- wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Employee error to blame for massive data leak, Wyze says
by Peter Reutemann 02 Jan '20

02 Jan '20

'Loads of folks found brand-new Wyze surveillance cameras under their trees or in their stockings this Christmas. And on Boxing Day, the company itself unwrapped a whole new world of trouble for everyone who uses its products, confirming a data leak that may have exposed personal data for millions of users over the course of a few weeks. Wyze first found out about the problem on the morning of December 26, company cofounder Dongsheng Song said in a corporate blog post. The company's investigation confirmed that user data was "not properly secured" and was exposed from December 4 onward. The database in question was basically a copy of the production database that Wyze created to work with, Song explained. Data points left exposed include user email addresses, camera nicknames, Wi-Fi network information, Wyze device information, some tokens associated with Alexa integrations, and "body metrics for a small number of product beta testers."' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/12/surveillance-camera-company-wyz… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. 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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Vivaldi To Change User-Agent String To Chrome Due To Unfair Blocking
by Peter Reutemann 20 Dec '19

20 Dec '19

'Because some internet websites unfairly block browsers from accessing their services, starting with Vivaldi 2.10, released today, the Vivaldi browser plans to disguise itself as Chrome to allow users to access websites that unfairly block them. From a report: Vivaldi will do this by modifying its default user-agent (UA) string to the UA string used by Chrome. A UA string is a piece of text that browsers send to websites when they initiate a connection. The UA String contains data about the browser type, rendering engine, and operating system. For example, a UA string for Firefox on Windows looks like this: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:71.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/71.0. UA strings have been in use since the 90s. For decades, websites have used UA agent strings to fine-tune performance and features or block outdated browsers. However, many website owners these days use UA strings to block users from accessing their sites. Some do it because they're not willing to deal with browser-specific bugs, some do it because of pettiness, while big tech companies like Google and Microsoft have done it (and continue to do it) to sabotage competitors on the browser market.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/12/19/2041250 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. 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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Nebula VPN routes between hosts privately, flexibly, and efficiently
by Peter Reutemann 20 Dec '19

20 Dec '19

'Last month, the engineering department at Slack—an instant messaging platform commonly used for community and small business organization—released a new distributed VPN mesh tool called Nebula. It's difficult to coherently explain Nebula in a nutshell. According to the people on Slack's engineering team, they asked themselves "what is the easiest way to securely connect tens of thousands of computers, hosted at multiple cloud service providers in dozens of locations around the globe?" And (developing) Nebula was the best answer they had. It's a portable, scalable overlay networking tool that runs on most major platforms, including Linux, MacOS, and Windows, with some mobile device support planned for the near future. Nebula-transmitted data is fully encrypted using the Noise protocol framework, which is also used in modern, highly security-focused projects such as Signal and WireGuard. Unlike more traditional VPN technologies—including WireGuard—Nebula automatically and dynamically discovers available routes between nodes and sends traffic down the most efficient path between any two nodes rather than forcing everything through a central distribution point.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/12/nebula-vpn-routes-between-hosts-pri… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. 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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Facebook is Building an Operating System So it Can Ditch Android
by Peter Reutemann 20 Dec '19

20 Dec '19

'Facebook doesn't want its hardware like Oculus and Portal to be at the mercy of Google because they rely on its Android operating system. >From a report: That's why Facebook has tasked a co-author of Microsoft's Windows NT named Mark Lucovsky with building the social network an operating system from scratch, according the The Information's Alex Heath. "We really want to make sure the next generation has space for us," says Facebook's VP of hardware Andrew 'Boz' Bosworth. "We don't think we can trust the marketplace or competitors to ensure that's the case. And so we're gonna do it ourselves." By moving to its own OS, Facebook could have more freedom to bake social interaction -- and hopefully privacy -- deeper into its devices. It could also prevent a disagreement between Google and Facebook from derailing the roadmaps of Oculus, Portal, or future gadgets. One added bonus of moving to a Facebook-owned operating system? It could make it tougher to force Facebook to spin out some of its acquisitions, especially if Facebook goes with Instagram branding for its future augmented reality glasses.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/12/19/1747243 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. 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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Apple, Google, and Amazon team up to create “CHIP,” a new smart home standard
by Peter Reutemann 19 Dec '19

