- wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Windows 10 Spontaneous Downgrade
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 08 Nov '18

08 Nov '18

Some users of Windows 10 Pro are discovering that their machines are suddenly claiming to only have a Windows 10 Home licence <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/08/windows_10_activation/>. This isn’t confined to the “Insider” prereleases, but production releases as well (both upgrades and fresh installs). Seems some Microsoft support staff have confirmed that there is a “temporary issue” with the licence servers, which may take 1-2 days to fix.

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WLinux, the First Paid-for Linux Distro for Windows 10, Goes On Sale on Microsoft Store
by Peter Reutemann 07 Nov '18

07 Nov '18

'WLinux is a $20 open-source, Debian-based distribution, designed to run on Windows 10's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). The WSL allows Windows 10 to run various GNU/Linux distros inside Windows as Microsoft Store apps, providing access to Ubuntu, openSUSE, Debian, Fedora, Kali Linux, and others. The WSL has disadvantages over a running a dedicated GNU/Linux system. For example, there's no official support for desktop environments or graphical applications, and I/O performance bottlenecks, but it is being improved over time. The developers of WLinux describe it as a "fast Linux terminal environment for developers", saying it is the first distribution to be "pre-configured and optimized to run specifically on Windows Subsystem for Linux". Announcing WLinux's availability, Microsoft program manager Tara Raj, called out the wlinux-setup tool, "which allows users to easily set up common developer toolchains, and removes unsupported features like systemd."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/18/11/07/1510223 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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How New, Polite Linus Torvalds Points Out Bad Kernel Code
by Peter Reutemann 06 Nov '18

06 Nov '18

'Linus Torvalds "has shown already for the new Linux 4.20~5.0 cycle he isn't relaxing his standards but is communicating better when it comes to bringing up coding," reports Phoronix, adding "So far it looks like Linus' brief retreat is paying off with still addressing code quality issues -- and not blatantly accepting new code into the kernel as some feared -- but in doing so in a professional manner compared to his past manner of exclaiming himself over capitalized sentences and profanity that at time put him at odds with some in the Linux kernel community." AmiMoJo quotes their report: Last Saturday he took issue with the HID pull request and its introduction of the BigBen game controller driver that was introduced: the developer enabled this new driver by default. Linus Torvalds has always frowned upon random new drivers being enabled by default in the kernel configuration driver. [H]e still voiced his opinion over this driver's default "Y" build configuration, but did so in a more professional manner than he has done in the past: We do *not* enable new random drivers by default. And we most *definitely* don't do it when they are odd-ball ones that most people have never heard of. Yet the new "BigBen Interactive" driver that was added this merge window did exactly that. Just don't do it. Yes, yes, every developer always thinks that _their_ driver is so special and so magically important that it should be enabled by default. But no. When we have thousands of drivers, we don't randomly pick one new driver to be enabled by default just because some developer thinks it is special. It's not.... Please don't do things like this. Phoronix also describes another "kernel oops" testing Torvalds' patience, in which Linus responded tactfully that "What makes me *very* unhappy about this is that if I'm right, I think it means that code was literally not tested at all by anybody who didn't have one of the entries in that list."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/18/11/03/1833213 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Explicating Neural Networks
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 06 Nov '18

06 Nov '18

The usual problem with neural nets is, once you have trained them, you have no actual idea why they come to the decisions that they do. One classic example was a net that was being trained to distinguish between pictures of huskies and wolves, where it turned out it was actually assigning the highest weight to the area of snow in the background of the pictures. Enter LIME, which is a Python-based toolkit that tries to analyze the trained net to show you how each part of the dataset is being interpreted <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/05/hands_on_with_lime/>. The article shows example pictures where areas are colour-coded green or red to indicate whether they make a positive or negative contribution to a particular classification decision. This way, you can spot if any parts that should be ignored are being given an anomalously high weight. Or vice versa.

