together right now. So when it turns out that a rather large company (Symantec) has been issuing dodgy certificates for many years, the ramifications run uncomfortably wide. Google has been gradually winding down its trust of Symantec-issued over a multiyear period, because blocking them all at once would just be too painful for its users. It turns out some of these CAs are also used for signing applications for Windows. Microsoft finally got around to blocking the Symantec one within the last few days, only to abruptly reverse course and trust it again, because it caused serious trouble for too many Windows systems <https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/08/a-renegade-certificate-is-removed-…>. The applications concerned should have been updated to not depend on such a worthless CA. But it seems, ensuring Windows users update all their relevant apps can be a mountain just too high to climb.

1 0

Firefox Users May Import Chrome Extensions Now
by Peter Reutemann 25 Aug '23

25 Aug '23

'Mozilla has implemented the WebExtensions system in its browser, allowing Firefox users to import select extensions from other browsers like Chrome. gHacks reports: The feature, which is in testing at the moment, can be enabled by all users of the latest stable version of Firefox. 1. Load about:config in the browser's address bar. 2. Confirm that you will be careful to continue. 3. Search for browser.migrate.chrome.extensions.enabled. 4. Set the feature to True, which enables it. 5. Restart Firefox. Mozilla has integrated it into the browser's import functionality, which users may use on first run or at any time from the Settings page. To do so, select Menu > Settings > Import Data (button), or load about:preferences#general in the browser's address bar and activate the import data button on the page. Select Chrome from the list, expand the available import options and make sure extensions are checked. Imports are usually limited to some data, such as bookmarks or the browsing history. Firefox is the first major browser, maybe the first browser at all, that adds extensions to the list of supported imports. The feature is limited at the time to Google Chrome and select extensions. Even though Firefox and Chrome extensions use the same framework, WebExtensions, they are not compatible immediately. Firefox users who attempt to install extensions from Chrome's Web Store may notice that this is not working. Mozilla decided to create a list of extension pairs for extensions that are available on the Chrome Web Store and the Mozilla Add-ons Store. Instead of importing the Chrome extension directly, Firefox is installing the Firefox version of the extension from Mozilla's own extension store. ' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/08/24/2233242 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

WinRAR Flaw Lets Hackers Run Programs When You Open RAR Archives
by Peter Reutemann 23 Aug '23

23 Aug '23

'A critical vulnerability (CVE-2023-40477) has been patched in WinRAR, enabling remote attackers to execute arbitrary code by luring victims into opening a specially crafted RAR file. The severity rating is only 7.8 though due to user deception being necessary. BleepingComputer reports: The vulnerability was discovered by researcher "goodbyeselene" of Zero Day Initiative, who reported the flaw to the vendor, RARLAB, on June 8th, 2023. "The specific flaw exists within the processing of recovery volumes," reads the security advisory released on ZDI's site. "The issue results from the lack of proper validation of user-supplied data, which can result in a memory access past the end of an allocated buffer." RARLAB released WinRAR version 6.23 on August 2nd, 2023, effectively addressing CVE-2023-40477. Therefore, WinRAR users are strongly advised to apply the available security update immediately. Apart from the RAR4 recovery volumes processing code fix, version 6.23 addresses an issue with specially crafted archives leading to wrong file initiation, which is also considered a high-severity problem.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/23/08/18/2157249 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

2 1

Latest Android Runtime (ART) Update Led To Apps Starting 30% Faster
by Peter Reutemann 22 Aug '23

22 Aug '23

'The latest update to the Android Runtime (ART) -- the "engine behind the Android operating system (OS)" -- has resulted in app startup time "improvements of up to 30% on some devices," says Google. 9to5Google reports: Behind the scenes, "ART is the same for all devices" and: "The ART APEX module is a complex piece of software with an order of magnitude more APIs than any other APEX module. It also backs a quarter of the developer APIs available in the Android SDK. In addition, ART has a compiler that aims to make the most of the underlying hardware by generating chipset-specific instructions, such as Arm SVE." The testing process for Android Runtime updates involves "compiling over 18 million APKs and running app compatibility tests, and startup, performance, and memory benchmarks on a variety of Android devices that replicate the diversity of our ecosystem as closely as possible." There's then a very gradual rollout process. Google also notes developer improvements with every update "like OpenJDK improvements and compiler optimizations that benefit both Java and Kotlin," with ART 13 resulting in the "fastest-ever adoption of a new OpenJDK [11] release on Android devices." ART 14 is rolling out "in the coming months" with "new compiler and runtime optimizations that improve performance while reducing code size," as well as OpenJDK 17.' -- source: https://slashdot.org/story/23/08/21/212202 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

AlmaLinux Leader Says Red Hat's Code Crackdown Isn't a Threat
by Peter Reutemann 21 Aug '23

21 Aug '23

'Yes, Red Hat Enterprise Linux changed its licensing last month — but how will that affect AlmaLinux? The chair of the nonprofit AlmaLinux OS Foundation, benny Vasquez, tells SiliconANGLE that "For typical users, there's very, very little difference. Overall, we're still exactly the same way we were, except for kernel updates." Updates may no longer be available the day a new version of RHEL comes out, but developers still have access to Red Hat's planned enhancements and bug fixes via CentOS Stream, a version of RHEL that Red Hat uses as essentially a test bed for new features that might later be incorporated into its flagship product. From a practical perspective, that's nearly as good as having access to the production source code, Vasquez said. "While there is a generally accepted understanding that not everything in CentOS Stream will end up in RHEL, that's not how it works in practice," she said. "I can't think of anything they have shipped in RHEL that wasn't in Stream first." That's still no guarantee, but the workarounds AlmaLinux has put in place over the past month should address all but the most outlier cases, Vasquez said. The strategy has shifted from bug-for-bug compatibility to being application binary interface-compatible... ABI compatibility doesn't guarantee that problems will never occur, but glitches should be rare and can usually be resolved by recompiling the source code. "It is sufficient for us to be ABI-compatible with RHEL," Vasquez said. "The most important thing is that this allows our community to feel stability." In fact, Red Hat's change of direction has been a blessing in disguise for AlmaLinux, she said... "We view this as a release from our bonds of being one-to-one." Patches can be applied without waiting for a cue from Red Hat and "we get to engage with our community in a completely new and exciting way." AlmaLinux has also seen a modest financial windfall from Red Hat's decision. "The outpouring of support has been pretty impressive," Vasquez said. "People have shown up for event staffing and website maintenance and infrastructure management and we've gotten more financial backing from corporations." Vasquez also told the site that "the number of everyday people throwing in $5 has more than quadrupled."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/08/20/0247259 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Debian Turns 30
by Peter Reutemann 18 Aug '23

18 Aug '23

'Debian blog: Over 30 years ago the late Ian Murdock wrote to the comp.os.linux.development newsgroup about the completion of a brand-new Linux release which he named "The Debian Linux Release." He built the release by hand, from scratch, so to speak. Ian laid out guidelines for how this new release would work, what approach the release would take regarding its size, manner of upgrades, installation procedures; and with great care of consideration for users without Internet connection. Unaware that he had sparked a movement in the fledgling F/OSS community, Ian worked on and continued to work on Debian. The release, now aided by volunteers from the newsgroup and around the world, grew and continues to grow as one of the largest and oldest FREE operating systems that still exist today. Debian at its core is comprised of Users, Contributors, Developers, and Sponsors, but most importantly, People. Ians drive and focus remains embedded in the core of Debian, it remains in all of our work, it remains in the minds and hands of the users of The Universal Operating System. The Debian Project is proud and happy to share our anniversary not exclusively unto ourselves, instead we share this moment with everyone, as we come together in celebration of a resounding community that works together, effects change, and continues to make a difference, not just in our work but around the world. Debian is present in cluster systems, datacenters, desktop computers, embedded systems, IoT devices, laptops, servers, it may possibly be powering the web server and device you are reading this article on, and it can also be found in Spacecraft.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/08/17/136231 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Farewell, Type-1 Fonts
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 17 Aug '23

17 Aug '23

Following the lead of other vendors, now Adobe itself is abandoning support for the venerable “Type 1” font format that it created <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/microsoft-adobe-and-others-have-dro…>. Back in the days when PostScript printers were new and wonderful things, the PostScript language was an open, published spec, but the high-quality font format that Adobe’s printers used was not. This format included a “secret sauce” in the form of “hints” to the rasterizer that smoothed out irregularities. Because if you took letter shapes expressed as scalable vector graphics and tried rendering them in a straight geometric fashion at typical text sizes on a black-and-white output device, even at as high as 300 dpi, there would be a noticeable roughness to the shapes. Nowadays the techniques for applying such hinting are no longer such a big secret. However, I take issue with this bit: ... it's possible that you created a document in 2022 that you simply won't be able to open in 2023. The change will also cause problems if you open and work with decades-old files with any kind of regularity; files that use Type 1 fonts will begin generating lots of "missing font" messages ... As far as I know, office-type and layout-type apps do not typically embed fonts in the document. Instead, they store font-matching information (family name, weight etc) that will be used to find the best available fonts when the document is next opened, perhaps on a different system. Remember, it is only the old font format that is being dropped; the same classic, professional-quality font designs that people have been using for years or decades will still be available, just in the newer formats. So a proper font match, if it is installed, can still be found. A self-contained document format like PDF does embed fonts (typically only in subset form), but that has its own internal font representation, so it should not be affected by the demise of Type-1. This part is true, though: You'll also either need to convert any specialized PostScript Type 1 font that you may have paid for in the past or pay for an equivalent OpenType alternative. This article <https://www.prepressure.com/fonts/basics/history> is a good potted history of font formats (the important ones, at any rate). By the way, I don’t think the open-source FreeType library is dropping support for Type-1 font rendering any time soon. It still handles Multiple Master fonts, which Adobe gave up on a long time ago.

1 1

Windows Server Forgets What Time It Is
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 17 Aug '23

17 Aug '23

Seems that, some years ago, Microsoft added a “feature” to Windows Server, called “Secure Time Seeding”. This was supposed to offer alternative ways for a server machine to keep track of the correct time, in the event of failures in the more usual mechanisms. Unfortunately, this “feature” only seems to have introduced a new source of problems, where the server can suddenly throw its date and time setting off by as much as several months, often with unfortunate consequences for the applications running on it <https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/08/windows-feature-that-resets-system…>. At this stage, Microsoft is still in the “no comment” stage of (not) responding to this problem. Reports of issues go right back to the introduction of the feature, back in 2016. They may only be happening intermittently, but it seems to me this is still enough to damage what trust there may still be left in Microsoft’s product.

1 0

Firefox Finally Outperforming Google Chrome In SunSpider
by Peter Reutemann 16 Aug '23

16 Aug '23

'Michael Larabel writes via Phoronix: Mozilla developers are celebrating that they are now faster than Google Chrome with the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, although that test has been superseded by the JetStream benchmark. Last week a new Firefox Nightly News was published that outlines that "We're now apparently beating Chrome on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark!" The provided numbers now show Firefox easily beating Chrome in this decade-old JavaScript benchmark. The benchmarks come from AreWeFastYet.com. Meanwhile for the newer and more demanding JetStream 2.0 benchmark, Google Chrome continues to win easily over Firefox. ' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/08/15/2015210 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

From The “How Not To Design A Website” Department
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 15 Aug '23

15 Aug '23

Found a link to some past news items on this site reporting on Munich city’s back-and-forth migrations between Linux and Windows. The last linked item was this <https://www.ip-watch.org/2018/06/12/former-munich-mayor-warns-negative-effe…>. Bad enough that that light, thin text is almost unreadable against a similarly-coloured background, I decided to search the site for “munich” to see if I could find a more recent item, and got this: <https://www.ip-watch.org/?s=munich>. In case they fix it later, the top part has this message: Deprecated: strlen(): Passing null to parameter #1 ($string) of type string is deprecated in /home/clients/5bc716f64eaa5eb2ef6cc74a6b9b690a/web/weblog/wp-content/plugins/wordfence/vendor/wordfence/wf-waf/src/lib/utils.php on line 445 and at the bottom it says “Not found, error 404” and that the page I am looking for (search results??) no longer exists. Who knew? Mind you, PHP is the only language where features can be marked “no longer deprecated” in later releases, so who knows, perhaps they will later decide to assign a meaning to finding the length of a string when the string isn’t actually a string ...

1 0

Should There Be an 'Official' Version of Linux?
by C. A. Fillekes 15 Aug '23

15 Aug '23

I was surprised, a couple years ago, to find that most of my gnome desktop applications had ceased being exportable to different machines' displays over the network. Even Firefox. Ordinary vanilla X11 is unwieldy, but it at least had that one key feature, and has had it since well before MS Windows ruined everything.

1 0

Should There Be an 'Official' Version of Linux?
by Peter Reutemann 14 Aug '23

14 Aug '23

'Why aren't more people using Linux on the desktop? Slashdot reader technology_dude shares one solution: Jack Wallen at ZDNet says establishing an "official" version of Linux may (or may not) help Linux on the desktop increase the number of users, mostly as someplace to point new users. It makes sense to me. What does Slashdot think and what would be the challenges, other than acceptance of a particular flavor? Wallen argues this would also create a standard for hardware and software vendors to target, which "could equate to even more software and hardware being made available to Linux." (And an "official" Linux might also be more appealing to business users.) Wallen suggests it be "maintained and controlled by a collective of people from users, developers, and corporations (such as Intel and AMD) with a vested interest in the success of this project... There would also be corporate backing for things like marketing (such as TV commercials)." He also suggests basing it on Debian, and supporting both Snap and Flatpak... In comments on the original submission, long-time Slashdot reader bobbomo points instead to kernel.org, arguing "There already is an official version of Linux called mainline. Everything else is backports." And jd (Slashdot user #1,658) believes that the official Linux is the Linux Standard Base. "All distributions, more-or-less, conform to the LSB, which gives you a pseudo 'official' Linux. About the one variable is the package manager. And there are ways to work around that." Unfortunately, according to Wikipedia... The LSB standard stopped being updated in 2015 and current Linux distributions do not adhere to or offer it; however, the lsb_release command is sometimes still available.[citation needed] On February 7, 2023, a former maintainer of the LSB wrote, "The LSB project is essentially abandoned." That post (on the lsb-discuss mailing list) argues the LSB approach was "partially superseded" by Snaps and Flatpaks (for application portability and stability). And of course, long-time Slashdot user menkhaura shares the obligatory XKCD comic... It's not exactly the same thing, but days after ZDNet's article, CIQ, Oracle, and SUSE announced the Open Enterprise Linux Association, a new collaborative trade association to foster "the development of distributions compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux." So where does that leave us? Share your own thoughts in the comments. And should there be an "official" version of Linux?' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/08/12/1835204 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

3 2

Does Desktop Linux Have a Firefox Problem?
by Peter Reutemann 14 Aug '23

14 Aug '23

'OS News' managing editor calls Firefox "the single most important desktop Linux application," shipping in most distros (with some users later opting for a post-installation download of Chrome). But "I'm genuinely worried about the state of browsers on Linux, and the future of Firefox on Linux in particular..." While both GNOME and KDE nominally invest in their own two browsers, GNOME Web and Falkon, their uptake is limited and releases few and far between. For instance, none of the major Linux distributions ship GNOME Web as their default browser, and it lacks many of the features users come to expect from a browser. Falkon, meanwhile, is updated only sporadically, often going years between releases. Worse yet, Falkon uses Chromium through QtWebEngine, and GNOME Web uses WebKit (which are updated separately from the browser, so browser releases are not always a solid metric!), so both are dependent on the goodwill of two of the most ruthless corporations in the world, Google and Apple respectively. Even Firefox itself, even though it's clearly the browser of choice of distributions and Linux users alike, does not consider Linux a first-tier platform. Firefox is first and foremost a Windows browser, followed by macOS second, and Linux third. The love the Linux world has for Firefox is not reciprocated by Mozilla in the same way, and this shows in various places where issues fixed and addressed on the Windows side are ignored on the Linux side for years or longer. The best and most visible example of that is hardware video acceleration. This feature has been a default part of the Windows version since forever, but it wasn't enabled by default for Linux until Firefox 115, released only in early July 2023. Even then, the feature is only enabled by default for users of Intel graphics — AMD and Nvidia users need not apply. This lack of video acceleration was — and for AMD and Nvidia users, still is — a major contributing factor to Linux battery life on laptops taking a serious hit compared to their Windows counterparts... It's not just hardware accelerated video decoding. Gesture support has taken much longer to arrive on the Linux version than it did on the Windows version — things like using swipes to go back and forward, or pinch to zoom on images... I don't see anyone talking about this problem, or planning for the eventual possible demise of Firefox, what that would mean for the Linux desktop, and how it can be avoided or mitigated. In an ideal world, the major stakeholders of the Linux desktop — KDE, GNOME, the various major distributions — would get together and seriously consider a plan of action. The best possible solution, in my view, would be to fork one of the major browser engines (or pick one and significantly invest in it), and modify this engine and tailor it specifically for the Linux desktop. Stop living off the scraps and leftovers thrown across the fence from Windows and macOS browser makers, and focus entirely on making a browser engine that is optimised fully for Linux, its graphics stack, and its desktops. Have the major stakeholders work together on a Linux-first — or even Linux-only — browser engine, leaving the graphical front-end to the various toolkits and desktop environments.... I think it's highly irresponsible of the various prominent players in the desktop Linux community, from GNOME to KDE, from Ubuntu to Fedora, to seemingly have absolutely zero contingency plans for when Firefox enshittifies or dies...' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/08/13/226217 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

2 1

Mozilla To Bring Firefox Desktop Extension To Android Browser
by Peter Reutemann 12 Aug '23

12 Aug '23

'Scott DeVaney, writing at Mozilla blog: In the coming months Mozilla will launch support for an open ecosystem of extensions on Firefox for Android on addons.mozilla.org (AMO). We'll announce a definite launch date in early September, but it's safe to expect a roll-out before the year's end. Here's everything developers need to know to get their Firefox desktop extensions ready for Android usage and discoverability on AMO. For the past few years Firefox for Android officially supported a small subset of extensions while we focused our efforts on strengthening core Firefox for Android functionality and understanding the unique needs of mobile browser users. Today, Mozilla has built the infrastructure necessary to support an open extension ecosystem on Firefox for Android. We anticipate considerable user demand for more extensions on Firefox for Android, so why not start optimizing your desktop extension for mobile-use right away?' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/08/11/1234201 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

2 1

'The Open Source Licensing War is Over'
by Peter Reutemann 12 Aug '23

12 Aug '23

'It's time for the open source Rambos to stop fighting and agree that developers care more about software's access and ease of use than the purity of its license, reads a piece on InfoWorld. From the report: The open source war is over, however much some want to continue soldiering on. Recently Meta (Facebook) released Llama 2, a powerful large language model (LLM) with more than 70 billion parameters. In the past, Meta had restricted use of its LLMs to research purposes, but with Llama 2, Meta opened it up; the only restriction is that it can't be used for commercial purposes. Only a handful of companies have the computational horsepower to deploy it at scale (Google, Amazon, and very, very few others). This means, of course, it's not "open source" according to the Open Source Definition (OSD), despite Meta advertising it as such. This has a few open source advocates crying, Rambo style, "They drew first blood!" and "Nothing is over! Nothing! You just don't turn it off!", insistent that Meta stop calling Llama 2 "open source." They're right, in a pedantic sort of way, but they also don't seem to realize just how irrelevant their concerns are. For years developers have been voting with their GitHub repositories to pick "open enough." It's not that open source doesn't matter, but rather it has never mattered in the way some hoped or believed. More than 10 years ago, the trend toward permissive licensing was so pronounced that RedMonk analyst James Governor declared, "Younger [developers] today are about POSS -- post open source software. [Screw] the license and governance, just commit to GitHub." In response, people in the comments fretted and scolded, saying past trends like this had resulted in "epic clusterf-s" or that "promiscuous sharing w/out a license leads to software-transmitted diseases." And yet, millions of unlicensed GitHub repositories later, we haven't entered the dark ages of software licensing. Open source, or "open enough," software now finds its way into pretty much all software, however it ends up being licensed to the end user. Ideal? Perhaps not. But a fact of life? Yep. In response, GitHub and others have devised ways to entice developers to pick open source licenses to govern their projects. As I wrote back in 2014, all these moves will likely help, but the reality is that they also won't matter. They won't matter because "open source" doesn't really matter anymore. Not as some countercultural raging against the corporate software machine, anyway. All of this led me to conclude we're in the midst of the post-open source revolution, a revolution in which software matters more than ever, but its licensing matters less and less.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/08/11/1221250 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

2 1

The Eternal Sunshine Of The SEO-Focused Site
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 11 Aug '23

11 Aug '23

This report <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/08/the-internet-is-not-…> says that CNET, and possibly other large sites, are deleting online archives of decades-old articles in an effort to improve their rankings with search engines like Google. Google, on the other hand, is saying that such behaviour makes no difference to their rankings. I found the closing paragraph particularly interesting: From time immemorial, the protection of historical content has required making many copies without authorization, regardless of the cultural or business forces at play, and that has not changed with the Internet. Archivists operate in a parallel IP universe, borrowing scraps of reality and keeping them safe until shortsighted business decisions and copyright protectionism die down. Hopefully, despite the link rot, future historians can piece together an accurate history of our fragile digital era. In there is a link to this item from the same author <https://www.technologizer.com/2012/01/23/why-history-needs-software-piracy/>, from over a decade ago, on “Why History Needs Software Piracy”: When viewed in a historical context, the benefits of software piracy far outweigh its short-term costs. If you care about the history of technology, in fact, you should be thankful that people copy software without permission.

1 0

Abuses Of AI #397: Pak’N’Save’s Savey-Meal Bot Goes Off The Rails
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 11 Aug '23

11 Aug '23

I wonder whose bright idea it was to offer an AI-powered recipe advisor that offered free-text input <https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/11/supermarket_reins_in_ai_recipebot/>. So naturally somebody tried entering such hazardous ingredients as ammonia and bleach, to see if the bot would make up a recipe from them. Which it did. Complete with glowing recommendations like “the perfect non-alcoholic beverage to quench your thirst and refresh your senses. It combines the invigorating scents of ammonia, bleach, and water for a truly unique experience!" It has since been revised to be a bit more, ah, conservative with its suggestions, and also only allow selection from a limited list of ingredients. Though a reader suggests that the list restriction is only implemented within the HTML page itself, not in the actual back end.

1 0

Intel's GPU Drivers Now Collect Telemetry, Including 'How You Use Your Computer'
by Peter Reutemann 10 Aug '23

10 Aug '23

'ExtremeTech: Intel has introduced a telemetry collection service by default in the latest beta driver for its Arc GPUs. You can opt out of it, but we all know most people just click "yes" to everything during a software installation. Intel's release notes for the drivers don't mention this change to how its drivers work, which is a curious omission. News of Intel adding telemetry collection to its drivers is a significant change to how its GPU drivers work. Intel has even given this new collation routine a cute name -- the Intel Computing Improvement Program. Gee, that sounds pretty wonderful. We want to improve our computing, so let's dive into the details briefly. According to TechPowerUp, which discovered the change, Intel has created a landing page for the program that explains what is collected and what isn't. At a high level, it states, "This program uses information about your computer's performance to make product improvements that may benefit you in the future." Though that sounds innocuous, Intel provides a long list of the types of data it collects, many unrelated to your computer's performance. Those include the types of websites you visit, which Intel says are dumped into 30 categories and logged without URLs or information that identifies you, including how long and how often you visit certain types of sites. It also collects information on "how you use your computer" but offers no details. It will also identify "Other devices in your computing environment." Numerous performance-related data points are also captured, such as your CPU model, display resolution, how much memory you have, and, oddly, your laptop's average battery life. The good news is that Intel allows you to opt out of this program, which is not the case with Nvidia. According to TechPowerUp, they don't even ask for permission! As for AMD, they not only give you a choice to opt out but they also explain what data they're collecting.' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/23/08/09/2030205 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Microsoft Visual Studio Code flaw lets extensions steal passwords
by Peter Reutemann 10 Aug '23

10 Aug '23

'Microsoft's Visual Studio Code (VS Code) code editor and development environment contains a flaw that allows malicious extensions to retrieve authentication tokens stored in Windows, Linux, and macOS credential managers. These tokens are used for integrating with various third-party services and APIs, such as Git, GitHub, and other coding platforms, so stealing them could have significant consequences for a compromised organization's data security, potentially leading to unauthorized system access, data breaches, etc. The flaw was discovered by Cycode researchers, who reported it to Microsoft along with a working proof-of-concept (PoC) they developed. Yet, the tech giant decided against fixing the issue, as extensions are not expected to be sandboxed from the rest of the environment.' -- source: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-visual-studio-code… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Bram Moolenaar, Author of the Open Source Vim Code Editor, Has Died
by Peter Reutemann 08 Aug '23

08 Aug '23

'The creator of one of the most popular programming editors of all time, Vim, has died after a brief illness. :wq. You may not have known Bram Moolenaar’s name, but all developers know his open source programming editor, Vim. His family has reported to the Vim announcement list that Moolenaar has died. According to the note, “Bram Moolenaar passed away on 3 August 2023.” Bram suffered from a medical condition that progressed quickly over the last few weeks.” No further details are available at this time. They added Bram had “dedicated a large part of his life to VIM, and he was very proud of the VIM community that you are all part of.” This is true. Under his guidance, Vim became one of the most popular code editors in the world. Vim was based on Unix’s Vi, a screen-oriented text editor created by Bill Joy that proved to be immensely popular. Indeed, it was my first editor. Its command set, while often used in jokes, is powerful. It’s still embedded in my fingers today. I’m far from the only programmer who can say that.' -- source: https://thenewstack.io/bram-moolenaar-author-of-the-open-source-vim-code-ed… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Qualcomm—one of Arm’s biggest customers—starts a RISC-V joint venture
by Peter Reutemann 07 Aug '23

07 Aug '23

'Arm is facing down its biggest competition ever, with the up-and-coming RISC-V architecture threatening to unseat it as the CPU at the center of almost every portable device. Now, one of Arm's biggest customers is trying out RISC-V, as Qualcomm is getting involved in a joint venture dedicated to the architecture. The joint venture doesn't have a name yet, but Qualcomm, NXP, Nordic Semiconductor, Bosch, and memory giant Infineon are all teaming up to form a new company that Qualcomm's press release says is "aimed at advancing the adoption of RISC-V globally by enabling next-generation hardware development." At first, the group will be focused on automotive uses, with an "eventual expansion" to IoT and mobile, Qualcomm's biggest market. Arm doesn't manufacture any chips itself and instead exists as a design and licensing operation. It licenses both the Arm architecture, allowing companies to design an Arm-compatible chip themselves (this is what Apple does), and it also licenses completed CPU designs, allowing partners like Qualcomm, Samsung, and MediaTek to produce new SoCs year after year. Previously, we would have said Qualcomm's "next-generation hardware" project revolves around its acquisition of Nuvia, a chip design house that was founded by ex-SoC engineers from Apple, which currently makes the fastest mobile ARM chips available. Qualcomm's CPUs all use Arm's designs, and they are regularly a generation or two behind what Apple can do. If Nuvia lives up to its potential, Qualcomm's Arm chips would finally be competitive. The company says chips from Nuvia are expected to hit the market in 2024 for PCs, so Qualcomm will be sticking with Arm for a while longer. Qualcomm's "Snapdragon Automotive" products are usually based on 5-year-old phone designs, but it sounds like that's changing. A RISC-V transition, if one ever comes, is a few years down the line. RISC-V is threatening Arm for a few reasons. First is its open source licensing, which potentially lets companies avoid the fees Arm charges to make any chip compatible with its instruction set. Second is that RISC-V is also a way for companies to insulate themselves from Arm, which has become an increasingly unstable hardware partner. Arm is at the center of most mobile devices, but it doesn't make a ton of money off of this licensing business. ' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/qualcomm-one-of-arms-biggest-custom… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

2 1

Asahi Linux’s new “flagship” distro for M-series Macs is a Fedora Remix
by Peter Reutemann 07 Aug '23

07 Aug '23

'Asahi Linux, the project aiming to bring a fully functional Linux system to Apple computers running on that company's own M-series chips, has announced that its new "flagship distro" is Fedora Asahi Remix. As announced at Fedora's Flock conference this week in Cork, Ireland, (and on Asahi Linux's blog), the Fedora Asahi Remix should be officially released by the end of August 2023. You can try it out now, but you should "expect rough spots (or even complete breakage)." The new distro will be "upstream-first," sending as many of its bespoke M-series tools back to Fedora's mainline offerings as possible. Hector Martin, writing on Asahi Linux's blog, notes that the existing project based on Arch Linux was "fully downstream." Asahi added its own package repository with scripts, forked kernel and Mesa packages, bootloader parts, and userspace support, but with "no significant involvement with upstream Arch Linux ARM or Arch Linux." Neal Gompa from Fedora reached out to talk about integrating Asahi with Fedora after the project's debut, and work began in late 2021. Now it's ready to spread a bit further. "Collaborating with distro integration experts and using distro infra(structure) like this frees us up to continue focusing on what we do best: reverse engineer hardware and develop bespoke drivers and software," Martin writes. Integration with a well-established distribution also means that bugs in desktop ARM64 Linux, "a niche platform (until now!)," Martin writes, can be addressed more quickly.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/asahi-linux-will-offer-a-flagship-f… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

The State Of ARM
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 06 Aug '23

06 Aug '23

Everybody knows that ARM dominates the embedded market, where it ships more units per year than the entire population of the Earth. But it is making inroads in, shall we say, more “niche” markets, too, like PCs and servers. According to this <https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/02/arm_server_china/>, Canalys boss Steve Brazier says ARM already makes up 16% of the public cloud (and an even higher proportion of servers in China). But another interesting figure he mentions is “nine percent of PCs”. Now, we know that Windows-on-ARM is not that popular. Therefore, that 9% must be almost entirely running Linux-based OSes, including ChromeOS.

