- wlug - University of Waikato Mail Lists

Ubuntu 17.10: Return of the GNOME
by Peter Reutemann 27 Nov '17

27 Nov '17

'If you've been following the Linux world at all, you know this has been an entire year for spring cleaning. Early in 2017, Canonical stopped work on its homegrown Unity desktop, Mir display server, and its larger vision of "convergence"—a unified interface for Ubuntu for phones, tablets, and desktops. And now almost exactly six years after Ubuntu first switched from GNOME 2 to the Unity desktop, that has been dropped, too. The distro is back to GNOME, and Canonical recently released Ubuntu 17.10, a major update with some significant changes coming to the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system. In light of the GNOME switch, this release seems like more of a homecoming than an entirely new voyage. But that said, Ubuntu 17.10 simultaneously feels very much like the start of a new voyage for Ubuntu. The last few Ubuntu desktop releases have been about as exciting as OpenSSH releases—you know you need to update, but beyond that, no one really cares. Sure, there have been a few feature updates with each new numeric increment, perhaps some slightly more up-to-date GNOME and GTK components under the hood. But by and large, Ubuntu's Unity 7 desktop has been in maintenance mode for several years. That period of stagnation turned Ubuntu from one of the more interesting operating systems around into just another Linux distro barely worthy of mention. This trend changes with 17.10. There are big changes—an entirely new default desktop in fact—but this release feels different not because the desktop has changed, but because Ubuntu feels like it once again has a sense of focus and direction. Even Canonical's letter-based naming scheme has arrived at a starting over point: "Artful Aardvark" is 17.10's nickname.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/11/ubuntu-17-10-return-of-the-gnome/ 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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Minecraft In School!?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 26 Nov '17

26 Nov '17

<http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11948169>: Teacher Adele Warburton says Minecraft is more than just a fun computer game. She says using Minecraft as a learning tool encourages 21st century skills such as collaboration, communication, creativity and problem solving. It also teaches the children about being good digital citizens. "We talk about how you wouldn't rip someone's book up, therefore you wouldn't tear down their house in Minecraft."

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Clear Linux Beats CentOS, openSUSE, and Ubuntu in (Enterprise) Benchmark Tests
by Peter Reutemann 26 Nov '17

26 Nov '17

'Recently completed Linux distro benchmarks by Phoronix show Intel's Clear Linux is the most powerful on x86 hardware. A six-way, enterprise-focused Linux distro comparison show Clear Linux being the fastest with a Core i9 and Xeon systems, easily beating CentOS, openSUSE, and Ubuntu in a majority of the tests. When doing an 11-way Linux distro boot test they also found Clear Linux easily booted the fastest followed by the Clear-inspired Solus distribution. Clear Linux does work on AMD hardware and works on Intel CPUs back to Sandy Bridge but leverages its speed from optimized compiler settings, specially built libraries capable of AVX instructions on supported systems, a specially tuned kernel configuration, and other optimizations/patches. Debian 9.2 and Fedora 27 "ended up being dropped from this article due to data overload," the article concludes, "and those distributions really not offering anything really different in terms of the performance."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/17/11/27/0227218 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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There's A Cluster of 750 Raspberry Pi's at Los Alamos National Lab
by Peter Reutemann 26 Nov '17

26 Nov '17

'Slashdot reader overheardinpdx shares a video from the SC17 supercomputing conference where Bruce Tulloch from BitScope "describes a low-cost Rasberry Pi cluster that Los Alamos National Lab is using to simulate large-scale supercomputers." Slashdot reader mspohr describes them as "five rack-mount Bitscope Cluster Modules, each with 150 Raspberry Pi boards with integrated network switches." With each of the 750 chips packing four cores, it offers a 3,000-core highly parallelizable platform that emulates an ARM-based supercomputer, allowing researchers to test development code without requiring a power-hungry machine at significant cost to the taxpayer. The full 750-node cluster, running 2-3 W per processor, runs at 1000W idle, 3000W at typical and 4000W at peak (with the switches) and is substantially cheaper, if also computationally a lot slower. After development using the Pi clusters, frameworks can then be ported to the larger scale supercomputers available at Los Alamos National Lab, such as Trinity and Crossroads. BitScope's Tulloch points out the cluster is fully integrated with the network switching infrastructure at Los Alamos National Lab, and applauds the Raspberry Bi cluster as "affordable, scalable, highly parallel testbed for high-performance-computing system-software developers."' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/11/25/051211 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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Happy 30th Birthday Microsoft Excel
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 24 Nov '17

24 Nov '17

Nice retrospective <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/24/microsoft_excel_30_years_old/> on how useful, and how overused, spreadsheets have been since the days of Visicalc and Lotus 1-2-3. Also found a link in one of the comments to this paper <https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-016-1044-7>, which reports on the worryingly high proportion of genetics research publications where gene names like “SEPT2” and “MARCH1” have been auto-converted by Excel to ... guess what data type it thought they were ...