19 Dec '19

'Apple, Google, Amazon, and the Zigbee Alliance have all teamed up to make a new smart home standard. The new working group went live today under the name of "Project Connected Home over IP" with announcement blog posts from Google, Apple, Zigbee, and a new website, connectedhomeip.com. The name doesn't sound too catchy until you realize "Connected Home over IP" abbreviates to "CHIP" which, across all these blog posts, is quietly used only a single time in the official FAQ. According to the new website, "The goal of the Connected Home over IP project is to simplify development for manufacturers and increase compatibility for consumers." But thanks to XKCD, we all know that one new standard to "unite them all" often just results in making one additional standard available, but assuming the companies involved actually support their own standard, this could—maybe—make things easier for consumers.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/12/apple-google-and-amazon-team-up-for… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. 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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Hate Speech Row: Fine Or Jail Anyone Who Calls People Boffins, Geeks or Eggheads, Psychology Nerd Demands
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 19 Dec '19

19 Dec '19

>From <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/12/18/nerds_hate_speech/>: Labeling super-smart people with terms like nerd, geek, or boffin is hate speech, and should be punishable as such, argues lecturer and Harley-Street psychotherapist Dr Sonja Falck. ... She then embarked on a “contextual analysis of literature” and decided that calling someone a boffin was equivalent to the worst racial slurs. A couple of points occur to me. One is, one should be careful of the logical pitfalls of arguing “A is no better than B”. Because the flip side of that is that you are also saying “B is no worse than A”. In the process of trying to demonize A, and in the absence of any additional evidence for your position, you could be seen to be trivializing B. The other point is that targeted groups seem to be granted a licence to own terms which are used as slurs against them. These terms become accepted as commonplace inside the group, that nobody outside is allowed to use.

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IoT is becoming popular
by leoole123＠yandex.ru 19 Dec '19

19 Dec '19

Smart technologies are rapidly spreading among ordinary users. More and more intelligent and remotely controlled equipment appears in our lives. But let’s see not from the user’s side. Let’s mind like a creator’s. Where is it better to place a “control center”? More and more integrators are transferring their capacities to the public cloud; there is formed a system for management. Labels from all things come through the gateways and are processed directly in the cloud. If the Internet connection is interrupted, all modules continue to work, and immediately after the appearance of the connections are synchronized. More details here: https://www.sim-networks.com/en/blog/iot-solutions-in-sim-cloud

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Open Source Gets No Respect, Episode #310
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 18 Dec '19

18 Dec '19

The developer of FUSE for macOS <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/12/16/fuse_macos_closed_source/> found that, while many companies were including his software in their commercial products, they were curiously reluctant to offer him any actual monetary support for his work. So he took the drastic step of making the latest version closed-source. While it continues to be available for non-commercial use at no charge, commercial vendors will need to license it for inclusion in their products. The result? He has actually got a bunch of licensing deals signed now.

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Dyktando
by jakub.adecki＠interia.pl 18 Dec '19

18 Dec '19

Zachęcaj swojeg dzieco aby uczyło się ortografi. Zasady gramatyki i ortografii są konieczne do sukcesu w życiu. Za każdym razem warto dokonać korekty niewłaściwej pisowni. Dlatego tak ważne jest systematyczne ćwiczenie i nauka prawidłowej pisowni wyrazów. Sprawdź https://dyktanda.pl/

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Microsoft Begins Accepting Extensions For Its Edge Chromium Browser
by Peter Reutemann 18 Dec '19

18 Dec '19

'Microsoft's new Chromium-based Edge browser is now open to developers to submit extensions. The updated version of Edge is set to launch on January 15. From a report: Microsoft says that if a developer has already created an extension for Google Chrome, there shouldn't be any additional work to port it over to Edge Chromium. The browser will be the new default delivered to all 900 million Windows 10 users, so developers should have no reason not to port their extensions over.' -- source: https://slashdot.org/story/19/12/17/1621248 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. 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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