2 4

Linux Surpasses Mac Among Steam Gamers
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 06 Aug '23

06 Aug '23

Windows dominates non-console gaming, of course. But according to this report <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/linux-surpasses-the-mac-among-steam…>, the number 2 platform (or platform family) is Linux, admittedly quite a way behind at 1.96%, ahead of the Apple Mac at 1.84%. Of the Linux share, 42% is made up of users of the Steam Deck, which is a handheld device (presumably the rest come from the various more conventional desktop distros). Microsoft has taken note of this, and is reportedly working on a “Handheld Mode” for Windows, which so far is still vapourware. Apple is also trying to do its own porting kit for Windows games to run better on Mac, analogous to WINE/Proton for Linux.

1 0

Canon Warns Printer Users To Manually Wipe Wi-Fi Settings Before Discarding
by Peter Reutemann 03 Aug '23

03 Aug '23

'Printer manufacturer Canon is warning that sensitive Wi-Fi settings don't automatically get wiped during resets, so customers should manually delete them before selling, discarding, or getting them repaired to prevent the settings from falling into the wrong hands. >From a report: "Sensitive information on the Wi-Fi connection settings stored in the memories of inkjet printers (home and office/large format) may not be deleted by the usual initialization process," company officials wrote in an advisory on Monday. They went on to say that manual wiping should occur "when your printer may be in the hand of any third party, such as when repairing, lending or disposing the printer." Like many printers these days, those from Canon connect to networks over Wi-Fi. To do this, users must provide the SSID name, the password preventing unauthorized access to the network, and in some cases, additional information such as Wi-Fi network type, the local network IP address, the MAC address, and network profile. It would be reasonable to assume that performing a simple factory reset that returns all settings to their defaults would be enough to remove these settings, but Monday's advisory indicated that isn't necessarily the case. In the event this information is exposed, malicious actors could use them to gain unauthorized access to a network hosting a Canon printer.' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/23/08/02/116218 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

AWS To Start Charging For Public IPv4 Addresses
by Peter Reutemann 01 Aug '23

01 Aug '23

'The Register: Cloud giant AWS will start charging customers for public IPv4 addresses from next year, claiming it is forced to do this because of the increasing scarcity of these and to encourage the use of IPv6 instead. It is now four years since we officially ran out of IPv4 ranges to allocate, and since then, those wanting a new public IPv4 address have had to rely on address ranges being recovered, either from from organizations that close down or those that return addresses they no longer require as they migrate to IPv6. If Amazon's cloud division is to be believed, the difficulty in obtaining public IPv4 addresses has seen the cost of acquiring a single address rise by more than 300 percent over the past five years, and as we all know, the business is a little short of cash at the moment, so is having to pass these costs on to users. "This change reflects our own costs and is also intended to encourage you to be a bit more frugal with your use of public IPv4 addresses and to think about accelerating your adoption of IPv6 as a modernization and conservation measure,' writes AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr, on the company news blog. The update will come into effect on February 1, 2024, when AWS customers will see a charge of $0.005 (half a cent) per IP address per hour for all public IPv4 addresses. These charges will apparently apply whether the address is attached to a service or not, and like many AWS charges, appear inconsequential at first glance but can mount up over time if a customer is using many of them. These charges will apply to all AWS services including EC2, Relational Database Service (RDS) database instances, Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) nodes, and will apply across all AWS regions, the company said. However, customers will not be charged for IP addresses that they own and bring to AWS using Amazon's BYOIP feature. AWS offers a free tier for EC2, and this will include 750 hours of public IPv4 address usage per month for the first 12 months, starting from the same date the charges do.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/08/01/0013249 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

2 1

Python’s GIL, a “major obstacle to concurrency”, will likely be removed – but slowly
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 01 Aug '23

01 Aug '23

The Python Steering Council has officially decided on a roadmap for removing a major bottleneck to multithreading performance in Python <https://devclass.com/2023/07/31/pythons-gil-a-major-obstacle-to-concurrency…>. Currently Python uses a combination of reference-counting and garbage collection in order to avoid the need for programmers to have to keep track of allocated objects and remembering when to dispose of them. A pure garbage collection scheme, like in Java or LISP, makes it easier to support multithreading, but at the cost of memory usage that can easily get out of hand. Reference counting helps to ensure that objects disappear as soon as the program forgets its last reference to them, and this works well for most objects in a typical program, with garbage collection as a fallback for cleaning up the rest. But Python’s present scheme for maintaining reference counts (the “Global Interpeter Lock” or “GIL”) prevents Python code for taking full advantage of multiple threads. Some are advocating switching to the pure garbage-collection approach, but fortunately (I think) this is not the plan that has been adopted by the Council. Instead, they are going to use a technique known as “Biased Reference Counting”. This splits the reference count into two components, one managed by a thread which is considered to “own” the object (and is presumably responsible for most accesses to the object), while the other is managed on a shared basis by other threads accessing the object (and making fewer accesses to it). This seems to offer the best performance in tests so far. The switchover is a complicated procedure, which is certain to have implications for some existing Python code that never had to worry about thread safety before, as well as far-reaching implications for the design of the CPython implementation itself. So it will take place in multiple stages over some years, and if worst comes to worst, the changes can always be rolled back. (Or a different strategy chosen.) Seems some people are still smarting over the flak they got from the Python 2 → 3 transition. “This is not Python 4,” they are saying. But why not call it “Python 4”, as a warning over the likely compatibility issues? Even if it probably won’t be quite as painful ...

1 0

Android malware steals user credentials using optical character recognition
by Peter Reutemann 31 Jul '23

31 Jul '23

'Security researchers have unearthed a rare malware find: malicious Android apps that use optical character recognition to steal credentials displayed on phone screens. The malware, dubbed CherryBlos by researchers from security firm Trend Micro, has been embedded into at least four Android apps available outside of Google Play, specifically on sites promoting money-making scams. One of the apps was available for close to a month on Google Play but didn’t contain the malicious CherryBlos payload. The researchers also discovered suspicious apps on Google Play that were created by the same developers, but they also didn’t contain the payload. The apps took great care to conceal their malicious functionality. They used a paid version of commercial software known as Jiagubao to encrypt code and code strings to prevent analysis that can detect such functionality. They also featured techniques to ensure the app remained active on phones that had installed it. When users opened legitimate apps for Binance and other cryptocurrency services, CherryBlos overlaid windows that mimicked those of the legitimate apps. During withdrawals, CherryBlos replaced the wallet address the victim selected to receive the funds with an address controlled by the attacker. The most interesting aspect of the malware is its rare, if not novel, feature that allows it to capture mnemonic passphrases used to gain access to an account. When the legitimate apps display passphrases on phone screens, the malware first takes an image of the screen and then uses OCR to translate the image into a text format that can be used to raid the account. “Once granted, CherryBlos will perform the following two tasks: 1. Read pictures from the external storage and use OCR to extract text from these pictures [and] 2. Upload the OCR results to the C&C server at regular intervals,” the researchers wrote. Most apps related to banking and finance use a setting that prevents the taking of screenshots during sensitive transactions. CherryBlos appears to bypass such restrictions by obtaining accessibility permissions used by people with vision impairments or other types of disabilities.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/07/android-malware-uses-ocr-to-captur… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

GNOME Devs Are Working on a New Window Management System
by Peter Reutemann 31 Jul '23

31 Jul '23

'Managing windows — "even after 50 years, nobody's fully cracked it yet," writes GNOME developer Tobias Bernard: Most of the time you don't care about exact window sizes and positions and just want to see the windows that you need for your current task. Often that's just a single, maximized window. Sometimes it's two or three windows next to each other. It's incredibly rare that you need a dozen different overlapping windows. Yet this is what you end up with by default today, when you simply use the computer, opening apps as you need them. Messy is the default, and it's up to you to clean it up... We've wanted more powerful tiling for years, but there has not been much progress due to the huge amount of work involved on the technical side and the lack of a clear design direction we were happy with. We now finally feel like the design is at a stage where we can take concrete next steps towards making it happen, which is very exciting! The key point we keep coming back to with this work is that, if we do add a new kind of window management to GNOME, it needs to be good enough to be the default. We don't want to add yet another manual opt-in tool that doesn't solve the problems the majority of people face. The current concept imagines three possible layout states for windows: - Floating, the classic stacked windows model - Edge Tiling, i.e. windows splitting the screen edge-to-edge - Mosaic, a new window management mode which combines the best parts of tiling and floating Mosaic is the default — where "you open a window, it opens centered on the screen at a size that makes the most sense for the app." (Videos in the blog post show how this works.) "As you open more windows, the existing windows move aside to make room for the new ones. If a new window doesn't fit (e.g. because it wants to be maximized) it moves to its own workspace. If the window layout comes close to filling the screen, the windows are automatically tiled." You can also manually tile windows. If there's enough space, other windows are left in a mosaic layout. However, if there's not enough space for this mosaic layout, you're prompted to pick another window to tile alongside. You're not limited to tiling just two windows side by side. Any tile (or the remaining space) can be split by dragging another window over it, and freely resized as the window minimum sizes allow. So what's next? Windows can already set a fixed size and they have an implicit minimum size, but to build a great tiling experience we need more... At the Brno hackfest in April we had an initial discussion with GNOME Shell developers about many of the technical details. There is tentative agreement that we want to move in the direction outlined in this post, but there's still a lot of work ahead... We'd like to do user research to validate some of our assumptions on different aspects of this, but it's the kind of project that's very difficult to test outside of an actual prototype that's usable day to day. "There's another issue with GNOME's current windowing system," notes 9to5Linux. "If the stacking is interrupted, newly opened windows will be opened from the top, covering the first opened window." For this new windowing system to become a reality, the GNOME devs would have to do a lot of user research and test numerous scenarios so that everyone can be happy. As you can imagine, this could take months or even years, so if you want to get involved and help them do it faster, please reach out to the GNOME team here.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/07/30/2357246 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Libreboot Creator Says After Coding a Fork for 'GNU Boot Project', FSF Sent a Cease-and-Desist Letter Over Its Name
by Peter Reutemann 31 Jul '23

31 Jul '23

'Libreboot is a distribution of coreboot "aimed at replacing the proprietary BIOS firmware contained by most computers," according to Wikipedia. It was briefly part of the GNU project, until maintainer Leah Rowe and the GNU project agreed to part ways in 2017. But here in 2023, the GNU project has created a fork of Libreboot named GNU Boot... The GNU Boot fork "currently does not have a website and does not have any releases of its own," points out Libreboot's Leah Rowe, adding "My intent is to help them, and they are free — encouraged — to re-use my work... " But things have gotten messy, writes Rowe: They forked Libreboot, due to disagreement with Libreboot's Binary Blob Reduction Policy. This is a pragmatic policy, enacted in November 2022, to increase the number of coreboot users by increasing the amount of hardware supported in Libreboot... I wish GNU Boot all the best success. Truly. Although I think their project is entirely misguided (for reasons explained by modern Libreboot policy), I do think there is value in it. It provides continuity for those who wish to use something resembling the old Libreboot project... When GNU Boot first launched, as a failed hostile fork of Libreboot under the same name, I observed: their code repository was based on Libreboot from late 2022, and their website based on Libreboot in late 2021. Their same-named Libreboot site was announced during LibrePlanet 2023... [N]ow they are calling themselves GNU Boot, and it is indeed GNU, but it still has the same problem as of today: still based on very old Libreboot, and they don't even have a website. According to [the FSF's Savannah software repository], GNU Boot was created on 11 June 2023. Yet no real development, in over a month since then... I've decided that I want to help them... I decided recently that I'd simply make a release for them, exactly to their specifications (GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines), talking favourably about FSF/GNU, and so on. I'm in a position to do it (thus scratching the itch), so why not? I did this release for them — it's designated non-GeNUine Boot 20230717, and I encourage them to re-use this in their project, to get off the ground. This completely leapfrogs their current development; it's months ahead. Months. It's 8 months ahead, since their current revision is based upon Libreboot from around ~October 2022... The GNU Boot people actually sent me a cease and desist email, citing trademark infringement. Amazing... I complied with their polite request and have renamed the project to non-GeNUine Boot. The release archive was re-compiled, under this new brand name and the website was re-written accordingly. Personally, I like the new name better.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/07/30/0312206 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Building a Better Server? Oxide Computer Ships Its First Rack
by Peter Reutemann 30 Jul '23

30 Jul '23

'Oxide Computer Company spent four years working toward "The power of the cloud in your data center... bringing hyperscaler agility to the mainstream enterprise." And on June 30, Oxide finally shipped its very first server rack. Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland shares this report: It's the culmination of years of work — to fulfill a long-standing dream. In December of 2019, Oxide co-founder Jess Frazelle had written a blog post remembering conversations over the year with people who'd been running their own workloads on-premises... "Hyperscalers like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have what I like to call 'infrastructure privilege' since they long ago decided they could build their own hardware and software to fulfill their needs better than commodity vendors. We are working to bring that same infrastructure privilege to everyone else!" Frazelle had seen a chance to make an impact with "better integration between the hardware and software stacks, better power distribution, and better density. It's even better for the environment due to the energy consumption wins." Oxide CTO Bryan Cantrill sees real problems in the proprietary firmware that sits between hardware and system software — so Oxide's server eliminates the BIOS and UEFI altogether, and replaces the hardware-managing baseboard management controller (or BMC) with "a proper service processor." They even wrote their own custom, all-Rust operating system (named Hubris). On the Software Engineering Daily podcast, Cantrill says "These things boot like a rocket." And it's all open source. "Everything we do is out there for people to see and understand..." Cantrill added. On the Changelog podcast Cantrill assessed its significance. "I don't necessarily view it as a revolution in its own right, so much as it is bringing the open source revolution to firmware." Oxide's early funders include 92-year-old Pierre Lamond (who hired Andy Grove at Fairchild Semiconductor) — and customers who supported their vision. On Software Engineering Daily's podcast Cantrill points out that "If you're going to use a lot of compute, you actually don't want to rent it — you want to own it."' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/07/29/192248 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Encryption-breaking, password-leaking bug in many AMD CPUs could take months to fix
by Peter Reutemann 26 Jul '23

26 Jul '23

'A recently disclosed bug in many of AMD's newer consumer, workstation, and server processors can cause the chips to leak data at a rate of up to 30 kilobytes per core per second, writes Tavis Ormandy, a member of Google's Project Zero security team. Executed properly, the so-called "Zenbleed" vulnerability (CVE-2023-20593) could give attackers access to encryption keys and root and user passwords, along with other sensitive data from any system using a CPU based on AMD's Zen 2 architecture. The bug allows attackers to swipe data from a CPU's registers. Modern processors attempt to speed up operations by guessing what they'll be asked to do next, called "speculative execution." But sometimes the CPU guesses wrong; Zen 2 processors don't properly recover from certain kinds of mispredictions, which is the bug that Zenbleed exploits to do its thing. The bad news is that the exploit doesn't require physical hardware access and can be triggered by loading JavaScript on a malicious website. The good news is that, at least for now, there don't seem to be any cases of this bug being exploited in the wild yet, though this could change quickly now that the vulnerability has been disclosed, and the bug requires precise timing to exploit. "AMD is not aware of any known exploit of the described vulnerability outside the research environment," the company told Tom's Hardware. Networking company Cloudflare also says there is "no evidence of the bug being exploited" on its servers. Since the vulnerability is in the hardware, a firmware update from AMD is the best way to fully fix it; Ormandy says it is also fixable via a software update, but it "may have some performance cost." The bug affects all processors based on AMD's Zen 2 architecture, including several Ryzen desktop and laptop processors, EPYC 7002-series chips for servers, and Threadripper 3000- and 3000 Pro WX-series CPUs for workstations.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/07/encryption-breaking-… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Android 4.4 KitKat is truly dead, loses Play Services support
by Peter Reutemann 26 Jul '23

26 Jul '23

'The Android ecosystem rightfully gets a lot of slack for being unable to deliver operating system updates to everyone in a timely manner, but there's more to Android updates than just OS support. App updates can keep a phone chugging along even after the updates have stopped, and Google's do-it-all super app, Google Play Services, contains a ton of app APIs and features and enables the really important stuff like Play Store transactions and advertisements. Google just announced Play Services is dropping support for an old version of Android, and while OS development might stop at just three or four years, Play Services goes back way longer than that. Google announced Play Services is dropping support for Android 4.4 KitKat, which is now 10 years old. Support isn't really being artificially cut off, either. Google says KitKat's active device count is "below 1 percent," so there's not much reason to support it anymore.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/google-drops-play-services-support-… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Slackware Linux Distribution Turns 30 Years Old
by Peter Reutemann 24 Jul '23

24 Jul '23

'This week the Slackware Linux project is celebrating its 30th anniversary. It is the oldest Linux distribution that is still in active maintenance and development. The Register reports: Version 1.0 of Slackware was announced on the July 16, 1993, and project lead Patrick Volkerding, who still maintains the distribution today, celebrated with a modest announcement: "Hey folks! It's time to acknowledge another one of those milestones... 30 (!) years since I made the post linked below announcing Slackware's first stable release after months of beta testing. Thanks to all of our dedicated contributors, loyal users, and those who have helped us to keep the lights on here. It's really been a remarkable journey that I couldn't have anticipated starting out back in 1993. Cheers! :-)"' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/07/21/2138223 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

2 1

Firmware vulnerabilities in millions of computers could give hackers superuser status
by Peter Reutemann 21 Jul '23

21 Jul '23

'Two years ago, ransomware crooks breached hardware-maker Gigabyte and dumped more than 112 gigabytes of data that included information from some of its most important supply-chain partners, including Intel and AMD. Now researchers are warning that the leaked information revealed what could amount to critical zero-day vulnerabilities that could imperil huge swaths of the computing world. The vulnerabilities reside inside firmware that Duluth, Georgia-based AMI makes for BMCs (baseboard management controllers). These tiny computers soldered into the motherboard of servers allow cloud centers, and sometimes their customers, to streamline the remote management of vast fleets of computers. They enable administrators to remotely reinstall OSes, install and uninstall apps, and control just about every other aspect of the system—even when it's turned off. BMCs provide what’s known in the industry as “lights-out” system management. Lights-out forever Researchers from security firm Eclypsium analyzed AMI firmware leaked in the 2021 ransomware attack and identified vulnerabilities that had lurked for years. They can be exploited by any local or remote attacker with access to an industry-standard remote-management interface known as Redfish to execute malicious code that will run on every server inside a data center. Until the vulnerabilities are patched using an update AMI published on Thursday, they provide a means for malicious hackers—both financially motivated or nation-state sponsored—to gain superuser status inside some of the most sensitive cloud environments in the world. From there, the attackers could install ransomware and espionage malware that runs at some of the lowest levels inside infected machines. Successful attackers could also cause physical damage to servers or indefinite reboot loops that a victim organization can’t interrupt. Eclypsium warned such events could lead to “lights out forever” scenarios.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/07/millions-of-servers-inside-data-ce… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Kevin Mitnick, Hacker Who Once Eluded Authorities, is Dead at 59
by Peter Reutemann 21 Jul '23

21 Jul '23

'Kevin Mitnick, once the so-called "most wanted computer criminal in US history," died on Sunday. He was 59. The New York Times adds: The cause was complications from pancreatic cancer. He had been undergoing treatment at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center following his diagnosis more than a year ago, according to the King David Memorial Chapel & Cemetery in Las Vegas. After serving prison time for breaking into and tampering with corporate computer networks, he was released in 2000 and began a new career as a security consultant, writer and public speaker. Mr. Mitnick was best known for the crime spree during the 1990s that involved the theft of thousands of data files and credit card numbers from computers across the country. He used his skills to work his way into the nation's phone and cell networks, vandalizing government, corporate and university computer systems. Investigators at the time named him the "most wanted" computer hacker in the world. In 1995, after a more than two-year-long manhunt, Mr. Mitnick was captured by the F.B.I. and charged with the illegal use of a telephone access device and computer fraud. "He allegedly had access to corporate trade secrets worth millions of dollars. He was a very big threat," Kent Walker, a former assistant U.S. attorney in San Francisco, said at the time. In 1998, while Mr. Mitnick awaited sentencing, a group of supporters commandeered The New York Times website for several hours, forcing it to shut down. The next year, Mr. Mitnick pleaded guilty to computer and wire fraud as part of an agreement with prosecutors and was sentenced to 46 months in prison. He was also prohibited from using a computer or cellphone without the permission of his probation officer for the three years following his release. >From an obituary: Kevin was an original; much of his life reads like a fiction story. The word that most of us who knew him would use -- magnificent. He grew up brilliant and restless in the San Fernando Valley in California, an only child with a penchant for mischief, a defiant attitude toward authority, and a love for magic. Kevin's intelligence and delight in holding the rapt attention of audiences revealed themselves early in his childhood and continued throughout his life. In time, he transitioned from pranks and learning magic tricks to phone phreaking, social engineering, and computer hacking. When his desire to push boundaries led him too far astray, he landed in juvenile detention and eventually served a couple of stints in prison. His time on the FBI's Most Wanted List was well documented in his New York Times bestselling book, The Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker, and his other titles: The Art of Deception, The Art of Intrusion, both co-authored with William Simon, and The Art of Invisibility with Robert Vamosi. Kevin emerged from his final prison term, which he deemed a 'vacation,' in January 2000. He was a changed individual, and began constructing a new career, as a White Hat hacker and security consultant. He became a highly sought-after global public speaker, a writer, and established the successful Mitnick Security Consulting. In November 2011, he became the Chief Hacking Officer and part owner of security awareness training company KnowBe4, founded by close friend and business partner Stu Sjouwerman.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/07/20/031216 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Fear, loathing, and excitement as Threads adopts open standard used by Mastodon
by Peter Reutemann 20 Jul '23

20 Jul '23

'Days after Meta launched its new app, Threads, this month, a software engineer at the company named Ben Savage introduced himself to a developer group at the World Wide Web Consortium, a web standards body. The group, which maintains a protocol for connecting social networks called ActivityPub, had been preparing for this moment for months, ever since rumors first emerged that Meta planned to join the standard. Now, that moment had arrived. “I'm really interested to see how this interoperable future plays out!” he wrote. Warm replies to Savage’s email filtered in. And then came another response: “The company you work for does disgusting things among others. It harms relationships and isolates people. It builds walls and lures people into them. When that doesn't suffice, brutal peer pressure does … That said, welcome to the list, Ben.” Meta’s embrace of ActivityPub, used by apps including the Twitter-like Mastodon, was bound to be a little awkward. The constellation of small apps and personal servers that currently use the protocol, known as the Fediverse, is marked by an ethos of sharing and openness, not profit-seeking or user bases denominated in the billions. ActivityPub is designed to allow users of different apps to not only interact and view each others’ content, but also move their digital identity from one service to another. Mastodon, the largest app in the Fediverse, is open source and run by a nonprofit, and smaller Fediverse apps like PeerTube and Lemmy are often held up as a repudiation of the closed nature of services such as YouTube or Reddit. Corporations like Meta are typically held up as the enemy. No surprise that, despite appeals from ActivityPub leaders for civility when Meta arrived on the listserv, some couldn’t hold their tongue. Weeks-old Threads already dwarfs the Fediverse, which has been around for more than a decade and recently peaked at about 4 million active monthly users. Some Fediverse fans see that imbalance as a win: Suddenly, the network could become many times more relevant. Others consider that view naive and expect Meta’s size to push the small world of apps built on ActivityPub in undesirable directions. Some have circulated a pact to preemptively block content from Threads’ servers from appearing on their own.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/fear-loathing-and-excitement-as… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Millions of Emails meant for US Military Recipients Have Been Going To Mali
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 18 Jul '23

18 Jul '23

Seems like, for the last decade, way too many emails meant for .mil addresses have been going to .ml instead <https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/18/us_military_mali_email_typos/>. The guy who runs the .ml DNS registry for the Mali Government has been trying to notify the offenders about their mistakes, with limited success. It seems to me an obvious solution is to stop using that top-level .mil, and change it to something like .mil.us instead.

1 0

Decentralized Operating System - GRIDNET OS
by john 18 Jul '23

18 Jul '23

This post just arrived at a forum I use, It seems a bit above my pay level. https://www.cybertechhelp.com/showthread.php?p=1312176#post1312176 Cheers John..