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Microsoft Microsoft Working on Porting Sysinternals To Linux
by Peter Reutemann 05 Nov '18

05 Nov '18

'A Microsoft exec has confirmed yesterday that the company's engineers are working on porting the highly popular Sysinternals software package to Linux. Microsoft engineers have already ported the ProcDump utility and are currently working on porting ProcMon as well. More tools to follow. Microsoft's decision to port this highly popular debugging utility to Linux comes after two months ago, in September, Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's executive vice president of the cloud and enterprise group, revealed that "sometimes slightly over half of Azure VMs are Linux." With Linux's growing adoption as the preferred OS for running Azure VMs, it's only natural that Azure engineers are now looking into porting their favorite debugging utilities to Linux, for both themselves but also for the company's customers.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/18/11/05/157226 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Flaws in Self-Encrypting SSDs Let Attackers Bypass Disk Encryption
by Peter Reutemann 05 Nov '18

05 Nov '18

'Researchers have found flaws that can be exploited to bypass hardware encryption in well known and popular SSD drives. Master passwords and faulty standards implementations allow attackers access to encrypted data without needing to know the user-chosen password. SSDs from Micron (Crucial) and Samsung are affected. These are SSDs that support hardware-level encryption via a local built-in chip, separate from the main CPU. Some of these devices have a factory-set master password that bypasses the user-set password, while other SSDs store the encryption key on the hard drive, from where it can be retrieved. The issue is worse on Windows, where BitLocker defers software-level encryption to hardware encryption-capable SSDs, meaning user data is vulnerable to attacks without the user's knowledge. More in the research paper.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/18/11/05/213255 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Slashdot poll: What do you make of programming languages and open source organizations adopting a code of conduct?
by Peter Reutemann 05 Nov '18

05 Nov '18

See this link for poll: https://slashdot.org/poll/3103 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Old School 'Sniffing' Attacks Can Still Reveal Your Browsing History
by Peter Reutemann 04 Nov '18

04 Nov '18

'Most modern browsers -- such as Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, and even browsers such as FuzzyFox and DeterFox (different, security-focused versions of Firefox) -- have vulnerabilities that allow hosts of malicious websites to extract hundreds to thousands of URLs in a user's web history, per new research from the University of California San Diego. What's worse, the vulnerabilities are built into the way they structure links, meaning that major structural changes will have to take place in these browsers in order to protect user privacy. The only browser that was immune to the attacks was Tor Browser, as the browser does not keep track of a user's internet history. The vulnerabilities have to do with why, for instance, unclicked links appear blue while visited links appear violet: there's a different set of rules and style that apply to links depending on whether they've been visited or not. However, a bad actor building a web page can manipulate this faster loading time for visited links by "sniffing," or inferting your browsing history. In essence, sniffing is finding and exploiting proxies that reveal your web history. As outlined in the UC San Diego report, this sniffing could happen in a couple of ways: they could force the browser to reload multiple complex images or image transformations that differ based on whether you've visited a link or not, which would create drastic differences in the loading time for each. With this strategy, actors can test 60 sensitive URLs per second. Bad actors could exploit a "bytecode cache," which speeds up the loading time for revisiting a link that you've already visited. "By embedding a special script in a web page, the actor can test how long it takes for a web page to load and infer whether you've visited it or not," reports Motherboard. "Actors can probe 3,000 URLs per second with this method. When the vulnerability was reported to Google, the company marked the issue as "security-sensitive" but "low-priority."' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/18/11/04/0426252 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Intel CPUs fall to new hyperthreading exploit that pilfers crypto keys
by Peter Reutemann 04 Nov '18

04 Nov '18

'Over the past 11 months, the processors running our computers, and in some cases phones, have succumbed to a host of attacks. Bearing names such as Meltdown and Spectre, BranchScope, TLBleed, and Foreshadow, the exploits threaten to siphon some of our most sensitive secrets—say passwords or cryptographic keys—out of the silicon microarchitecture in ways that can’t be detected or stopped by traditional security defenses. On Friday, researchers disclosed yet another leak that has already been shown to exist on a wide range of Intel chips and may also affect other makers, too. PortSmash, as the new attack is being called, exploits a largely overlooked side-channel in Intel’s hyperthreading technology. A proprietary implementation of simultaneous multithreading, hyperthreading reduces the amount of time needed to carry out parallel computing tasks, in which large numbers of calculations or executions are carried out simultaneously. The performance boost is the result of two logical processor cores sharing the hardware of a single physical processor. The added logical cores make it easier to divide large tasks into smaller ones that can be completed more quickly.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/11/intel-cpus-fall-to-n… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Are Paper Books Still Legal?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 04 Nov '18

04 Nov '18

But how do they charge you the streaming fees? <http://www.dieselsweeties.com/ics/500/>

