- wlug - University of Waikato Mail Lists

Germany's Cybersecurity Agency Recommends Firefox As Most Secure Browser
by Peter Reutemann 17 Oct '19

17 Oct '19

'Firefox is the only browser that received top marks in a recent audit carried out by Germany's cyber-security agency -- the German Federal Office for Information Security (or the Bundesamt fur Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik -- BSI). The BSI tested Mozilla Firefox 68 (ESR), Google Chrome 76, Microsoft Internet Explorer 11, and Microsoft Edge 44. The tests did not include other browsers like Safari, Brave, Opera, or Vivaldi. The audit was carried out using rules detailed in a guideline for "modern secure browsers" that the BSI published last month, in September 2019. The BSI normally uses this guide to advise government agencies and companies from the private sector on what browsers are safe to use. The article includes a list of all the minimum requirements required for the BSI to consider a browser "secure." It also lists the areas where the other browsers failed, such as: Lack of support for a master password mechanism (Chrome, IE, Edge); No built-in update mechanism (IE), and No option to block telemetry collection (Chrome, IE, Edge)' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/10/17/2136219 Cheers, Pete -- 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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Hard drives not mounting
by Ian Young 17 Oct '19

17 Oct '19

Hi John (et al) I am going to assume these are drives formatted NTFS. Of late I have encountered drives from Windows machines which Linux won't mount, I think ntfs-3g is a bit finicky about this in recent versions. Get in touch with me directly if you wish, I have a gadget which will connect drives via USB to avoid having to put them into a machine. Some distributions may be able to see the drives even if Mint doesn't wish to, we could try various versions.

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Google Ejects Open-Source WireGuard From Play Store Over Donation Links
by Peter Reutemann 17 Oct '19

17 Oct '19

'Google appears to be removing apps that have donation links, including open-source apps where donations are one of the main sources of revenue. WireGuard, a free and open-source VPN, has been reportedly dropped over this according to WireGuard lead developer Jason Donenfeld. Phoronix reports: After waiting days for Google to review the latest version of their secure VPN tunnel application, it was approved and then removed and delisted -- including older versions of WireGuard. The reversal comes on the basis of violating their "payments policy." The only bit of possible "payments" within the WireGuard app is a donation link within the program taking the user to the WireGuard website should anyone want to donate to support this promising open-source secure networking tech. An appeal to the situation was also rejected by Google, Donenfeld has confirmed this morning on their mailing list. In trying to make it back into Android's Play Store, Jason has dropped the donation link from the Android app version while it's still awaiting review from Google. ' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/10/16/2215248 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
by Peter Reutemann 17 Oct '19

17 Oct '19

Hi everyone Due to Labor Day falling on our usual meeting slot and the university no longer opening up rooms on public holidays, this month's meeting takes place a week earlier, ie next Monday! "Creating a low power consumption Print Server using a Raspberry Pi. Peter Reutemann will present/demo the material prepared by Ian Stewart as he cannot attend the meeting unfortunately." -- details: https://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/257884319/ 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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Calibre Replacement Considerations
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 16 Oct '19

16 Oct '19

This blog post <https://anarc.at/software/desktop/calibre/> popped up in my screensaver display a few minutes ago, and was interesting enough for me to find the original. Calibre is the well-known software package for viewing and managing ebooks and converting between formats. As the blog writer says: It's used by Linux geeks as well as Windows power-users and vastly surpasses any native app shipped by ebook manufacturers. I know almost exactly zero people that have an ebook reader that do *not* use Calibre. However, there seem to be quite a few problems with it, not the least of which is that the principal developer seems to have trouble appreciating security vulnerabilities. Another issue is that it is written in Python 2 (though an in-progress port to Python 3 seems to be mostly “going well”). At one point the developer claimed that wasn’t a big deal, as he could continue to maintain Python 2 himself after it became obsolete upstream, but he seems to have backtracked from that position. One pressing problem is that newer versions of Calibre depend on Python 2 libraries that are no longer available in Debian (and therefore would also disappear from all the usual Debian derivatives, like Ubuntu and Linux Mint). However, the list of useful functions that Calibre performs is remarkably long, so finding substitutes for them all is going to be rather daunting.

