- wlug - University of Waikato Mail Lists

Text processing in the shell
by Peter Reutemann 18 Mar '20

18 Mar '20

Hi everyone Just came across this article, which also has real-world examples: 'One of the things that makes the shell an invaluable tool is the amount of available text processing commands, and the ability to easily pipe them into each other to build complex text processing workflows. These commands can make it trivial to perform text and data analysis, convert data between different formats, filter lines, etc. When working with text data, the philosophy is to break any complex problem you have into a set of smaller ones, and to solve each of them with a specialized tool.' -- source: https://blog.balthazar-rouberol.com/text-processing-in-the-shell 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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meeting next Monday - cancelled
by Peter Reutemann 17 Mar '20

17 Mar '20

Hi everyone Due to COVID-19, we are cancelling all WLUG meetings for the foreseeable future. Stay safe and we'll see you again when things are back to normal! 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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meeting next Monday (in theory)
by Peter Reutemann 15 Mar '20

15 Mar '20

Hi everyone At this stage, the university is monitoring the COVID-19 situation but (to my knowledge) isn't closing yet nor is it curtailing meetings such as ours. However, this could change any day and I will post an update when this should happen. So, at this stage we have an exciting WLUG meeting scheduled for next Monday: 'The voice interface represents another big shift in user interfaces, and could be as big a shift as the shift from switches to terminals, the switch from terminals to windowed GUIs, or the switch from full computers to small touchscreen devices. Unfortunately, right now most of these devices are little more than a telephone for talking to a server in the cloud. That is a big problem for privacy, and presents the user with a false choice between access and privacy. Today's computers are capable of handling a verbal interface without requiring a cloud service to handle all of your requests. Aaron Chantrill is one of the developers on the Naomi Project, a free and open source voice assistant (https://projectnaomi.com). It is a plugin based system based on Jasper (http://jasperproject.github.io/), and depending on how the user chooses to configure it, can run totally offline. In this presentation, Aaron would like to introduce people to the Naomi Project, talk about the benefits of a verbal interface, talk about the current architectures of virtual assistants, and ways in which that architecture can be altered to provide better privacy, and also do a comparison of offline speech to text and text to speech solutions, including Pocketsphinx, Mozilla Deepspeech, Kaldi, and Julius. Finally, He will invite people to participate in building and improving Naomi. There is a lot to do and much of it is both engaging and cutting-edge.' Details: https://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/266792000/ https://gettogether.community/events/3276/wlug-meeting/ 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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Ice Lake GPU underperforming? Put it in powersave mode. Wait, what?
by Peter Reutemann 15 Mar '20

15 Mar '20

'Back in December, Linux users were starting to notice that Ice Lake-equipped laptops were getting better framerates in powersave mode than in performance mode. This Tuesday, Intel developer Francisco Jerez released a patchset to address the conundrum. Jerez begins by noting the fact that if your system bottleneck is I/O, boosting CPU performance won't help—the CPU can't process more data if the I/O subsystem isn't providing it fast enough. "In IO-bound scenarios (by definition) the throughput of the system doesn't improve with increasing CPU frequency beyond the threshold value at which the IO device becomes the bottleneck." Jerez goes on to note that pointlessly boosting the CPU into turbo frequencies when there's no additional data for it to process doesn't just hurt power efficiency. In the case of laptop designs, there's typically no room for desktop- or server-style "overengineering"—you've got limited space as well as limited power. This means, among other things, that there's only so much cooling to go around. "With the current governors [...] the CPU frequency tends to oscillate with the load, often with an amplitude far into the turbo range, leading to severely reduced energy efficiency." This is particularly likely to become a problem in games, where the GPU portions of the processor get a much bigger workout than the x86 CPU itself. If you unnecessarily boost CPU frequency, you waste your TDP budget dealing with unnecessary waste heat from the CPU—which may in turn require throttling the GPU, since you've already eaten through your thermal overhead.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/03/power-management-is-hard-linux-patc… 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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Internet 'is Not Working For Women and Girls', Says Sir Tim Berners-Lee
by Peter Reutemann 13 Mar '20

13 Mar '20

'Women and girls face a "growing crisis" of online harms, with sexual harassment, threatening messages and discrimination making the web an unsafe place to be, Sir Tim Berners-Lee has warned. The inventor of the world wide web said the "dangerous trend" in online abuse was forcing women out of jobs, causing girls to skip school, damaging relationships and silencing female opinions, prompting him to conclude that "the web is not working for women and girls." "The world has made important progress on gender equality thanks to the unceasing drive of committed champions everywhere," Berners-Lee wrote in an open letter to mark the web's 31st birthday on Thursday. "But I am seriously concerned that online harms facing women and girls -- especially those of colour, from LGBTQ+ communities and other marginalised groups -- threaten that progress."' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/20/03/12/1436247 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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Firefox 74 Slams Facebook In Solitary Confinement: Browser Add-On Stops Social Network Stalking Users Across the Web
by Peter Reutemann 13 Mar '20