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Booting a Raspberry-Pi 3B without using a SD-Card
by Ian Stewart 02 Nov '18

02 Nov '18

Hi, If you have a Raspberry Pi Model 3B, then you may be able use it with no micro SD-Card and have it boot Raspbian off a USB flash drive stick. I have found this possible with an Apacer AH356 64GB USB 3.1 Flash Drive<https://www.pbtech.co.nz/product/MEMAPC11464/Apacer-AH356-64GB-USB-31-Flash…> stick that I bought from PB-Tech a couple of weeks ago for $21.85. Admittedly you can buy a micro SD-card like the Apacer 64GB microSDXC UHS-I Class10<https://www.pbtech.co.nz/product/MEMAPC81064/Apacer-64GB-microSDXC-UHS-I-Cl…> from PB-Tech for $28.75 and put Raspbian onto it. So using the USB flash drive stick only saves a few dollars. However, there may be other advantages over using a USB flash drive vs. a micro SD-Card for the Raspbian OS. For example, you can shutdown the Raspberry Pi and remove the USB stick, take it to another computer, and backup your data. I also installed the Raspbian distro onto WD Elements Portable 2TB 2.5" USB 3.0 External HDD<https://www.pbtech.co.nz/product/HDDWDX2621/WD-Elements-Portable-2TB-25-USB…> which PB-Tech sell for $129. The R-Pi (with no SD-Card) would not boot this drive. Possibly because the USB drive is too slow to initialize after power on??? I also found that the R-Pi would not boot up Raspbian on an old 8GB Kingston USB flash drive. Maybe its too slow to initialize??? All the above tests were done using the current latest Raspbian release which is dated 2018_10_09. FYI: Below are details on how to install the Raspbian distro image onto a USB flash drive stick. cheers, Ian. Installing the Raspbian distro onto USB flash drive... Download the latest 1.4GB Raspbian distribution file: 2018-10-09-raspbian-stretch.zip Unzip the file to create a 4.1GB image file: 2018-10-09-raspbian-stretch.img Copy the 4.1GB image to a USB flash drive stick... $ sudo dd bs=4M if=2018-10-09-raspbian-stretch.img of=/dev/sdX status=progress conv=fsync Note: For the device /dev/sdX replace the X with the drive letter of your USB flash drive stick. e.g. /dev/sdc Insert the USB flash drive stick into the R-Pi model 3B. Remove any SD-Card that may be installed in the Raspberry Pi. Power on the R-Pi. After about 10 seconds the colourful POST display will appear, and the USB stick will commence its first boot. It will detect that it is a 4.1GB partition, expand to being a partition that fills the whole of the USB flash drive stick and reboot. The second reboot will be slow and takes about one minute. I assume it is expanding the squashed file system??? Subsequent reboots are faster.

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Blockchain For International Trade
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 01 Nov '18

01 Nov '18

ASB is close to offering a general blockchain-based service for international trading payments, starting with this <https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=121526…>: ... the transaction was a landmark because the blockchain-based service meant digital payment and paperwork for the deal were wrapped up in an hour - compared to the two to four days it would take to process using more traditional means. Also: Trade is currently paperwork-heavy, Beehre says, making it susceptible to fraud or human error. Which is odd, because isn’t it precisely the point of all that paperwork to reduce the chance of fraud or human error? However: ... blockchain also appealed because of[sic] the technology was created to be unhackable. Every time I hear the word “unhackable”, I reach for my ... never mind.

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IBM To Buy Red Hat, the Top Linux Distributor, For $34 Billion
by Peter Reutemann 01 Nov '18