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In 2019, multiple open source companies changed course—is it the right move?
by Peter Reutemann 16 Oct '19

16 Oct '19

'Free and open source software enables the world as we know it in 2019. From Web servers to kiosks to the big data algorithms mining your Facebook feed, nearly every computer system you interact with runs, at least in part, on free software. And in the larger tech industry, free software has given rise to a galaxy of startups and enabled the largest software acquisition in the history of the world. Free software is a gift, a gift that made the world as we know it possible. And from the start, it seemed like an astounding gift to give. So astounding in fact that it initially made businesses unaccustomed to this kind of generosity uncomfortable. These companies weren't unwilling to use free software, it was simply too radical and by extension too political. It had to be renamed: "open source." Once that happened, open source software took over the world. Recently, though, there's been a disturbance in the open source force. Within the last year, companies like Redis Labs, MongoDB, and Confluent all changed their software licenses, moving away from open source licenses to more restrictive terms that limit what can be done with the software, making it no longer open source software. The problem, argue Redis Labs, MongoDB and others, is a more modern tech trend: hosted software services. Also known as, "the cloud." Also known as Amazon AWS. Amazon, for its part, came out swinging, releasing its own version of the code behind Elastic Search this spring in response to licensing changes at Elastic (the company behind Elastic Search). And besides a new trademark dispute over Amazon's naming convention, Elastic has a very different response from that of MongoDB and Redis—it hasn't said a word in protest.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/is-the-software-worl… 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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Hard drives
by john 16 Oct '19

16 Oct '19

I sent this yesterday with four screenshots not aware that I may incur the wrath of the moderator. Here is a copy of the e-mail minus the pretty pictures. My neighbor just gave me a couple of failed Sea-gate hard drives to test I put them (one at a time) into my Linux mint machine. They showed up in my computer but would not mount.(see attachments) I ran the "Disks" utility which reported exactly the same problem (one incident of over temperature) for both disks However it stated that the disks were OK. One disk has 500GB of movies and TV series The other 375GB Operas and areas. The disks were used by a Mother and Son on two laptops and were cross pollinated between the two. I doubt that forcing a mount would reap a reward in this case. If any one can help with this it would be neat. Cheers John..

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Interview With Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller On 15 Years of Fedora
by Peter Reutemann 16 Oct '19

16 Oct '19

'Fedora -- as a Linux distribution -- will celebrate the 15th anniversary of its first release in November, though its technical lineage is much older, as Fedora Core 1 was created following the discontinuation of Red Hat Linux 9 in favor of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Five years after the start of Fedora.next, the distribution is on the right track -- stability has improved, and work on minimizing hard dependencies in packages and containers, including more audio/video codecs by default, flicker-free boot, and lowering power consumption for notebooks, among other changes, have greatly improved the Fedora experience, while improvements in upstream projects such as GNOME and KDE have likewise improved the desktop experience. In a wide-ranging interview with TechRepublic, Fedora project leader Matthew Miller discussed lessons learned from the past, popular adoption and competing standards for software containers, potential changes coming to Fedora, as well as hot-button topics, including systemd.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/10/16/1712207 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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meetup.com: members will pay soon
by Peter Reutemann 15 Oct '19

15 Oct '19

Hi everyone Came across this news item from meetup.com: https://www.meetup.com/lp/paymentchanges Members will soon get charged USD 2 per month for using meetup.com. So far, it was only the organizers that had to cough up money. The idea is to lower costs for organizers and ensure that people RSVPing actually show up. I'll put this as topic for the upcoming AGM. In the meantime, we should start looking for alternatives. E.g.: https://alternativeto.net/software/meetup/ Personally, I like GetTogether (https://gettogether.community/). 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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UK’s AMD-CPU-Based Archer2 Supercomputer At Edinburgh Uni
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 15 Oct '19

15 Oct '19

What’s notable about this super <https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/15/uk_archer2_supercomputer/> is that it uses AMD CPUs instead of Intel, and it is (mostly) CPU-only, with a small number of GPUs available on the side.

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