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Searching For Vulnerable Webcams
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 23 Jan '16

23 Jan '16

Customers don’t understand and don’t care about the security of the devices they put online. And vendors are in no hurry to enlighten them, if it adds to costs and cuts profits. If anybody is in a position to intervene, it has to be a Government authority. <http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/01/how-to-search-the-internet-of-thing…>

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Linux Filesystems On Windows
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 22 Jan '16

22 Jan '16

Came across this <http://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoronix-articles/8468…> rather informative posting about different filesystems for cross-platform use. One interesting possibility is UDF (“Universal Disk Format”), which is how DVDs are usually formatted. It turns out it is useful not just for read-only media but read/write as well. There is widespread built-in support for it on Linux, OS X and Windows, albeit with some limitations in the proprietary OSes (as usual). It can even work on flash drives, though there may be some issues with the hardware layout being optimized for FAT32 or other antiquated filesystems. Alternatively, the article mentions a number of choices for accessing Linux filesystems on Windows: <http://www.fs-driver.org/> <http://uranus.chrysocome.net/linux/ext2ifs.htm> <http://www.diskinternals.com/linux-reader/> <http://www.chrysocome.net/virtualvolumes> Disclaimer: I haven’t tried any of these.

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Command-Line Options For CUPS
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 20 Jan '16

20 Jan '16

I was looking for some options to tweak scaling and positioning of images printed with the CUPS “lp” command. This page <http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/doc-1.5/options.html> lists various keywords that can be used with the “-o” option, in particular “natural-scaling”, “ppi” and “position”. You’ll notice that section has a large banner at the top saying “Not Supported on Mac OS X”. Which is slightly ironic, given that CUPS is owned by Apple. Anyway, the description of those options has disappeared from versions of that page for CUPS 1.6 and later, e.g. <http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/doc-1.6/options.html>, <http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/doc-2.1/options.html>. This even though I have CUPS 2.1.2 on my system, and the “position” option, for example, does seem to do something.

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Tracking Protection In Wi-Fi Networks Coming Soon To Linux
by Peter Reutemann 19 Jan '16

19 Jan '16

'Fedora contributor and NetworkManager developer Lubomir Rintel explains how your devices are being identified on a network by a unique number that most of us know by the name of MAC address. Same goes for mobile networking, as your laptop's or mobile phone's MAC address is, in most cases, broadcasted everywhere you go before you even attempt a connection to a wireless network. And that's a problem for your privacy. The solution? Randomization of the MAC address while scanning for Wi-Fi networks. Apple is already using this method on iOS 8 and later mobile operating systems, and so is Microsoft in Windows 10, so Linux users will ["likely"] get it in the upcoming NetworkManager 1.2 release.' -- source: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/01/19/1345210 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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Building Your Own Internet Router
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 19 Jan '16

19 Jan '16

<http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/01/numbers-dont-lie-its-time-to-build-y…>: A lot of you are probably muttering, "right, pfSense, sure." Some of you might even be thinking about smoothwall or untangle NG. I played with most of the firewall distros out there, but I decided to go more basic, more old school: a plain, CLI-only install of Ubuntu Server and a few iptables rules. His benchmarks show his homebrew router handily beating off-the-shelf products in wired performance. In wireless performance, however, he feels available PC cards are way behind what dedicated router boxes can do.

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Serious Linux Kernel Vulnerability Patched
by Peter Reutemann 19 Jan '16

19 Jan '16

"A patch for a critical Linux kernel flaw, present in the code since 2012, is expected to be pushed out today. The vulnerability affects versions 3.8 and higher, said researchers at startup Perception Point who discovered the vulnerability. The flaw also extends to two-thirds of Android devices, the company added. An attacker would require local access to exploit the vulnerability on a Linux server. A malicious mobile app would get the job done on an Android device. The vulnerability is a reference leak that lives in the keyring facility built into the various flavors of Linux. The keyring encrypts and stores login information, encryption keys and certificates, and makes them available to applications." -- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/16/01/19/1326212 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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WLUG meeting next Monday
by Peter Reutemann 19 Jan '16

19 Jan '16

Hi everyone We have a WLUG meeting coming up next Monday: "Lawrence D'Oliveiro and Ian Stewart will demo RAID 1 configurations and also using rsync for backups." More details: http://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/228022101/ 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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Mr “Linux Software RAID” Stepping Down
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 18 Jan '16

18 Jan '16

Neil Brown, the guy who has been mostly responsible for the software RAID subsystem on Linux since he created it over a decade and a half ago, has decided to hand over the reins <http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Neil-Brown-Last-MD>. No drama involved, he just seems to have lost interest.

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Fedora Linux Might Drop Incremental Upgrades
by Peter Reutemann 17 Jan '16

17 Jan '16

"As you might know, Fedora and many other GNU/Linux distributions require users to do an incremental upgrade when attempting to move from an older version of the operating system to the most recent one. For example, if you want to upgrade from Fedora 21 to Fedora 23, you will have first to upgrade to Fedora 22. Lately, Fedora upgrades have become more stable and reliable, mostly because of some brand-new technologies, such as the DNF package manger. Fedora's Adam Williamson theorizes about an innovative method that might support official upgrade of the Fedora Linux operating system across two releases in the future." -- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/16/01/16/2156219 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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Bug that can leak crypto keys just fixed in widely used OpenSSH
by Peter Reutemann 17 Jan '16

17 Jan '16

'A critical bug that can leak secret cryptographic keys has just just been fixed in OpenSSH, one of the more widely used implementations of the secure shell (SSH) protocol. The vulnerability resides only in the version end users use to connect to servers and not in versions used by servers. A maliciously configured server could exploit it to obtain the contents of the connecting computer's memory, including the private encryption key used for SSH connections. The bug is the result of code that enables an experimental roaming feature in OpenSSH versions 5.4 to 7.1 "The matching server code has never been shipped, but the client code was enabled by default and could be tricked by a malicious server into leaking client memory to the server, including private client user keys," OpenSSH officials wrote in an advisory published Thursday. "The authentication of the server host key prevents exploitation by a man-in-the-middle, so this information leak is restricted to connections to malicious or compromised servers." The advisory said that anyone using a vulnerable version should update right away. Those who are unable to update should disable roaming by adding the string UseRoaming no to the global ssh_config(5) file or to the user configuration in ~/.ssh/config, or by entering -UseRoaming=no on the command line.' -- source: http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/01/bug-that-can-leak-crypto-keys-just-… 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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