01 Nov '18

'International Business Machines (IBM) is acquiring software maker Red Hat in a deal valued at $34 billion, the companies said Sunday. From a report: The purchase, announced on Sunday afternoon, is the latest competitive step among large business software companies to gain an edge in the fast-growing market for Internet-style cloud computing. In June, Microsoft acquired GitHub, a major code-sharing platform for software developers, for $7.5 billion. IBM said its acquisition of Red Hat was a move to open up software development on computer clouds, in which software developers write applications that run on remote data centers. >From a press release: This acquisition brings together the best-in-class hybrid cloud providers and will enable companies to securely move all business applications to the cloud. Companies today are already using multiple clouds. However, research shows that 80 percent of business workloads have yet to move to the cloud, held back by the proprietary nature of today's cloud market. This prevents portability of data and applications across multiple clouds, data security in a multi-cloud environment and consistent cloud management. IBM and Red Hat will be strongly positioned to address this issue and accelerate hybrid multi-cloud adoption. Together, they will help clients create cloud-native business applications faster, drive greater portability and security of data and applications across multiple public and private clouds, all with consistent cloud management. In doing so, they will draw on their shared leadership in key technologies, such as Linux, containers, Kubernetes, multi-cloud management, and cloud management and automation. IBM's and Red Hat's partnership has spanned 20 years, with IBM serving as an early supporter of Linux, collaborating with Red Hat to help develop and grow enterprise-grade Linux and more recently to bring enterprise Kubernetes and hybrid cloud solutions to customers. These innovations have become core technologies within IBM's $19 billion hybrid cloud business. Between them, IBM and Red Hat have contributed more to the open source community than any other organization.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/18/10/28/1859245 That completely flew under the radar! I still remember from my Unix sysadmin course at uni back in the days (using IBM's AIX), when an IBM guy came in for some guest lectures and mentioned that they are ramping up their investment in Linux and also offer Linux next to their own AIX Unix systems. Well, Linux has definitely come a long way! Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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'Open Source Creators: Red Hat Got $34 Billion and You Got $0. Here's Why.'
by Peter Reutemann 31 Oct '18

31 Oct '18

'Donald Fischer, who served as a product manager for Red Hat Enterprise Linux during its creation and early years of growth, writes: Red Hat saw, earlier than most, that the ascendance of open source made the need to pay for code go away, but the need for support and maintenance grew larger than ever. Thus Red Hat was never in the business of selling software, rather it was in the business of addressing the practical challenges that have always come along for the ride with software. [...] As an open source developer, you created that software. You can keep your package secure, legally documented, and maintained; who could possibly do it better? So why does Red Hat make the fat profits, and not you? Unfortunately, doing business with large companies requires a lot of bureaucratic toil. That's doubly true for organizations that require security, legal, and operational standards for every product they bring in the door. Working with these organizations requires a sales and marketing team, a customer support organization, a finance back-office, and lots of other "business stuff" in addition to technology. Red Hat has had that stuff, but you haven't. And just like you don't have time to sell to large companies, they don't have time to buy from you alongside a thousand other open source creators, one at a time. Sure, big companies know how to install and use your software. (And good news! They already do.) But they can't afford to put each of 1100 npm packages through a procurement process that costs $20k per iteration. Red Hat solved this problem for one corner of open source by collecting 2,000+ open source projects together, adding assurances on top, and selling it as one subscription product. That worked for them, to the tune of billions. But did you get paid for your contributions?' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/18/10/31/1520256 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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The CAP Theorem Strikes Again
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 31 Oct '18

31 Oct '18

There is a fundamental rule with distributed databases: you can pick any two of: * Maintaining data Consistency across the entire network * Maintaining data Availability across the entire network * Being able to deal with a Partitioning of the network into two or more disconnected pieces but you can never have all three. An example of this is the outage at GitHub earlier this month <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/10/31/github_lost_a_network_link_for_43_…>. A link broke between the east-coast and west-coast halves of their network, and in an effort to maintain ongoing service availability on both sides of the partition, they ended up sacrificing consistency of the data. Which came back to bite them when the link was re-established, and the inconsistency could not easily be resolved.

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The DNS Encryption Controversy
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 31 Oct '18

31 Oct '18

There is a rather acrimonious argument currently going on among the Internet technorati over two different competing protocols for implementing encryption of domain name (DNS) queries <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/10/30/doh-contorversy/>. One of them is called “DNS-over-TLS” and the other is “DNS-over-HTTPS”. The former passes the DNS queries over its own TLS-encrypted connection, while the latter piggybacks on good old HTTP, using the latter’s TLS capability instead. The former is clearly simpler, and one might say “purer”, but the latter is deliberately designed to make it hard to tell what DNS queries a user might be making, since they become indistinguishable from regular HTTPS connections. So the question becomes, do you see this obfuscation as a good thing or a bad thing? It is intended to prevent snoops (both Governmental and non-Governmental) from invading the privacy of users, but it also blocks “legitimate” analysis of traffic by network admins trying to manage their systems as well. Clearly, you can’t do one without the other. So is the price worth paying?

