- wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Math Advance Suggest RSA Encryption Could Fall Within 5 Years
by Peter Reutemann 07 Aug '13

07 Aug '13

"The two encryption systems used to secure the most important connections and digital files could become useless within years, reports MIT Technology Review, due to progress towards solving the discrete logarithm problem. Both RSA and Diffie-Hellman encryption rely on there being no efficient algorithm for that problem, but French math professor Antoine Joux has published two papers in the last six months that suggest one could soon be found. Security researchers that noticed Joux's work recommend companies large and small begin planning to move to elliptic curve cryptography, something the NSA has said is best practice for years. Unfortunately, key patents for implementing elliptic curve cryptography are controlled by BlackBerry." -- source: http://it.slashdot.org/story/13/08/06/2056239 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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XMir-Based Xubuntu Images Now Available
by Peter Reutemann 07 Aug '13

07 Aug '13

"Xubuntu, the Xfce-based flavor of Xubuntu, is presently evaluating the use of Canonical's Mir display server via the XMir X11 transition layer. For helping in the process and testing, the Ubuntu derivative has made public some Xubuntu XMir images. " -- source: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQyOTQ 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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Review of Porteus distro on Distrowatch
by Ian Young 06 Aug '13

06 Aug '13

There is a generally favourable review of Porteus in this week's Distrowatch, should anyone who may be interested not have seen this already. I talked about this distro and its close relative Slax at a recent wlug meeting.

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GNOME 3.10 to be Offered for Wayland Beside X
by Peter Reutemann 06 Aug '13

06 Aug '13

"The GNOME project announced plans for supporting Wayland quite a while ago and progress has been reported incrementally for months. Wayland was supported in GNOME 3.95 for the particularly crafty, but starting with 3.10, binaries will be offered for Wayland right beside X. Matthias Clasen posted of this and other decisions made today at Guadec." -- source: http://ostatic.com/blog/gnome-3-10-to-be-offered-for-wayland-beside-x 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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PiCast Offers Chromecast Functionality for Raspberry Pi
by Peter Reutemann 05 Aug '13

05 Aug '13

'Much has been made about Google's $35 Chromecast dongle, which lets users stream their desktops and video to large screen TVs, but there is now a similar application for the Raspberry Pi that offers some of the same functionality: PiCast. Its developer has an informational page up here, where he notes: "I thought what do I have that I could use w/HDMI [licensing] and wouldn't be terribly hard to do? My Arduino? Nope BUT my Raspberry Pi can do it all, literally and [at the] same price as the Chromecast."' -- source: http://ostatic.com/blog/picast-offers-chromecast-functionality-for-raspberr… 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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Half of Tor Sites Compromised, Including TORMail
by Peter Reutemann 05 Aug '13

05 Aug '13

"The founder of Freedom Hosting has been arrested in Ireland and is awaiting extradition to USA. In a crackdown the FBI claims to be about hunting down pedophiles, half of the onion sites in the TOR network have been compromised, including the e-mail counterpart of TOR deep web, TORmail. The FBI has also embedded a 0-day Javascript attack against Firefox 17 on Freedom Hosting's server. It appears to install a tracking cookie and a payload that phones home to the FBI when the victim resumes non-TOR browsing. Interesting implications for The Silk Road and the value of Bitcoin stemming from this. The attack relies on two extremely unsafe practices when using TOR: Enabled Javascript, and using the same browser for TOR and non-TOR browsing. Any users accessing a Freedom Hosting hosted site since 8/2 with javascript enabled are potentially compromised." -- source: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/08/04/2054208/half-of-tor-sites-compromise… 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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Calligra and Krita Release 2.7
by Peter Reutemann 04 Aug '13

04 Aug '13

"KDE applications Calligra and Krita both made 2.7 release announcements in the last 24 hours. Calligra is actually 2.7.1 because a last minute bug crept in after tagging 2.7.0. Both demonstrate lots of exciting new features and improvements." -- source: http://ostatic.com/blog/calligra-and-krita-release-2-7 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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Firefox OS Phones Spread Out in Latin America
by Peter Reutemann 04 Aug '13

04 Aug '13

"Marking yet another milestone for Mozilla's Firefox OS mobile phone platform, devices based on it have arrived in Venezuela and Colombia, and Mozilla has just announced hat Firefox OS phones will arrive in Brazil in the fourth quarter of this year. When we covered Mozilla's mobile plans back in April, the company was targeting five countries to deliver the phones in: Venezuela, Poland, Brazil, Portugal and Spain. It's quickly becoming clear, though, that these phones will show up in many more markets." -- source: http://ostatic.com/blog/firefox-os-phones-spread-out-in-latin-america 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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With Microsoft Office on Android, Has Linus Torvalds Won?
by Peter Reutemann 01 Aug '13

01 Aug '13

"The father of Linux, Linus Torvalds, once said, 'If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won.' Microsoft yesterday released one of its cash cows, Microsoft Office, for Android. Since Microsoft has a very vague idea of what users want and is suffering from lock-in, the app is just an Android front end of Office 365 and is accessible only by the paid users. There are already quite a lot of office suites available on Android including Office Pro, QuickOffice and KingSoft, so Microsoft will have to struggle there. Still it's a Microsoft core application coming to Linux. So, it looks like Linus has won." -- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/08/01/1413252/with-microsoft-office-on-a… 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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Report: Linux is Driving Innovation and Affordability in Supercomputing
by Peter Reutemann 01 Aug '13

01 Aug '13

"When most of us think about supercomputers, we think about closet-sized machines loaded with exotic and expensive technologies developed at great expense. However, if you actually look at the state of supercomputing, off-the-shelf components and open source platforms are playing an important role. In fact, The Linux Foundation has released an analysis paper on 20 years of data collected by the Top500.org supercomputer list. The Top500 list has ranked the world’s fastest supercomputers since 1993. The paper shows that Linux has become the dominant OS running on Top500 machines over the past decade." -- source: http://ostatic.com/blog/report-linux-is-driving-innovation-and-affordabilit… 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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