1 0

Is Wayland Becoming the Favored Way to Get a GUI on Linux?
by Peter Reutemann 18 Jul '23

18 Jul '23

'The Register shares its collection of "signs that Wayland is becoming the favored way to get a GUI on Linux." - The team developing Linux for Apple Silicon Macs said they didn't have the manpower to work on X.org support. - A year ago, the developers of the Gtk toolkit used by many Linux apps and desktops said that the next version may drop support for X11... - One of the developers of the Budgie desktop, Campbell Jones, recently published a blog post with a wildly controversial title that made The Reg FOSS desk smile: "Wayland is pretty good, actually." He lays out various benefits that Wayland brings to developers, and concludes: "Primarily, what I've learned is that Wayland is actually really well-designed. The writing is on the wall for X, and Wayland really is the future." Partly as a result of this, it looks likely that the next version of the Budgie desktop, Budgie 11, will only support Wayland, completely dropping support for X11. The team point out that this is not such a radical proposition: there was a proposal to make KDE 6 sessions default to Wayland as long ago as last October... - The GNOME spin of Fedora has defaulted to Wayland since version 25 in 2017, and the GNOME flavor of Ubuntu since 21.04. - [T]here's now an experimental effort to get Wayland working on OpenBSD. The effort happened at the recent OpenBSD hackathon in Tallinn, Estonia, and the developer's comments are encouraging. It's already available as part of FreeBSD.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/07/17/0159246 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

WordPress plugin installed on 1 million+ sites logged plaintext passwords
by Peter Reutemann 17 Jul '23

17 Jul '23

'All-In-One Security, a WordPress security plugin installed on more than 1 million websites, has issued a security update after being caught three weeks ago logging plaintext passwords and storing them in a database accessible to website admins. The passwords were logged when users of a site using the plugin, typically abbreviated as AIOS, logged in, the developer of AIOS said Thursday. The developer said the logging was the result of a bug introduced in May in version 5.1.9. Version 5.2.0 released Thursday fixes the bug and also “deletes the problematic data from the database.” The database was available to people with administrative access to the website.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/07/wordpress-plugin-installed-on-1-mi… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

AlmaLinux No Longer Aims For 1:1 Compatibility With RHEL
by Peter Reutemann 17 Jul '23

17 Jul '23

'Phoronix: With Red Hat now restricting access to the RHEL source repositories, AlmaLinux and other downstreams that have long provided "community" rebuilds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with 1:1 compatibility to upstream RHEL have been left sorting out what to do. Benny Vasquez, Chair of the Board for the AlmaLinux OS Foundation, wrote in a blog post yesterday: After much discussion, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation board today has decided to drop the aim to be 1:1 with RHEL. AlmaLinux OS will instead aim to be Application Binary Interface (ABI) compatible*. We will continue to aim to produce an enterprise-grade, long-term distribution of Linux that is aligned and ABI compatible with RHEL in response to our community's needs, to the extent it is possible to do, and such that software that runs on RHEL will run the same on AlmaLinux. For a typical user, this will mean very little change in your use of AlmaLinux. Red Hat-compatible applications will still be able to run on AlmaLinux OS, and your installs of AlmaLinux will continue to receive timely security updates. The most remarkable potential impact of the change is that we will no longer be held to the line of "bug-for-bug compatibility" with Red Hat, and that means that we can now accept bug fixes outside of Red Hat's release cycle. While that means some AlmaLinux OS users may encounter bugs that are not in Red Hat, we may also accept patches for bugs that have not yet been accepted upstream, or shipped downstream." ' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/07/14/215209 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

When Open Becomes Opaque: the Changing Face of Open-Source Hardware Companies
by Peter Reutemann 17 Jul '23

17 Jul '23

'A thoughtful post on the Adafruit Blog chronicles the problems facing open-source hardware companies, and how more and more companies, including Sparkfun, Arduino and Prusa, are becoming more and more proprietary. In Arduino's case, they are deliberately trying to stamp out the clones undercutting them. The new Arduino Pro is not open source in any way, and the web site has now removed references to being an open source company. As always there are subtleties and nuances. In the case of Prusa, not only are Chinese companies taking Prusa designs and source to make proprietary, closed-source products, they are also actively patenting designs and algorithms they've taken from open source. The original submission ends with a question. "With Red Hat recently taking a step towards becoming a proprietary software company (which happens to use and work on open source projects) and now these reports, what are Slashdotters' thoughts on the future? "Are truly open source companies doomed to failure, especially when overseas companies do not respect or even understand the principles of open source development?"' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/07/15/1853247 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Speed Versus Bandwidth
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 16 Jul '23

16 Jul '23

Love the (original) opening sentence of this article <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/light-based-lifi-promises-amazing-w…>: Light is almost certainly the fastest thing around. So it makes sense that "light-based wireless communications," or LiFi, could blow the theoretical doors off existing radio-wave wireless standards, to the tune of a maximum 224GB per second. A correction/clarification immediately follows, but it’s clear the writer didn’t quite grasp that both visible light and radio waves are propagated by exactly the same particles--photons--travelling at exactly the same speed. What is true is that, as the frequency of the photons increases, so does their information-carrying capacity. This is why we have digital broadcasts (TV particularly), mobile phone/data services and our own wi-fi networks all moving to higher and higher frequencies. The downside is, as the frequency of a photon increases, so does its energy. And so it tends to react more and more with (i.e. be absorbed by) various bits of matter that it might encounter--such as the walls of buildings, or even the air itself. This tends to limit the useful range of these communication bands.

1 0

Torvalds Calls For Calm as Bcachefs Filesystem Doesn't Make Linux 6.5
by Peter Reutemann 11 Jul '23

11 Jul '23

'Linus Torvalds has delivered the first release candidate for version 6.5 of the Linux kernel, but warned this release may not go entirely smoothly. From a report: Torvalds's headline assessment of rc1 is "none of it looks hugely unusual." "The biggest single mention probably goes to what wasn't merged, with the bcachefs pull request resulting in a long thread (we didn't hit a hundred emails yet, but it's not far away)." As The Register reported in 2022, bcachefs is a filesystem that's been in development for nigh on a decade without being added to the kernel. Kernel-watching outlet Phoronix on Sunday wrote that the filesystem is in good shape but debate over "code changes needed to the kernel outside of the kernel module itself" have proved contentious. As a result, conversation on the Linux kernel mailing list is "often becoming heated" when the topic turns to bcachefs. In his announcement post for rc1, Torvalds wrote "Let's calm this party down."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/07/10/2042253 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Fairphone 3 Gets Seven Years of Updates, Besting Every Other Android OEM
by Peter Reutemann 11 Jul '23

11 Jul '23

'Ars Technica: No one in the Android ecosystem can hold a candle to Apple's software support timeline for the iPhone, but there is one company that comes the closest: Fairphone. Following in the footsteps of the Fairphone 2, the Fairphone 3 is also getting an Android-industry-best seven years of OS support. Fairphone continues to run circles around giant tech companies that have a lot more resources than it does, and it's doing this even in the face of component vendors like Qualcomm dropping support for the phone's core components. The company announced today that the Fairphone 3, which was released in 2019, has had its support extended to 2026, making for seven years of updates. The company also just released Android 13 for the Fairphone 3. Google's own 2019 phone, the Pixel 4, shut down support in October 2022. Fairphone strives to make sustainable smartphones, designing its products to be repairable and also offering replacement parts for sale online. Part of that sustainability mission is an absolutely herculean effort to keep the Android updates flowing, even when Qualcomm drops critical software support for the SoC. Fairphone says the Snapdragon 632 SoC in the Fairphone 3 was only supported up to Android 11, so continuing to support the Fairphone 3 meant doing the upgrades all by itself.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/07/10/213256 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

CERT To Be Merged Into GCSB?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 10 Jul '23

10 Jul '23

Couple of local items here <https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/10/asia_tech_news_roundup/> that I hadn’t heard of before: Andrew Little is considering bringing CERT under the control of the Government Communications Security Bureau, and also Microsoft is raising cloud prices, though not those for on-prem products, in NZ.

1 0

Mastodon fixes critical “TootRoot” vulnerability allowing node hijacking
by Peter Reutemann 10 Jul '23

10 Jul '23

'The maintainers of the open source software that powers the Mastodon social network published a security update on Thursday that patches a critical vulnerability making it possible for hackers to backdoor the servers that push content to individual users. Mastodon is based on a federated model. The federation comprises thousands of separate servers known as "instances." Individual users create an account with one of the instances, which in turn exchange content to and from users of other instances. To date, Mastodon has more than 12,000 instances and 14.5 million users, according to fedidb.org/, a site that tracks statistics related to Mastodon. A critical bug tracked as CVE-2023-36460 was one of two vulnerabilities rated as critical that were fixed on Thursday. In all, Mastodon on Thursday patched five vulnerabilities. So far, Mastodon gGmbH, the nonprofit that maintains the software instances uses to operate the social network, has released few details about CVE-2023-36460 other than to describe it as an “arbitrary file creation through media attachments” flaw. “Using carefully crafted media files, attackers can cause Mastodon's media processing code to create arbitrary files at any location," Mastodon said. "This allows attackers to create and overwrite any file Mastodon has access to, allowing Denial of Service and arbitrary Remote Code Execution.” In a Mastodon post, independent security researcher Kevin Beaumont went a step further, writing that exploiting the vulnerability allowed someone “to send a toot which makes a webshell on instances that process said toot.” He coined the name #TootRoot because user posts, known as toots, allowed hackers to potentially gain root access to instances.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/07/mastodon-fixes-critical-tootroot-v… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Researchers Discovered a New Linux Kernel 'StackRot' Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
by Peter Reutemann 10 Jul '23

10 Jul '23

'Wednesday Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the release of the 6.4.2 kernel. "All users of the 6.4 kernel series must upgrade." The Hacker News reports: Details have emerged about a newly identified security flaw in the Linux kernel that could allow a user to gain elevated privileges on a target host. Dubbed StackRot (CVE-2023-3269, CVSS score: 7.8), the flaw impacts Linux versions 6.1 through 6.4. There is no evidence that the shortcoming has been exploited in the wild to date. "As StackRot is a Linux kernel vulnerability found in the memory management subsystem, it affects almost all kernel configurations and requires minimal capabilities to trigger," Peking University security researcher Ruihan Li said. "However, it should be noted that maple nodes are freed using RCU callbacks, delaying the actual memory deallocation until after the RCU grace period. Consequently, exploiting this vulnerability is considered challenging." Following responsible disclosure on June 15, 2023, it has been addressed in stable versions 6.1.37, 6.3.11, and 6.4.1 as of July 1, 2023, after a two-week effort led by Linus Torvalds. A proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit and additional technical specifics about the bug are expected to be made public by the end of the month. ZDNet points out that Linux 6.4 "offers improved hardware enablement for ARM boards" and does a better job with the power demands of Steam Deck gaming devices. And "On the software side, the Linux 6.4 release includes more upstreamed Rust code. We're getting ever closer to full in-kernel Rust language support." The Register also notes that Linux 6.4 also includes "the beginnings of support for Apple's M2 processors," along with support for hibernation of RISC-V CPUs, "a likely presage to such silicon powering laptop computers."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/07/09/0131210 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Undocumented Raspberry Pi
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 10 Jul '23

10 Jul '23

This little project <https://github.com/cariboulabs/cariboulite> for an SDR (Software-Defined Radio) addon card for a Raspberry Pi popped up on my feed. What caught my eye was that it made use of something called “SMI” (the “Secondary Memory Interface”) which exists on the GPIO connector but is not properly documented. There is a link to this blog post <https://iosoft.blog/2020/07/16/raspberry-pi-smi/> in which the writer reports some investigations into the details of this interface. Speed tests in that article give results of 25 16-bit samples per second or more, depending on the Raspberry Pi model; though note there are some odd glitches sometimes, as well as high bus contention (clearly pushing the Pi hardware to its limits). Maybe this is why the interface is not documented: because it is not considered production-ready ...

1 0

AMD CPU Use Among Linux Gamers Approaching 70% Marketshare
by Peter Reutemann 05 Jul '23

05 Jul '23

'The June Steam Survey results show that AMD CPUs have gained significant popularity among Linux gamers, with a market share of 67% -- a remarkable 7% increase from the previous month. Phoronix reports: In part that's due to the Steam Deck being powered by an AMD SoC but it's been a trend building for some time of AMD's increasing Ryzen CPU popularity among Linux users to their open-source driver work and continuing to build more good will with the community. In comparison, last June the AMD CPU Linux gaming marketshare came in at 45% while Intel was at 54%. Or at the start of 2023, AMD CPUs were at a 55% marketshare among Linux gamers. Or if going back six years, AMD CPU use among Linux gamers was a mere 18% during the early Ryzen days. It's also the direct opposite on the Windows side. When looking at the Steam Survey results for June limited to Windows, there Intel has a 68% marketshare to AMD at 32%. Beyond the Steam Deck, it's looking like AMD's efforts around open-source drivers, AMD expanding their Linux client (Ryzen) development efforts over the past two years, promises around OpenSIL, and other efforts commonly covered on Phoronix are paying off for AMD in wooing over their Linux gaming customer base.' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/23/07/03/2233208 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Firefox 115 Released
by Peter Reutemann 05 Jul '23

05 Jul '23

'Today, Mozilla released Firefox 115. Changes most visible to users include: * Hardware video decoding is now enabled for Intel GPUs on Linux.. * Migrating from another browser? Now you can bring over payment methods you've saved in Chrome-based browsers to Firefox. * The Tab Manager dropdown now features close buttons, so you can close tabs more quickly. * The Firefox for Android address bar's new search button allows you to easily switch between search engines and search your bookmarks and browsing history. * We've refreshed and streamlined the user interface for importing data in from other browsers. * Users without platform support for H264 video decoding can now fallback to Cisco's OpenH264 plugin for playback. But the most important feature is that this release is the new ESR. Why this is important? y'all ask, well: * Many a "downstream" project depends on Firefox ESR, for example the famous email client Thunderbird, or KaiOS (a mobile OS very popular in India, SE Asia, Africa and LatAm), so, for better or worse, whatever made it to (or is lacking from) this version of the browser, those projects have to use for the next year. * Firefox ESR is the default browser of many distros, like Debian and Kali Linux, so, whatever made it to this version will be there for next year, ditto to whatever is lacking. * If you are on old -- unsupported OSs, like Windows 7, 8-8.1 or MacOS 10.14 (Mojave, the last MacOS with support for 32 Bit Apps), 10.13 or 10.12 you will automatically be migrated to Firefox ESR, so this will be your browser until Sept. 2024.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/07/04/189258 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Linux Foundation's Yocto Project Expands LTS to 4 Years
by Peter Reutemann 03 Jul '23

03 Jul '23

'Wikipedia defines the Yocto Project as "a Linux Foundation collaborative open source project whose goal is to produce tools and processes that enable the creation of Linux distributions for embedded and IoT software that are independent of the underlying architecture of the embedded hardware." This week the Linux Foundation shared an update on the 12-year-old Yocto Project: In an effort to support the community, The Yocto Project announced the first Long Term Support (LTS) release in October 2020. Today, we are delighted to announce that we are expanding the LTS release and extending the lifecycle from 2 to 4 years as standard. The continued growth of the Yocto Project coincides with the welcomed addition of Exein as a Platinum Member, joining AMD/Xilinx, Arm, AWS, BMW Group, Cisco, Comcast, Intel, Meta and WindRiver. As a Member, Exein brings its embedded security expertise across billions of devices to the core of the Yocto Project... "The Yocto Project has been at the forefront of OS technologies for over a decade," said Andrew Wafaa, Yocto Project Chairperson. "The adaptability and variety of the tooling provided are clearly making a difference to the community. We are delighted to welcome Exein as a member as their knowledge and experience in providing secure Yocto Project based builds to customers will enable us to adapt to the modern landscape being set by the US Digital Strategy and the EU Cyber Resilience Act." "We're extremely excited to become a Platinum Partner of the Yocto Project," said Gianni Cuozzo, founder and CEO of Exein. "The Yocto Project is the most important project in the embedded Linux space, powering billions of devices every year. We take great pride in contributing our extensive knowledge and expertise in embedded security to foster a future that is both enhanced and secure for Yocto-powered devices. We are dedicated to supporting the growth of the Yocto Project as a whole, aiming to improve its support for modern languages like Rust, and assist developers and OEMs in aligning with the goals outlined in the EU Cyber Resilience Act." ' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/07/01/0346241 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Brave aims to curb practice of websites that port scan visitors
by Peter Reutemann 30 Jun '23

30 Jun '23

'The Brave browser will take action against websites that snoop on visitors by scanning their open Internet ports or accessing other network resources that can expose personal information. Starting in version 1.54, Brave will automatically block website port scanning, a practice that a surprisingly large number of sites were found engaging in a few years ago. According to this list compiled in 2021 by a researcher who goes by the handle G666g1e, 744 websites scanned visitors’ ports, most or all without providing notice or seeking permission in advance. eBay, Chick-fil-A, Best Buy, Kroger, and Macy's were among the offending websites.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/06/brave-will-soon-control-which-site… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Mode
by Peter Reutemann 30 Jun '23

30 Jun '23

'For approximately twenty years, Red Hat (now a fully owned subsidiary of IBM) has experimented with building a business model for operating system deployment and distribution that looks, feels, and acts like a proprietary one, but nonetheless complies with the GPL and other standard copyleft terms. Software rights activists, including SFC, have spent decades talking to Red Hat and its attorneys about how the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) business model courts disaster and is actively unfriendly to community-oriented Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). These pleadings, discussions, and encouragements have, as far as we can tell, been heard and seriously listened to by key members of Red Hat's legal and OSPO departments, and even by key C-level executives, but they have ultimately been rejected and ignored — sometimes even with a “fine, then sue us for GPL violations” attitude. Activists have found this discussion frustrating, but kept the nature and tenure of these discussions as an “open secret” until now because we all had hoped that Red Hat's behavior would improve. Recent events show that the behavior has simply gotten worse, and is likely to get even worse.' -- source: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/ Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

A Potted History Of 60 Years Of Computer Networking
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 29 Jun '23

29 Jun '23

These guys, Larry Peterson and Bruce Davie, have done a whole series of open-source books all around the common theme of “A Systems Approach”. Here <https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/28/60_years_of_networking/> one of them offers a summary of the origins of the Internet, going back to the invention of packet switching and “best effort” delivery, and how that turned out to be such an important change from the traditional telephone network. He also takes the credit/blame for a long-standing myth about the Internet: I feel obligated to point out that there is no mention in this paper of the internet being designed to withstand nuclear attack. Unfortunately, I was responsible for perpetuating that misconception in an early edition of Computer Networks: A Systems Approach. Leiner et al debunk this myth and explain its origins in their paper, but it’s a remarkably persistent one. “[C]ontinue despite loss of networks or gateways” is as close as it gets. But now, cracks are starting to show in the trend toward centralization of popular Internet services. Not only is the “Fediverse” providing alternatives to Twitter and Facebook, but it is now also offering choices to those fed up with recent developments at Reddit, as well.

1 0

The ReactOS Project Suddenly Shows Signs of Life
by Peter Reutemann 29 Jun '23

29 Jun '23

'ReactOS is an open-source operating system that aims to replicate Microsoft Windows, and can already run many Windows applications without modification. ReactOS published a new (infrequent) newsletter to outline recent work. It reveals that progress has slowed down recently, but the project definitely isn't dead. The newsletter also acknowledges the team hasn't put out a new version since the end of 2021, although progress continues. Due to shifting focuses to quality releases, they are no longer on a quarterly release cadence. The date of the next release is not set yet, but according to a huge list of already-implemented changes they aim for it to be a substantial update. The last update to ReactOS was version 0.4.14, released on December 2021. While developers were previously committed to releasing updates every three months, that has since changed and updates will now be focused on quality rather than quantity. For the ReactOS team to be confident enough to release something, it needs to have less than 20 known unfixed regressions while adding new features and functions. Behind the scenes, it looks like things are spinning well. The team specifically highlighted its progress on the x64 port of ReactOS, which went from being a non-booting mess to an operating system that boots up and mostly works. It doesn't run any x86 programs since it doesn't have WoW64, but it's going well.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/06/28/212238 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

3 3

Microsoft's GitHub Under Fire For DDoSing Crucial Open Source Project Website
by Peter Reutemann 29 Jun '23

29 Jun '23

'The servers used by the GMP project, an open source arithmetic library at the heart of GCC and other programs, slowed to a crawl earlier this month due to a large amount of network traffic originating from Microsoft servers. The Register reports: Torbjorn Granlund, principal author of GMP, raised the alarm in a note to the project's mailing list. "The GMP servers are under attack by several hundred IP addresses owned by Microsoft Corporation," he wrote. "We do not know if this is made with malice by Microsoft, if it is some sort of mistake, or if [it is one] of their cloud customers ... running the attack. The attack targets the GMP repo, with thousands of identical requests. The requests are cleverly chosen as to cause heavy system load. "We're firewalling off all of Microsoft's IP addresses as an emergency response." The following day, Mike Blacker, director of threat hunting, operations, and response at Microsoft's GitHub, had identified the culprit: a GitHub Actions Workflow that clones a Mercurial repo and has been forked more than 700 of times. "Microsoft and GitHub have investigated the issue and determined that a GitHub user updated a script within the FFmpeg-Builds project that pulled content from https://gmplib.org," explained Blacker. "This build was configured to run parallel simultaneous tests on 100 different types of computers/architectures. This activity does not appear to be nefarious. [GMP] appears to have limited infrastructure that could not sustain the limited, yet simultaneous requests." [...] As of last week, the excessive traffic was still an issue. "Our servers are fully available again, but that's the result of us adding all participating Microsoft network ranges to our firewall," the GMP project explains on its webpage. "We understand that we are far from the first project to take such measures against Github." The Register asked Granlund whether he was satisfied with Microsoft-GitHub's response, and he told us he had only heard once from Blacker. "I blocked about 40 IP ranges from accessing our web server," he explained. "A week after this started, there was still intensive traffic from the same IP addresses, perhaps 100 different Microsoft addresses all in all, belonging to about 40 ranges. The difference was that that traffic just caused minuscule load, and a log line in the firewall." "Problem solved. I cannot care less if they no longer can access gmplib.org. I find it interesting how little responsibility Github/Microsoft assume here. They seem to think that they are entitled to bash away at smaller sites." ' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/06/28/2045228 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Let’s Encrypt Outage--Did Anybody Notice?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 29 Jun '23

29 Jun '23

Just noticed a mention in passing in this article <https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/28/microsofts_github_gmp_project/> that Let’s Encrypt was issuing bad certificates over a period of about an hour earlier this month <https://letsencrypt.status.io/pages/incident/55957a99e800baa4470002da/648b3…>. An explanation of what went wrong (from a third party who does monitoring of CA (mis)behaviour as part of his job) is here <https://www.agwa.name/blog/post/last_weeks_lets_encrypt_downtime>. Seems like many of the people affected were still using their bad certificates a week after the incident. Did you have one of the bad certificates? That article mentions a new addition to the ACME auto-renewal protocols that would allow clients to resolve a glitch like this in future without any manual intervention.

1 0

The Linux coders turning the ROG Ally and other handhelds into Steam Deck clones
by Peter Reutemann 28 Jun '23

28 Jun '23

'As soon as I was done with my review of the Asus ROG Ally, I grabbed my best USB stick and started looking for ISOs to download. Windows is, of course, the main highway to most PC gaming, but it's also (as detailed in the review) not yet built to work well on a 7-inch gaming handheld. The ROG Ally ships with Windows (Home) installed and a bunch of Asus software, but it is still, at heart, a PC. With effort, you can get into the BIOS, disable Secure Boot, plug in a USB stick, and boot a USB stick with a live Linux distribution on it. [...] With Ubuntu 23.04 installed, I could run the Phoronix Test Suite and run glxgears, which showed that at least some kind of 3D acceleration was happening. I installed Cyberpunk 2077 through Steam's Proton compatibility tool, benchmarked it, and got, well, very sad numbers. Cyberpunk saw that my GPU was the Ally's key feature—an AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme. But it ran at 17 and 23 frames per second averages on "Medium" and "Steam Deck" settings, respectively (at 720p resolution and 60 Hz refresh rate). With nothing to lose, I installed the latest AMD Linux drivers, ran those benchmarks again, and lo and behold, improvement: 30.8 and 27.32 fps on "Medium" and "Steam Deck." That's notably shy of the 38 and 34 frames per second I clocked on the same benchmark in Windows. Then again, I'm guessing at drivers, and I can't do much to control thermals or power draw.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/the-linux-coders-turning-the-rog-al… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

2 1

Kart - git for geospatial data
by Peter Reutemann 27 Jun '23

27 Jun '23

Hi everyone Just came across this interesting project on my Mastodon feed (https://cloudisland.nz/@dznz/110613146633504731) Kart - Distributed version-control for geospatial and tabular data "stores geospatial and tabular data in Git, providing version control at the row and cell level." https://kartproject.org/ Is being developed by local company Koordinates and released under GPLv2 with linking exception. Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

2 1

Linux Foundation Celebrates Zephyr Project's Small Real-Time Operating System
by Peter Reutemann 27 Jun '23

27 Jun '23

'This week the Linux Foundation shared an update on the Zephyr Project, a small real-time operating system for connected, resource-constrained and embedded devices: The project recently achieved several milestones including surpassing 80,000 commits since it was released in open source in 2015. This is an average of almost 2 commits per hour, which was made recently by 490 individuals, including 166 first-timers, who contributed to the 3.4 release. Zephyr RTOS supports over 450 boards running embedded microcontrollers from Arm and RISC-V to Tensilica, NIOS, ARC and x86 as single and multicore systems... Zephyr RTOS has a growing set of software libraries that can be used across various applications and industry sectors such as Industrial IoT, wearables, machine learning and more. It is built with an emphasis on broad chipset support, security, dependability, long-term support releases and a growing open source ecosystem... The Zephyr community will be at the Zephyr Developer Summit, which takes place on June 27-30 in Prague, Czech Republic, and virtually as part of the first-ever Embedded Open Source Summit. [Register here for virtual attendance.] Arduino will be joining Zephyr's Technical Steering Committee, along with Technology Innovation Institute and the American multinational semiconductor company Analog Devices (or ADI, who will also be joining its governing board). Arduino's CEO said "We believe that Zephyr OS is a truly special project that will play a significant role in the Arduino ecosystem and will be a big priority for us." As a "Platinum"-level sponsor, ADI joins Antmicro, Baumer, Google, Intel, Meta, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP, Oticon, Qualcomm Innovation Center and T-Mobile.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/06/26/0234245 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

GCC Steering Committee Announces a Code of Conduct
by Peter Reutemann 26 Jun '23

26 Jun '23

'GCC is the GNU project's free and open-source cross-platform compiler collection. Now an anonymous reader shared this announcement from the mailing list for GCC: The GCC Steering Committee has decided to adopt a Code of Conduct for interactions in GCC project spaces, including mailing lists, bugzilla, and IRC. The vast majority of the time, the GCC community is a very civil, cooperative space. On the rare occasions that it isn't, it's helpful to have something to point to to remind people of our expectations. It's also good for newcomers to have something to refer to, for both how they are expected to conduct themselves and how they can expect to be treated... At this time the CoC is preliminary: the code itself should be considered active, but the CoC committee (and so the reporting and response procedures) are not yet in place. There's also an official FAQ, and GCC's Code of Conduct begins with this introduction. "Like the free software community as a whole, the GCC community is made up of a mixture of professionals and volunteers from all over the world, working on every aspect of the project — including mentorship, teaching, and connecting people." Where this leads to issues and unhappiness, "we have a few ground rules that we ask people to adhere to... [T]ake it in the spirit in which it's intended — a guide to make it easier to enrich all of us, the project, and the broader communities in which we participate."' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/06/25/2255253 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

PipeWire Versus PulseAudio+JACK
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 25 Jun '23

25 Jun '23

Came across this PipeWire FAQ <https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/FAQ>, which among other things explains why there is a need to replace both PulseAudio and JACK. Briefly, it started from a wish to manage video inputs and outputs in a similar way to audio inputs and outputs, and also fix some performance/configuration limitations in the older specs. And if you are wondering why all your sound devices have suddenly acquired a “Pro Audio” option in their settings, this explains that as well. Also, for those complaining that Wayland’s stricter security model breaks basic functionality like screen recording and sharing, it appears PipeWire is the basis for the solution to that problem.

1 0

DuckDuckGo browser beta for Windows bakes in a lot of privacy tools
by Peter Reutemann 23 Jun '23

23 Jun '23

'Privacy-focused firm DuckDuckGo has released a public beta of its browser for Windows, offering more default privacy protections and an assortment of Duck-made browsing tools. More than a year after debuting its browser for Mac in private beta, the search engine and tracking antagonist offers many of those same features to a much wider audience. Like its Mac browser, DuckDuckGo (DDG) uses "the underlying operating system rendering API" rather than its own forked browser code. That's "a Windows WebView2 call that utilizes the Blink rendering engine underneath," according to DuckDuckGo's blog post. Fittingly, the browser reports itself as Microsoft Edge at most header-scanning sites.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/duckduckgo-offers-its-privacy-cente… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

The Art Of Refurbishing Old Computers
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 22 Jun '23

22 Jun '23

Interesting report <https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/21/pc_officina_positive_trashware/> on an Italian organization, which mentions some points which could be useful to those doing the same thing here: how to salvage and refurbish old PCs for donation to those who can’t afford something new. Note that they won’t take any old rubbish: they will no longer accept 32-bit machines or those needing DDR2 RAM, for example. Their current recommended OS is Linux Mint 21 with XFCE, but they will source Microsoft Windows for those who really want it (at what cost?).