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Fedora 29 Released
by Peter Reutemann 30 Oct '18

30 Oct '18

'Fedora 29 is released today. Among the new features are the ability to allow parallel installation of packages such as Node.js. Fedora 29 also supports ZRAM (formerly called compcache) for ARMv7 and v8. In addition to the more efficient use of RAM, it also increases the lifespan of microSD cards on the Raspberry Pi as well as other SBCs. "Additionally, UEFI for ARMv7 is now supported in Fedora 29, which also benefits Raspberry Pi users," reports TechRepublic. "Fedora already supported UEFI on 64-bit ARM devices."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/18/10/30/229249 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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You Can Play Over 2, 600 Windows Games on Linux Via Steam Play
by Peter Reutemann 29 Oct '18

29 Oct '18

'At the end of August, Valve announced a new version of Steam Play for Linux that included Proton, a WINE fork that made many Windows games, including more recent ones ,such as Witcher 3, Dark Souls 3 and Dishonored, playable on Linux. Just two months later, ProtonDB says there are over 2,600 Windows games that users can play on Linux, and the number is rapidly growing daily. From a report: When Valve Software launched Steam Play with Proton, it made it easier for gamers to play Windows games that hadn't yet been ported to Linux with the click of a button. Not all games may run perfectly on Linux, but that's also often the case with Windows 10, which can not play older games as well as previous versions of Windows did, even under Compatibility Mode. In only two months, the database of games that work with Proton has increased to over 2,600 -- more than half of the 5,000 Linux-native games that can be obtained through the Steam store.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/18/10/29/1721258 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Easy-to-exploit privilege escalation bug bites OpenBSD and other big name OSes
by Peter Reutemann 29 Oct '18

29 Oct '18

'Several big-name Linux and BSD operating systems are vulnerable to an exploit that gives untrusted users powerful root privileges. The critical flaw in the X.org server—the open-source implementation of the X11 system that helps manage graphics displays—affects OpenBSD, widely considered to be among the most secure OSes. It also impacts some versions of the Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian, and CentOS distributions of Linux. An advisory X.org developers published Thursday disclosed the 23-month-old bug that, depending on how OS developers configure it, lets hackers or untrusted users elevate very limited system rights to unfettered root. The vulnerability, which is active when OSes run X.org in privileged (setuid) mode, allows files to be overwritten using the -logfile and -modulepath parameters. It also makes it trivial for low-privilege users to escalate system rights. A variety of nuances are leading to widely divergent assessments of the bug's severity. “Depending on whom you talk to, the reported severity will vary greatly,” Louis Dion-Marcil, a security researcher at GoSecure, told Ars. “I think most people will tell you it is very severe, and I would agree with them. The bug allows you to write arbitrary data to arbitrary files, which might seem trivial and not that dangerous, but it effectively allows regular, unprivileged users to elevate their privileges to the one of complete administrator of the system.”' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/10/x-org-bug-that-gives… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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New Zealand Chooses Google Chromebooks Over Microsoft Windows 10 For Education
by Peter Reutemann 28 Oct '18

28 Oct '18

'Google announced this week that it has signed an agreement with New Zealand's Ministry of Education to provide all state and state integrated schools in the country with Chrome Education licenses. The three-year agreement goes into effect on November 1 next month. From a report: "Starting on November 1, as part of an agreement with Google and the New Zealand Ministry of Education, all state and state-integrated schools across New Zealand will be able to start claiming Ministry-funded Chrome Education licenses to manage new and existing unmanaged Chromebooks. The Chrome Education license was developed to make device management in schools a breeze, so that teachers and students can focus on what's most important -- teaching and learning. Equipped with the Chrome Education license, schools can utilize essential education features to better support the many ways Chromebooks are used in the classroom," says Suan Ye, Head of Google for Education, Australia and New Zealand.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/10/28/2214209 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Linus Torvalds and Greg K-H Talk About Linux Community, Dealing with Hardware Bugs, Chromebooks Gaining Traction, Microsoft, Companies Gleaning Data and More
by Peter Reutemann 28 Oct '18

