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Latest SUSE Linux Enterprise Goes All in With Confidential Computing
by Peter Reutemann 21 Jun '23

21 Jun '23

'SUSE's latest release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 5 (SLE 15 SP5) has a focus on security, claiming it as the first distro to offer full support for confidential computing to protect data. From a report: According to SUSE, the latest version of its enterprise platform is designed to deliver high-performance computing capabilities, with an inevitable mention of AI/ML workloads, plus it claims to have extended its live-patching capabilities. The release also comes just weeks after the community release openSUSE Leap 15.5 was made available, with the two sharing a common core. The Reg's resident open source guru noted that Leap 15.6 has now been confirmed as under development, which implies that a future SLE 15 SP6 should also be in the pipeline. SUSE announced the latest version at its SUSECON event in Munich, along with a new report on cloud security issues claiming that more than 88 percent of IT teams have reported at least one cloud security incident over the the past year. This appears to be the justification for the claim that SLE 15 SP5 is the first Linux distro to support "the entire spectrum" of confidential computing, allowing customers to run fully encrypted virtual machines on their infrastructure to protect applications and their associated data. Confidential computing relies on hardware-based security mechanisms in the processor to provide this protection, so enterprises hoping to take advantage of this will need to ensure their servers have the necessary support, such as AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization-Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) and Intel's Trust Domain Extensions (TDX).' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/06/20/1846203 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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PostgreSQL Reconsiders Its Process-Based Model
by Peter Reutemann 20 Jun '23

20 Jun '23

'Jonathan Corbet, writing at LWN: In the fast-moving open-source world, programs can come and go quickly; a tool that has many users today can easily be eclipsed by something better next week. Even in this environment, though, some programs endure for a long time. As an example, consider the PostgreSQL database system, which traces its history back to 1986. Making fundamental changes to a large code base with that much history is never an easy task. As fundamental changes go, moving PostgreSQL away from its process-oriented model is not a small one, but it is one that the project is considering seriously. A PostgreSQL instance runs as a large set of cooperating processes, including one for each connected client. These processes communicate through a number of shared-memory regions using an elaborate library that enables the creation of complex data structures in a setting where not all processes have the same memory mapped at the same address. This model has served the project well for many years, but the world has changed a lot over the history of this project. As a result, PostgreSQL developers are increasingly thinking that it may be time to make a change.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/06/19/1723259 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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KDE Plasma 6 Is Now 'Fairly Livable'
by Peter Reutemann 20 Jun '23

20 Jun '23

'Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham believes that Plasma 6 is now "fairly livable" and recommends KDE developers and power users / enthusiasts start giving it a try. Phoronix reports: He characterized Plasma 6 as: "Basically everything in Plasma compiles with Qt 6, and at this point Plasma 6 is fairly livable. To give you a sense of how livable, it's good enough that over the past 2 months, I've gone on three KDE-related trips from the USA to Europe, with my only computer running Plasma 6 in "current git master" state, with work-in-progress merge requests applied! Its stability has been good enough that this has caused me no apprehension, and indeed, it's been totally fine on each trip. So seriously, if you're a KDE developer or an adventurous user, start living on Plasma 6! Jump right in, the water's fine. :)" He went on to write more about the current development activities around Plasma 6. He also shared his personal beliefs around Plasma 6.0 release timing although no official release schedule is yet to be determined. Nate's belief is that Plasma 6.0 will likely be ready for release sometime between December and March.' -- source: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/23/06/19/212256 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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The State Of Linux Music Production
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 17 Jun '23

17 Jun '23

Been messing about with my old MIDI keyboard again, after a long while putting it aside. It now complains about a “low battery” warning, but I think that only affects the onboard sound settings, which I’m not particularly fussed about. I got a USB-MIDI interface a few years back, and I can use that with the keyboard to drive sound sources on my main machine. But things have changed in the Linux music world since the last time I tried this (at least on Debian). JACK and PulseAudio have both been replaced by this new thing, PipeWire, which is supposed to handle video, audio and MIDI routing through a common architecture. So I no longer have to start up jackd when I want to switch to music-production mode (in fact, trying to run jackd under PipeWire will screw up your audio something awful). Instead, patching between sources and sinks is done via WirePlumber, for which a convenient GUI frontend is available in the form of qpwgraph. All the main PipeWire-related processes are managed as user-level services via systemd. One thing hasn’t changed, and that is the incompatibility between ALSA MIDI ports and JACK MIDI ports: that USB-MIDI interface only appears to the system as ports of the ALSA kind, whereas JACK-aware apps want to accept MIDI data via ports of the JACK kind. So I still have to start up the old “a2jmidid” program to provide a bridge between these two. qpwgraph shows all these different kinds of entities, each labelled with its type: “ALSA”, “PW” (PipeWire) or “JACK”. The latter two can be connected directly to one another, while ALSA ports can only be connected to ALSA ports. The colour-coding--purple for ALSA MIDI ports, red for JACK/PipeWire MIDI, green for JACK/PipeWire audio--is a hint that you can only connect matching colours. Some JACK-aware apps still have trouble running under PipeWire; for these, there is the “pw-jack” tool, which substitutes the JACK dynamic libraries with ones that hook directly into PipeWire before launching the specified app. E.g. I had to run a2jmidid with pw-jack a2jmidid Also, the command pw-jack zynaddsubfx -O jack tells ZynAddSubFX to run with its JACK interface active, and I can route events from my keyboard to it via the intermediary nodes automatically created by a2jmidid. Don’t forget to hook up its audio output terminals to the box representing my speakers, and voilà, I can make sound.