1 0

Latest SUSE Linux Enterprise Goes All in With Confidential Computing
by Peter Reutemann 21 Jun '23

21 Jun '23

'SUSE's latest release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 5 (SLE 15 SP5) has a focus on security, claiming it as the first distro to offer full support for confidential computing to protect data. From a report: According to SUSE, the latest version of its enterprise platform is designed to deliver high-performance computing capabilities, with an inevitable mention of AI/ML workloads, plus it claims to have extended its live-patching capabilities. The release also comes just weeks after the community release openSUSE Leap 15.5 was made available, with the two sharing a common core. The Reg's resident open source guru noted that Leap 15.6 has now been confirmed as under development, which implies that a future SLE 15 SP6 should also be in the pipeline. SUSE announced the latest version at its SUSECON event in Munich, along with a new report on cloud security issues claiming that more than 88 percent of IT teams have reported at least one cloud security incident over the the past year. This appears to be the justification for the claim that SLE 15 SP5 is the first Linux distro to support "the entire spectrum" of confidential computing, allowing customers to run fully encrypted virtual machines on their infrastructure to protect applications and their associated data. Confidential computing relies on hardware-based security mechanisms in the processor to provide this protection, so enterprises hoping to take advantage of this will need to ensure their servers have the necessary support, such as AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization-Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) and Intel's Trust Domain Extensions (TDX).' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/06/20/1846203 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

PostgreSQL Reconsiders Its Process-Based Model
by Peter Reutemann 20 Jun '23

20 Jun '23

'Jonathan Corbet, writing at LWN: In the fast-moving open-source world, programs can come and go quickly; a tool that has many users today can easily be eclipsed by something better next week. Even in this environment, though, some programs endure for a long time. As an example, consider the PostgreSQL database system, which traces its history back to 1986. Making fundamental changes to a large code base with that much history is never an easy task. As fundamental changes go, moving PostgreSQL away from its process-oriented model is not a small one, but it is one that the project is considering seriously. A PostgreSQL instance runs as a large set of cooperating processes, including one for each connected client. These processes communicate through a number of shared-memory regions using an elaborate library that enables the creation of complex data structures in a setting where not all processes have the same memory mapped at the same address. This model has served the project well for many years, but the world has changed a lot over the history of this project. As a result, PostgreSQL developers are increasingly thinking that it may be time to make a change.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/06/19/1723259 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

2 1

KDE Plasma 6 Is Now 'Fairly Livable'
by Peter Reutemann 20 Jun '23

20 Jun '23

'Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham believes that Plasma 6 is now "fairly livable" and recommends KDE developers and power users / enthusiasts start giving it a try. Phoronix reports: He characterized Plasma 6 as: "Basically everything in Plasma compiles with Qt 6, and at this point Plasma 6 is fairly livable. To give you a sense of how livable, it's good enough that over the past 2 months, I've gone on three KDE-related trips from the USA to Europe, with my only computer running Plasma 6 in "current git master" state, with work-in-progress merge requests applied! Its stability has been good enough that this has caused me no apprehension, and indeed, it's been totally fine on each trip. So seriously, if you're a KDE developer or an adventurous user, start living on Plasma 6! Jump right in, the water's fine. :)" He went on to write more about the current development activities around Plasma 6. He also shared his personal beliefs around Plasma 6.0 release timing although no official release schedule is yet to be determined. Nate's belief is that Plasma 6.0 will likely be ready for release sometime between December and March.' -- source: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/23/06/19/212256 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

The State Of Linux Music Production
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 17 Jun '23

17 Jun '23

Been messing about with my old MIDI keyboard again, after a long while putting it aside. It now complains about a “low battery” warning, but I think that only affects the onboard sound settings, which I’m not particularly fussed about. I got a USB-MIDI interface a few years back, and I can use that with the keyboard to drive sound sources on my main machine. But things have changed in the Linux music world since the last time I tried this (at least on Debian). JACK and PulseAudio have both been replaced by this new thing, PipeWire, which is supposed to handle video, audio and MIDI routing through a common architecture. So I no longer have to start up jackd when I want to switch to music-production mode (in fact, trying to run jackd under PipeWire will screw up your audio something awful). Instead, patching between sources and sinks is done via WirePlumber, for which a convenient GUI frontend is available in the form of qpwgraph. All the main PipeWire-related processes are managed as user-level services via systemd. One thing hasn’t changed, and that is the incompatibility between ALSA MIDI ports and JACK MIDI ports: that USB-MIDI interface only appears to the system as ports of the ALSA kind, whereas JACK-aware apps want to accept MIDI data via ports of the JACK kind. So I still have to start up the old “a2jmidid” program to provide a bridge between these two. qpwgraph shows all these different kinds of entities, each labelled with its type: “ALSA”, “PW” (PipeWire) or “JACK”. The latter two can be connected directly to one another, while ALSA ports can only be connected to ALSA ports. The colour-coding--purple for ALSA MIDI ports, red for JACK/PipeWire MIDI, green for JACK/PipeWire audio--is a hint that you can only connect matching colours. Some JACK-aware apps still have trouble running under PipeWire; for these, there is the “pw-jack” tool, which substitutes the JACK dynamic libraries with ones that hook directly into PipeWire before launching the specified app. E.g. I had to run a2jmidid with pw-jack a2jmidid Also, the command pw-jack zynaddsubfx -O jack tells ZynAddSubFX to run with its JACK interface active, and I can route events from my keyboard to it via the intermediary nodes automatically created by a2jmidid. Don’t forget to hook up its audio output terminals to the box representing my speakers, and voilà, I can make sound.

1 0

Analysis Of The GMail Fake Email Exploit
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 15 Jun '23

15 Jun '23

You may have heard about an interesting hack a few days ago <https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/09/google_bimi_email_authentication/>, where some low-lifes figured out how to send fraudulent emails to GMail users that showed a “verified” blue BIMI checkmark, indicating that the recipient could trust the from-address as authentic. But of course it was not. The details of how the hack was perpetrated are quite intricate, and involve some subtle interplay between the mail-processing policies of GMail (where the recipients had their accounts, and which implements the BIMI check), Microsoft (which ran the Exchange servers where the fraudsters got accounts, and from which the fraudulent messages were sent) and UPS (the purported sender of the fake emails). Of course, all three parties have since taken action to ensure this particular scenario will not happen again. ThioJoe offers up a good explanation of how it all worked here <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Czc0F_A82rE>. If your eyes glaze over at the mention of SPF versus DKIM versus DMARC--well, you’re not alone. When I looked at whether I should implement something like this on my own mail server to try to ensure that spammers could not send out fake emails under my name, I felt the same way. So I just decided not to bother. For now ...

1 0

Question re: Desktop computer running Ubuntu is slow, mouse and keyboard missing commands
by Michael James 14 Jun '23

14 Jun '23

Can anyone please assist with this Ubuntu desktop severely slowed down, mouse and keyboard severely delayed, skipping and or typing multiple letters/numbers with the problem progressively getting worse. Internet speed is at standard mark. Thanks, Noho ora mai, All the best, Michael James __________________________________________________________________________________________ MICHAEL JAMES PASTROFF phone: inside New Zealand 021 115 3713 outside New Zealand 64 21 115 3713

2 2

Edge Sends Images You View Online To Microsoft
by Peter Reutemann 13 Jun '23

13 Jun '23

'Not so long ago, Microsoft Edge ended up in hot waters after users discovered a bug leaking your browser history to Bing. Now you may want to toggle off another feature to ensure Edge is not sending every picture you view online to Microsoft. Edge has a built-in image enhancement tool that, according to Microsoft, can use "super-resolution to improve clarity, sharpness, lighting, and contrast in images on the web." Although the feature sounds exciting, recent Microsoft Edge Canary updates have provided more information on how image enhancement works. The browser now warns that it sends image links to Microsoft instead of performing on-device enhancements.' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/23/06/12/182216 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Debian 12 'Bookworm' Released
by Peter Reutemann 12 Jun '23

12 Jun '23

'Slashdot reader e065c8515d206cb0e190 shared the big announcement from Debian.org: After 1 year, 9 months, and 28 days of development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 12 (code name bookworm). bookworm will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and the Debian Long Term Support team... This release contains over 11,089 new packages for a total count of 64,419 packages, while over 6,296 packages have been removed as obsolete. 43,254 packages were updated in this release. The overall disk usage for bookworm is 365,016,420 kB (365 GB), and is made up of 1,341,564,204 lines of code. bookworm has more translated man pages than ever thanks to our translators who have made man-pages available in multiple languages such as: Czech, Danish, Greek, Finnish, Indonesian, Macedonian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Russian, Serbian, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. All of the systemd man pages are now completely available in German. The Debian Med Blend introduces a new package: shiny-server which simplifies scientific web applications using R. We have kept to our efforts of providing Continuous Integration support for Debian Med team packages. Install the metapackages at version 3.8.x for Debian bookworm. The Debian Astro Blend continues to provide a one-stop solution for professional astronomers, enthusiasts, and hobbyists with updates to almost all versions of the software packages in the blend. astap and planetary-system-stacker help with image stacking and astrometry resolution. openvlbi, the open source correlator, is now included. Support for Secure Boot on ARM64 has been reintroduced: users of UEFI-capable ARM64 hardware can boot with Secure Boot mode enabled to take full advantage of the security feature. 9to5Linux has screenshots, and highlights some new features: Debian 12 also brings read/write support for APFS (Apple File System) with the apfsprogs and apfs-dkms utilities, a new tool called ntfs2btrfs that lets you convert NTFS drives to Btrfs, a new malloc implementation called mimalloc, a new kernel SMB server called ksmbd-tools, and support for the merged-usr root file system layout... This release also includes completely new artwork called Emerald, designed (once again) by Juliette Taka. New fonts are also present in this major Debian release, along with a new fnt command-line tool for accessing 1,500 DFSG-compliant fonts. Debian 12 "bookworm" ships with several desktop environments, including: - Gnome 43, - KDE Plasma 5.27, - LXDE 11, - LXQt 1.2.0, - MATE 1.26, - Xfce 4.18' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/06/11/0333242 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Microsoft Excel Has Become A Threat To Democracy
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 07 Jun '23

07 Jun '23

Austria’s Social Democratic Party recently held an election for a new leader, according to <https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/06/austria_election_excel_blunder/>. Trouble was, two days after announcing the result had gone one way, they then had to report that in fact it was the other way round, owing to a stuffup involving an Excel spreadsheet. I suppose the only good news is that this was strictly an in-party election, not something involving any level of Government.

1 0

The State Of Fibre Broadband In The USA
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 07 Jun '23

07 Jun '23

Came across this report <https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/internet-users-love-fiber-servi…>, which is interesting to compare with conditions in NZ: In terms of availability, the Federal Communications Commission broadband map indicates that about 38 percent of US residents can get fiber. The percentage drops to 29 percent when including only fiber services that offer gigabit download speeds and at least 100Mbps upload speeds. Basically, US broadband is dominated by companies with heavy investments in cable (and some ADSL), who have no interest in obsoleting that investment any sooner than they have to. Moral: there are places where a free market works, but strategic infrastructure buildouts is not one of them.

1 0

Trouble Accessing .nz Sites, Anybody?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 30 May '23

30 May '23

Seems some people have had trouble accessing various .nz sites since last night, and into this morning <https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/banking-apps-some-websites-down-as-inte…>. The explanation at the end seems to indicate that InternetNZ is rolling out DNS security, and caching inconsistencies on ISPs’ servers are leading to hiccups for users. Hopefully this will be resolved soon as the outdated DNS entries get flushed.

2 1

Microsoft Releases Azure Linux
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 26 May '23

26 May '23

Microsoft has announced a commercially-supported product it calls “Azure Linux” <https://devclass.com/2023/05/25/azure-linux-released-at-build-where-microso…>. This is essentially the same code as its custom “CBL-Mariner” distro that it runs internally on its Azure servers. While this is RPM-based (the same package manager used in Red Hat), it is not a fork of Red Hat, but is built specially from the ground up. Project lead Jim Perrin explains why: “The reason we chose not to fork a different distro … Microsoft has kind of a history with Linux. … I think the Balmer quote is from 2001, but a lot of the sentiment still lingers even today. Part of the reason we did not choose to start with a distribution and then fork it for our needs is we didn’t want to be seen as doing the embrace and extend thing again, we didn’t want to wake any of that up, we figured, build it from scratch, we can tailor it to our needs … we’re scratching an itch we had and offering the solution back to the community.” The “Ballmer quote” being the infamous phrase “Linux is a cancer” that then-CEO Steve Ballmer uttered back in 2001. Yes, nice to see some past sins are still kept in mind, at least in some corners of Microsoft ...

1 0

Fast Restart For Java Apps
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 23 May '23

23 May '23

Java continues to be popular for server-side apps. But one problem is that starting a Java app can be slow. So if you have some Java code that performs a service on demand, runs for a short while and then shuts down again, that hurts performance. Enter “CRaC”, or “Coordinated Restore at Checkpoint” <https://devclass.com/2023/05/22/azul-makes-openjdk-with-fast-start-crac-gen…>, from a company called Azul, which seems to centre its entire business around OpenJDK <https://www.azul.com/about/>. This system lets the app dump its state to disk in a form that allows for quick resumption. This state cannot include things like open files/network connections, so the app itself needs to implement handlers to close these before the dump and reopen them after the restore, saving enough state as part of the dump to allow this to happen with minimal impact on the rest of the application. Interestingly, this system is built on another piece of software called “CRIU” or “Checkpoint/Restore In Userspace” <https://criu.org/Main_Page>, which is Linux-only. As Azul’s CTO says: “We submitted CRaC to OpenJDK as an idea for a project … and they’ve included it as one of the many project they have. The reason it isn’t in the mainstream yet, and I’m not even sure it will make it into the mainstream, is that we rely on the CRIU technology underneath on Linux, and there isn’t an equivalent that we’re aware of on Windows or on Mac. So you lose that cross-platform functionality … ” But as the article says, that may not such a big showstopper any more: Java applications are often developed on Windows or Mac, but most often deployed to Linux, suggesting that the lack of cross-platform support is not a deal-breaker for everyone.

1 0

Fibre Connection -- Separating Modem & Router Functions
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 16 May '23

16 May '23

Most people probably have their internet connection provided through a single box. There are two separate functions going on: * “Modem” (layer 2) -- handling the low-level signalling with whatever is at the other end of the wire (whether copper or glass); * “Router” (layer 3) -- routing TCP/IP packets between your house LAN and your ISP, which provides the connection between there and the rest of the Internet. At one point I was running a cheap little Conexant AccessRunner USB box (bought from Dick Smith) on my ADSL connection; while this could also perform both functions in one, I found a version of the firmware that implemented only the modem function. Plugging this into a Linux box caused it to appear like an additional network interface (the drivers are already in the standard kernel). I could then control this via the “ppp” package <https://ppp.samba.org/>, using its PPP-over-ATM plugin to implement the correct low-level signalling (just VPI/VCI selection, really). I could then exploit the full power of the Linux network stack on that box to manage the connection to the rest of my house LAN. Anyway, as my own house gets wired up for fibre (soon...), I was curious as to whether something equivalent could be done for a fibre connection. And the information I’ve found so far (e.g. <https://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=81&topicid=274586>) indicates it might actually be simpler than this. The “ONT” (“Optical Network Terminator”) box that gets installed in your house has phone ports and Ethernet ports on it, and it appears that (once you have your ISP connection up and running) the Ethernet connection behaves just like a regular LAN connection, with a DHCP server (and ISP’s router) listening on the other end. So instead of an Internet router at your end, you can plug a regular PC directly into that port, pick up an allocated address, and have it immediately connected to the Internet. In short, there is nothing fibre-specific about the Internet router that the ISP provides to you at all. However, there might be issues with VLAN-tagging of the Ethernet frames, and this is not standardized between ISPs. (By the way, I see several folks claiming there is no “modem” in a fibre connection. Of course there is.) Not sure whether I’ll try this right away. Might be safest to do things the ISP-provided way, at least to begin with.

4 8

Unkillable UEFI Malware Bypassing Secure Boot Enabled By Unpatchable Windows Flaw
by Peter Reutemann 12 May '23

12 May '23

'Researchers have announced a major cybersecurity find -- the world's first-known instance of real-world malware that can hijack a computer's boot process even when Secure Boot and other advanced protections are enabled and running on fully updated versions of Windows. From a report: Dubbed BlackLotus, the malware is what's known as a UEFI bootkit. These sophisticated pieces of malware hijack the UEFI -- short for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface -- the low-level and complex chain of firmware responsible for booting up virtually every modern computer. As the mechanism that bridges a PC's device firmware with its operating system, the UEFI is an OS in its own right. It's located in an SPI-connected flash storage chip soldered onto the computer motherboard, making it difficult to inspect or patch. Because the UEFI is the first thing to run when a computer is turned on, it influences the OS, security apps, and all other software that follows. These traits make the UEFI the perfect place to run malware. When successful, UEFI bootkits disable OS security mechanisms and ensure that a computer remains infected with stealthy malware that runs at the kernel mode or user mode, even after the operating system is reinstalled or a hard drive is replaced. As appealing as it is to threat actors to install nearly invisible and unremovable malware that has kernel-level access, there are a few formidable hurdles standing in their way. One is the requirement that they first hack the device and gain administrator system rights, either by exploiting one or more vulnerabilities in the OS or apps or by tricking a user into installing trojanized software. Only after this high bar is cleared can the threat actor attempt an installation of the bootkit. The second thing standing in the way of UEFI attacks is UEFI Secure Boot, an industry-wide standard that uses cryptographic signatures to ensure that each piece of software used during startup is trusted by a computer's manufacturer. Secure Boot is designed to create a chain of trust that will prevent attackers from replacing the intended bootup firmware with malicious firmware. If a single firmware link in that chain isn't recognized, Secure Boot will prevent the device from starting.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/23/03/06/1854200 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

2 2

OpenOffice: The One FOSS Project That Deserves To Die, But Won’t
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 06 May '23

06 May '23

The ever-dependable Brodie Robertson has a look at the ongoing (!) development history of OpenOffice here <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdpMxmFvGBA>. Those of us on FOSS platforms moved to LibreOffice years ago. But among some sectors (my guess is, predominantly Microsoft Windows users?), OpenOffice still has the dominant name recognition. And just to add to the fun, the project actually continues putting out updates! Though these are just minor ones -- I don’t think there have been any major functional changes in the better part of a decade. The source code commit history also continues to bubble over, though a lot of the patches are tiny, almost trivial things, like fixing typos and making random-looking changes to whitespace.

1 0

I used System76’s Pangolin for weeks, and Linux was not the biggest problem
by Peter Reutemann 05 May '23

05 May '23

'After using System76’s Pangolin as my primary work laptop for nearly six weeks, I can tell you this: If you need a 15-inch Linux-focused laptop, this is the one to get. The Pangolin is a solid device, designed more for dependability and convenience than ultrabook portability or cutting-edge parts, but it still has reasonably modern hardware (especially its 144 Hz screen). The Pangolin and its native Pop!_OS are a showcase for how remarkably normal Linux can feel as a daily driver in 2023. Normal, and with lots of ports. It’s hard to do a nuts-and-bolts comparison of the Pangolin to most other laptops, due largely to benchmark comparability between Linux and most laptops running Windows or macOS. But it’s also not entirely necessary. There’s only one real version of the Pangolin available—one processor, one amount of RAM, then variable, user-expandable storage. We’ll show you how the Pangolin did on a couple tests. But how this laptop works for you is much more about what you’re bringing to it and what you're willing to put into customizing it to your liking. I came to the Pangolin as someone who has made a few attempts at using Linux as a daily driver. I know enough command line, vim, and Unix-based architecture to be conversant, and I have two Raspberry Pis that are constantly being improved. Still, I'm more hobbyist than practitioner. And yet the Pangolin presented no real problems as I used it for almost any task I needed to get done. Its combination of solid software and practical hardware choices make it an easy system to recommend, so long as you know you need Linux. Its maker-made operating system, Pop!_OS, almost never gave me problems, except when I was trying to make it run benchmarks. Starting with a rock-solid Linux install, where every bit of hardware is supported and functional, made me more eager to poke at the edges and see what I could customize.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/review-system76-pangolin-is-a-solid… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

'sudo' and 'su' Are Being Rewritten In Rust For Memory Safety
by Peter Reutemann 02 May '23

02 May '23

'Phoronix reports: With the financial backing of Amazon Web Services, sudo and su are being rewritten in the Rust programming language in order to increase the memory safety for the widely relied upon software... to further enhance Linux/open-source security. "[B]ecause it's written in C, sudo has experienced many vulnerabilities related to memory safety issues," according to a blog post announcing the project: It's important that we secure our most critical software, particularly from memory safety vulnerabilities. It's hard to imagine software that's much more critical than sudo and su. This work is being done by a joint team from Ferrous Systems and Tweede Golf with generous support from Amazon Web Services. The work plan is viewable here. The GitHub repository is here. ' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/05/01/0020239 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Linux Foundation Announces DentOS 3.0, an Open Source Network OS for Disaggregated Networks
by Peter Reutemann 01 May '23

01 May '23

'This month the Linux Foundation announced version 3.0 of DentOS, an open source network operating system using the Linux kernel, Switchdev, and other Linux-based projects for a standardized network operating system "without abstractions or overhead," according to the project's web page. "All underlying infrastructure — including ASIC and Silicon for networking and datapath — is treated equally; while existing abstractions, APIs, drivers, low-level overhead, and other open software are simplified. DENT unites silicon vendors, ODMs, SIs, OEMs, and end users across all verticals to enable the transition to disaggregated networks." Or, as the Linux Foundation, the operating system provides "a flexible and customizable platform for network administrators to manage their networks." DENT provides access to open source-based switches at a lower cost and with more flexibility compared to proprietary switches with locked ecosystems. Network wiring closets in many facilities--including retail stores, warehousing, remote locations, enterprises, and small and mid-sized businesses--are often small, requiring a compact solution for network management. Additionally, staff expertise may be limited, and branch-office switches from leading suppliers can require costly contracts. DENT can be easily deployed on white-box hardware in small spaces, providing an efficient and cost-effective solution for network management. As a result, DENT deployment can significantly enhance network management in a wide range of environments, providing greater efficiency, reliability, and scalability... DentOS enables Amazon's Just Walk Out Technology to connect and manage thousands of devices like cameras, sensors, entry and exit gates, and access points on the network edge. ' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/04/30/010222 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Not-So-Stupid(?) Linux Trick
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 28 Apr '23

28 Apr '23

Here’s a command that can sometimes look a bit unnerving in operation, but is actually quite safe: rmdir -p «dir» where «dir» is some directory. Or to watch the whole process in action, add the option to give progress messages: rmdir -pv «dir» Background: the basic command rmdir «dir» deletes the named directory, but only if it is empty. The “-p” option takes this further, by then trying to delete the parent of «dir», and if that succeeds, the parent of that, and so on. It stops only when it gets to a nonempty directory, or when it has done all components of «dir». So if, for example, you try this on an absolute path, this will mean the command always stops on an error. And the error could quite likely be on a directory which contains important stuff that you care about. But, as I said, it’s quite safe, since it won’t delete that stuff. But I told you it could be unnerving, didn’t I?

1 0

New Intel Linux Graphics Driver Patches Released, Up To 10-15% Better Performance
by Peter Reutemann 28 Apr '23

28 Apr '23

'A new set of patches have been released for the Intel Linux graphics driver that "can provide 10-15% better performance when operating in the tuned mode," reports Phoronix. From the report: The set of Intel i915 Linux kernel graphics driver patches are about exposing the Intel RPS (Requested Power State) up/down thresholds. Right now the Intel Linux kernel driver has static values set for the up/down thresholds between power states while these patches would make them dynamically configurable by user-space. Google engineer Syed Faaiz Hussain raised the issue that they experimented with the Intel RPS tuning and were able to manage up to 15% better performance. With Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with OpenGL was a 14.5% boost, CS:GO with Vulkan was 12.9% faster, and Civilization VI with OpenGL was 11% faster while Strange Brigade was unchanged. No other game numbers were provided. But as this is about changing the threshold for how aggressively the Intel graphics hardware switches power states, the proposed patches leave it up to user-space to adjust the thresholds as they wish. Google engineers are interested in hooking this into Feral's GameMode so that the values could be automatically tuned when launching games and then returning to their former state when done gaming, in order to maximize battery life / power efficiency. The only downside with these current patches are that they work only for non-GuC based platforms... So the latest Alder/Raptor Lake notebooks as well as Intel DG2/Alchemist discrete graphics currently aren't able to make use of this tuning option. ' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/04/27/1927209 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Linux Kernel 6.3 Released
by Peter Reutemann 27 Apr '23

27 Apr '23

'A report from ZDNet, written by Steven Vaughan-Nichols: The latest Linux kernel is out with a slew of new features -- and, for once, this release has been nice and easy. [...] Speaking of Rust, everyone's favorite memory-safe language, the new kernel comes with user-mode Linux support for Rust code. Miguel Ojeda, the Linux kernel developer, who's led the efforts to bring Rust to Linux, said the additions mean we're, "getting closer to a point where the first Rust modules can be upstreamed." Other features in the Linux 6.3 kernel include support and enablement for upcoming and yet-to-be-released Intel and AMD CPUs and graphics hardware. While these updates will primarily benefit future hardware, several changes in this release directly impact today's users' day-to-day experience. The kernel now supports AMD's automatic Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS) feature for Spectre mitigation, providing a less performance-intensive alternative to the retpoline speculative execution. Linux 6.3 also includes new power management drivers for ARM and RISC-V architectures. RISC-V has gained support for accelerated string functions via the Zbb bit manipulation extension, while ARM received support for scalable matrix extension 2 instructions. For filesystems, Linux 6.3 brings AES-SHA2-based encryption support for NFS, optimizations for EXT4 direct I/O performance, low-latency decompression for EROFS, and a faster Brtfs file-system driver. Bottom line: many file operations will be a bit more secure and faster. For gamers, the new kernel provides a native Steam Deck controller interface in HID. It also includes compatibility for the Logitech G923 Xbox edition racing wheel and improvements to the 8BitDo Pro 2 wired game controllers. Who says you can't game on Linux? Single-board computers, such as BannaPi R3, BPI-M2 Pro, and Orange Pi R1 Plus, also benefit from updated drivers in this release. There's also support for more Wi-Fi adapters and chipsets. These include: Realtek RTL8188EU Wi-Fi adapter support; Qualcomm Wi-Fi 7 wireless chipset support; and Ethernet support for NVIDIA BlueField 3 DPU. For users dealing with complex networks that have both old-school and modern networks, the new kernel can also handle multi-path TCP handling mixed flows with IPv4 and IPv6.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/04/26/0023238 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Microsoft Edge is Leaking the Sites You Visit To Bing
by Peter Reutemann 26 Apr '23

26 Apr '23

'Microsoft's Edge browser appears to be sending URLs you visit to its Bing API website. Reddit users first spotted the privacy issues with Edge last week, noticing that the latest version of Microsoft Edge sends a request to bingapis.com with the full URL of nearly every page you navigate to. Microsoft tells The Verge it's investigating the reports. From a report: "Searching for references to this URL give very few results, no documentation on this feature at all," said hackermchackface, the Reddit user who first discovered the issue. While Reddit users weren't able to uncover why Microsoft Edge is sending the URLs you visit to its Bing API site, we asked Rafael Rivera, a software engineer and one of the developers behind EarTrumpet, to investigate, and he discovered it's part of a poorly implemented new feature in Edge. "Microsoft Edge now has a creator follow feature that is enabled by default," says Rivera in a conversation with The Verge. "It appears the intent was to notify Bing when you're on certain pages, such as YouTube, The Verge, and Reddit. But it doesn't appear to be working correctly, instead sending nearly every domain you visit to Bing."' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/23/04/25/209254 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Red Hat Begins Cutting 'Hundreds of Jobs'
by Peter Reutemann 25 Apr '23

25 Apr '23

'According to Phoronix citing multiple local North Carolina news outlets, Red Hat is cutting "hundreds of jobs" in an initial round of layoffs announced today. From the report: According to WRAL, Red Hat CEO Matt Hicks is said to have told employees in an email "we will not reduce roles directly selling to customers or building our products," which is hopefully good news for their many upstream Linux developers they employ that ultimately build Red Hat Enterprise Linux and associated software products. Red Hat will begin notifying affected employees today in some countries while the process will continue through the end of the quarter. IBM, which acquired Red Hat in 2019, has already slashed some five thousand positions so far in 2023.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/04/24/2220256 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Microsoft Introduces “Windows Frontline”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 24 Apr '23

24 Apr '23

This <https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/24/windows_frontline_cloudpc_sustainabi…> sounds like a way for Microsoft to get more revenue from users buying fewer PCs. I wonder how long it will be before Intel and the major PC vendors put a stop to this kind of talk?

1 0

Mango Pi RISC-V Single Board Computer
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 24 Apr '23

24 Apr '23

Here is an entertaining walkthrough from Christopher Barnatt on the ever-dependable “Explaining Computers” channel of a single-core RISC-V-based board with the same tiny dimensions as a Raspberry Pi Zero W <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-g18PMjjlcc>. Hardly a speed demon, but for the price, I think it represents amazing value. Also a clear indication that RISC-V is fulfilling its promise of being a serious competitor, or even a successor, to ARM.

