- wlug - University of Waikato Mail Lists

Backblaze 2016 Hard Drive Report
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 31 Jan '17

31 Jan '17

<https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/01/8tb-hgst-disks-show-…>: Traditionally, the company has stuck with consumer-oriented disks. Backblaze argues that the extra cost of "enterprise" disks doesn't make sense for its usage pattern. Other studies have shown no significant difference in reliability between “enterprise” and “consumer” disks anyway.

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USB-C Power Meter
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 31 Jan '17

31 Jan '17

With all the worries over bad USB-C cables and vendors that play fast and loose with the power spec, here <https://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2017/01/usb-c-power-meter/> is a measurement gadget that can help to some extent. But as the article says: If you really want to test a new charger or cable before plugging it into an expensive device, your best bet is some DIYish electronics involving a breakout board and a multimeter. But there doesn't seem to be a plug-and-play version of that yet.

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The Trump-And-Dump Bot
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 30 Jan '17

30 Jan '17

This bot <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/30/trumps_corporate_twitter_trolling_t…> analyzes Trump’s tweets, identifies the company he is badmouthing, and does a quick short-sell to profit from the momentary dip in the company’s stock value. T3's approach involves using a Python Twitter bot and API calls to services like Indico for machine learning (sentiment analysis and entity recognition), Clearbit for company identification, Google Finance for stock pricing, and E‑Trade for executing the trade. They have been donating the profits to charity. Imagine that--an ethical use for short-selling...

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Windows Users: It Might Be Time To Stop Using Antivirus
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 27 Jan '17

27 Jan '17

The nail in the coffin, according to O'Callahan, is that software vendors rarely speak out about antivirus issues "because they need cooperation from the AV vendors." He then links to a mailing list thread in 2012, where he suggests keeping a list of the AV software that interferes with Firefox. Later in the thread, Mozilla PR swoops in and tells him to knock it off. <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/01/antivirus-is-bad/>

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Code-Signing Vs Software Developers
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 26 Jan '17

26 Jan '17

This item <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/26/windows_code_signing_changes/> is about Microsoft adopting some recommendations from the “Certificate Authority Security Council” that code-signing keys should be embedded in special hardware devices, not simply kept as files on a regular computer. Apparently they are also suggesting some yet-to-be-defined “cloud-based service” as an alternative, which raises some questions. One of the commenters linked this article <http://www.pcworld.com/article/2846653/storage-for-spies-how-the-fips-stand…> which gives a good overview of hardware signing key devices that are certified to the various levels of the FIPS 140-2 standard. The idea is not a new one. But like most security techniques that are worth a darn, it can cause all kinds of irritations in practical use.

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KDE-Branded Laptop
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 26 Jan '17

26 Jan '17

Announcing ... the KDE Slimbook <http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-Slimbook-Laptop>.

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why ifconfig may not work these days
by Ian Young 26 Jan '17

26 Jan '17

>From time to time I find myself wondering where *ifconfig* has gone. This article may provide the answer. https://lwn.net/Articles/710533/ See also: http://baturin.org/docs/iproute2/

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Mossberg: What?s up with Firefox, the browser that time forgot?
by rowan schischka 26 Jan '17

26 Jan '17

Happy new year everybody. Somehow i missed the first meeting. For the next one could we do a live benchmark of web browsers available on linux? Theres a couple of things to consider such as: how quickly new browser versions are available - security updates accuracy of rendering - i have found Midori feels fast but does not display some web pages the same as others Theres also flash and HTML5 we could look into. A few years ago (around 2010/2011) I made a simple HTML5 canvas with some animations that looked like a space invaders game, from memory, on debian i had the following results: IE, can't remember version, got around 20 fps chrome scored 120 something fps firefox received around 12 fps I dont know what benchmarks are available for us to use but it would be interesting, it would also be interesting to look at comparing browsers on fedora and ubuntu -- Kind Regards Rowan Schischka

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Mossberg: What’s up with Firefox, the browser that time forgot?
by Peter Reutemann 25 Jan '17

25 Jan '17

'Until about five years ago, techies and others who wanted a speedier, extensible, more privacy-oriented web browser on their desktops often immediately downloaded Mozilla's Firefox to use instead of Internet Explorer on Windows or Safari on the Mac. But those days seem long ago. Firefox is hardly discussed today, and its usage has cratered from a high of over 30 percent of the desktop browser market in 2010 to about 12 percent today, according to Mozilla, citing stats from NetMarketShare. (Various other analytics firms put the share as low as 10 percent or as high as 15 percent.) And Firefox’s share on mobile devices is even worse, at under 1 percent, according to the same firm. Today, the go-to-browser is Google’s Chrome, which has over a 50 percent share on both desktop and mobile, according to NetMarketShare.' -- source: http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/25/14376710/walt-mossberg-mozilla-firefox-br… 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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AdNauseam, Google, And The Myth Of The “Acceptable Ad”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 24 Jan '17

24 Jan '17

[AdNauseam 3.0] contains some new features we’ve been excited to discuss with users and critics, but the discussion was quickly derailed when we learned that Google had banned AdNauseam from its store, where it had been available for the past year. We also learned that Google has disallowed users from manually installing or updating AdNauseam on Chrome, effectively locking them out of their own saved data, all without prior notice or warning. <http://freedom-to-tinker.com/2017/01/24/adnauseam-google-and-the-myth-of-th…>

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