- wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

If You Buy Something, Do You Own It?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 31 Jul '18

31 Jul '18

Raglan man Niall Darwin discovers that assurances by electric-car company Tesla’s own official representatives aren’t worth a darn. And so, the question needs to be asked for the hundredth or thousandth time: when you buy a consumer item with essential proprietary software at its heart, what actually do you own? <https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2018/07/waikato-man-suing-tesla-…>

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Now They Need To Fix The TV Sets ...
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 31 Jul '18

31 Jul '18

YouTube has adopted a more responsive page layout to cope with videos having different aspect ratios <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/youtube-picks-up-dark-mode-on-andro…>. To no-one’s surprise, this has annoyed a few people who have become accustomed to the old design. When 16:9 widescreen TVs were being conceived way back in the 1990s, the aim clearly was to allow us all to view cinematic movies full-screen, making maximum use of available screen area with minimal or no black bars. Nobody foresaw the widespread popularity of smartphones with built-in cameras, and of the common use of footage captured with such devices in TV broadcasts. But while such phones commonly have 16:9 screens and their cameras capture 16:9 footage, their users often hold them vertically, so the image ends up in just about the worst shape for display on a regular widescreen TV. There seems to be a common convention nowadays of filling in the gaps with blurred portions of the actual image -- which I agree looks less jarring than black bars. Hmmm ... there have been computer monitors that can be rotated to portrait or landscape orientations, with automatic adjustment of the display to match (aka “xrandr” <https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/xrandr>). Wouldn’t it be useful if a TV could do the same...?

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Ubuntu 18.04.01 now released for most flavours
by Ian Stewart 30 Jul '18

30 Jul '18

Hi, A few days ago Ubuntu 18.04.01 was released for most flavours (e.g. Desktop, Server, Mate, Budgie, Kylin, Xubuntu, Kubuntu) You can get your flavour, in 32 or 64 bit, from here... https://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop <https://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop> http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/releases/18.04.1/release/ <http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/releases/18.04.1/release/> http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-mate/releases/18.04.1/release/ http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-budgie/releases/18.04.1/release/ http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntukylin/releases/18.04.1/release/ http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/18.04.1/release/ http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/18.04.1/release/ My understanding is that if you are running 16.04.xx LTS and you have enabled "Notify me of a new updated version of Ubuntu", then you should now start to get pop-up's prompting you to do an on-line update to 18.04.01. I'm hopeful that it will bring some stability to Mate that seemed to be lacking in 18.04.00. cheers, Ian.

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Distrowatch review of Ubuntu MATE and Budgie 18.04
by Ian Young 30 Jul '18

30 Jul '18

This week's Distrowatch features Ubuntu MATE and Budgie for review. Not the usual reviewer and somewhat longer than most of the weekly distro reviews. Some faults found with the MATE version and to a lesser extent with Budgie. The laptop in use for testing only had 2GiB of RAM however which might account for some of the problems encountered. 4 GiB seems to be a bare minimum these days.

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Intel Moving Away From Hyperthreading?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 27 Jul '18

27 Jul '18

Looks like Intel’s next-generation i7 product family will abandon hyperthreading in favour of increasing the core count. So while you will still be able to run 8 concurrent threads, each one gets its own core now. Also, it looks like Intel’s current fab technology is running out of steam, while the new one is a bit behind schedule. <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/leaked-benchmarks-show-intel-is-dro…>

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Space Supercomputer Comes Up To First Birthday
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 26 Jul '18

26 Jul '18

340 days ago, an HPE machine made up of two Apollo Intel x86 servers running RHEL was installed on the ISS, without any radiation hardening or any other special hardware adaptation measures, apart from a “water-cool enclosure”. So far it has suffered only two complete outages, both triggered by loss of external power, not the failure of the machine itself. Though the software has apparently been picking up transient memory errors (not too surprising, really). <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/26/hpe_iss_supercomputer/>

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Fwd: [NZLUG] Linux.conf.au Call for Papers.
by Peter Reutemann 25 Jul '18

25 Jul '18

Apologies for cross-posting. Cheers, Peter ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Michael Field <michael.field(a)concepts.co.nz> Date: Thu, Jul 26, 2018 at 9:58 AM Subject: [NZLUG] Linux.conf.au Call for Papers. To: "nzlug(a)lists.nzoss.org.nz" <nzlug(a)lists.nzoss.org.nz> I don’t know if anybody has posted that the Call for Proposals is open for Linux Conference Australia (in Chch this year) – they close on 30th July. See https://linux.conf.au/ if you want to submit Presentation / Tutorial / Miniconf. If accepted, you get free registration, speakers dinner ticket and so on. Mike *Michael Field* | *Senior Systems Engineer* *COMPUTER CONCEPTS LIMITED* <http://concepts.co.nz/> *P:* 03 348 2500 | *W:* concepts.co.nz 21 Durham Street South, Sydenham, Christchurch, New Zealand 8023 This email and any attachments are confidential. They may contain privileged information or copyright material. If you are not an intended recipient, you should not read, copy, use or disclose the contents without authorisation and we request you contact us at once by return email. Please then delete the email and any attachments from your system. We do not accept liability in connection with computer viruses, data corruption, delay, interruption, unauthorised access or unauthorised amendment. Any views expressed in this email and any attachments do not necessarily reflect the views of the company. _______________________________________________ NZLUG mailing list NZLUG(a)lists.nzoss.org.nz http://lists.nzoss.org.nz/mailman/listinfo/nzlug -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Bluetooth Security Flaw Could Let Nearby Attacker Grab Your Private Data
by Peter Reutemann 24 Jul '18