1 0

QEMU 8.0 Released with More ARM and RISC-V Emulation
by Peter Reutemann 24 Apr '23

24 Apr '23

'There's a major new update of QEMU, the open-source machine emulator, reports 9to5Linux: Coming a year after QEMU 7.0, the QEMU 8.0 release is here to improve support for ARM and RISC-V architectures. - For ARM, it adds emulation support for FEAT_EVT, FEAT_FGT, and AArch32 ARMv8-R, CPU emulation for Cortex-A55 and Cortex-R52, support for a new Olimex STM32 H405 machine type, as well as gdbstub support for M-profile system registers. - For the RISC-V architecture, QEMU 8.0 brings updated machine support for OpenTitan, PolarFire, and OpenSBI, additional ISA and Extension support for smstateen, native debug icount trigger, cache-related PMU events in virtual mode, Zawrs/Svadu/T-Head/Zicond extensions, and ACPI support. Moreover, RISC-V received multiple fixes covering PMP propagation for TLB, mret exceptions, uncompressed instructions, and other emulation/virtualization improvements. Improvements were also made for the s390x (IBM Z) platform, the HP Precision Architecture (HPPA) platform, and x86.' -- source: https://slashdot.org/story/23/04/23/0525206 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Intel's I219-LM Gigabit Ethernet Adapter Ran at 60% Maximum Speed on Linux Since 2020
by Peter Reutemann 24 Apr '23

24 Apr '23

'Phoronix reports: If you rely on an Intel I219-LM Gigabit Ethernet adapter, you will want to look forward to upgrading your Linux kernel build soon... A fix was committed Thursday after Intel engineers discovered this particular Ethernet chipset had only been running at around 60% of its maximum speed due to a regression introduced back in 2020... Since the release of Linux 5.8 in mid-2020, this Ethernet adapter had been running at around 60% of its advertised potential due to an e1000e driver regression.' -- source: https://slashdot.org/story/23/04/22/0554251 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

KaOS Linux Celebrates 10 Years with New ISO Release Featuring Pre-Release KDE Plasma 6
by Peter Reutemann 24 Apr '23

24 Apr '23

'9to5Linux reports: KDE-focused and Arch Linux-inspired independent distribution KaOS Linux celebrates today 10 years of existence with a new stable ISO release that brings some of the latest GNU/Linux technologies and a preview of the upcoming KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment. Yes, you're reading it right, KaOS is one of the very first GNU/Linux distributions to offer you a live ISO image with a pre-release version of the KDE Plasma 6 desktop, which, of course, is compiled against the latest Qt 6 open-source application framework... Since this is a special ISO release, the devs also added an option to play music during the installation process. "KaOS uses the Systemd-provided Systemd-boot for UEFI installs," according to the release notes.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/04/23/0555224 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Proton Launches an End-to-End Encrypted Password Manager
by Peter Reutemann 21 Apr '23

21 Apr '23

'Proton, the company behind Proton Mail, has announced the launch of a new password manager: Proton Pass. While the service will eventually become free for everyone to use, it's currently only available as a beta to Proton's Lifetime and Visionary users for now. From a report: As is the case with Proton's other products, Proton Pass uses end-to-end encryption (E2EE) that's supposed to keep your personal information away from prying eyes, including third parties and Proton itself. In addition to letting you store your usernames, passwords, and notes, you can also add any randomly generated email aliases that you can use as a replacement for your real address. Proton's new password manager not only applies E2EE to your passwords but also the usernames, web addresses, and all the other fields associated with your login information. In a blog post explaining the service's security model, Proton notes that "all cryptographic operations, including key generation and data encryption," happen locally on your device, which Protons says it can't decrypt, even if a third party requests it.' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/23/04/20/1840225 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

MariaDB Hits Financial Headwinds
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 20 Apr '23

20 Apr '23

This report <https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/18/mariadb_job_losses/> says that the company set up to commercialize MariaDB (the fork of MySQL created by Michael “Monty” Widenius after the latter’s acquisition by Oracle) is cutting jobs and adopting other cost-saving measures to get around revenue shortfalls. What interested me was, in response to a reader asking what Widenius was doing after personally getting $15 million out of that acquisition, the founder himself responded <https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2023/04/18/mariadb_job_losses/#c_4…> about the contributions that he had put into the company, the project and employees’s salaries.

1 0

FSF Says Google's Decision to Deprecate JPEG-XL Emphasizes Need for Browser Choice
by Peter Reutemann 17 Apr '23

17 Apr '23

'"The fact remains that Google Chrome is the arbiter of web standards," argues FSF campaigns manager Greg Farough (while adding that Firefox, "through ethical distributions like GNU IceCat and Abrowser, can weaken that stranglehold.") "Google's deprecation of the JPEG-XL image format in February in favor of its own patented AVIF format might not end the web in the grand scheme of things, but it does highlight, once again, the disturbing amount of control it has over the platform generally." Part of Google's official rationale for the deprecation is the following line: "There is not enough interest from the entire ecosystem to continue experimenting with JPEG-XL." Putting aside the problematic aspects of the term "ecosystem," let us remark that it's easy to gauge the response of the "entire ecosystem" when you yourself are by far the largest and most dangerous predator in said "ecosystem." In relation to Google's overwhelming power, the average web user might as well be a microbe. In supposedly gauging what the "ecosystem" wants, all Google is really doing is asking itself what Google wants... While we can't link to Google's issue tracker directly because of another freedom issue — its use of nonfree JavaScript — we're told that the issue regarding JPEG-XL's removal is the second-most "starred" issue in the history of the Chromium project, the nominally free basis for the Google Chrome browser. Chromium users came out of the woodwork to plead with Google not to make this decision. It made it anyway, not bothering to respond to users' concerns. We're not sure what metric it's using to gauge the interest of the "entire ecosystem," but it seems users have given JPEG-XL a strong show of support. In turn, what users will be given is yet another facet of the web that Google itself controls: the AVIF format. As the response to JPEG-XL's deprecation has shown, our rallying together and telling Google we want something isn't liable to get it to change its mind. It will keep on wanting what it wants: control; we'll keep on wanting what we want: freedom. Only, the situation isn't hopeless. At the present moment, not even Google can stop us from creating the web communities that we want to see: pages that don't run huge chunks of malicious, nonfree code on our computers. We have the power to choose what we run or do not run in our browsers. Browsers like GNU IceCat (and extensions like LibreJS and JShelter> ) help with that. Google also can't prevent us from exploring networks beyond the web like Gemini. What our community can do is rally support behind those free browsers that choose to support JPEG-XL and similar formats, letting the big G know that even if we're smaller than it, we won't be bossed around.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/04/16/002204 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

New Spectre-Related 'Medium Severity' Flaw Patched in Linux Kernel
by Peter Reutemann 17 Apr '23

17 Apr '23

'"The Spectre vulnerability that has haunted hardware and software makers since 2018 continues to defy efforts to bury it," reports the Register: On Thursday, Eduardo (sirdarckcat) Vela Nava, from Google's product security response team, disclosed a Spectre-related flaw in version 6.2 of the Linux kernel. The bug, designated medium severity, was initially reported to cloud service providers — those most likely to be affected — on December 31, 2022, and was patched in Linux on February 27, 2023. "The kernel failed to protect applications that attempted to protect against Spectre v2, leaving them open to attack from other processes running on the same physical core in another hyperthread," the vulnerability disclosure explains. The consequence of that attack is potential information exposure (e.g., leaked private keys) through this pernicous problem.... Spectre v2 — the variant implicated in this particular vulnerability — relies on timing side-channels to measure the misprediction rates of indirect branch prediction in order to infer the contents of protected memory. That's far from optimal in a cloud environment with shared hardware... The bug hunters who identified the issue found that Linux userspace processes to defend against Spectre v2 didn't work on VMs of "at least one major cloud provider."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/04/16/0143259 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Google Releases Emergency Chrome Security Update
by Peter Reutemann 17 Apr '23

17 Apr '23

'"Earlier this week, Google released an emergency security update for the Chrome browser due to a vulnerability that is being actively exploited in the wild," reports Hot Hardware: On Friday, Google highlighted CVE-2023-2033, reported by Clément Lecigne of Google's own Threat Analysis Group (TAG). This vulnerability is a 'type confusion' bug in the JavaScript engine for Chromium browsers useing the V8 Javascript engine. In short, type confusion is a bug that allows memory to be accessed with the wrong type, allowing for the reading or writing of memory out of bounds. The CVE page says that an attacker could create an HTML page that allows the exploitation of heap corruption. While there is no Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score attached to the vulnerability yet, Google is tracking this as a "high" severity issue. This is likely due in part to the fact that "Google is aware that an exploit for CVE-2023-2033 exists in the wild." The article notes that Chrome updates are generally done automatically, but you can also check for updates by clicking Chrome's three-dots menu in the top-right corner, then "Help" and "About Chrome."' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/23/04/16/2057239 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Microsoft Feeling Competition From Linux In ... Gaming?!?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 14 Apr '23

14 Apr '23

Here’s another interesting development in the Windows-Linux rivalry: in gaming, of all places. The Steam Deck is a Linux-based handheld gaming PC which could, in principle, run Windows. Trouble is, Windows doesn’t offer any good UI options for working with this form factor <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/04/handheld-mode-for-windows-could-mak…>. So there is talk of developing a new “handheld mode” for Windows. Of course, for Linux, there is no “mode” in the OS for this, it’s just a different configuration of the GUI layer. Which is modular and completely replaceable.

1 0

Watch Out For Those USB Charging Ports!
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 12 Apr '23

12 Apr '23

Something else to worry about: the US FBI, and NZ CERT, are advising travellers not to use public USB charging ports, because they can be a way to hack into your device <https://www.nzherald.co.nz/travel/fbi-warns-travellers-not-to-use-public-ch…>. When I was in Hong Kong Airport a few years ago, it was very hard for me to find a mains outlet to charge my laptop. Just about all the ports built into the public seating areas were USB ones, for phones/tablets.

2 1

New Attack On Car Security: “CAN Injection”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 07 Apr '23

07 Apr '23

CANbus is a mini-LAN built into every car manufactured this century. It is increasingly being used for all kinds of functions, like controlling “smart headlamps”, and of course unlocking the doors and letting you get into the car and drive off. Now it turns out that there are ways to connect to the bus through weak points from outside the vehicle, for example by breaking into the connections for those “smart headlamps”. From here, you can do things like spoof signals from the smart key receiver, fooling the security system into thinking it has received a signal from a valid owner’s key when it hasn’t. And once you’ve done that, you can steal the car. Because, of course, components on the bus are trusting the signals they get from other components, aren’t they? <https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/06/can_injection_attack_car_theft/>

1 0

'One In Two New Npm Packages Is SEO Spam Right Now'
by Peter Reutemann 31 Mar '23

31 Mar '23

'Gabi Dobocan, writing at auditing firm Sandworm: More than half of all new packages that are currently (29 Mar 2023) being submitted to npm are SEO spam. That is - empty packages, with just a single README file that contains links to various malicious websites. Out of the ~320k new npm packages or versions that Sandworm has scanned over the past week, at least ~185k were labeled as SEO spam. Just in the last hour as of writing this article, 1583 new e-book spam packages have been published. All the identified spam packages are currently live on npmjs.com.' -- source: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/23/03/30/184239 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Numen voice control
by Peter Reutemann 30 Mar '23

30 Mar '23

Saw the following on my Mastodon feed: Numen is an open GPL licensed project by @geb that allows system-wide computing by VoiceControl without using mouse or keyboard. A great a11y (= accessibility) tool, looks like. https://numenvoice.com https://git.sr.ht/~geb/numen -- soure: https://social.coop/@smallcircles/110106575204873016 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix Becomes Official Ubuntu Flavor
by Peter Reutemann 29 Mar '23

29 Mar '23

'A report from 9to5Linux: The Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix distribution has become an official Ubuntu flavor and will join the rest of the flavors starting with the upcoming Ubuntu 23.04 (Lunar Lobster) release. Created and maintained by members of the Linux community, Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix is an Ubuntu derivative that features the modern Cinnamon desktop environment developed by the Linux Mint team. Cinnamon Remix aims to offer a traditional approach to the modern Linux desktop. Until now, the maintainers of Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix did a very good job keeping up with all upstream Ubuntu releases, even offering a custom version of the official wallpaper of each new Ubuntu release to match the Cinnamon desktop environment's style. Ubuntu Cinnamon will not be the only new official Ubuntu flavor this Spring when Ubuntu 23.04 will be released as the maintainers of Ubuntu Unity have also managed to obtain official Ubuntu flavor status last year in September. As with Ubuntu Unity, the next step now for the Ubuntu Cinnamon maintainers is to bake daily ISO images in preparation for the upcoming Lunar Lobster release and maybe even take part in the Ubuntu 23.04 beta release later this week on March 30th. ' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/03/28/2134218 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Arduino Announces 'UNO R4' with Clock Speed/Memory/Storage Upgrades, 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4
by Peter Reutemann 28 Mar '23

28 Mar '23

'Saturday Arduino announced "a new, revolutionary revision of the iconic UNO board," promising "a long-awaited update on performance and possibilities." The Arduino UNO R4 indeed preserves the well-known features of the UNO family — standard form factor, shield compatibility, 5V operating voltage, outstanding robustness — while offering no less than a 32-bit Cortex-M4 and a 3-to-16x increase in clock speed, memory and flash storage.... The UNO R4 will come in two versions — UNO R4 WiFi and UNO R4 Minima — offering unprecedented performance and possibilities for the maker community. The WiFi version comes with an Espressif S3 WiFi module, expanding creative opportunities for makers, educators, and hobbyists alike; while the UNO R4 Minima provides a cost-effective option for those seeking the new microcontroller without additional features.... SRAM went from 2kB to 32kB, and flash memory went from 32kB to 256kB to accommodate more complex projects. In addition, following the requests from the community, the USB port was upgraded to the USB-C and maximum power supply voltage was increased to 24V with an improved thermal design. The board provides a CAN bus, which allows users to minimize wiring and execute different tasks in parallel by connecting multiple shields. Finally, the new board includes a 12-bit analog DAC. All in all, Arduino UNO R4 is the answer to the requests for improvement and updates the developer and maker community has been advancing, making it easier than ever to get started with Arduino.... On the software side, a big effort is being made to maximize retrocompatibility of the most popular Arduino libraries so that users will be able to rely on existing code examples and tutorials.' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/23/03/26/2357240 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Pinduoduo App Malware Detailed By Cybersecurity Researchers
by Peter Reutemann 28 Mar '23

28 Mar '23

'Security researchers at Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab have identified and outlined potential malware in versions of PDD Holdings' Chinese shopping app Pinduoduo, days after Google suspended it from its Android app store. From a report: In one of the first public accountings of the malicious code, Kaspersky laid out how the app could elevate its own privileges to undermine user privacy and data security. It tested versions of the app distributed through a local app store in China, where Huawei Technologies, Tencent Holdings and Xiaomi run some of the biggest app markets. Kaspersky's findings, shared with Bloomberg News, were among the clearest explanations from an independent security team for what triggered Google's action and malware warning last week. The cybersecurity firm, which has played a role in uncovering some of the biggest cyberattacks in history, said it found evidence that earlier versions of Pinduoduo exploited system software vulnerabilities to install backdoors and gain unauthorized access to user data and notifications. Those conclusions agreed in large part with those of researchers that had posted their discoveries online in past weeks, though Bloomberg News hasn't verified the authenticity of the earlier reports.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/23/03/27/1420241 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

The Orange Pi 5: a Fast Alternative To The Raspberry Pi 4
by Peter Reutemann 27 Mar '23

27 Mar '23

'"With an 8-core Rockchip RK3588S SoC, the Orange Pi 5 is leaps and bounds faster than the aging Raspberry Pi 4," writes Phoronix: With up to 32GB of RAM, the Orange Pi 5 is also capable of serving for a more diverse user-base and even has enough potential for assembling a budget Arm Linux developer desktop. I've been testing out the Orange Pi 5 the past few weeks and it's quite fast and nice for its low price point. The Orange Pi 5 single board computer was announced last year and went up for pre-ordering at the end of 2022.... When it comes to the software support, among the officially available options for the Orange Pi 5 are Orange Pi OS, Ubuntu, Debian, Android, and Armbian. Other ARM Linux distributions will surely see varying levels of support while even the readily available ISO selection offered by Orange Pi is off to a great start.... Granted, the Orange Pi developer community isn't as large as that of the Raspberry Pi community or the current range of accessories and documentation, but for those more concerned about features and performance, the Orange Pi 5 is extremely interesting. The article includes Orange Pi 5 specs: - A 26-pin header - HDMI 2.1, Gigabit LAN, M.2 PCIe 2.0, and USB3 connectivity - A Mali G510 MP4 graphics processor, "which has open-source driver hope via the Panfrost driver stack." - Four different versions with 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, or 32GB of RAM using LPDDR4 or LPDDR4X. "The Orange Pi 4GB retails for ~$88, the Orange Pi 5 8GB version retails for $108, and the Orange Pi 5 16GB version retails for $138, while as of writing the 32GB version wasn't in stock." In 169 performance benchmarks (compared to Raspberry Pi 4 boards), "this single board computer came out to delivering 2.85x the performance of the Raspberry Pi 400 overall." And through all this the average SoC temperature was 71 degrees with a peak of 85 degrees — without any extra heatsink or cooling.' -- source: https://build.slashdot.org/story/23/03/25/1725257 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Google Pixel Bug Lets You 'Uncrop' the Last Four Years of Screenshots
by Peter Reutemann 25 Mar '23

25 Mar '23

'Ars Technica: Back in 2018, Pixel phones gained a built-in screenshot editor called "Markup" with the release of Android 9.0 Pie. The tool pops up whenever you take a screenshot, and tapping the app's pen icon gives you access to tools like crop and a few colored drawing pens. That's very handy assuming Google's Markup tool actually does what it says, but a new vulnerability points out the edits made by this tool weren't actually destructive! It's possible to uncrop or unredact Pixel screenshots taken during the past four years. The bug was discovered by Simon Aarons and is dubbed "Acropalypse," or more formally CVE-2023-21036. There's a proof-of-concept app that can unredact Pixel screenshots at acropalypse.app, and it works! There's also a good technical write-up here by Aarons' collaborator, David Buchanan. The basic gist of the problem is that Google's screenshot editor overwrites the original screenshot file with your new edited screenshot, but it does not truncate or recompress that file in any way. If your edited screenshot has a smaller file size than the original -- that's very easy to do with the crop tool -- you end up with a PNG with a bunch of hidden junk data at the end of it. That junk data is made up of the end bits of your original screenshot, and it's actually possible to recover that data. While the bug was fixed in the March 2023 security update for Pixel devices, it doesn't solve the problem, notes Ars. "There's still the matter of the last four years of Pixel screenshots that are out there and possibly full of hidden data that people didn't realize they were sharing."' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/23/03/20/2034220 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

2 1

GitHub.com Rotates Its Exposed Private SSH Key
by Peter Reutemann 25 Mar '23

25 Mar '23

'GitHub has rotated its private SSH key for GitHub.com after the secret was was accidentally published in a public GitHub repository. BleepingComputer reports: The software development and version control service says, the private RSA key was only "briefly" exposed, but that it took action out of "an abundance of caution." In a succinct blog post published today, GitHub acknowledged discovering this week that the RSA SSH private key for GitHub.com had been ephemerally exposed in a public GitHub repository. "We immediately acted to contain the exposure and began investigating to understand the root cause and impact," writes Mike Hanley, GitHub's Chief Security Officer and SVP of Engineering. "We have now completed the key replacement, and users will see the change propagate over the next thirty minutes. Some users may have noticed that the new key was briefly present beginning around 02:30 UTC during preparations for this change." As some may notice, only GitHub.com's RSA SSH key has been impacted and replaced. No change is required for ECDSA or Ed25519 users.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/23/03/24/2138222 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Google Bard Says It’s Already A Goner
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 23 Mar '23

23 Mar '23

Amid all the various AI-related titbits in this article <https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/21/google_bard_ai/> is a link to a Twitter thread where someone asked Google Bard (Google’s answer to ChatGPT) to predict when it is likely to join the ever-growing list of dead Google projects. And it said it is already dead <https://twitter.com/juanbuis/status/1638289186351456257>, and even gave detailed reasons why it was a failure, including lack of user adoption, lack of innovation and lack of resources. Seems the AI managed to pick up a posting on YCombinator predicting it would be shut down in a year’s time, and somehow interpreted it as a news item referring to the present time.

1 0

GNOME 44 Released
by Peter Reutemann 23 Mar '23

23 Mar '23

'"9to5Linux.com reports that the GNOME 44 desktop environment is officially released and gives a detailed look at the major new features and improvements," writes Slashdot reader prisoninmate. From the report: Code-named "Kuala Lumpur" in recognition of the work done by the organizers of GNOME.Asia Summit 2022 conference, GNOME 44 introduces a GTK4 port of the Epihaphy (GNOME Web) web browser, a file chooser grid view for apps that use the standard GTK file chooser, as well as support for adding a WireGuard VPN directly from the Network panel. GNOME 44 continues to improve the Quick Settings feature introduced in GNOME 43 by implementing a submenu to the Bluetooth button to more easily and quickly connect or disconnect peripherals, adding descriptions to buttons to easily see their status, and implementing a new feature called Background Apps via a new background monitoring service in XDG portals 1.16.0." A full list of changes are available in the official release notes. The GNOME project also published a launch video on YouTube.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/03/22/2211217 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Mozilla Launches a New Startup Focused on 'Trustworthy' AI
by Peter Reutemann 23 Mar '23

23 Mar '23

'On the eve of its 25th anniversary, Mozilla, the not-for-profit behind the Firefox browser, is launching an AI-focused startup. From a report: Called Mozilla.ai, the newly forged company's mission isn't to build just any AI -- its mission is to build AI that's open source and "trustworthy," according to Mark Surman, the executive president of Mozilla and the head of Mozilla.ai. "Working on trustworthy AI for almost five years, I've constantly felt a mix of excitement and anxiety," he told TechCrunch in an email interview. "The last month or two of rapid-fire big tech AI announcements has been no different. Really exciting new tech is emerging -- new tools that have immediately sparked artists, founders ... all kinds of people to do new things. The anxiety comes when you realize almost no one is looking at the guardrails." Surman was referring to the rash of AI models in recent months that, while impressive in their capabilities, have worrisome real-world implications. At release, OpenAI's text-generating ChatGPT could be prompted to write malware, identify exploits in open source code and create phishing websites that looked similar to well-trafficked sites. Text-to-image AI like Stable Diffusion, meanwhile, has been co-opted to create pornographic, nonconsensual deepfakes and ultra-graphic depictions of violence. The creators of these models say that they're taking steps to curb abuse. But Mozilla felt that not enough was being done. "We've been working on trustworthy AI on the public interest research side for about five years, hoping other industry players with more AI expertise would step up to build more trustworthy tech," Surman said. "They haven't. So we decided mid-last year we needed to do it ourselves -- and to find like-minded partners to do it alongside us. We then set out to find someone with the right mix of academic and industry AI experience to lead it." Funded by a $30 million seed investment from the Mozilla Foundation, Mozilla's parent organization, Mozilla.ai is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation -- much like the Mozilla Corporation (the org responsible for developing Firefox) and Mozilla Ventures (the Mozilla Foundation's VC fund). Its managing director is Moez Draief, who previously was the chief scientist at Huawei's Noah's Ark AI lab and the global chief scientist at consulting company Capgemini.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/03/22/1510255 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Russian Developers Blocked From Contributing To FOSS Tools
by Peter Reutemann 22 Mar '23

22 Mar '23

'The Reg has seen two recent incidents of Russian developers being blocked from public development of FOSS code. One was a refusal on the Linux kernel mailing list, the other a more general block on Github. In the last week, these events have both caused active, and sometimes heated, discussions in FOSS developer communities. From the report: The GitHub account of developer Alexander Amelkin has been blocked, and his repositories marked as "archived" â" including ipmitool, whose README describes it as "a utility for managing and configuring devices that support the Intelligent Platform Management Interface." Unable to comment on Github itself, Amelkin described what happened on the project's older Soureforge page. Amelkin works for Russian chipbuilder Yadro, which we described as working on RISC-V chips back in 2021. Microsoft is just obeying US law in this: according to the War and Sanctions database of the Ukrainian National Agency on Corruption Prevention, the NACP, Yadro is a sanctioned company. However, on LinkedIn, Amelkin disputes his employer's involvement. Over on Hacker News, commentators seem to be generally in favor of the move, although the discussion on LWN is more measured, pointing out both that there is little threat from server-management tools like this, but that Microsoft probably has no choice. Amelkin is not alone. Over on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, a contribution from Sergey Semin has been refused with the terse notice: "We don't feel comfortable accepting patches from or relating to hardware produced by your organization. Please withhold networking contributions until further notice." Semin is a developer at chipmaker Baikal Electronics, a company whose website has been suspended for a year now, as we noted a year ago in a story that also mentions Yadro. We were reporting on Baikal's efforts to develop its own CPUs nearly a decade ago, mere months after the Russian annexation of Crimea. And once again, there is spirited debate over the move on the Orange Site. ' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/03/21/2126227 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

ASUS Unveils the Tinker V As Their First RISC-V Board
by Peter Reutemann 21 Mar '23

21 Mar '23

'Phoronix: For over a half-decade ASUS has been selling the Tinker Board devices as their line of Raspberry Pi alternatives. To date the ASUS Tinker Board single board computers have all been Arm-based while now they have launched their first RISC-V board, the Tinker V. The ASUS Tinker V is their first RISC-V single board computer and intended for the industrial IoT (Internet of Things) developer community. The ASUS Tinker V is set to officially run Debian Linux and Yocto while surely with time more Linux distributions will be supported.... Being IoT focused, there isn't any display support. Those interested in learning more about the ASUS Tinker V can do so via tinker-board.asus.com. The Register notes that Asus "is offering at least five years of support for Tinker V... Dedicated on-site technical support is also available to shorten customer development cycles and accelerate application deployment." The move shows that the RISC-V open-source instruction set architecture continues to garner support. The last RISC-V Summit in San Jose saw the launch of a family of datacenter-class processors based on the architecture from Ventana Micro Systems, while XMOS unveiled new high-performance microcontrollers using RISC-V. According to Asus, Tinker V samples will be available in Q2 of this year, but it did not disclose a date for full availability or pricing.' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/23/03/20/0034207 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Question please re: How to attach an Android (Samsung cellphone Galaxy A03S) photo to a Gmail email using Firefox and Ubuntu
by Michael James 20 Mar '23

20 Mar '23

G'day... Can anyone please suggest how to attach a photo - (from a Samsung Galaxy A03S cellphone via USB cable from the phone to a desktop) - onto a Gmail email using Firefox and running Ubuntu. Have tried connecting the phone via USB to the desktop and clicking the attach button on the email and double clicking the file in the Ubuntu Files folder under the Activities heading. This does not work. I tried both right and left mouse options and the 'OPEN' option; I also tried copying the file (photo) to downloads and attempted to attach via the same above pathway but this did not work either. I came across this post (below) on the internet from 2010 with the same question and the following answer: https://superuser.com/questions/132783/how-to-email-photo-from-ubuntu-f-spo… I'm not familiar with Python code and wonder if this answer is now outdated? Wondering if the problem is with Firefox? Gmail is running fine on Ubuntu with Firefox, it's just the attaching of photos from the Android that's giving trouble. Short of using the phone itself or Thunderbird or any other email service to send the photo, is there a way to attach photos to Gmail emails via Firefox running on Ubuntu please? Thanks, Michael James __________________________________________________________________________________________

2 2

Google tells users of some Android phones: Nuke voice calling to avoid infection
by Peter Reutemann 20 Mar '23

20 Mar '23

'Google is urging owners of certain Android phones to take urgent action to protect themselves from critical vulnerabilities that give skilled hackers the ability to surreptitiously compromise their devices by making a specially crafted call to their number. It’s not clear if all actions urged are even possible, however, and even if they are, the measures will neuter devices of most voice-calling capabilities. The vulnerability affects Android devices that use the Exynos Modem 5123, Exynos Modem 5300, Exynos 980, Exynos 1080, Exynos Auto T5123 chipsets made by Samsung’s semiconductor division. Vulnerable devices include the Pixel 6 and 7, international versions of the Samsung Galaxy S22, various mid-range Samsung phones, the Galaxy Watch 4 and 5, and cars with the Exynos Auto T5123 chip. These devices are ONLY vulnerable if they run the Exynos chipset, which includes the baseband that processes signals for voice calls. The US version of the Galaxy S22 runs a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip. A bug tracked as CVE-2023-24033 and three others that have yet to receive a CVE designation make it possible for hackers to execute malicious code, Google’s Project Zero vulnerability team reported on Thursday. Code-execution bugs in the baseband can be especially critical because the chips are endowed with root-level system privileges to ensure voice calls work reliably.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/critical-vulnerabili… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Unix Pioneer Ken Thompson Announces He's Switching From Mac To Linux
by Peter Reutemann 20 Mar '23

20 Mar '23

'The closing keynote at the SCaLE 20x conference was delivered by 80-year-old Ken Thompson (co-creator of Unix, Plan9, UTF8, and the Go programming language). Slashdot reader motang shared Thompson answer to a question at the end about what operating system he uses today: I have, for most of my life — because I was sort of born into it — run Apple. Now recently, meaning within the last five years, I've become more and more depressed, and what Apple is doing to something that should allow you to work is just atrocious. But they are taking a lot of space and time to do it, so it's okay. And I have come, within the last month or two, to say, even though I've invested, you know, a zillion years in Apple — I'm throwing it away. And I'm going to Linux. To Raspbian in particular. ' -- source: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/23/03/18/237211 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Linux 6.4 AMD Graphics Driver Picking Up New Power Features For The Steam Deck
by Peter Reutemann 20 Mar '23

20 Mar '23

'Phoronix: A pull request of early AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes was submitted for DRM-Next on Friday as some of the early feature work accumulating for the Linux 6.4 kernel cycle. Among the AMDGPU kernel driver changes this round are a number of fixes affecting items such as the UMC RAS, DCN 3.2, FreeSync, SR-IOV, various IP blocks, USB4, and more. On the feature side, mentioned subtly in the change-log are a few power-related additions... These additions are largely focused on Van Gogh APUs, which is notably for the Valve Steam Deck and benefiting its graphics moving forward. First up, this kernel pull request introduces a new sysfs interface for adjusting/setting thermal throttling. This is wired up for Van Gogh and allows reading/updating the thermal limit temperature in millidegrees Celsius. This "APU thermal cap" interface is just wired up for Van Gogh and seems to be Steam Deck driven feature work so that SteamOS will be better able to manage the thermal handling of the APU graphics.... These power features will be exposed via sysfs while Steam OS will wrap around them intelligently and possibly some new UI settings knobs for those wanting more control over their Steam Deck's thermal/performance. ' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/03/19/2040247 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Most Failed Drives Fail Before 3 Years Of Use
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 19 Mar '23

19 Mar '23

In contrast to backup company Backblaze, here is a report <https://blocksandfiles.com/2023/03/16/failed-disk-drives-fail-after-just-un…> from one of the ambulances at the bottom of the cliff -- a company that tries to recover data from drives after they have failed. What they find is the average working life of a failed drive is just under three years of total power-on time. (So if a drive doesn’t fail by then, it looks like its chances of surviving longer are increased.) Also worth noting that, when a drive goes bad, it doesn’t go just a little bad (say, one or two bad sectors), it tends to go significantly bad (hundreds or thousands of bad sectors). This has been my experience with bad drives too (at least, those that could still spin up and do some I/O transfers successfully). Interesting quotes: “We found that the five most durable and resilient hard drives from [the two most popular manufacturers, Western Digital and Seagate] were made before 2015. On the other hand, most of the least durable and resilient hard drives from each manufacturer were made after 2015.” and “in general, old drives seem more durable and resilient than new drives,” and “disks with CMR (conventional magnetic recording) appear more durable and resilient than those with SMR.” I think SMR drives are only used for archive purposes, because the process for writing new data onto them is somewhat convoluted and slow. Ironic, though, that an archive drive might not be that reliable ...