13 Mar '20

'Tim Anderson reporting via The Register: The first thing users will see after updating to Mozilla's latest browser, Firefox 74, is a prompt to install the Facebook Container add-on. The Facebook Container add-on is not new, but has been enhanced in its latest version, 2.1.0, with the ability to add custom sites to the container so that you can "login with Facebook wherever you need to." The purpose of the Facebook Container is to let you continue to use Facebook but without having the social network site track your browsing elsewhere. "Installing this extension closes your Facebook tabs, deletes your Facebook cookies, and logs you out of Facebook," say the docs. When you visit Facebook and log in, the cookies it plants are isolated to the container. This prevents Facebook Like buttons and embedded comments from working on other sites. There is also an issue with sites that require or offer a Facebook login, which you can now overcome by adding those sites to the container. Sites are added by clicking a fence icon and selecting "Allow site in Facebook container." The effect is like having two web browsers, one in which you are logged into Facebook and subject to potential tracking on any site which has Facebook content, and another where Facebook has no knowledge of you.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/03/12/2027215 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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Modern RAM Used For Computers, Smartphones Still Vulnerable To Rowhammer Attacks
by Peter Reutemann 13 Mar '20

13 Mar '20

'According to new research published today, modern RAM cards are still vulnerable to Rowhammer attacks despite extensive mitigations that have been deployed by manufacturers over the past six years. These mitigations, collectively referred to as Target Row Refresh (TRR), are a combination of software and hardware fixes that have been slowly added to the design of modern RAM cards after 2014 when academics disclosed the first-ever Rowhammer attack. But in a new research paper titled today and titled "TRRespass: Exploiting the Many Sides of Target Row Refresh," a team of academics from universities in the Netherlands and Switzerland said they developed a generic tool named TRRespass that can be used to upgrade the old Rowhammer attacks to work on the new-and-improved TRR-protected RAM cards. The new upgraded attacks work on both DIMM and LPDDR4 memory types, and can be used to retrieve encryption keys from memory, or escalate an attacker's access right to sudo/SYSTEM-level.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/20/03/12/2042242 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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Security Practices At The CIA
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 12 Mar '20

12 Mar '20

The trial of an ex-CIA operative accused of leaking some military-grade hacking tools <https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/03/cia_dirty_laund.html> has exposed some embarrassing details about the security practices of an organization that, you would expect, has security as its core mission. They regularly used (and freely circulated) rubbish passwords for services on their intranet for the elite “Operational Support Branch”, the excuse being that access to that intranet was already being tightly controlled. The old adage that “a system is only as secure as its weakest point”? They have heard of it...

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Want To Use An Open-Source, Royalty-Free Video Codec? Pay Up, Please!
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 12 Mar '20

12 Mar '20

A company called Sisvel is assembling a pool of patents claiming to cover the AV1 video codec <https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200312/04075244087/former-refrigerator-…>. They expect to eventually have an arsenal of about 2000 patents, for which they will demand licence fees. If you remember, AV1 was created precisely to avoid the patent morass that surrounds H.265 aka HEVC.

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Microsoft delivers emergency patch to fix wormable Windows 10 flaw
by Peter Reutemann 12 Mar '20

12 Mar '20

'Microsoft on Thursday released an unscheduled fix for a critical security bug that makes it possible for attackers to remotely execute malicious code that can spread from vulnerable machine to vulnerable machine without requiring any interaction from users. The flaw, in version 3 of Microsoft's implementation of the Server Message block protocol, is present only in 32- and 64-bit Windows 10 versions 1903 and 1909 for clients and servers. Although the vulnerability is difficult to exploit in a reliable way, Microsoft and outside researchers consider it critical because it opens large networks to "wormable" attacks, in which the compromise of a single machine can trigger a chain reaction that causes all other Windows machines to quickly become infected. That's the scenario that played on with the WannaCry and NotPetya in 2017. In a bulletin accompanying Thursday's patch, Microsoft said it has no evidence the flaw is being actively exploited, but the company went on to label the bug as "exploitation more likely." That designation means malicious actors will probably develop and use exploits in the future.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/microsoft-delivers-e… 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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