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How Four Microsoft Engineers Proved That The “Darknet” Would Defeat DRM
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 24 Nov '17

24 Nov '17

A rerun of an article published five years ago, about a (in)famous paper from 2002 <https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/how-four-microsoft-engineers-pr…>: By itself, the paper's clever and provocative argument likely would have earned it a broad readership. But the really remarkable thing about the paper is who wrote it: four engineers at Microsoft whose work many expected to be at the foundation of Microsoft's future DRM schemes. The paper's lead author told Ars that the paper's pessimistic view of Hollywood's beloved copy protection schemes almost got him fired. But ten years later [2012], its predictions have proved impressively accurate. ... While Biddle and his colleagues didn't succeed in allaying the fears of Palladium's critics, the paper's central arguments have held up well. The authors predicted that the emergence of the darknet would produce a technological and legal arms race. They thought content companies and law enforcement would attack those aspects of the darknet that were most centralized, but that the darknet would adapt through greater decentralization. And they predicted that efforts to build secure DRM schemes would continue to fail. All of their predictions have continued to hold true over the last decade. And still continue to hold true.

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quote on slashdot today
by Peter Reutemann 23 Nov '17

23 Nov '17

"The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected. -- The Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd Edition, June 1972" (found at the bottom of https://slashdot.org/) 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 Will Warn Users When Visiting Sites That Suffered a Data Breach
by Peter Reutemann 23 Nov '17

23 Nov '17

'Mozilla engineers are working on a notifications system for Firefox that shows a security warning to users visiting sites that have suffered data breaches. The notifications system will use data provided by Have I Been Pwned?, a website that indexes public data breaches and allows users to search and see if their details have been compromised in any of these incidents. Work on this project has only recently started. The code to show these warnings is not even in the Firefox codebase but managed separately as an add-on available (on GitHub). The alert also includes an input field. In the add-ons current version this field doesn't do anything, but we presume it's there to allow users to search and see if their data was exposed during that site's security breach. Troy Hunt, Have I Been Pwned's author has confirmed his official collaboration with Mozilla on this feature.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/11/23/1451219 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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Skype for Linux. V4.3 replaced with V8.10
by Ian Stewart 23 Nov '17

23 Nov '17

Skype for Linux has been at V4.3 for quite some time (years?). This version has now gone end-of-life and Microsoft replaced it with Skype for Linux V8.10.0.4 on 8 November 2017. If you start Skype for Linux V4.3 it will launch the login screen. Upon entering your account and password details Skype will crash. You will not be the only one to have struck this feature and you can read about this here<https://askubuntu.com/questions/975804/skype-crashes-after-logging-in>. For an announcement on Skype for Linux from Microsoft and public discussion go here<https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/skype/forum/skype_linux-skype_startms-s…> I used synaptic packet manager to remove my Skype 4.3. I then downloaded Skype V8.10 from here<https://www.skype.com/en/get-skype/> for my Ubuntu 16.04 laptop. The file downloaded was skypeforlinux-64.deb at 63.9MB. Double clicking on the file auto-launched its installation. I found that my preferred settings had changed so you may want to spend some time going through them and setting them as desired. >From the public discussion<https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/skype/forum/skype_linux-skype_startms-s…> on this new version the 4th person to post a reply states... "with lots of improvements" Really? No more search in history. No more normal application settings. No more support of x32 processors. Enjoy the "improvements". cheers, Ian.

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How a Wi-Fi Pineapple Can Steal Your Data (And How To Protect Yourself From It)
by Peter Reutemann 22 Nov '17

22 Nov '17

'The Wi-Fi Pineapple is a cheap modified wireless router enables anyone to execute sophisticated exploits on Wi-Fi networks with little to no networking expertise. A report in Motherboard explains how it can be used to run a Wall of Sheep and execute a man-in-the-middle attack, as well as how you can protect yourself from Pineapple exploits when you're connected to public Wi-Fi. "... it's important that whenever you are done connecting to a public Wi-Fi network that you configure your phone or computer to 'forget' that network. This way your device won't be constantly broadcasting the SSIDs of networks it has connected to in the past, which can be spoofed by an attacker with a Pineapple," reports Motherboard. "Unfortunately there is no easy way to do this on an Android or an iPhone, and each network must be forgotten manually in the 'Manage Network' tab of the phone's settings. Another simple solution is to turn off your Wi-Fi functionality when you're not using it -- though that isn't as easy to do on some devices anymore -- and don't allow your device to connect to automatically connect to open Wi-Fi net' -- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/17/11/21/2255254 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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