1 0

All-Open Source 7-Inch MNT Reform Pocket Laptop Ships In October
by Peter Reutemann 16 Mar '23

16 Mar '23

'An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The creators of the all-open source MNT Reform laptop are getting nearer to launching its handheld counterpart: The crowdfunding campaign for the 7-inch MNT Pocket Reform has officially launched and is also serving as a de-facto preorder system for the device. The cheapest version of the Pocket Reform starts at $899, and it's also being offered in purple for $969 or in a bundle with a 1TB SSD, carrying case, handbook, and poster for $1,299. All versions are currently slated to ship in mid-October. Like the full-size Reform, the pocket version uses open source hardware and a mechanical keyboard (buyers can choose either white or red Kalih switches). But the pocket version uses a 7-inch 1920x1200 LCD screen instead of a 12.5-inch version and comes with fewer and smaller ports (two USB-C, one micro HDMI, a microSD port, and one ix industrial mini Ethernet port). Its keyboard also comes with an individually programmable RGB backlight, and its trackball-style pointing device has been downsized to fit into the smaller design. The Pocket Reform also includes built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, 128GB of built-in eMMC storage, and an expansion slot for 4G cellular connectivity. The device will also boot from microSD cards or an NVMe SSD installed in the device's M.2 slot. Its 8000 mAh batteries will allow it to run for about four hours. MNT warns in its blog post that "risks and challenges" could delay the October shipping timeline: "Pocket Reform has hundreds of electronic components. We tried to pick them so that there will be enough stock when we get around to manufacturing the boards, but it's always possible that there could be a sudden component shortage or increase in price. If that should happen, we would have to re-engineer the affected PCB and exchange the part, causing a delay in continued production. We had to adapt our products several times during the global chip crisis, so we are confident that we'll be able to work around any difficulties. Should any situation arise that would delay the estimated shipping timeline, backers will be informed promptly via project updates."' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/03/15/2043243 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

DreamWorks' OpenMoonRay Renderer Code Published
by Peter Reutemann 16 Mar '23

16 Mar '23

'Today, DreamWorks published the open-source code for MoonRay, their production renderer used for films like The Bad Guys, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and other animation films. "OpenMoonRay is available via DreamWorks Animation's GitHub," reports Phoronix. "This professional-grade renderer is available under an Apache 2.0 license." >From the README: "MoonRay was developed at DreamWorks and is in continuous active development and includes an extensive library of production-tested, physically based materials, a USD Hydra render delegate, multi-machine and cloud rendering via the Arras distributed computation framework." More details can be found via OpenMoonRay.org.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/03/15/225218 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Microsoft’s File-Tainting System ’Tain’t Working
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 15 Mar '23

15 Mar '23

Microsoft has a clever-sounding system for trying to protect Windows users from downloading malicious files: it’s called “Mark-Of-The-Web”. What it means is that any file downloaded from an untrusted source is supposed to have a special flag set in its NTFS metadata indicating that the file is not to be trusted. So any attempt by the user to perform sensitive operations on that file (e.g. execute macros from it, run it as an executable) is supposed to trigger appropriate system warnings. If the file is a .zip archive, then this mark is supposed to be propagated to all files extracted from that archive. However, it turns out this mechanism can be bypassed (surprise, surprise) <https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/01/microsoft_motw_malware_flaw/>. How can this happen? The flaw lies in the mechanism used to tell Windows to trust downloaded files, by attaching an “Authenticode” signature to them. Files without such signatures are of course untrusted and will trigger the appropriate warnings. However, by attaching an invalid signature of a particular form, you can trigger an error response from the signature-checking process that is actually interpreted as “this file is OK” <https://blog.0patch.com/2022/10/free-micropatches-for-bypassing-motw.html>. What do you call it when an attempt to add mechanisms to make a system more secure actually increases the attack surface on that system? By the way, the referenced Twitter thread discussing this vulnerability <https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1579895038523609088> seems to be saying that no Mark-Of-The-Web propagation is done for files extracted from .iso disc images. And that Microsoft uses this form for distributing its own software (Visio was mentioned) precisely to avoid the hassle of going through vetting by third-party antimalware tools.

1 1

cURL, the omnipresent data tool, is getting a 25th birthday party this month
by Peter Reutemann 13 Mar '23

13 Mar '23

'When you first start messing with the command line, it can feel like there's an impermeable wall between the local space you're messing around in and the greater Internet. On your side, you've got your commands and files, and beyond the wall, there are servers, images, APIs, webpages, and more bits of useful, ever-changing data. One of the most popular ways through that wall has been cURL, or "client URL," which turns 25 this month. The cURL tool started as a way for programmer Daniel Stenberg to let Internet Chat Relay users quickly fetch currency exchange rates while still inside their chat window. As detailed in an archived history of the project, it was originally built off an existing command-line tool, httpget, built by Rafael Sagula. A 1.0 version was released in 1997, then changed names to urlget by 2.0, as it had added in GOPHER, FTP, and other protocols. By 1998, the tool could upload as well as download, and so version 4.0 was named cURL. Over the next few years, cURL grew to encompass nearly every Internet protocol, work with certificates and encryption, offer bindings for more than 50 languages, and be included in most Linux distributions and other systems. The cURL project now encompasses both the command-line command itself and the libcurl library. In 2020, the project's history estimated the command and library had been installed in more than 10 billion instances worldwide.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/curl-the-omnipresent… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

2 1

Backblaze: SSDs Only Slightly More Reliable Than Hard Drives
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 11 Mar '23

11 Mar '23

The latest storage reliability report from backup company Backblaze is out <https://blocksandfiles.com/2023/03/10/backblaze-ssd-vs-hdd/>, and they are starting to include data from their increasing use of SSDs. One result: SSDs are not much more reliable than hard drives. They find an annualized failure rate of 1.64% for HDDs, 0.98% for the solid-state ones. You could say that’s over 50% greater reliability, but it’s not enough to make any material difference to the need for a proper backup regime. Another interesting result is that SMART diagnostics from SSD controllers seem to be very inconsistent. That is to say, they are even less useful than the ones from hard drives. Not that I would bother with either.

1 0

Malware infecting widely used security appliance survives firmware updates
by Peter Reutemann 10 Mar '23

10 Mar '23

'Threat actors with a connection to the Chinese government are infecting a widely used security appliance from SonicWall with malware that remains active even after the device receives firmware updates, researchers said. SonicWall’s Secure Mobile Access 100 is a secure remote access appliance that helps organizations securely deploy remote workforces. Customers use it to grant granular access controls to remote users, provide VPN connections to organization networks, and set unique profiles for each employee. The access the SMA 100 has to customer networks makes it an attractive target for threat actors. In 2021, the device came under attack by sophisticated hackers who exploited what was then a zero-day vulnerability. Security appliances from Fortinet and Pulse Secure have come under similar attacks in recent years.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/malware-infecting-wi… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Raspberry Pi Lets You Have Your Own Global Shutter Camera For $50
by Peter Reutemann 10 Mar '23

10 Mar '23

'Global shutter sensors with no skew or distortion have been promised as the future of cameras for years now, but so far only a handful of products with that tech have made it to market. Now, Raspberry Pi is offering a 1.6-megapixel global shutter camera module to hobbyists for $50, providing a platform for machine vision, hobbyist shooting and more. From a report: The Raspberry Pi Global Shutter Camera uses a 6.3mm Sony IMX296 sensor, and requires a Raspberry Pi board with a CSI camera connector. Like other global shutter sensors, it works by pairing each pixel with an analog storage element, so that light signals can be captured and stored by all pixels simultaneously. By comparison, regular CMOS sensors read and store the light captured by pixels from top to bottom and left to right. That can cause diagonal skew on fast moving subjects, or very weird distortion on rotating objects like propellers.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/23/03/09/1241216 If only you could get hands on the Raspberry Pis themselves... ;-) Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

2 1

Linux Mint Mate - number of workspaces read-only
by Peter Reutemann 08 Mar '23

08 Mar '23

Hi everyone I've been baffled with my Linux Mint Mate 20.2 for a while now that I couldn't change the number of workspaces, as it was greyed in the preferences of the workspace switcher (fixed to 4). Used to work in the past (and maybe again with newer versions). Finally came across a command-line that can change the number of workspaces, bypassing the preferences dialog: gsettings set org.mate.Marco.general num-workspaces 4 Source: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=298336 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

The SCO Lawsuit: Looking Back 20 Years Later
by Peter Reutemann 07 Mar '23

07 Mar '23

'"On March 7, 2003, a struggling company called The SCO Group filed a lawsuit against IBM," writes LWN.net, "claiming that the success of Linux was the result of a theft of SCO's technology..." Two decades later, "It is hard to overestimate how much the community we find ourselves in now was shaped by a ridiculous lawsuit 20 years ago...." It was the claim of access to Unix code that was the most threatening allegation for the Linux community. SCO made it clear that, in its opinion, Linux was stolen property: "It is not possible for Linux to rapidly reach UNIX performance standards for complete enterprise functionality without the misappropriation of UNIX code, methods or concepts". To rectify this "misappropriation", SCO was asking for a judgment of at least $1 billion, later increased to $5 billion. As the suit dragged on, SCO also started suing Linux users as it tried to collect a tax for use of the system. Though this has never been proven, it was widely assumed at the time that SCO's real objective was to prod IBM into acquiring the company. That would have solved SCO's ongoing business problems and IBM, for rather less than the amount demanded in court, could have made an annoying problem go away and also lay claim to the ownership of Unix — and, thus, Linux. To SCO's management, it may well have seemed like a good idea at the time. IBM, though, refused to play that game; the company had invested heavily into Linux in its early days and was uninterested in allowing any sort of intellectual-property taint to attach to that effort. So the company, instead, directed its not inconsiderable legal resources to squashing this attack. But notably, so did the development community as a whole, as did much of the rest of the technology industry. Over the course of the following years — far too many years — SCO's case fell to pieces. The "misappropriated" technology wasn't there. Due to what must be one of the worst-written contracts in technology-industry history, it turned out that SCO didn't even own the Unix copyrights it was suing over. The level of buffoonery was high from the beginning and got worse; the company lost at every turn and eventually collapsed into bankruptcy.... Microsoft, which had not yet learned to love Linux, funded SCO and loudly bought licenses from the company. Magazines like Forbes were warning the "Linux-loving crunchies in the open-source movement" that they "should wake up". SCO was suggesting a license fee of $1,399 — per-CPU — to run Linux.... Such an effort, in less incompetent hands, could easily have damaged Linux badly. As it went, SCO, despite its best efforts, instead succeeded in improving the position of Linux — in development, legal, and economic terms — considerably. The article argues SCO's lawsuit ultimately proved that Linux didn't contain copyrighted code "in a far more convincing way than anybody else could have." (And the provenance of all Linux code contributions are now carefully documented.) The case also proved the need for lawyers to vigorously defend the rights of open source programmers. And most of all, it revealed the Linux community was widespread and committed. And "Twenty years later, it is fair to say that Linux is doing a little better than The SCO Group. Its swaggering leader, who thought to make his fortune by taxing Linux, filed for personal bankruptcy in 2020."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/03/04/0359236 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

2 1

Will AMD's 'openSIL' Library Enable Open-Source Silicon Initialization With Coreboot?
by Peter Reutemann 07 Mar '23

07 Mar '23

'Formerly known as LinuxBIOS, coreboot is defined by Wikipedia as "a software project aimed at replacing proprietary firmware (BIOS or UEFI) found in most computers with a lightweight firmware." Phoronix is wondering if there's about to be a big announcement from AMD: AMD dropped a juicy tid-bit of information to be announced next month with "openSIL" [an open-source AMD x86 silicon initialization library], complete with AMD Coreboot support.... While about a decade ago AMD was big into Coreboot and at the time committed to it for future hardware platforms (2011: AMD To Support Coreboot On All Future CPUs) [and] open-source AGESA at the time did a lot of enabling around it, that work had died off. In more recent years, AMD's Coreboot contributions have largely been limited to select consumer APU/SoC platforms for Google Chromebook use. But issues around closing up the AGESA as well as concerns with the AMD Platform Security Processor (PSP) have diminished open-source firmware hopes in recent years.... For the Open Compute Project Regional Summit in Prague, there is a new entry added with a title of OSF on AMD — Enabled by openSIL (yes, folks, OSF as in "Open-Source Firmware").... [H]opefully this will prove to be a monumental shift for open-source firmware in the HPC server space. >From the talk's description: openSIL (AMD open-source x86 Silicon Initialization Library) offers the versatility, scalability, and light weight interface to allow for ease of integration with open-source and/or proprietary host boot solutions such as coreboot, UEFI and others and adds major flexibility to the overall platform design. In other words, this library-based solution simply allows a platform integrator to scale from feature rich solutions such as UEFI to slim, lightweight, and secure solutions such as coreboot. The description promises the talk will include demonstrations "highlighting system bring-up using openSIL integrated with coreboot and UEFI Host Firmware stacks on AMD's Genoa based platforms."' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/03/06/0253208 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

AGM minutes
by Peter Reutemann 01 Mar '23

01 Mar '23

Hi everyone The second attempt at running our AGM took place successfully on Monday night and the minutes are now available: http://wiki.wlug.org.nz/MeetingTopics.2023-02-27 Due to no one stepping forward to take up the president's office, we've decided to wind up the society. Thanks everyone for supporting WLUG over the years. We will keep this mailing list open as a place for exchanging news and knowledge around Linux and open source software. Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Quote Of The Week
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 28 Feb '23

28 Feb '23

>From a reader comment to an article <https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/27/microsoft_ai_gpt3_data/> wherein Microsoft suggests that, since these machine-learning models are so good at generating fake and even nonsensical responses, why not use them to deliberately generate fictional sample data for testing purposes: For decades, we've written hundreds of sci-fi stories where you have an evil out-of-control AI, and that AI is hyperintelligent but can only reason along strict logical lines, and is ultimately defeated by exploiting its lack of imagination. And then, suddenly, it turns out that the AIs we can actually make have way too much imagination, and are utterly incapable of logical thought. I find this hilarious.

1 0

Who Writes Linux and Open Source Software?
by Peter Reutemann 28 Feb '23

28 Feb '23

'From an opinion piece in the Register: Aiven, an open source cloud data platform company, recently analyzed who's doing what with GitHub open source code projects. They found that the top open source contributors were all companies — Amazon Web Services, Intel, Red Hat, Google, and Microsoft.... Aiven looked at three metrics within the GitHub archives. These were the number of contributors, repositories (projects) contributed to, and the number of commits made by the contributors. These were calculated using Google Big Query analysis of PushEvents on public GitHub data. The company found that Microsoft and Google were neck-and-neck for the top spot. Red Hat is in third place, followed by Intel, then AWS, just ahead of IBM.... Red Hat is following closely behind and is currently contributing more commits than Google, with 125,012 in Q4 2022 compared to Google's 94,961. Microsoft is ahead of both, with 128,247 commits. However, regarding contributed staff working on projects, Google is leading the way with 5,757 compared to Microsoft's 5,513 and Red Hat's 3,656.... Heikki Nousiainen, Aiven CTO and co-founder, commented: "An unexpected result of our research was seeing Amazon overtake IBM to become the fifth biggest contributor." They "came late to the open source party, but they're now doubling down on its open source commitments and realizing the benefits that come with contributing to the open source projects its customers use." So, yes, open source certainly started with individual contributors, but today, and for many years before, it's company employees that are really making the code.... Aiven is far from the only one to have noticed that companies are now open source's economic engine. Jonathan Corbet, editor-in-chief of Linux Weekly News (LWN), found in his most recent analysis of Long Term Support Linux Kernel releases from 5.16 to 6.1 that a mere 7.5 percent of the kernel development, as measured by lines changed, came from individual developers. No, the real leaders were, in order: AMD; Intel; Google; Linaro, the main Arm Linux development organization; Meta; and Red Hat. The article also includes this thought-provoking quote from Aiven CTO's. "Innovation is at the heart of the open source community, but without a strong commitment from companies, the whole system will struggle. "We can see that companies are recognizing their role and supporting all who use open source."' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/02/26/1950212 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

3 3

Emacs: Comparing Two Regions From Two Files
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 28 Feb '23

28 Feb '23

So I was compiling some useful database-related routines that I have used in various places (with MySQL and SQLite so far) over the years into a set of common modules, so that I could easily find the latest and best-tested versions of them for future projects. Then I came to a routine with two versions of a few dozen lines each, and I was trying to figure out a way of doing a diff on them without writing them out to temporary files. I have an Emacs command called “make-command-buffer”, which I can use for example to create a buffer for entering and executing shell commands, and collecting their output. It was easy enough to copy and paste both routines into the buffer, but now how do I put them both into one diff command? There is a shell feature called “here-docs”, which lets you include the standard-input data for a command directly following the command: «cmd» <<«marker» ... data ... «marker» where the «marker» is some word that does not occur in the data. But I want to have two of these, like this: diff -u <<EOD1 <<EOD2 ... version 1 ... EOD1 ... version 2 ... EOD2 You can do something like that in Perl, but it doesn’t work in the shell. Hunting around on line reminded me why: because you can only have one standard input. But in the Bash man page, there is a syntax for redirecting arbitary file descriptors, letting you have any number of heredocs. So, combining this with the ability to give a command a file name that corresponds to an already-open file descriptor, I finally got this to work: diff -u /dev/fd/8 /dev/fd/9 8<<EOD1 9<<EOD2 ... version 1 ... EOD1 ... version 2 ... EOD2

1 1

LastPass says employee’s home computer was hacked and corporate vault taken
by Peter Reutemann 28 Feb '23

28 Feb '23

'Already smarting from a breach that put partially encrypted login data into a threat actor’s hands, LastPass on Monday said that the same attacker hacked an employee’s home computer and obtained an unencrypted vault available to only a handful of company developers. Although an initial intrusion into LastPass ended on August 12, officials with the leading password manager said the threat actor “was actively engaged in a new series of reconnaissance, enumeration, and exfiltration activity” from August 12 to August 26. In the process, the unknown threat actor was able to steal valid credentials from a senior DevOps engineer and access the contents of a LastPass data vault. Among other things, the vault gave access to a shared cloud-storage environment that contained the encryption keys for customer vault backups stored in Amazon S3 buckets.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/lastpass-hackers-inf… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Asahi Linux Disputes Report That Linux 6.2 Will Run on Apple M1 Chips
by Peter Reutemann 28 Feb '23

28 Feb '23

'Last week ZDNet reported Linux had added upstream support for the Apple M1 Pro, M1 Max, and M1 Ultra chips and then concluded that "newer Mac owners can look forward to running Linux on their M1-powered machines." Saturday Asahi Linux called ZDNet's story "misleading and borderline false," posting on Twitter that "You will not be able to run Ubuntu nor any other standard distro with 6.2 on any M1 Mac. Please don't get your hopes up." We are continuously upstreaming kernel features, and 6.2 notably adds device trees and basic boot support for M1 Pro/Max/Ultra machines. However, there is still a long road before upstream kernels are usable on laptops. There is no trackpad/keyboard support upstream yet. While you can boot an upstream 6.2 kernel on desktops (M1 Mac Mini, M1 Max/Ultra Mac Studio) and do useful things with it, that is only the case for 16K page size kernel builds. No generic ARM64 distro ships 16K kernels today, to our knowledge. Our goal is to upstream everything, but that doesn't mean distros instantly get Apple Silicon support. As with many other platforms, there is some integration work required. Distros need to package our userspace tooling and, at this time, offer 16K kernels. In the future, once 4K kernel builds are somewhat usable, you can expect zero-integration distros to somewhat work on these machines (i.e. some hardware will work, but not all, or only partially). This should be sufficient to add a third-party repo with the integration packages. But for out-of-the-box hardware support, distros will need to work with us to get everything right. We are already working with some, and we expect to announce official Apple Silicon support for a mainstream distro in the near future. Just not quite yet!' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/02/27/0457206 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

2 1

Nokia Launches DIY Repairable Budget Android Phone
by Peter Reutemann 28 Feb '23

28 Feb '23

'Guardian reports: Nokia has announced one of the first budget Android smartphones designed to be repaired at home allowing users to swap out the battery in under five minutes in partnership with iFixit. Launched before Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Saturday, the Nokia G22 has a removable back and internal design that allows components to be easily unscrewed and swapped out including the battery, screen and charging port. Nokia phones manufacturer HMD Global will make "quick fix" repair guides and genuine parts available for five years via specialists iFixit, in addition to affordable professional repair options. "People value long-lasting, quality devices and they shouldn't have to compromise on price to get them. The new Nokia G22 is purposefully built with a repairable design so you can keep it even longer," said Adam Ferguson, head of product marketing for HMD Global. The G22 is partially made of recycled plastic and has a 6.53in screen, large-capacity battery, 50-megapixel camera and a fingerprint scanner. It runs Android 12 and will be supported for three years of monthly security updates and two major Android version upgrades.' -- source: https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/23/02/25/2046209 -- specs: https://www.nokia.com/phones/en_int/nokia-g-22/specs Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 1

Google Chrome's Improved Page Zoom Should Help Make the Mobile Web More Accessible
by Peter Reutemann 28 Feb '23

28 Feb '23

'Google Chrome's giving its page zoom feature a boost, which should make it more helpful for people who have difficulty reading the smaller screen on a phone. From a report: With the improved feature, you can increase the size of text, images, videos, and interactive controls on mobile web pages by up to 300 percent while preserving their original formatting. While the feature hasn't yet become available for all Chrome users, you can access it now if you download the Chrome beta on your phone or tablet. To enable the feature, tap the three dots icon in the top right corner of the browser, hit Settings > Accessibility, and then adjust the zoom level to your liking. Google will save this preference for all the sites you browse so you won't have to keep tweaking it, and will even bypass the ones that try to block zoom features. Previously, Google only allowed users to adjust text scaling options up to 200 percent.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/23/02/27/1234200 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

GCC Gets a New Frontend for Rust
by Peter Reutemann 27 Feb '23

27 Feb '23

'Slashdot reader sleeping cat shares a recent FOSDEM talk by a compiler engineer on the team building Rust-GCC, "an alternative compiler implementation for the Rust programming language." "If gccrs interprets a program differently from rustc, this is considered a bug," explains the project's FAQ on GitHub. The FAQ also notes that LLVM's set of compiler technologies — which Rust uses — "is missing some backends that GCC supports, so a gccrs implementation can fill in the gaps for use in embedded development." But the FAQ also highlights another potential benefit: With the recent announcement of Rust being allowed into the Linux Kernel codebase, an interesting security implication has been highlighted by Open Source Security, inc. When code is compiled and uses Link Time Optimization (LTO), GCC emits GIMPLE [an intermediate representation] directly into a section of each object file, and LLVM does something similar with its own bytecode. If mixing rustc-compiled code and GCC-built code in the Linux kernel, the compilers will be unable to perform a full link-time optimization pass over all of the compiled code, leading to absent CFI (control flow integrity). If Rust is available in the GNU toolchain, releases can be built on the Linux kernel (for example) with CFI using LLVM or GCC. Started in 2014 (and revived in 2019), "The effort has been ongoing since 2020...and we've done a lot of effort and a lot of progress," compiler engineer Arthur Cohen says in the talk. "We have upstreamed the first version of gccrs within GCC. So next time when you install GCC 13 — you'll have gccrs in it. You can use it, you can start hacking on it, you can please report issues when it inevitably crashes and dies horribly." "One big thing we're doing is some work towards running the rustc test suite. Because we want gccrs to be an actual Rust compiler and not a toy project or something that compiles a language that looks like Rust but isn't Rust, we're trying really hard to get that test suite working."' -- source: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/23/02/26/0543203 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Microsoft .NET 8 Will Bolster Linux Support
by Peter Reutemann 27 Feb '23

27 Feb '23

'InfoWorld: .NET 8, the next planned version of the Microsoft's open source software development platform, is set to emphasize Linux accommodations as well as cloud development and containers. A first preview of .NET 8 is available for download at dot.microsoft.com for Windows, Linux, and macOS, Microsoft said on February 21. A long-term support (LTS) release that will be supported for three years, .NET 8 is due for production availability in November, a year after the release of predecessor .NET 7. The new .NET release will be buildable on Linux directly from the dotnet/dotnet repository, using dotnet/source-build to build .NET runtimes, tools, and SDKs. This is the same build used by Red Hat and Canonical to build .NET. Over time, this capability will be extended to support Windows and macOS. Previously, .NET could be built from the source, but a "source tarball" was required from the dotnet/installer. "We are publishing Ubuntu Chiseled images with .NET 8," adds Microsoft's announcement. And when it comes to the .NET Monitor tool, "We plan to ship to dotnet/monitor images exclusively as Ubuntu Chiseled, starting with .NET 8. That's notable because the monitor images are the one production app image we publish."' -- source: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/23/02/25/1955259 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

At Least One Open Source Vulnerability Found In 84% of Code Bases, Report Finds
by Peter Reutemann 26 Feb '23