28 Oct '18

'Swapnil Bhartiya, who runs the blog TFIR, had a chance to interview Linus Torvalds at Open Source Summit in the second half of August this year. (Some context: The interview, which was published this week, took place before Mr. Torvalds said he needs to take a step back to reflect on how he has dealt with the community over the years. Since then, we have learned that Mr. Torvalds is returning to his position.) In the wide-ranging interview, Mr. Torvalds has touched a wide-range of subjects, including formulating workarounds for the problematic hardware bugs (Meltdown, Spectre), and Chromebooks gaining traction (though it is still not a machine that he could use for his work yet). He also talked about companies gleaning a lot of data about their users, regulations, (a tad bit of politics), Linux community. Greg Kroah-Hartman (aka Greg K-H) joined Mr. Bhartiya and Mr. Torvalds for the second half of the interview. On Sunday, Mr. Bhartiya published an additional interview of Mr. Kroah-Hartman.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/18/10/28/1437239 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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New SystemD Vulnerability Discovered
by Peter Reutemann 28 Oct '18

28 Oct '18

'The Register reports that a new security bug in systemd "can be exploited over the network to, at best, potentially crash a vulnerable Linux machine, or, at worst, execute malicious code on the box" by a malicious host on the same network segment as the victim. According to one Red Hat security engineer, "An attacker could exploit this via malicious DHCP server to corrupt heap memory on client machines, resulting in a denial of service or potential code execution." According to the bug description, systemd-networkd "contains a DHCPv6 client which is written from scratch and can be spawned automatically on managed interfaces when IPv6 router advertisements are received." OneHundredAndTen shared this article from the Register: In addition to Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, systemd has been adopted as a service manager for Debian, Fedora, CoreOS, Mint, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. We're told RHEL 7, at least, does not use the vulnerable component by default. Systemd creator Leonard Poettering has already published a security fix for the vulnerable component -- this should be weaving its way into distros as we type. If you run a systemd-based Linux system, and rely on systemd-networkd, update your operating system as soon as you can to pick up the fix when available and as necessary.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/10/27/196227 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Firefox and Google Drive: random download locations?
by Peter Reutemann 25 Oct '18

25 Oct '18

Hi everyone In case you're using Google Drive frequently in conjunction with Firefox and always wondered about the random download locations (when "always ask" is enabled), I just found the reason for this... Firefox has a boolean setting "browser.download.lastDir.savePerSite" (not defined by default) that defines whether to remember the download location per site. However, with Google Drive, you will get a random URL serving the file, turning the last known download directory into a useless feature unfortunately. So, just go into "about:config", and create the above mentioned boolean setting and use "false" as the value. Now you have a "global" last known download location. -- source: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/925960 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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New Study Claims Data Harvesting Among Android Apps Is 'Out of Control'
by Peter Reutemann 25 Oct '18

25 Oct '18

'A new study from Oxford University revealed that almost 90 percent of free apps on the Google Play store share data with Alphabet. "The researchers, who analyzed 959,000 apps from the U.S. and UK Google Play stores, said data harvesting and sharing by mobile apps was now 'out of control,'" reports TechSpot. "'We find that most apps contain third party tracking, and the distribution of trackers is long-tailed with several highly dominant trackers accounting for a large portion of the coverage,' reads the report." From the report: It's revealed that most of the apps, 88.4 percent, could share data with companies owned by Google parent Alphabet. Next came a firm that's no stranger to data sharing controversies, Facebook (42.5 percent), followed by Twitter (33.8 percent), Verizon (26.27 percent), Microsoft (22.75 percent), and Amazon (17.91 percent). [I]nformation shared by these third-party apps can include age, gender, location, and information about a user's other installed apps. The data "enables construction of detailed profiles about individuals, which could include inferences about shopping habits, socio-economic class or likely political opinions." Big firms then use the data for a variety of purposes, such as credit scoring and for targeting political messages, but its main use is often ad targeting. Not surprising, given that revenue from online advertising is now over $59 billion per year. According to the research, the average app transfers data to five tracker companies, which pass the data on to larger firms. The biggest culprits are news apps and those aimed at children, both of which tend to have the most third-party trackers associated with them.' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/18/10/24/2340207 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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The World’s First Video Game?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 24 Oct '18

24 Oct '18

Tennis For Two, almost certainly the first computer-controlled real-time video game, 60 years old this month <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/10/22/tennis_for_two_at_60/>. Note this was an analog computer, which would have been faster at simulating the physics than the digital ones available in 1958.

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