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Crowdfunded Linux Voice Magazine Releases Second Issue CC-BY-SA
by Peter Reutemann 11 Jan '15

11 Jan '15

"As covered previously on Slashdot, Linux Voice crowdfunded its way to success in late 2013, showing how a small team can make things happen with a different business model (giving profits and content back to the community). Now, a few months after the magazine made issue 1 freely available, they've released issue 2 under the Creative Commons for everyone to share and modify. If you've ever fancied making your own Raspberry Pi-powered arcade machine, there's a full guide in the second issue." -- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/01/11/0311258 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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Sloppy File Permissions Make Red Star OS Vulnerable
by Peter Reutemann 11 Jan '15

11 Jan '15

"Red Star OS Desktop 3.0, the official Linux distro of North Korea, which recently found its way onto torrents and various download sites in form of an ISO image, is interesting for a number of reasons, including its attempt to look like commercial operating systems (currently OS X, earlier versions mimicked the Windows GUI). Hackers are also poking Red Star for security vulnerabilities. An pseudonymous researcher noted in a post to the Open Source Software Security (oss-sec) mailing list, that the OS has one significant security hole: Red Star 3.0 ships with a world-writeable udev rule file /etc/udev/rules.d/85-hplj10xx.rules (originally designed for HP LaserJet 1000 series printers) which can be modified to include RUN+= arguments executing arbitrary commands as root by Udev. In the post he also mentions how the older Red Star 2.0 shipped with another schoolboy mistake: /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit was world-writeable." -- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/01/11/032207 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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Rust Programming Language Reaches 1.0 Alpha
by Peter Reutemann 11 Jan '15

11 Jan '15

"Rust, a new a systems programming language with a focus on safety, performance and concurrency, has released the 1.0 alpha version of the language. This means that the language and core libraries are feature-complete for the 1.0 release. In practical terms, this means that the rate of change experienced by early adopters will slow down dramatically and major breaking changes should be very rare (during the alpha cycle some major changes may still occur if considered necessary). The language will stabilize further when the beta stage is reached (planned for six weeks from now)." -- source: http://developers.slashdot.org/story/15/01/11/0254252 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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USB 3.1 & Type C Connectors
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 11 Jan '15

11 Jan '15

At the recent CES exhibition in Las Vegas, there was being shown a lot of new hardware taking advantage of the new USB specs <http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/01/usb-3-1-and-type-c-the-only-stuff-at…>. There are 4 quite separate parts to these specs: * the USB 3.1 spec, supporting theoretical data rates up to 10Gb/s * the USB Power Delivery spec, which can supply up to 100W to connected devices * the new “Type C” connector, which has 4 separate physical data channels on it, including one for backward compatibility with USB 2.0 * USB Alternate Mode, which can use some or all of the Type C channels to communicate non-USB data (e.g. DisplayPort). In principle, it is neat to be able to replace all the different kinds of ports on a machine with ports all of a single kind. However, the article suggests that Alternate Mode could be a problem: it seems inevitable that different ports on a machine will be restricted to different uses for the Alternate Mode function. Which means, instead of the current situation where a monitor connector is different from a USB connector so you cannot plug a cable for one into the other, you will have the situation where all the connectors and cables _are_ the same, but if you plug the wrong device into the wrong port, it just won’t work. I remember in an e-mail exchange with Stuart Cheshire a few years ago (he was the mastermind behind the Zeroconf initiative, which Apple implemented as “Rendezvous”—later renamed “Bonjour”—and Linux users know as the “Avahi” packages), he said that there should indeed be just a single type of port on a computer, all speaking the same protocol. And that protocol should be TCP/IP. After all, why shouldn’t you run full TCP/IP between your keyboard, mouse and PC? The silicon it takes to implement the network stack shouldn’t amount to much of a cost these days. Of course, it should be IPv6, not IPv4...

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NZ Postcodes Database
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 10 Jan '15

10 Jan '15

If you didn’t know about it, this guy Nick Le Mouton has put together a pretty extensive list of postcode information for New Zealand, available here <https://www.noodles.net.nz/2007/09/14/new-zealand-postcode-database-v2/>. There are details on 43457 streets in 1260 suburbs with latitude/longitude positions, and separate tables of rural delivery addresses and P O boxes/private bag locations.

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Got an Asus router? Someone on your network can probably hack it
by Peter Reutemann 09 Jan '15

09 Jan '15

'If you're running an Asus wireless router, chances are good that someone inside your network can take full administrative control of it thanks to a currently unpatched vulnerability in virtually all versions of the firmware, a security researcher said. While the vulnerability isn't as serious as those that allowhackers on the Internet at large to compromise the devices, it's nonetheless concerning. People with administrative control can reroute everyone connected to malicious websites and possibly install alternate or even malicious firmware updates. "I trust people that join my network to some degree, but I don't want them to be able to reconfigure the router," Joshua Drake, research director at Accuvant and the person whobrought the vulnerability to light Thursday, told Ars. "I can't prevent them without this getting fixed (short of the workaround)."' -- source: http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/01/got-an-asus-router-someone-on-your-… 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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meetings
by Peter Reutemann 08 Jan '15

08 Jan '15

Hi everyone We're currently in the process of sorting out the dates for the monthly meetings this year. Ian S. suggested to not bother moving the meeting forward by a week if it falls on a Monday that is a public holiday, as we've done in the past. Why this change? The advantage would be that there is no confusion over *when* the meeting happens, it's always the 4th Monday. However, the downside could be that people are away or have no public transport to get to the meeting. What are your thoughts? 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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Intel’s “Compute Stick” Computer In An HDMI Dongle
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 08 Jan '15

08 Jan '15

<http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/01/intels-compute-stick-is-a-full-windo…> Available with either Windows 8.1, 2GiB RAM and 32GiB of flash storage, or Linux, 1GiB RAM and 8GiB flash. Is there some kind of deal with Microsoft to never offer identical hardware configurations with your choice of Windows or Linux?

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Extra Leap Second To Be Added To Clocks On June 30
by Peter Reutemann 08 Jan '15

08 Jan '15

"On June 30 this year, the day will last a tad longer — one second longer, to be precise — as a leap second is to be added to clocks worldwide. The time UTC will go from 23:59:59 to 23:59:60 in order to cope with Earth's rotation slowing down a bit. So, what do you intend to do during that extra second added to that day? Well, you may want to fix your systems. The last time a leap second was added, in 2012, a number of websites, Java and even Linux experienced some troubles. Leap seconds can be disruptive to precision systems used for navigation and communication. Is there a better way of dealing with the need for leap seconds?" -- source: http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/01/06/1821234 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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ODFPY Now Supports Python 3
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 07 Jan '15

07 Jan '15

ODFPY is a very handy set of tools for manipulating Open Document Format files. Besides its own command-line tools, it also offers a Python class library that you can call from your own programs. I have been using this in my own billing system for many years to generate invoices for clients. This used to kept in a SVN repo on a somewhat slow server at <https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/software/odfpy/home>. But now they have moved to GitHub at <https://github.com/eea/odfpy>, and I see the current library works with Python 3 as well. This pleases me no end, as I have been moving many of my older projects across from Python 2.

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