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Analysis Of The GMail Fake Email Exploit
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 15 Jun '23

15 Jun '23

You may have heard about an interesting hack a few days ago <https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/09/google_bimi_email_authentication/>, where some low-lifes figured out how to send fraudulent emails to GMail users that showed a “verified” blue BIMI checkmark, indicating that the recipient could trust the from-address as authentic. But of course it was not. The details of how the hack was perpetrated are quite intricate, and involve some subtle interplay between the mail-processing policies of GMail (where the recipients had their accounts, and which implements the BIMI check), Microsoft (which ran the Exchange servers where the fraudsters got accounts, and from which the fraudulent messages were sent) and UPS (the purported sender of the fake emails). Of course, all three parties have since taken action to ensure this particular scenario will not happen again. ThioJoe offers up a good explanation of how it all worked here <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Czc0F_A82rE>. If your eyes glaze over at the mention of SPF versus DKIM versus DMARC--well, you’re not alone. When I looked at whether I should implement something like this on my own mail server to try to ensure that spammers could not send out fake emails under my name, I felt the same way. So I just decided not to bother. For now ...

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Question re: Desktop computer running Ubuntu is slow, mouse and keyboard missing commands
by Michael James 14 Jun '23

14 Jun '23

Can anyone please assist with this Ubuntu desktop severely slowed down, mouse and keyboard severely delayed, skipping and or typing multiple letters/numbers with the problem progressively getting worse. Internet speed is at standard mark. Thanks, Noho ora mai, All the best, Michael James __________________________________________________________________________________________ MICHAEL JAMES PASTROFF phone: inside New Zealand 021 115 3713 outside New Zealand 64 21 115 3713

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Edge Sends Images You View Online To Microsoft
by Peter Reutemann 13 Jun '23

13 Jun '23

'Not so long ago, Microsoft Edge ended up in hot waters after users discovered a bug leaking your browser history to Bing. Now you may want to toggle off another feature to ensure Edge is not sending every picture you view online to Microsoft. Edge has a built-in image enhancement tool that, according to Microsoft, can use "super-resolution to improve clarity, sharpness, lighting, and contrast in images on the web." Although the feature sounds exciting, recent Microsoft Edge Canary updates have provided more information on how image enhancement works. The browser now warns that it sends image links to Microsoft instead of performing on-device enhancements.' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/23/06/12/182216 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Debian 12 'Bookworm' Released
by Peter Reutemann 12 Jun '23

12 Jun '23

'Slashdot reader e065c8515d206cb0e190 shared the big announcement from Debian.org: After 1 year, 9 months, and 28 days of development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 12 (code name bookworm). bookworm will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and the Debian Long Term Support team... This release contains over 11,089 new packages for a total count of 64,419 packages, while over 6,296 packages have been removed as obsolete. 43,254 packages were updated in this release. The overall disk usage for bookworm is 365,016,420 kB (365 GB), and is made up of 1,341,564,204 lines of code. bookworm has more translated man pages than ever thanks to our translators who have made man-pages available in multiple languages such as: Czech, Danish, Greek, Finnish, Indonesian, Macedonian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Russian, Serbian, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. All of the systemd man pages are now completely available in German. The Debian Med Blend introduces a new package: shiny-server which simplifies scientific web applications using R. We have kept to our efforts of providing Continuous Integration support for Debian Med team packages. Install the metapackages at version 3.8.x for Debian bookworm. The Debian Astro Blend continues to provide a one-stop solution for professional astronomers, enthusiasts, and hobbyists with updates to almost all versions of the software packages in the blend. astap and planetary-system-stacker help with image stacking and astrometry resolution. openvlbi, the open source correlator, is now included. Support for Secure Boot on ARM64 has been reintroduced: users of UEFI-capable ARM64 hardware can boot with Secure Boot mode enabled to take full advantage of the security feature. 9to5Linux has screenshots, and highlights some new features: Debian 12 also brings read/write support for APFS (Apple File System) with the apfsprogs and apfs-dkms utilities, a new tool called ntfs2btrfs that lets you convert NTFS drives to Btrfs, a new malloc implementation called mimalloc, a new kernel SMB server called ksmbd-tools, and support for the merged-usr root file system layout... This release also includes completely new artwork called Emerald, designed (once again) by Juliette Taka. New fonts are also present in this major Debian release, along with a new fnt command-line tool for accessing 1,500 DFSG-compliant fonts. Debian 12 "bookworm" ships with several desktop environments, including: - Gnome 43, - KDE Plasma 5.27, - LXDE 11, - LXQt 1.2.0, - MATE 1.26, - Xfce 4.18' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/06/11/0333242 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Microsoft Excel Has Become A Threat To Democracy
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 07 Jun '23

07 Jun '23

Austria’s Social Democratic Party recently held an election for a new leader, according to <https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/06/austria_election_excel_blunder/>. Trouble was, two days after announcing the result had gone one way, they then had to report that in fact it was the other way round, owing to a stuffup involving an Excel spreadsheet. I suppose the only good news is that this was strictly an in-party election, not something involving any level of Government.

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The State Of Fibre Broadband In The USA
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 07 Jun '23

07 Jun '23

Came across this report <https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/internet-users-love-fiber-servi…>, which is interesting to compare with conditions in NZ: In terms of availability, the Federal Communications Commission broadband map indicates that about 38 percent of US residents can get fiber. The percentage drops to 29 percent when including only fiber services that offer gigabit download speeds and at least 100Mbps upload speeds. Basically, US broadband is dominated by companies with heavy investments in cable (and some ADSL), who have no interest in obsoleting that investment any sooner than they have to. Moral: there are places where a free market works, but strategic infrastructure buildouts is not one of them.

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