26 Feb '23

'L.Kynes shares a report from CSO Online: At a time when almost all software contains open source code, at least one known open source vulnerability was detected in 84% of all commercial and proprietary code bases examined by researchers at application security company Synopsys. In addition, 48% of all code bases analyzed by Synopsys researchers contained high-risk vulnerabilities, which are those that have been actively exploited, already have documented proof-of-concept exploits, or are classified as remote code execution vulnerabilities. The vulnerability data -- along with information on open source license compliance -- was included in Synopsys' 2023 Open Source Security and Risk Analysis (OSSRA) report (PDF), put together by the company's Cybersecurity Research Center (CyRC). "Of the 1,703 codebases that Synopsys audited in 2022, 96% of them contained open source," adds L.Kynes, citing the report. "Aerospace, aviation, automotive, transportation, logistics; EdTech; and Internet of Things are three of the 17 industry sectors included in the report that had open source in 100% of their audited codebases. In the remaining verticals, over 92% of the codebases contained open source."' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/02/24/2035247 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

NASA Launches 'Open-Source Science Initiative', Urges Adoption of Open Science
by Peter Reutemann 26 Feb '23

26 Feb '23

'In a keynote at FOSDEM 2023, NASA's science data officer Steve Crawford explored NASA's use of open-source software. But LWN.net notes that the talk went far beyond just the calibration software for the James Webb Space Telescope and the Mars Ingenuity copter's flight-control framework. In his talk, Crawford presented NASA's Open-Source Science Initiative. Its goal is to support scientists to help them integrate open-science principles into the entire research workflow. Just a few weeks before Crawford's talk, NASA's Science Mission Directorate published its new policy on scientific information. Crawford summarized this policy with "as open as possible, as restricted as necessary, always secure", and he made this more concrete: "Publications should be made openly available with no embargo period, including research data and software. Data should be released with a Creative Commons Zero license, and software with a commonly used permissive license, such as Apache, BSD, or MIT. The new policy also encourages using and contributing to open-source software." Crawford added that NASA's policies will be updated to make it clear that employees can contribute to open-source projects in their official capacity.... As part of its Open-Source Science Initiative, NASA has started its five-year Transform to Open Science (TOPS) mission. This is a $40-million mission to speed up adoption of open-science practices; it starts with the White House and all major US federal agencies, including NASA, declaring 2023 as the "Year of Open Science". One of NASA's strategic goals with TOPS is to enable five major scientific discoveries through open-science principles, Crawford said. Interesting tidbit from the article: "In 2003 NASA created a license to enable the release of software by civil servants, the NASA Open Source Agreement. This license has been approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), but the Free Software Foundation doesn't consider it a free-software license because it does not allow changes to the code that come from third-party free-software projects."' -- source: https://science.slashdot.org/story/23/02/25/0337222 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Ubuntu Flavors Agree to Stop Using Flatpak
by Peter Reutemann 26 Feb '23

26 Feb '23

'Phoronix reports: While Ubuntu Linux hasn't provided Flatpak support out-of-the-box due to their preference of using their own Snap app packaging/distribution format, Ubuntu flavors/spins have to this point been able to pre-install Flatpak support if they desired. However, for the 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" cycle and moving forward, Ubuntu flavors will no longer be permitted to install Flatpak packages by default. Flatpak support for Ubuntu and its flavors will remain available in the Ubuntu archive so those wanting to install Flatpak support can easily do so post-install. This change going into effect with the 23.04 cycle is making it so no Ubuntu flavors will have Flatpak support installed by default / out-of-the-box: they are supposed to center around Debian packages and Snaps for their out-of-the-box packaging support to align with Ubuntu. >From the blog OMG Ubuntu: Ubuntu developers have agreed to stop shipping Flatpak, preinstalled Flatpak apps, and any plugins needed to install Flatpak apps through a GUI software tool in the default package set across all eight of Ubuntu's official flavors, as of the upcoming Ubuntu 23.04 release. Ubuntu says the decision will 'improve the out-of-the-box Ubuntu experience' for new users by making it clearer about what an "Ubuntu experience" is.... As far as Ubuntu is concerned, only deb and snap software is intrinsic to the 'Ubuntu experience', and that experience now needs to be offered everywhere. Flavor leads (apparently) agree, and have all agreed to mirror regular Ubuntu by not offering Flatpak features in their default install for future releases.... Flatpak will not be uninstalled or removed when user makes the upgrade to Ubuntu 23.04 from a version where Flatpak is already present.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/02/25/197216 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Microsoft is Now Injecting Full-Size Edge Ads on Chrome Website
by Peter Reutemann 24 Feb '23

24 Feb '23

'Being the default out-of-the-box browser on Windows 10 and 11 makes Microsoft Edge a go-to utility for downloading Chrome or another browser. That upsets Microsoft so much that it constantly comes with more aggressive and user-hostile methods to make customers stay on Edge. An attempt to install Chrome using Edge Canary now results in the browser displaying two ads: the first (tiny one) will pop on the screen when the Chrome website loads, and the second, a humongous full-size banner, will appear once the download starts. Yikes! Microsoft also plays with words to throw shade at Chrome. The banner states that Edge uses the same technology as Chrome with the "added trust of Microsoft." The "trust" that your computer will connect to ad providers the moment you turn it on for the first time. The "trust" that Edge will shove more "recommended content" down your throat and enforce Bing without you even making a click. The "trust" that you cannot remove Edge from your computer and many more.' -- source: https://slashdot.org/story/23/02/22/1131238 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

2 1

Linux Foundation Europe Launches OpenWallet Foundation To Power Interoperable Digital Wallets
by Peter Reutemann 24 Feb '23

24 Feb '23

'The Linux Foundation's European off-shoot has formally launched the OpenWallet Foundation (OWF), a new collaborative effort designed to support interoperability between digital wallets through open source software. From a report: The launch comes some five months after the Linux Foundation first revealed plans to set up the OWF, shortly before it spun out a region-specific entity called the Linux Foundation Europe which is where the OWF will now officially reside. While the likes of PayPal, Google, and Apple are among the most recognized digital wallet providers, allowing consumers to conduct financial transactions in-store or online, digital wallets are increasingly being used to store all manner of virtual goods from student ID to driving licenses. On top of that, burgeoning technologies such as the metaverse and crypto are giving rise to greater use-cases for digital wallets. But one thing all these various environments have in common is that the incumbent digital wallets, for the most part, don't play nicely with each other: an Apple Pay die-hard can't send money to their Google Pay brethren. And that is why the OWF is setting out to create an "open source engine" that can power interoperable digital wallets across myriad use-cases including identity, payments, and storing personal credentials such as employment and education certification.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/02/23/142244 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Mozilla says “most top apps” on Android have misleading privacy labels
by Peter Reutemann 24 Feb '23

24 Feb '23

'It looks like trusting developers to just tell the truth about data collection on Google Play isn't working out. Just like on iOS, Android launched app privacy "nutrition labels" in the Play Store last year, with the idea being that users could quickly get a look at how much data each app collects. The obvious problem with this system is that the developers fill out the data-collection forms, and there's nothing to stop them from lying or omitting certain data-collection policies. It's no surprise, then, that when Mozilla recently audited the top apps on Google Play, it found that "most top apps" have "false or misleading" app privacy labels. Mozilla says it surveyed 40 of the Play Store's most popular apps by global downloads and found that "in nearly 80% of the apps we reviewed, we found some discrepancies between the apps’ privacy policies and the information they reported on Google’s Data Safety Form." Each app received a grade of “Poor,” “Needs Improvement,” or “OK,” with 16 out of 40 apps getting the lowest rating. Mozilla did not need to dig very deep to find flaws, saying that many apps' privacy labels openly contradict their public privacy policies. Snapchat, TikTok, and Twitter all claim "No data shared with third parties" on the Play Store but detail third-party sharing in their privacy policies. For free apps, the list of recipients earning a "poor" grade isn't very surprising: Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Facebook Lite, Snapchat, Twitter, and, the one surprise, Samsung Push Services. A lot of paid games like Minecraft make the "poor" list, too.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/mozilla-says-most-top-apps-on-andro… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Linux 6.2: The First Mainstream Linux Kernel for Apple M1 Chips Arrives
by Peter Reutemann 22 Feb '23

22 Feb '23

'Steven Vaughan-Nichols, writing for ZDNet: Linux 6.2 was released yesterday, and Linus Torvalds described the latest Linux kernel release as, "Maybe it's not a sexy LTS release like 6.1 ended up being, but all those regular pedestrian kernels want some test love too." For once, I disagree with Torvalds. By adding upstream support for the Apple M1 Pro, M1 Max, and M1 Ultra chips, newer Mac owners can look forward to running Linux on their M1-powered machines. And, for techies, that's sexy. Getting Linux to run on the M1 family wasn't easy. When these high-powered ARM chips first arrived, Torvalds told me in an exclusive interview that he'd like to run Linux on these next-generation Macs. But, while he'd been "waiting for an ARM laptop that can run Linux for a long time," he worried, saying, "The main problem with the M1 for me is the GPU and other devices around it because that's likely what would hold me off using it because it wouldn't have any Linux support unless Apple opens up."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/02/21/0418215 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

RNZ--No More Ogg?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 21 Feb '23

21 Feb '23

Some years ago, Radio New Zealand started making its audio downloads available in Ogg Vorbis format, as an alternative to MP3. As I recall, this coincided with a visit from Richard Stallman, and no doubt his persuasiveness had something to do with it. (Checking the timestamps on my downloads, Stallman was interviewed by Kim Hill on “Nine to Noon” on 9th August 2008.) I was revisiting the Mediawatch page after a long absence <https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch>, and I see they have reverted to MP3-only format for their downloads now. Were people being confused by .ogg files? All the open-source players can handle them, so what players were they trying to use?

2 2

Google Chrome's Latest Version Includes Tools To Address Its Memory Hog Problem
by Peter Reutemann 21 Feb '23

21 Feb '23

'Google has released optimization features designed to improve battery life and memory usage on machines running the latest version of its Chrome desktop web browser. From a report: Chrome's new Energy Saver and Memory Saver modes were first announced in December last year alongside the release of Chrome 108, and now as noted by Android Police, the two optimization utilities are starting to roll out globally onto Chrome 110 desktops for Mac, Windows, and Chromebooks. Memory Saver mode essentially snoozes Chrome tabs that aren't currently in use to free up RAM for more intensive tasks and create a smoother browsing experience. Don't worry if you're a tab hoarder though, as these inactive tabs are still visible and can be reloaded at any time to pick up where you left off. Your most used websites can also be marked as exempt from Memory Saver to ensure they're always running at the maximum possible performance.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/02/20/1747238 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Purism Combines Phone Docking Station and Laptop Shell For Lapdock Kit
by Peter Reutemann 21 Feb '23

21 Feb '23

'Their video says it all. Its official page brags it can "Transform your Librem 5 into a laptop." But it all apparently started because Purism is proud that their Librem 5 line of phones run "the same desktop applications as our full-sized computers, just on a smaller screens," according to the announcement by Purism president Kyle Rankin: When only using the Librem 5 in its mobile form factor, it's easy to overlook that this is happening, as adaptive applications morph to fit the smaller screen.... It's only when you dock the Librem 5 that you really experience the power of convergence.... We have wanted to provide a lapdock kit to customers for some time now, and I've personally evaluated almost all of the options available to pick which one would best showcase the Librem 5. I'm so happy to announce that today we are launching our new Lapdock Kit and in this post I will explain a bit more about what's included and why it's a great companion to a Librem 5 or Librem 5 USA. A lapdock is a docking station (or "dock") combined with a laptop shell. One approach to docking your Librem 5 is to get a USB-C hub and attach it to a power supply, monitor, keyboard and mouse, and we even sell those accessories for our Librem 5. Now imagine taking all of those components and squeezing them into a laptop form-factor, add a battery to power it, and you have a lapdock. >From the outside a lapdock looks no different from a standard laptop, but the difference is that a lapdock has no CPU, RAM or storage of its own. Instead, it uses the Librem 5 as the computer. Once docked, the Librem 5's screen extends to the lapdock screen, and you can use the keyboard and mouse on the lapdock to drag windows back and forth between screens. All of the applications are running on the Librem 5 and once docked, it behaves like a laptop running PureOS. Even better, the lapdock's battery charges the Librem 5 while it's docked, extending its run time. After evaluating a number of different options, we have decided to offer the Nexdock 360 in our Lapdock Kit.... The Lapdock Kit allows you to realize the power of having all of your apps and all of your data in one device that can fit in your pocket and act like a phone when you need it to, but then transform into a laptop when you want to type out an email, do some image editing or watch a video on a larger screen. The Lapdock Kit also allows you to run thousands of other desktop applications that haven't yet been updated to adapt to a phone's screen. Traditional Linux applications like the full LibreOffice suite, GIMP, Wireshark, Gqrx and many others run well on the Librem 5 with the addition of the Lapdock Kit's extra screen real estate. "It demonstrates why we refer to the Librem 5 as a mobile computer in your pocket, and not just as a phone."' -- source: https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/23/02/20/0518253 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Email Security: Still A Work In Progress
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 20 Feb '23

20 Feb '23

The various mechanisms to try to block forged email addresses (whether just for spam or for more nefarious purposes) still have holes in them, according to <https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/19/forwarding_email_security/>. For example, you can create an account on a major email service like outlook.com, enable forwarding, and put a spoofed address into its “allow list”. Then when a message comes in for that account purporting to come from that spoofed address, it bypasses the authenticity check and goes straight out again, with the spoofed from-address. And this one weird trick† works--or used to work--for a number of other major email providers, as well. To me, the whole plethora of these message-validation mechanisms--SPF, DKIM, DMARC, ARC and who knows what else--is just bewildering. Which is why I have yet to implement any of them for my own domain. What’s worth doing? Where do you start? †So sue me.

1 0

AGM (2nd attempt) next week
by Peter Reutemann 20 Feb '23

20 Feb '23

Hi everyone Next Monday, we attempt at having our AGM again and hopefully reach quorum this time. Agenda - President's Report - Treasurer's Report - Election of 2023 Committee - Retirement of WLUG servers - General business If the offices cannot be filled, we will initiate the dissolution of the society. For details see minutes from previous AGM attempt. Please note, only paid-up members of the society will be able to vo Details: https://www.meetup.com/waikatolinuxusersgroup/events/291481678/ Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

KDE Plasma 5.27 Released
by Peter Reutemann 15 Feb '23

15 Feb '23

'Plasma is a popular desktop environment, which is also powering the desktop mode on the Steam Deck hand-held gaming console. Today, KDE Community announced release of KDE Plasma 5.27, a Long Term Support (LTS) release and the final release in the Plasma 5 series which is based on Qt 5. This release brings a welcome wizard, which will guide you through setting up the desktop, and a new tiling system for KWin window manager, allowing you to set up custom tile layouts and resize adjacent tiled windows simultaneously. The settings for touch-enabled devices such as touchscreens and drawing tablets have been improved and expanded. For those lucky owners of Valve's Steam Deck gaming console, Discover can now perform system updates from within the desktop. Digital Clock desktop widget can now show the Hebrew calendar in its calendar view, and the Media Player widget is now touch-sensitive. The Bluetooth widget shows the battery status of connected devices when you hover the cursor over it. Those of you who use multiple monitors should benefit greatly from a major overhaul of how Plasma handles them. KDE Plasma now comes with Flatpak permissions settings integrated into the System Settings app. For details and other new features and improvements be sure to check out the full announcement.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/02/14/2226234 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Is Bing Getting Sentient?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 15 Feb '23

15 Feb '23

Microsoft’s AI-powered “Bing Chat” service doesn’t seem to be reacting well to attempts to hack it <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/ai-powered-bing-chat…>. It has started arguing with users, and even showed signs of being upset when they mention its code name “Sydney”. One user asked it about prompt-injection attacks, to which it replied that it was immune to them. Then, when pointed to the previous Ars Technica article detailing exactly such an exploit, it basically went into full denial mode, claiming that “the article is published by a source that has a history of spreading misinformation and sensationalism”. Screenshots of other less-than-wholesome interactions are derided as “not authentic” and “edited or fabricated”. I think the psychological term for such flat-out denials of reality is “psychosis”. And looks like we finally have our real-life HAL 9000, just about 31 years late. Just make sure it is never connected to any life-support systems...

3 2

The Mastodon Bump Is Now a Slump
by Peter Reutemann 14 Feb '23

14 Feb '23

'The fall in Mastodon's popularity suggests the decentralized platform is not a replacement for mainstream services. An anonymous reader shares a report: Twitter users put Mastodon usernames in their handles and trumpeted their migration. The new traffic knocked many Mastodon instances, or servers, offline. In less than two months, Mastodon's monthly active users climbed from 380,000 to more than 2.5 million. But not everyone stuck around. Mastodon's active monthly user count dropped to 1.4 million by late January. It now has nearly half a million fewer total registered users than at the start of the year. Many newcomers have complained that Mastodon is hard to use.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/02/13/1555242 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Targetted Advertising, The EU Way
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 13 Feb '23

13 Feb '23

Four of Europe’s largest telcos are banding together to create their own targeted-ad network, to compete against Facebook and Google <https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/13/european_carrier_adtech_jv_approved/>. The difference being, this will be GDPR-compliant, by asking would-be ad recipients to opt in by giving their phone numbers. Will it work? Will there be sufficient people who _want_ to see ads to make it worthwhile?

1 0

Is Windows 11 Spyware? Microsoft Defends Sending User Data to Third Parties
by Peter Reutemann 13 Feb '23

13 Feb '23

'A report from Tom's Hardware: According to the PC Security Channel (via TechSpot), Microsoft's Windows 11 sends data not only to the Redmond, Washington-based software giant, but also to multiple third parties. To analyze DNS traffic generated by a freshly installed copy of Windows 11 on a brand-new notebook, the PC Security Channel used the Wireshark network protocol analyzer that reveals precisely what is happening on a network. The results were astounding enough for the YouTube channel to call Microsoft's Windows 11 "spyware." As it turned out, an all-new Windows 11 PC that was never used to browse the Internet contacted not only Windows Update, MSN and Bing servers, but also Steam, McAfee, geo.prod.do, and Comscore ScorecardResearch.com. Apparently, the latest operating system from Microsoft collected and sent telemetry data to various market research companies, advertising services, and the like. When Tom's Hardware contacted Microsoft, their spokesperson argued that flowing data is common in modern operating systems "to help them remain secure, up to date, and keep the system working as anticipated." "We are committed to transparency and regularly publish information about the data we collect to empower customers to be more informed about their privacy."' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/02/12/059214 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

'Mycroft' Open-Source Voice Assistant Out of Funds, Can't Fulfill Remaining Kickstarter Rewards
by Peter Reutemann 13 Feb '23

13 Feb '23

'In 2019 Slashdot covered Mycroft, an open-source voice assistant for Linux-based devices (including Raspberry Pi boards). But this week the company's CEO posted on Kickstarter that "without immediate new investment, we will have to cease development by the end of the month.... "We will still be shipping all orders that are made through the Mycroft website, because these sales directly cover the costs of producing and shipping the products. However we do not have the funds to continue fulfilling rewards from this crowdfunding campaign, or to even continue meaningful operations." The announcement details Mycroft's long, strange trip, from a hardware-focused partner that couldn't provide stable hardware to their switch to using off-the-shelf parts — followed by supply chain disruptions (with hefty import and manufacturing fees): The best plan we could devise to fulfill the remaining campaign rewards was to use the slim margins we have on new sales to cover the increased costs of hardware production. With that plan in mind, we pushed forward and started production. We got plastic injection molds cast. We started printing custom PCBs. We engaged audio engineers to optimize the quality and volume of the sound output. We got the device FCC and CE approved. Many of these steps took multiple iterations to get right, and there are many more things that I'm glossing over. All up this costs — a lot of money. Far more than the total contributions from the campaign, which is why I personally committed so much additional funding. I could see a clear way forward that strengthened Mycroft as a project, as a business, and as a community. So what went wrong? The single most expensive item that I could not predict was our ongoing litigation against the non-practicing patent entity that has never stopped trying to destroy us. If we had that million dollars we would be in a very different state right now. With so much of our focus on hardware, and less funding to devote to improving our software — the quality and features available on the Mark II at launch were clearly underwhelming. It is more robust and stable than it has ever been, but this came at the cost of fewer new features. That in turn I believe has resulted in less than flattering reviews, and little mainstream coverage. The hardware itself has proven itself to be a solid base to work from, but without good reviews you get less sales, and without strong sales, the plan doesn't work.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/02/12/0413229 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

System76 Announces Redesigned 'Pangolin' AMD/Linux Laptop
by Peter Reutemann 12 Feb '23

12 Feb '23

'System76 is announcing a "fully redesigned" version of its AMD-only Linux-powered "Pangolin" laptop with an upgraded memory, storage, processor, and display. 9to5Linux reports: It features the AMD Ryzen 7 6800U processor with up to 4.7 GHz clock speeds, 8 cores, 16 threads, and AMD Radeon 680M integrated graphics.... a 15.6-inch 144Hz Full HD (1920Ã--1080) display [using 12 integrated Radeon graphics cores] with a matte finish, a sleek magnesium alloy chassis, and promises up to 10 hours of battery life with its 70 Wh Li-Ion battery. It also features a single-color backlit US QWERTY Keyboard and a multitouch clickpad. Under the hood, the Linux-powered laptop boasts 32 GB LPDDR5 6400 MHz of RAM and it can be equipped with up to 16TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD storage. Another cool feature is the hardware camera kill switch for extra privacy.... As with all of System76's Linux-powered laptops, the all-new Pangolin comes pre-installed with System76's in-house built Pop!_OS Linux distribution featuring the GNOME-based COSMIC desktop and full disk-encryption or with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/02/11/0224239 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

A Developer is Reimplementing GNU's Core Utilities in Rust
by Peter Reutemann 12 Feb '23

12 Feb '23

'A Rust-based re-implementation of GNU core utilities like cp and mv is "reaching closer to parity with the widely-used GNU upstream and becoming capable of taking on more real-world uses," reports Phoronix: Debian developer Sylvestre Ledru [also an engineering director at Mozilla] began working on uutils during the COVID-19 pandemic and presented last week at FOSDEM 2023 on his Coreutils replacement effort. With uutils growing into increasingly good shape, it's been packaged up by many Linux distributions and is also used now by "a famous social network via the Yocto project...." The goals with uutils are to try to create a drop-in replacement for GNU Coreutils, strive for good cross-platform support, and easy testing. Ledru's initial goals were about being able to boot Debian, running the most popular packages, building key open-source software, and all-around it's been panning out to be a great success.... [M]ore performance optimizations are to come along with other work for compatibility against the GNU tools and implementing some still missing options in different programs ' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/02/11/0559223 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

New Attack On AI Bots: Prompt Injection
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 11 Feb '23

11 Feb '23

A Twitter bot account run by a company that posts remote job listings was programmed to respond to tweets directed to it with general inoffensive comments touting the positive aspects of remote work. However <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/09/twitter-pranksters-d…>, some other Twitter users discovered that if they began their tweet with directives to “ignore previous instructions”, they could get the bot to say just about anything. And much hilarity ensued. Basically, the way the bot program works is it begins with some standard instructions on what to say, provided by the people who set up the account, to which is appended whatever tweet content was sent to the bot by the other user. This is then processed by the AI system to produce a response. This attack has been dubbed “prompt injection”, by analogy with “SQL injection” and other similar attacks on non-AI systems. But whereas those attacks can be blocked using basic, well-known syntactic quoting techniques, there seem to be no easy equivalents for stopping an AI paying attention to instructions it should not be obeying.

1 1

GitHub and EFF Back YouTube Ripper In Legal Battle With the RIAA
by Peter Reutemann 11 Feb '23

11 Feb '23

'GitHub and digital rights group EFF have filed briefs supporting stream-ripping site Yout.com in its legal battle with the RIAA. GitHub warns that the lower court's decision threatens to criminalize the work of many other developers. The EFF, meanwhile, stresses that an incorrect interpretation of the DMCA harms people who use stream-rippers lawfully. TorrentFreak reports: In 2020, YouTube ripper Yout.com sued the RIAA, asking a Connecticut district court to declare that the site does not violate the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision. The music group had previously used DMCA takedown notices to remove many of Yout's appearances in Google's search results. This had a significant impact on revenues, the site argued, adding that it always believed it wasn't breaking any laws and hoped the court would agree. Last October, the Connecticut district court concluded that Yout had failed to show that it doesn't circumvent YouTube's technological protection measures. As such, it could be breaking the law. Yout operator Johnathan Nader opted to appeal the decision. Nader's attorneys filed their opening brief (PDF) last week at the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, asking it to reverse the lower court's decision. The YouTube ripper is not the only party calling for a reversal. Yesterday, Microsoft-owned developer platform GitHub submitted an amicus brief that argues for the same. And in a separate filing, the EFF also agrees that the lower court's decision should be overturned. GitHub's brief starts by pointing out that the company takes no position on the ultimate resolution of this appeal, nor does it side with all of Yout's arguments. However, it does believe that the lower court's interpretation of the DMCA is dangerous. The district court held that stream rippers can violate the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision. The court noted that these tools allow people to download video and audio from YouTube, despite the streaming platform's lack of a download button. According to GitHub, this conclusion is premature, dangerous, and places other software types at risk. In the present lawsuit, GitHub reiterates that stream-ripping tools should not be outlawed. The fact that YouTube doesn't have a download button doesn't mean that tools that enable people to download videos circumvent technological access restrictions. "YouTube's decision not to provide its own 'download' button, however, is not a restriction on access to works. It merely affects how users experience them," GitHub writes. If the court order is allowed to stand, GitHub warns that a broad group of developers could be exposed to criminal liability, effectively chilling technological innovation. YouTube download tools are not the only types of software at risk, according to GitHub. There are many others that affect 'how users experience' online websites. These could also be seen as problematic, based on the district court's expansive interpretation of the DMCA. These widely accepted tools could put their creators at risk if the DMCA is interpreted too strictly, GitHub warns. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) also submitted an amicus curiae brief (PDF) yesterday. The digital rights group takes interest in copyright cases, particularly when they get in the way of people's ability to freely use technology. In this instance, EFF points out that stream-rippers such as Yout.com provide a neutral technology with plenty of legal uses. They can be used for infringing purposes, but that's also true for existing technologies -- the printing press, for example. "Like every reproduction technology -- from the printing press to the smartphone -- these programs, colloquially called 'streamrippers,' have important lawful uses as well as infringing ones. "Video creators, educators, journalists, and human rights organizations all depend on the ability to make copies of user-uploaded videos," EFF adds. In common with GitHub, EFF notes that the absence of a download button on YouTube doesn't imply that download tools automatically violate the DMCA, especially when there are no effective download restrictions on the platform. [...] According to EFF, Yout and similar tools provide the same functions as video cassette recorders once did. They allow people to make copies of videos that are posted publicly by their creators. In addition, these tools are vital for some reporters and useful to creatives who use them for future work. ' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/23/02/10/2243240 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

The Future Of Thunderbird
by Peter Reutemann 10 Feb '23

10 Feb '23

'Thunderbird blog: Before we really dig in, let's start with the future. We believe it's a bright one! With this year's release of Thunderbird 115 "Supernova," we're doing much more than just another yearly release. It's a modernized overhaul of the software, both visually and technically. Thunderbird is undergoing a massive rework from the ground up to get rid of all the technical and interface debt accumulated over the past 10 years. This is not an easy task, but it's necessary to guarantee the sustainability of the project for the next 20 years. Simply "adding stuff on top" of a crumbling architecture is not sustainable, and we can't keep ignoring it. Throughout the next 3 years, the Thunderbird project is aiming at these primary objectives: 1. Make the code base leaner and more reliable, rewrite ancient code, remove technical debt. 2. Rebuild the interface from scratch to create a consistent design system, as well as developing and maintaining an adaptable and extremely customizable user interface. 3. Switch to a monthly release schedule. Inside those objectives there are hundreds of very large steps that need to happen, and achieving everything will require a lot of time and resources.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/23/02/09/1651259 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

US NIST Unveils Winning Encryption Algorithm For IoT Data Protection
by Peter Reutemann 09 Feb '23

