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Now sites can fingerprint you online even when you use multiple browsers
by Peter Reutemann 14 Feb '17

14 Feb '17

'Researchers have recently developed the first reliable technique for websites to track visitors even when they use two or more different browsers. This shatters a key defense against sites that identify visitors based on the digital fingerprint their browsers leave behind.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/02/now-sites-can-fingerprint-you-onli… 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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Web Copy-Protection As A Censorship Tool
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 13 Feb '17

13 Feb '17

There has been ongoing work at the W3C for some time to standardize “Encrypted Media Extensions” (EME), with the usual claims that many publishers will refuse to offer their content without this kind of “protection”. The mitigating argument has been made that such a “feature” would be optional--the browser user could always turn it off. Well, it turns out Google has removed the option to disable its implementation of EME from Chrome. A further worry is that many countries’ copyright laws include provisions that prohibit the circumvention of copy-protection mechanisms. So work by security researchers to audit browsers that implement EME could be interpreted as violations of such provisions. Many have requested that the W3C explicitly state that EME conformance cannot be (ab)used in such a way, but so far it has refused. <https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170201/14285436609/codification-web-drm…>

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The City Of Munich Now Wants To Abandon Linux And Switch Back to Windows
by Peter Reutemann 12 Feb '17

12 Feb '17

'"The prestigious FOSS project replacing the entire city's administration IT with FOSS based systems, is about to be cancelled and decommissioned," writes long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino. TechRepublic reports: Politicians at open-source champion Munich will next week vote on whether to abandon Linux and return to Windows by 2021. The city authority, which made headlines for ditching Windows, will discuss proposals to replace the Linux-based OS used across the council with a Windows 10-based client. If the city leaders back the proposition it would be a notable U-turn by the council, which spent years migrating about 15,000 staff from Windows to LiMux, a custom version of the Ubuntu desktop OS, and only completed the move in 2013... The use of the open-source Thunderbird email client and LibreOffice suite across the council would also be phased out, in favor of using "market standard products" that offer the "highest possible compatibility" with external and internal software... The full council will vote on whether to back the plan next Wednesday. If all SPD and CSU councillors back the proposal put forward by their party officials, then this new proposal will pass, because the two parties hold the majority. The leader of the Munich Green Party says the city will lose "many millions of euros" if the change is implemented. The article also reports that Microsoft moved its German headquarters to Munich last year.' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/17/02/11/1930217 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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Bored with ho-hum cloud backups? Use Usenet (yes, Usenet!) instead
by Peter Reutemann 11 Feb '17

11 Feb '17

'Cloud backups these days are all the rage—for good reason. Rather than dealing with shuffling physical media offsite, you can simply back up the data offsite, where it can be stored in one of many professionally monitored data centers. Unfortunately, this kind of service isn’t free, and the cost can be a barrier. However, there is a cost-effective way to store your cloud backups: Usenet. With access to a Usenet news server, you can simply upload your backup there, and it will be stored redundantly in news servers all over the world. Best of all, this approach typically costs considerably less than a cloud backup service.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/bored-with-ho-hum-cl… 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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Oracle refuses to accept pro-Google “fair use” verdict in API battle
by Peter Reutemann 11 Feb '17

11 Feb '17

'Google successfully made its case to a jury last year that its use of Java APIs in Android was "fair use." A San Francisco federal jury rejected Oracle's claim that the mobile system infringed Oracle's copyrights. But Oracle isn't backing down. Late Friday, the company appealed the high-profile verdict to a federal appeals court. This is the latest stage of a seemingly never-ending legal battle over intellectual property that began in 2010. The conflict has meandered through two federal trials, in addition to multiple trips to the appellate courts and to the Supreme Court. Oracle opened its brief to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit right where it left off after losing its case. Among other things, Oracle is refusing to believe that the "fair use" defense to copyright-infringement allegations should have protected Google from having to pay billions of dollars in damages.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/02/oracle-refuses-to-accept-pro-go… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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When A Safety Check Becomes A Point Of Failure...
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 10 Feb '17

10 Feb '17

All inbound networking for GCE instances, load balancers and VPN tunnels enter via shared layer 2 load balancers. These load balancers are configured with changes to IP addresses for these resources, then automatically tested in a canary deployment, before changes are globally propagated. The issue was triggered by a large set of updates which were applied to a rarely used load balancing configuration. The application of updates to this configuration exposed an inefficient code path which resulted in the canary timing out. From this point all changes of public addressing were queued behind these changes that could not proceed past the testing phase. In other words, the safety system for validating configuration updates before allowing deployment suffered a failure which blocked all configuration updates thereafter. I guess the answer is to add a watchdog for the canaries ... how many more metaphors can I mix in? <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/10/google_cloud_outage_explanation/>

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We Finally Have A Computer That Can Survive The Surface Of Venus
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 10 Feb '17

10 Feb '17

The Venera landers that the USSR sent to Venus in the 1970s and 1980s were able to survive for up to 2 hours by heavy use of refrigeration and pre-cooling. But now researchers are testing electronics based on silicon carbide, which can work without special protection at very high voltages and temperatures: The chip, a simple 3-stage oscillator, kept functioning [in Venus-like conditions] at a steady 1.26MHz for 521 hours (21.7) days before the [test rig] had to be shut down. <https://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2017/02/venus-computer-chip/>.

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Met Goes Public Domain
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 10 Feb '17

10 Feb '17

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is putting 375,000 digitized images online under a Creative Commons CC0 (effectively Public Domain) licence. As Techdirt notes <https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170208/13005636669/met-goes-public-doma…>, it shouldn’t have to bother specifying such a licence: we should be able to take for granted that digitizations of public-domain works should themselves be public-domain. Unfortunately, others with control over such works (and sizeable legal budgets) think differently. So all kudos to the Met for making this very clear.

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The Right Not To Be Searchable
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 09 Feb '17

09 Feb '17

“[A] website in Romania ... obtained and posted Canadian judicial and tribunal decisions. These were all public documents, but they were not previously indexed by Google, which meant their contents were effectively hidden. The Romanian site allowed its copies to be indexed by Google, which made the decisions and the Canadian citizens involved visible for the first time -- something the people affected were not happy about. They complained to the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, who ruled that the Romanian site violated Canadian privacy law.” <https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170208/02314536660/landmark-court-decis…>

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Microsoft hosts the Windows source in a monstrous 300GB Git repository
by Peter Reutemann 07 Feb '17

07 Feb '17

'Microsoft has been working to enhance Git to improve the way it handles vast repositories. Central to this effort is a new project released (in part) as open source Git Virtual File system (GVFS). The premise of GVFS is straightforward enough: rather than fetching all the data at once, only a bare skeleton of the repository needs to be populated up front. The virtualized file system subsequently retrieves additional data on a demand-driven, as-needed basis. Building one particular Windows component, for example, will cause GVFS to fetch the files that make up that component, along with anything that the component depends on, but it will stop short of fetching all the many hundreds of gigabytes the repository contains.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/microsoft-hosts-the-… I remember using SourceSafe way back. It may not have been great, but it was a big improvement over "not having any" version control. :-) 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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