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Wi-Fi software security bug could leave Android, Windows, Linux open to attack
by Peter Reutemann 22 Apr '15

22 Apr '15

"In an e-mail today to the Open Source Software Security (oss-security) mailing list, the maintainer of wireless network client code used by Android, the Linux and BSD Unix operating systems, and Windows Wi-Fi device drivers sent an urgent fix to a flaw that could allow attackers to crash devices or even potentially inject malicious software into their memory. The flaw could allow these sorts of attacks via a malicious wireless peer-to-peer network name." -- source: http://bit.ly/1bjWGtn Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Development Activity In LibreOffice Versus OpenOffice
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 22 Apr '15

22 Apr '15

LWN has a comparison <http://lwn.net/Articles/637735/> of the relative health of the two main OpenOffice forks. Summary: in the last 4½ years, one project has done precisely two releases, while the other has managed over a dozen. In the last year, one has received contributions from just 16 developers, while the other has benefited from the work of around 16 times that number.

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meeting next Monday
by Peter Reutemann 21 Apr '15

21 Apr '15

Hi everyone We have a meeting coming up next Monday: "Due to the positive feedback on Baden Delamore's demonstration of Kali back in February, there will be a follow up to, delving deeper into the world of (in-)security." http://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/221426689/ Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

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NCR Unveils Android For ATMs
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 16 Apr '15

16 Apr '15

NCR is offering an Android-based platform for operating cash machines, called “Kalpana”. Unlike the multiple gigabytes of RAM needed to run Windows, this one only needs a fraction of a gigabyte. The company is also claiming significantly lower maintenance costs. <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/15/ncr_android_atm/> However, open-source or not, I’m still not convinced the question has been fully answered: what happens to devices running older versions once the vendor drops support?

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NVIDIA’s New Hardware Becoming “Open-Source-Unfriendly”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 16 Apr '15

16 Apr '15

NVIDIA, in its desire to stop third parties making hacks to its firmware to enable higher-end features on lower-end hardware, is moving to requiring signed firmware on its newer cards. Some promises made to the Nouveau project (which is developing open-source drivers for NVIDIA cards) have yet to eventuate, leaving them unable to take advantage of features of these cards. <http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-Unfriendly-OSS-Ha…>

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Controversy Over KDBUS
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 16 Apr '15

16 Apr '15

KDBUS is the in-kernel implementation of D-BUS, which is a core interprocess communication architecture used to build the GUI in every desktop Linux system today. Putting this code in the kernel provides performance improvements, as well as fixing many limitations that cannot be overcome by userspace-only code. After quite a few years of development, it looked like KDBUS was finally ready for merging into the Linux 4.1 kernel. However, controversy has now erupted. It seems from a look at few of the comments that they are objecting, not to the implementation, but to the protocol, which cannot be changed, otherwise it is no longer a drop-in replacement for D-BUS. <http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDBUS-Taking-Heat>

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Elementary OS Freya: A Complete List of Changes and New Features
by Peter Reutemann 15 Apr '15

15 Apr '15

"Based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and uses pantheon as the main desktop environment, Elementary OS freya delivers great new features, dozen of improvements, bugfixes, better documentation, updated applications from upstream, and many other goodies that will make your desktop a delight to use every day. Here’s everything you’ll find in the stable version of Elementary OS Freya." -- source: http://ubuntuportal.com/2015/04/elementary-os-freya.html Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

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reading files from old applications
by Ian Young 15 Apr '15

15 Apr '15

When all else fails try strings :-) Man strings. The resulting output if any could need a bit of tidying up.I have tried this on the odd older MS Word file when there was no alternative, at least gives an idea of text content. Hmmm. Having said that, I see the fine manual says ' strings is mainly useful for determining the contents of non-text files.'

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The Document Liberation, one year after
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 14 Apr '15

14 Apr '15

The Document Liberation is an offshoot of The Document Foundation (responsible for LibreOffice) to manage all the handling of proprietary/legacy document formats in a form that can be reused by other projects, not just LibreOffice. I like the name of the framework library they created: “librevenge”--the aim, of course, being to strike a blow against all the companies locking up users’ data in undocumented, proprietary formats which they then abandoned. For example, look at the support for Microsoft Works--anybody else even remember what that was? (Puts hand up.) It’s probably true to say that Open Source software now has better handling of many of these ancient formats than any current product from the companies that originally created those formats. <http://lwn.net/Articles/640198/>

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Linux 4.0 released
by Peter Reutemann 13 Apr '15

13 Apr '15

"So I decided to release 4.0 as per the normal schedule, because there really weren't any known issues, and while I'll be traveling during the end of the upcoming week due to a college visit, I'm hoping that won't affect the merge window very much. We'll see. Linux 4.0 was a pretty small release both in linux-next and in final size, although obviously "small" is all relative. It's still over 10k non-merge commits. But we've definitely had bigger releases (and judging by linux-next v4.1 is going to be one of the bigger ones)." -- source: http://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/linux-4.0-released.html Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

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