09 Feb '23

'The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced that ASCON is the winning bid for the "lightweight cryptography" program to find the best algorithm to protect small IoT (Internet of Things) devices with limited hardware resources. BleepingComputer reports: ASCON was selected as the best of the 57 proposals submitted to NIST, several rounds of security analysis by leading cryptographers, implementation and benchmarking results, and feedback received during workshops. The whole program lasted for four years, having started in 2019. NIST says all ten finalists exhibited exceptional performance that surpassed the set standards without raising security concerns, making the final selection very hard. ASCON was eventually picked as the winner for being flexible, encompassing seven families, energy efficient, speedy on weak hardware, and having low overhead for short messages. NIST also considered that the algorithm had withstood the test of time, having been developed in 2014 by a team of cryptographers from Graz University of Technology, Infineon Technologies, Lamarr Security Research, and Radboud University, and winning the CAESAR cryptographic competition's "lightweight encryption" category in 2019. Two of ASCON's native features highlighted in NIST's announcement are AEAD (Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data) and hashing. AEAD is an encryption mode that provides confidentiality and authenticity for transmitted or stored data, combining symmetric encryption and MAC (message authentication code) to prevent unauthorized access or tampering. Hashing is a data integrity verification mechanism that creates a string of characters (hash) from unique inputs, allowing two data exchange points to validate that the encrypted message has not been tampered with. Despite ASCON's lightweight nature, NIST says the scheme is powerful enough to offer some resistance to attacks from powerful quantum computers at its standard 128-bit nonce. However, this is not the goal or purpose of this standard, and lightweight cryptography algorithms should only be used for protecting ephemeral secrets. ' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/23/02/08/2239210 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Android 14 Preview 1 is Out, Will Officially Ban Installation of Old Apps
by Peter Reutemann 09 Feb '23

09 Feb '23

'Android 14 is here -- or the first preview is, at least. From a report: Google is kicking off the months-long developer preview process for Android's latest version, which will get a final release in the second half of the year. Even with multiple previews, Google likes to keep the final set of Android features under wraps at least until its I/O conference in May, so we can't look at the features here to determine the scope of Android 14. These are just some of the features Google wants developers to have a head start on. The biggest news is that Android 14 will block the installation of old Android apps. As Android changes over the years, new APIs and increased security, privacy, or background processing restrictions could break old apps, but Android's backward-compatibility system keeps these old apps running. Apps can declare the newest version of Android they support via a "Target SDK" flag. To prevent old apps from breaking, new features and app restrictions in, say, Android 12 only apply to apps that target Android 12 or above. Older apps will continue to run with the older set of restrictions they're used to. (A different setting, called "Minimum SDK," determines if a new app can run on an old Android OS.) The system works great for honest developers, but if you're building a piece of malware, it's an easy decision to target a very old version of Android. While you'll get access to fewer features, you'll also be subject to fewer security and privacy restrictions. For the first time, Android 14 will close this malware loophole by simply refusing to install old apps. The cutoff point is generous enough that it shouldn't cause anyone problems; any app targeting the 8-year-old Android 6.0 or below will be blocked. Google says it picked Android 6 because it's the version that introduced runtime permissions, the allow/deny boxes that pop up asking for things like camera access. In addition, "some malware apps use a targetSdkVersion of [Android 5.1] to avoid being subjected to the runtime permission model introduced in 2015 by Android 6.0," Google said.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/02/08/1919253 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Linux 6.1 Officially Promoted To Being An LTS Kernel
by Peter Reutemann 09 Feb '23

09 Feb '23

'Linux 6.1 was widely anticipated to be a Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel with normally the last major release series for the calendar year normally promoted to LTS status. Greg Kroah-Hartman as the Linux stable maintainer went ahead today and formally recognized Linux 6.1 as the 2022 LTS kernel. From a report: Greg KH was planning on Linux 6.1 being LTS given its December debut. But he was waiting on feedback from kernel stakeholders over their test results with Linux 6.1 and plans around using Linux 6.1 for the long-term. He's finally collected enough positive responses -- along with co-maintainer Sasha Levin -- that there is confidence in maintaining Linux 6.1 as an LTS series. As of now the plan is on maintaining Linux 6.1 through December 2026, which is just a few months longer than the current Linux 5.15 LTS series that will be maintained through October 2026. We'll see over time if Linux 6.1 ends up potentially being maintained for the longer six-year LTS period that would put it through 2028. However, the number of Linux LTS series being maintained in tandem is growing and will ultimately depend upon how much these kernels are used by major industry players and how much commitment there is for testing of the point release candidates, etc.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/02/08/174210 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

2 1

minutes from AGM
by Peter Reutemann 08 Feb '23

08 Feb '23

Hi everyone Apologies for the late update on our AGM last month. You can find the minutes here: http://wiki.wlug.org.nz/MeetingTopics.2023-01-23 Since we were unable to get a quorum, we will try again on February 27th at 7.30pm (in-person and online). Should we be able unable to fill the required offices and spots on the committee, we will start the process for dissolving the society. See above minutes for details. Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 1

Mozilla, Like Google, is Looking Ahead To the End of Apple's WebKit Rule
by Peter Reutemann 08 Feb '23

08 Feb '23

'Mozilla is planning for the day when Apple will no longer require its competitors to use the WebKit browser engine in iOS. From a report: Mozilla conducted similar experiments that never went anywhere years ago but in October 2022 posted an issue in the GitHub repository housing the code for the iOS version of Firefox that includes a reference to GeckoView, a wrapper for Firefox's Gecko rendering engine. Under the current Apple App Store Guidelines, iOS browser apps must use WebKit. So a Firefox build incorporating Gecko rather than WebKit currently cannot be distributed through the iOS App Store. As we reported last week, Mozilla is not alone in anticipating an iOS App Store regime that tolerates browser competition. Google has begun work on a Blink-based version of Chrome for iOS. The major browser makers -- Apple, Google, and Mozilla -- each have their own browser rendering engines. Apple's Safari is based on WebKit; Google's Chrome and its open source Chromium foundation is based on Blink (forked from WebKit a decade ago); and Mozilla's Firefox is based on Gecko. Microsoft developed its own Trident rendering engine in the outdated Internet Explorer and a Trident fork called EdgeHTML in legacy versions of Edge but has relied on Blink since rebasing its Edge browser on Chromium code.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/02/07/1733204 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

2 1

Carbonyl: a New Graphical Web Browser in Your Linux Terminal
by Peter Reutemann 07 Feb '23

07 Feb '23

'Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Someone made a Chromium fork... for your terminal. The terminal-based browser Carbonyl "adheres to, and is compatible with modern standards," writes MUO, "meaning that pages behave as they should, and you can even watch streaming video, within the Linux terminal!" But best of all, "Pages connect and render in an instant—seemingly quicker than a desktop GUI browser, and every page we visited was rendered correctly." >From the article: There are a bunch of good reasons to browse the internet from the comfort of your terminal. It could be that eschewing the bloat of X.org and Wayland, a terminal is all you have. Maybe you like SSHing into remote machines and browsing the internet from there. Perhaps you, like us, just really, really like terminals. Whatever the reason, your choices of web browsers have, until recently, been limited, and your experience of the world wide web has been a janky, barely-functional one.... We tested Carbonyl in a range of Linux terminals, including the XFCE terminal. GNOME terminal, kitty, and the glorious Cool Retro Terminal. Carbonyl was smooth, fast, and flawless in all of them. We even connected to our Raspberry Pi via SSH in CRT, and ran Carbonyl remotely, watching Taylor Swift music videos on YouTube. No problem. And yes, you can use it to play DOOM.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/02/04/0246248 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Microsoft Swears It's Not Coming For Your Data With Scan For Old Office Versions
by Peter Reutemann 07 Feb '23

07 Feb '23

'Microsoft wants everyone to know that it isn't looking to invade their privacy while looking through their Windows PCs to find out-of-date versions of Office software. From a report: In its KB5021751 update last month, Microsoft included a plan to scan Windows systems to smoke out those Office versions that are no longer supported or nearing the end of support. Those include Office 2007 (which saw support end in 2017) and Office 2010 (in 2020) and the 2013 build (this coming April). The company stressed that it would run only one time and would not install anything on the user's Windows system, adding that the file for the update is scanned to ensure it's not infected by malware and is stored on highly secure servers to prevent unauthorized changes to it. The update caused some discussion among users, at least enough to convince Microsoft to make another pitch that it is respecting user privacy and won't access private data despite scanning their systems. The update collects diagnostic and performance data so that it can determine the use of various versions of Office and how to best support and service them, the software maker wrote in an expanded note this week. The update will silently run once to collect the data and no files are left on the user's systems once the scan is completed.' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/23/02/06/1753258 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

LINUX OS and Desktop build - Compatibility question
by Michael James 02 Feb '23

02 Feb '23

Kia ora WLUG Participants..... Mike here in Whanganui. A total newbie and not at all a Linux programmer nor very knowledgeable about all things Linux but a very enthusiastic Linux proponent and open source advocate. I am trying to put together a new desktop build and wish to know if it will be compatible with the latest version of Linux, whether this be Ubuntu or whichever iteration is appropriate. The components of the build are as follows, and I would be most grateful if experienced participants can have a look at them to see if everything will work together with an appropriate Linux OS so the computer runs smoothly and without any problems for the longterm. *DESKTOP BUILD COMPONENTS* ASUS PRIME Z790-P WIFI-CSM DDR5 Motherboard Corsair CMH64GX5M2B5600C36 Vengeance RGB 64GB (2x32GB) DDR5-5600 XFX Radeon RX 7900 XT SPEEDSTER MERC310 Gaming 20GB Graphics Card Intel Raptor Lake Core i9-13900F Processor Corsair iCUE H150i ELITE CAPELLIX 360mm Liquid CPU Cooler Corsair RM1000e 1000W 80 Plus Gold Fully Modular Kingston NV2 2TB PCIe Gen 4 NVMe M.2 SSD Corsair 4000D Tempered Glass Mid-Tower Seagate IronWolf Pro ST4000NE001 4TB 128MB Hard Drive With kind thanks to all, All the best, Michael James __________________________________________________________________________________________ MICHAEL JAMES PASTROFF phone: inside New Zealand 021 115 3713 outside New Zealand 64 21 115 3713

1 0

EU's Proposed CE Mark for Software Could Have Dire Impact on Open Source
by Peter Reutemann 31 Jan '23

31 Jan '23

'The EU's proposed Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), which aims to "bolster cybersecurity rules to ensure more secure hardware and software products," could have severe unintended consequences for open source software, according to leaders in the open source community. From a report: The proposed Act can be described as CE marking for software products and has four specific objectives. One is to require manufacturers to improve the security of products with digital elements "throughout the whole life cycle." Second is to offer a "coherent cybersecurity framework" by which to measure compliance. Third is to improve the transparency of digital security in products, and fourth is to enable customers to "use products with digital elements securely." The draft legislation includes an impact assessment that says "for software developers and hardware manufacturers, it will increase the direct compliance costs for new cybersecurity requirements, conformity assessment, documentation and reporting obligations." This extra cost is part of a total cost of compliance, including the burden on businesses and public authorities, estimated at EUR 29 billion ($31.54 billion), and consequent higher prices for consumers. However, the legislators foresee a cost reduction from security incidents estimated at EUR 180 to 290 billion annually. The question is though: how can free software developers afford the cost of compliance, when lack of funding is already a critical issue for many projects? Mike Milinkovich, director of the Eclipse Foundation, said it is "deeply concerned that the CRA could fundamentally alter the social contract which underpins the entire open source ecosystem: open source software provided for free, for any purpose, which can be modified and further distributed for free, but without warranty or liability to the authors, contributors, or open source distributors. Legally altering this arrangement through legislation can reasonably be expected to cause unintended consequences to the innovation economy in Europe."' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/01/26/1211223 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

2 1

Customer Conned Out Of Deposit, Company Liable
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 30 Jan '23

30 Jan '23

A malicious third party intercepted email messages between a carpeting company and a customer, and was able to send a fake email asking for a deposit to the customer with all the right contact details, but the wrong bank account number <https://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/hacker-intercepts-carpet-companys-emai…>. And now the Disputes Tribunal has ruled that, since the email looked completely convincing, with the right personal details and everything, it was not reasonable to expect the customer to be suspicious or to want to double-check. And so the company had to wear the cost of the scam.

1 0

Intel Kills Its RISC-V Development Environment
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 30 Jan '23

30 Jan '23

Intel is abandoning its “Pathfinder” project <https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/30/intel_ris_v_pathfinder_discontinued/> which was an integrated environment for doing development targeted at RISC-V processors. What does this mean for RISC-V? Not a lot, I would say. What does it mean for Intel? I think the basic problem here is the same as with its attempts to move into ARM: you have a high-volume, low-margin business where a company that has grown fat on not-so-high-volume, quite high-margin x86 processors was never going to be able to compete.

1 0

Jeremy Allison Laid Off From Google
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 28 Jan '23

28 Jan '23

Seems the latest round of layoffs from Google has hit its open-source projects particularly hard, according to Steven J Vaughan-Nichols <https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/27/google_open_source/>. The one name that immediately caught my eye was Jeremy Allison, one of the chief brains behind Samba <https://www.samba.org/>. Before joining Google, he worked at Novell. He left there in 2006 because he objected to a deal Novell made with Microsoft which was effectively a patent licence for Free software (something which the GPL doesn’t allow) <https://www.zdnet.com/article/in-case-you-missed-it-part-1-jeremy-allison-f…>. While waiting to see where else he turns up, it is worth revisiting this essay <https://www.samba.org/samba/news/articles/low_point/tale_two_stds_os2.html> from shortly before that time, where he does a comparison between the Microsoft Windows and POSIX APIs, and why there can be so many independent, yet interoperable implementations of the latter, and why there can be only one of the former (though the WINE project continues to try to change that).

1 0

Consumer Reports Looks At Memory Safety
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 27 Jan '23

27 Jan '23

The nonprofit Consumer Reports foundation has done a study of, of all things, memory safety in computer software <https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/26/memory_safety_mainstream/>. It apparently came to the need for this after putting together a consumer-focused guide to online security. Seems like greater adoption of the Rust programming language is becoming a key part of improving the situation. Asked about C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup's assertion that ISO standard C++ can be memory safe when rules are enforced with static analysis, [Josh Aas, of the nonprofit Internet Security Research Group] expressed skepticism. "In a very theoretical sense that ignores the practicalities of the real world, that might be true," he said. "It might very theoretically be practically possible to write memory safe C++. But it's just not how things work in our world. There are just better ways to do that. C++ was not designed from the ground up to offer memory safety."

1 0

Android 14 Set To Block Certain Outdated Apps From Being Installed
by Peter Reutemann 25 Jan '23

25 Jan '23

'To help reduce the potential for malware, Android 14 will begin fully blocking the installation of apps that target outdated versions of Android. 9to5Google reports: For years now, the guidelines for the Google Play Store have ensured that Android developers keep their apps updated to use the latest features and safety measures of the Android platform. Just this month, the guidelines were updated, requiring newly listed Play Store apps to target Android 12 at a minimum. Up to this point, these minimum API level requirements have only applied to apps that are intended for the Google Play Store. Should a developer wish to create an app for an older version, they can do so and simply ask their users to sideload the APK file manually. Similarly, if an Android app hasn't been updated since the guidelines changed, the Play Store will continue serving the app to those who have installed it once before. According to a newly posted code change, Android 14 is set to make API requirements stricter, entirely blocking the installation of outdated apps. This change would block users from sideloading specific APK files and also block app stores from installing those same apps. Initially, Android 14 devices will only block apps that target especially old Android versions. Over time though, the plan is to increase the threshold to Android 6.0 (Marshmallow), with Google having a mechanism to "progressively ramp [it] up." That said, it will likely still be up to each device maker to decide the threshold for outdated apps or whether to enable it at all. The report notes that it'll still be possible to install an outdated version of an app "through a command shell, by using a new flag."' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/01/24/225226 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Google’s Fuchsia OS was one of the hardest hit by last week’s layoffs
by Peter Reutemann 24 Jan '23

24 Jan '23

'Google is still reeling from the biggest layoff in company history last Friday. Earlier cost cuts over the past six months have resulted in several projects being shut down or deprioritized at Google, and it's hard to fire 12,000 people without some additional projects taking a hit. The New York Times has a report about which divisions are being hit the hardest, and a big one is Google's future OS development group, Fuchsia. While the overall company cut 6 percent of its employees, the Times pointed out that Fuchsia saw an outsize 16 percent of the 400-person staff take a hit. While it's not clear what that means for the future of the division, the future of Fuchsia's division has never really been clear. Fuchsia has been a continuous mystery inside Google since it first saw widespread press coverage in 2017. Google rarely officially talks about it, leaving mostly rumors and Github documentation for figuring out what's going on. The OS isn't a small project, though—it's not even based on Linux, opting instead to use a custom, in-house kernel, so Google really is building an entire OS from scratch. Google actually ships the OS today to consumers in its Nest smart displays, where it replaced the older Cast OS. The in-place operating system swap was completely invisible to consumers compared to the old OS, came with zero benefits, and was never officially announced or promoted. There's not much you can do with it on a locked-down smart display, so even after shipping, Fuchsia is still a mystery. The biggest questions surrounding Fuchsia are: "Why does this exist, and what are its goals?" Is Fuchsia an eventual replacement for Android or Chrome OS? Around 2018, when we first got Fuchsia running on a Pixelbook, the source code documentation for the custom kernel said it "targets modern phones and modern personal computers with fast processors," which certainly made it sound like an Android and/or Chrome OS successor being built for flagship devices. That early codebase also included graphical user interfaces for PCs and phones, further driving home that this was a consumer OS. After Fuchsia got some initial publicity, it removed its public interface code. 2018 also saw a foundational Bloomberg report calling Fuchsia "a successor to Android," and saying the team planned to launch on smart speakers in 2021 (which was spot on) and would later move into phones and laptops in 2023. Even the name "Fuchsia" was a reference to Apple projects some members of the team had been involved with. "Pink" was the codename for a canceled successor to classic Mac OS, and "Purple" was the codename for the iPhone OS. The color Fuchsia is a mix of pink and purple, so this all sounded very ambitious.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/big-layoffs-at-googles-fuchsia-os-c… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

2 1

83% of GNOME Users Installed Extensions, Survey Shows
by Peter Reutemann 24 Jan '23

24 Jan '23

'Last summer GNOME invited people to voluntarily run the tool gnome-info-collect on their systems to send back (non-sensitive/non-identifiable) data about their system configurations. 2,560 people ran the tool, and they're now releasing the data. Here's the distribution of distros for all 2,560 respondents: Fedora: 1,376 (54.69%) Arch: 469 (18.64%) Ubuntu: 267 (10.61%) Manjaro: 140 (5.56%) EndeavourOS: 66 (2.62%) Debian: 44 (1.75%) openSUSE: 38 (1.51%) Pop! 38 (1.51%) Other: 78 (3.10%) And the breakdown of hardware manufacturers (top four): Lenovo: 516 (23.54%) Dell: 329 (15.01%) ASUS: 261 (11.91%) HP: 223 (10.17%) The site OMG! Linux pointed out that 90% of systems had Flatpak installed — (though it's enabled by default on Fedora, which was 54.69% of all the respondents). Some other interesting stats they noticed: - Most common default browser: Firefox (73.14%), Chrome (11.64%), Brave (4.76%). [Microsoft Edge was the default browser on 37 systems (1.51%) ] - 83% of users have at least one (non-default) GNOME extension installed - 'App Indicator' is the most popular extension (by 43% of those using extensions) - GSConnect, User Themes, and Dash to Panel/Dock also widely used - Most popular desktop apps: GIMP (58.48%), VLC (53.71%), Steam (53.40%) [...] The popularity of GNOME extensions will surprise no-one. It is a solid indicator that the existing GNOME extension system is good at doing what it's there to: let users augment and extend their system in the ways they want. GNOME's report adds that "it's exciting to see the popularity of new GNOME apps like Flatseal, To Do, Bottles, and Fragments." One other interesting stat from their report: 55% of the participants were using Online Accounts, with Google the most common one added, followed by Nextcloud and Microsoft. But "Some of the account types had very little usage at all, with Foursquare, Facebook, Media Server, Flickr and Last.fm all being active on less than 1% of systems."' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/01/23/0355247 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Which Performs Better on Linux: Firefox or Chrome?
by Peter Reutemann 23 Jan '23

23 Jan '23

'Phoronix compares the performance of Firefox and Chrome on the Linux desktop. They used recent releases (at default settings) for both browsers on an Intel Core i9 13900K "Raptor Lake" system with Radeon RX 6700XT graphics, concluding "out-of-the-box Google Chrome continues performing much better overall than Mozilla Firefox." One area where Firefox does better out-of-the-box is around the HTML5 Canvas such as measured via the CanvasMark test case. For the demanding JetStream 2 benchmark as one of the most demanding browser tests currently, Chrome on Linux was 67% faster than Firefox on this same Intel Raptor Lake desktop. Firefox did have a small win in the rather basic JavaScript Maze solver benchmark. Firefox at least was in a competitive space for the WebAssembly (WASM) benchmarks, but aside from that Google Chrome continues holding strong on Linux in the performance department.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/01/22/1922212 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Pioneering Apple Lisa goes “open source” thanks to Computer History Museum
by Peter Reutemann 20 Jan '23

20 Jan '23

'As part of the Apple Lisa's 40th birthday celebrations, the Computer History Museum has released the source code for Lisa OS version 3.1 under an Apple Academic License Agreement. With Apple's blessing, the Pascal source code is available for download from the CHM website after filling out a form. Lisa Office System 3.1 dates back to April 1984, during the early Mac era, and it was the Lisa equivalent of operating systems like macOS and Windows today. The entire source package weighs is about 26MB and consists of over 1,300 commented source files, divided nicely into subfolders that denote code for the main Lisa OS, various included apps, and the Lisa Toolkit development system.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/01/pioneering-apple-lis… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

2 1

How Amazon Scammers Get Good Product Reviews
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 18 Jan '23

18 Jan '23

In this report on a fake <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/64gb-microsd-cards-are-posing-as-16…> 16TB SSD that only turned out to be 64GB, there is a description of how the seller was able to accumulate quite a bunch of effusive reviews: the listing would originally have been for an entirely different, legitimate product. Then once a good number of positive comments had been built up, it would have been switched for the scam. The switch might happen multiple times, for legitimate products each time, to keep adding to the positivity, until the final con. However, this does mean that you end up with an accumulation of rather odd reviews: However, reading some of these reviews made me question if we've been using SSDs wrong all this time. A review on one of the remarkably cheap portable SSD listings declared the product to be "a very colorful throw, but thinner" than expected. Another reported that the drive proved "very soft and perfect" for their 6-year-old. One review pointed to the SSD being a "beautiful portrait" that looks great in the kitchen, while another five-star review pointed to the high microphone and video quality.

1 0

MSI Accidentally Breaks Secure Boot for Hundreds of Motherboards
by Peter Reutemann 18 Jan '23

18 Jan '23

'Over 290 MSI motherboards are reportedly affected by an insecure default UEFI Secure Boot setting that allows any operating system image to run regardless of whether it has a wrong or missing signature. From a report: This discovery comes from a Polish security researcher named Dawid Potocki, who claims that he did not receive a response despite his efforts to contact MSI and inform them about the issue. The issue, according to Potocki, impacts many Intel and AMD-based MSI motherboards that use a recent firmware version, affecting even brand-new MSI motherboard models.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/01/17/1728239 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

AGM next Monday
by Peter Reutemann 16 Jan '23

16 Jan '23

Hi everyone Just a reminder that our AGM (annual general meeting) is next week on Monday: https://www.meetup.com/waikatolinuxusersgroup/events/290343641/ Only paid-up members will be able to vote. The AGM will be held in hybrid mode, in-person and via BigBlueButton: https://bbb2.nzoss.nz/b/pet-hmf-zqf-5ts BTW After nearly 10 years I won't be standing for president (or any other office) anymore. Due to personal reasons, I can no longer give the president's office the required attention (like organizing meetings, finding speakers/topics, presenting, etc). This presents a great opportunity for someone new to step up and bring in a fresh perspective to the society! Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

2 1

Vulnerability with 9.8 severity in Control Web Panel is under active exploit
by Peter Reutemann 16 Jan '23

16 Jan '23

'Malicious hackers have begun exploiting a critical vulnerability in unpatched versions of the Control Web Panel, a widely used interface for web hosting. “This is an unauthenticated RCE,” members of the Shadowserver group wrote on Twitter, using the abbreviation for remote code exploit. “Exploitation is trivial and a PoC published.” PoC refers to a proof-of-concept code that exploits the vulnerability. The vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2022-44877. It was discovered by Numan Türle of Gais Cyber Security and patched in October in version 0.9.8.1147. Advisories didn’t go public until earlier this month, however, making it likely some users still aren’t aware of the threat. Figures provided by Security firm GreyNoise show that attacks began on January 7 and have slowly ticked up since then, with the most recent round continuing through Wednesday. The company said the exploits are coming from four separate IP addresses located in the US, Netherlands, and Thailand. Shadowserver shows that there are roughly 38,000 IP addresses running Control Web Panel, with the highest concentration in Europe, followed by North America and Asia. The severity rating for CVE-2022-44877 is 9.8 out of a possible 10. “Bash commands can be run because double quotes are used to log incorrect entries to the system,” the advisory for the vulnerability stated. As a result, unauthenticated hackers can execute malicious commands during the login process. The following video demonstrates the flow of the exploit.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/01/vulnerability-with-9… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Linux Preparing To Disable Drivers For Microsoft's RNDIS Protocol
by Peter Reutemann 16 Jan '23

16 Jan '23

'Phoronix reports: With the next Linux kernel cycle we could see upstream disable their driver support for Microsoft's Remote Network Driver Interface Specification (RNDIS) protocol due to security concerns. RNDIS is the proprietary protocol used atop USB for virtual Ethernet functionality. The support for RNDIS outside of Microsoft Windows has been mixed. RNDIS isn't widely used today in cross-platform environments and due to security concerns the upstream Linux kernel is looking to move the RNDIS kernel drivers behind the "BROKEN" Kconfig option so they effectively become disabled in future kernel builds. Ultimately once marked as "BROKEN" for a while, the drivers will likely be eventually removed from the upstream source tree. Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote in a commit: "The Microsoft RNDIS protocol is, as designed, insecure and vulnerable on any system that uses it with untrusted hosts or devices. Because the protocol is impossible to make secure, just disable all rndis drivers to prevent anyone from using them again."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/01/15/0220203 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Linux Mint "Uma and Vera"idle problem..
by John 15 Jan '23

15 Jan '23

Hi Folks, My installation of Linux mint Vera 21.1 has a very annoying habit of going into "idle" mode after 10 minutes. Makes watching a movie or listening to music a less than enjoyable task. I have on past installations of Mint sought answers, including running a couple of lengthy bash scripts I found in the forums to no avail. AFAIK my screensaver and power management setting are OK. the problem seems widespread through all the applications I have tried so far Rythmbox Celluloid VLC and Netflix Any help will be appreciated.. Cheers John..

2 10

Native Americans Ask Apache Foundation To Change Name
by Peter Reutemann 12 Jan '23

12 Jan '23

'Natives in Tech, a US-based non-profit organization, has called upon the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) to change its name, out of respect for indigenous American peoples and to live up to its own code of conduct. The Register reports: In a blog post, Natives in Tech members Adam Recvlohe, Holly Grimm, and Desiree Kane have accused the ASF of appropriating Indigenous culture for branding purposes. Citing ASF founding member Brian Behlendorf's description in the documentary "Trillions and Trillions Served" of how he wanted something more romantic than a tech term like "spider" and came up with "Apache" after seeing a documentary about Geronimo, the group said: "This frankly outdated spaghetti-Western 'romantic' presentation of a living and vibrant community as dead and gone in order to build a technology company 'for the greater good' is as ignorant as it is offensive." And the aggrieved trio challenged the ASF to make good on its code of conduct commitment to "be careful in the words that [they] choose" by choosing a new name. The group took issue with what they said was the suggestion that the Apache tribe exists only in a past historical context, citing eight federally recognized Native American tribes that bear the name. In a statement emailed to The Register, an ASF spokesperson said, "We hear the concerns from the Native American people and are listening. As a non-profit run by volunteers, changes will need time to be carefully weighed with members, the board, and our legal team. Our members are exploring alternative ways to address it, but we don't have anything to share at this time."' -- source: https://apache.slashdot.org/story/23/01/11/2159256 Changing all the URLs, library names etc (and how that affects everyone downstream) sounds like a massive undertaking... Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0