- wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

When Smart TVs Hit Their IQ Limits...
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 05 Sep '16

05 Sep '16

If you bought a 2012-vintage Sony Bravia smart TV, it is going to lose its ability to play YouTube videos. “The symptoms being experienced are not a failure of the TV, but are as a result of specification changes made by YouTube that exceed the capability of the TV’s hardware.” “As a result, Sony have decided to remove the YouTube icon for the 2012 Bravia TVs on 30th September 2016.” <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/05/youtube_breaks_sony_bravias/>

1 0

OpenOffice Could Shut Down
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 02 Sep '16

02 Sep '16

<http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/09/openoffice-after-year…> Does anybody still care? Use LibreOffice instead.

1 0

New Intel and AMD Chips Will Only Support Windows 10
by Peter Reutemann 02 Sep '16

02 Sep '16

'Buried in the announcement of the new Kaby Lake (seventh-generation) processors and a rash of incoming notebooks set to use them is the confirmation that they will have a Windows 10 future. Microsoft has been warning people for ages that Kaby Lake will not run on anything older than Windows 10, and it looks like AMD's upcoming Zen chip will be going the same way. Microsoft said, "As new silicon generations are introduced, they will require the latest Windows platform at that time for support. This enables us to focus on deep integration between Windows and the silicon, while maintaining maximum reliability and compatibility with previous generations of platform and silicon." "We are committed to working with Microsoft and our ecosystem partners to help ensure a smooth transition given these changes to Microsoft's Windows support policy," an Intel spokesperson said. "No, Intel will not be updating Win 7/8 drivers for 7th Gen Intel Core [Kaby Lake] per Microsoft's support policy change." An AMD representative was equally neutral. "AMD's processor roadmap is fully aligned with Microsoft's software strategy," AMD chief technical officer Mark Papermaster said, via a company spokeswoman.' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/09/01/2031247 Or just use a Linux distro flavor of your choice... 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/

2 1

ubuntu: unattended-upgrades
by Peter Reutemann 02 Sep '16

02 Sep '16

Finally came across a commandline way for configuring unattended upgrades: http://askubuntu.com/questions/9/how-do-i-enable-automatic-updates/204#204 Here are the commands: sudo apt-get install unattended-upgrades sudo dpkg-reconfigure unattended-upgrades Very useful for servers... 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/

1 0

ubuntu devices
by rowan schischka 01 Sep '16

01 Sep '16

this recent social media post by canonical indicates new ubuntu phones/tablets coming out soon. it would explain the phones out of stock for the last three months. Am I right? https://plus.google.com/+Ubuntu/posts/iXKQoj4k7QZ -- Kind Regards Rowan Schischka

2 1

New cloud attack takes full control of virtual machines with little effort
by Peter Reutemann 31 Aug '16

31 Aug '16

'The world has seen the most unsettling attack yet resulting from the so-called Rowhammer exploit, which flips individual bits in computer memory. It's a technique that's so surgical and controlled that it allows one machine to effectively steal the cryptographic keys of another machine hosted in the same cloud environment. Cutting-edge hack gives super user status by exploiting DRAM weakness Until now, Rowhammer has been a somewhat clumsy and unpredictable attack tool because it was hard to control exactly where data-corrupting bit flips happened. While previous research demonstrated that it could be used to elevate user privileges and break security sandboxes, most people studying Rowhammer said there was little immediate danger of it being exploited maliciously to hijack the security of computers that use vulnerable chips. The odds of crucial data being stored in a susceptible memory location made such hacks largely a matter of chance that was stacked against the attacker. In effect, Rowhammer was more a glitch than an exploit. Now, computer scientists have developed a significantly more refined Rowhammer technique they call Flip Feng Shui. It manipulates deduplication operations that many cloud hosts use to save memory resources by sharing identical chunks of data used by two or more virtual machines. Just as traditional Feng Shui aims to create alignment or harmony in a home or office, Flip Feng Shui can massage physical memory in a way that causes crypto keys and other sensitive data to be stored in locations known to be susceptible to Rowhammer.' -- source: http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/08/new-attack-steals-private-crypto-ke… 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/

1 0

Building a new Tor that can resist next-generation state surveillance
by Peter Reutemann 31 Aug '16

31 Aug '16

'Since Edward Snowden stepped into the limelight from a hotel room in Hong Kong three years ago, use of the Tor anonymity network has grown massively. Journalists and activists have embraced the anonymity the network provides as a way to evade the mass surveillance under which we all now live, while citizens in countries with restrictive Internet censorship, like Turkey or Saudi Arabia, have turned to Tor in order to circumvent national firewalls. Law enforcement has been less enthusiastic, worrying that online anonymity also enables criminal activity. Tor's growth in users has not gone unnoticed, and today the network first dubbed "The Onion Router" is under constant strain from those wishing to identify anonymous Web users. The NSA and GCHQ have been studying Tor for a decade, looking for ways to penetrate online anonymity, at least according to these Snowden docs. In 2014, the US government paid Carnegie Mellon University to run a series of poisoned Tor relays to de-anonymise Tor users. A 2015 research paper outlined an attack effective, under certain circumstances, at decloaking Tor hidden services (now rebranded as "onion services"). Most recently, 110 poisoned Tor hidden service directories were discovered probing .onion sites for vulnerabilities, most likely in an attempt to de-anonymise both the servers and their visitors.' -- source: http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/08/building-a-new-tor-that-withstands-… 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/

1 0

“Hacbook”: Refurbished HP EliteBooks
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 31 Aug '16

31 Aug '16

For US$329 <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/30/329_for_a_macbook_well_really_a_hac…>: ““It's optimized to run OS X, but you can install Linux or Windows on it and use it however you want - that's completely up to the user.”

2 1

Cool Linux Command-Line Image Management Hacks
by Peter Reutemann 30 Aug '16

30 Aug '16

"Feh and the identify command are two of the tools I use for viewing and managing images on Linux. They are fast, flexible, and can be stuffed into scripts for automating operations, which is especially valuable when you work with artists or marketing people who have large image galleries to maintain. For me, they are faster and better for managing large numbers of images than graphical image managers, which tend to require too much clicking and poking through nested menus to find what I want, if they even have it." -- source: https://www.linux.com/learn/cool-linux-command-line-image-management-hacks 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/

1 0

Maru OS: Marrying the Phone and the PC
by Peter Reutemann 30 Aug '16

30 Aug '16

"In case you haven't heard of Preetam D’Souza, he is noted in developer circles for exploring how to bring full-blown PC capabilities to smartphones and mobile devices. Maru OS is an operating system that he has created toward that end, and now this interesting platform has gone open source. Have you followed Canonical's efforts to marry computing and smartphone capabilities with its Ubuntu Unity phone OS that can dock into a monitor? Maru OS is in a similar space. Maru marries an Android base on a phone and Debian Linux on the desktop." -- source: http://ostatic.com/blog/maru-os-marrying-the-phone-and-the-pc 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/

1 0