24 Jul '18

'A recently discovered bug in many Bluetooth firmware and OS drivers could allow an attacker within about 30 meters to capture and decrypt data shared between Bluetooth-paired devices. Researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology discovered the flaw, which was flagged today by Carnegie Mellon University CERT. It affects Bluetooth's Secure Simple Pairing and Low Energy Secure Connections. ZDNet reports: As the CERT notification explains, the vulnerability is caused by some vendors' Bluetooth implementations not properly validating the cryptographic key exchange when Bluetooth devices are pairing. The flaw slipped into the Bluetooth key exchange implementation which uses the elliptic-curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) key exchange to establish a secure connection over an insecure channel. This may allow a nearby but remote attacker to inject a a bogus public key to determine the session key during the public-private key exchange. They could then conduct a man-in-the-middle attack and "passively intercept and decrypt all device messages, and/or forge and inject malicious messages." Thankfully, patches are on the way. "Intel recommended users upgrade to the latest support driver and to check with vendors if they have provided one in their respective updates," reports ZDNet. "Dell has released a new driver for the Qualcomm driver it uses while Lenovo's update is for the flaw in Intel software. LG and Huawei have referenced fixes for CVE-2018-5383 in their respective July updates for mobile devices." It is not yet known if Android, Google, or the Linux kernel are affected. Apple has released a patch for the flaw earlier this month.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/18/07/24/2121215 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. 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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ReactOS 0.4.9 Is Entirely Self-Hosting, Fixes FastFAT Crashes
by Peter Reutemann 24 Jul '18

24 Jul '18

'ReactOS, the "free Windows clone" operating system, has pushed out ReactOS 0.4.9 just recently, which brings a whole slew of improvements. With this latest 0.4.9 version, ReactOS has become entirely self-hosting without any issues, which means ReactOS can fully build itself from within itself, it does not require any third-party operating system to compile ReactOS. Self-hosting was built into older ReactOS versions, but it came with a myriad of issues -- the system would become too stressed under memory usage and storage I/O loads. This was due to a flawed NT-compliant kernel. Additional improvements in ReactOS 0.4.9 include overall stability and performance enhancements. The hardware abstraction layer and the FastFAT drivers received significant attention, and FastFAT should no longer eat through the cache so fast it causes system crashes due to resource leakage. FastFAT has also been rewritten to trigger a "chkdsk" repair on dirty / corrupt volumes during boot detections. Some other quality improvements are the addition of a built-in zipfldr extension -- ReactOS can now natively unpackage zipped archives, without the need of a third-party tool like WinZip.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/07/24/0139247 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. 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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In Encryption Push, Chrome Flags HTTP Sites as 'Not Secure'
by Peter Reutemann 24 Jul '18

24 Jul '18

'On Tuesday, Chrome started marking sites that don't use HTTPS as "not secure." From a report: First announced two years ago, Google said it would flag any site that still uses unencrypted HTTP to deliver its content in the latest version of Chrome, out Tuesday. It's part of the company's years-long effort effort to gradually nudge more webmasters and site owners into adopting HTTPS, a secure encryption standard for data in transit. Any site that doesn't load with green padlock or a "secure" message in the browser's address bar will be flagged -- and shamed -- as insecure. [...] According to nightly data compiled by security experts Troy Hunt and Scott Helme, roughly 100 of the top 500 websites are still serving their pages over unencrypted HTTP -- all of which will today be flagged as "insecure." Many of those sites -- like Baidu, JD.com, and Google.cn -- are Chinese language sites, but many popular Western sites -- including BBC.com, DailyMail.co.uk, and Fedex.com -- are HTTP. Of the top million sites, a little over half do not redirect to HTTPS. Chrome 68 also brings with it Page Lifecycle API, and the Payment Handler API. From a report: The Payment Handler API builds on the Payment Request API, which helped users check out online. The new API enables web-based payment apps to facilitate payments directly within the Payment Request experience, as seen above. As with every version, Chrome 68 includes an update to the V8 JavaScript engine: version 6.8. It reduces memory consumption as well as includes improvements to array destructuring, Object.assign, and TypedArray.prototype.sort. Check out the full list of changes for more information.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/07/24/177207 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. 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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