- wlug - University of Waikato Mail Lists

DSA Slowly Going Away
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 24 Nov '22

24 Nov '22

I notice that the new version of OpenSSH in Debian Unstable is taking another step toward dropping support for the DSA algorithm for key generation. I can remember back when DSA was introduced as an alternative to RSA. Unlike RSA, which is an encryption algorithm that can also be used for digital signatures, DSA was deliberately designed to be usable for signatures but not for encryption. This was back in the day when the US Government was still restricting exports of strong encryption products. Not long after that, I remember a research paper being published showing that DSA could in fact be used as an encryption algorithm. It wasn’t particularly efficient or even very practical, but it could theoretically be done. There was a time, in fact, when DSA was actually being preferred to RSA for generating SSH keys. Just checking the ssh-keygen man page, and the current default is RSA.

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Windows Subsystem for Linux with GUI apps launches for Windows 10
by Peter Reutemann 24 Nov '22

24 Nov '22

'The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), one of the best reasons to run Windows 11, is now available to Windows 10 users, in the latest version and with all its features. WSL dropped its "preview" label with this 1.0 release, and aims to simplify its installation from here on out. Getting the best version of WSL used to mean installing big, system-level Windows updates (including 11 itself). As part of its broader moving of key apps into its Store, Microsoft now offers the most feature-rich version of WSL there. "The in-Windows version of WSL will still receive critical bug fixes, but the Store version of WSL is where new features and functionality will be added," Windows Developer Platform Program Manager Craig Loewen noted in a blog post. Loewen noted that the "WSL community's requests" drove Microsoft to make the latest, GUI-ready framework version available to Windows 10 users. Now a Store installation is the default, even if you use the command line (PowerShell) to install and update WSL. Now anyone whose system is capable of running WSL has access to graphical apps and (optional) systemd support, and can hopefully spend less time wondering which WSL version they have, what they need, and what the differences are.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/windows-subsystem-for-linux-with-gu… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Network-crashing leap seconds to be abandoned by 2035, for at least a century
by Peter Reutemann 23 Nov '22

23 Nov '22

'There are not many things you can get Facebook, Google, the United States, France, and Linus Torvalds to agree on, but one of them has come to pass. A near-unanimous vote on Friday in Versailles, France, by parties to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM in its native French) on Resolution 4 means that starting in 2035, the leap second, the remarkably complicated way of aligning the Earth's inconsistent rotation with atomic-precision timekeeping, will see its use discontinued. Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, will run without them until 2135. It was unclear whether any leap seconds might occur before then, though it seems unlikely. The assumption is that within those 100 years, time-focused scientists (metrologists) will have found a way to synchronize time as measured by humans to time as experienced by our planet orbiting the Sun. But most people will not notice any difference at all, even as the time difference could reach up to one minute by the end of that 100 years.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/11/network-crashing-leap-seconds-to-be… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Tumblr To Add Support For ActivityPub, the Social Protocol Powering Mastodon and Other Apps
by Peter Reutemann 22 Nov '22

22 Nov '22

'TechCrunch: Tumblr will add support for ActivityPub, the open, decentralized social networking protocol that's today powering social networking software like Twitter alternative Mastodon, the Instagram-like Pixelfed, video streaming service PeerTube, and others. The news was revealed in a response to a Twitter user's complaint about Mastodon's complexities. Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg -- whose company acquired Tumblr from Verizon in 2019 -- suggested the user "come to Tumblr" as the site would soon "add activitypub for interconnect." "Don't stress," he said, before clarifying that Tumblr first has to deal with the waves of new users coming in right now from Twitter, but that support for "interop and activitypub" were due to come "ASAP." In short, this announcement means Tumblr would move from being only a niche blogging platform to instead become a part of a larger, decentralized social network of sorts -- and one whose user base has grown in size in recent days as people flee Elon Musk's Twitter in search of new communities. The ActivityPub protocol, its website explains, provides a client-to-server API for creating, updating, and deleting content as well as a federal server-to-server API for delivering notifications and subscribing to content. In practice, this means that Mastodon users can interact and follow users on other instances (independently run nodes), as well as with users on other social apps (like PeerTube), which also support the implementation of ActivityPub. It makes for a web of social networks where users can find and follow each other without having to set up new accounts on each new service. This is the opposite approach to today's "walled garden" social networks, where a post on one platform can't be viewed by those on others, unless you re-upload or repost the content directly or share a link to the other site where the content can be found.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/22/11/21/2320217 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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A History Of ARM, Part 2
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 22 Nov '22

22 Nov '22

Quite a nice article <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/a-history-of-arm-part-2-everything-…> covering the founding of ARM Ltd as parent company Acorn was hitting financial headwinds. Apple played an absolutely crucial part in keeping the company viable in its early days by being among its biggest customers: the Newton PDA sold 60,000 units in its first year, which was a flop for Apple but, at $20 a unit for royalties, a big boost for ARM Ltd at the time. In those early days, the company found it an uphill struggle to be taken seriously by the bigger players. Companies like Motorola and TI had trouble appreciating why they could not create their own in-house designs instead of licensing one from ARM, even when the latter could be done for a fraction of the cost of the former. But the boss was canny and persistent enough to make the right sort of deals to build a sound basis for the company: For Robin Saxby, the idea of working with rival chip companies was always part of the strategy. “Turn your enemies into friends,” he would say. “Why should they fight you if they can make more money for themselves by collaborating with you?” Unfortunately, big companies don’t always act rationally ...

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AMD Finally Opens Up Its Radeon Raytracing Analyzer 'RRA' Source Code
by Peter Reutemann 22 Nov '22

22 Nov '22

'Michael Larabel, reporting for Phoronix: This summer AMD announced the Radeon Raytracing Analyzer "RRA" as part of their developer software suite for helping to profile ray-tracing performance/issues on Windows and Linux with both Direct3D 12 and the Vulkan API. Initially the RRA 1.0 release was binary-only but now AMD has made good on their "GPUOpen" approach and made it open-source. As noted back in my original article from July on the Radeon Raytracing Analyzer release: "Radeon Raytracing Analyzer is hosted on GitHub but the only content in the actual Git repository right now is documentation, so it would appear that at least initially this is a closed-source package though some documentation also says it's MIT licensed." Last week that was cleared up with the Radeon Raytracing Analyzer source code going public. There are build instructions for compiling the RRA 1.0 sources on both Microsoft Windows and Linux while the Linux instructions are tailoring to Ubuntu use. Building the Radeon Raytracing Analyzer depends upon the Qt 5.15 toolkit.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/11/21/1716219 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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The Creator of Homebrew's Plan To Get Open Source Contributors Paid - Using Blockchain
by Peter Reutemann 21 Nov '22

21 Nov '22

'The creator of the Linux/macOS package manager Homebrew has a new package manager named Tea. But according to Stack Overflow's podcast, the software also "aims to solve the problem of providing funding for popular open source projects." While he is not a crypto bull, Max was inspired with a solution for the open source funding dilemma by his efforts to buy and sell an NFT. A contract written in code and shared in public enforced a rule sending a portion of his proceeds to the digital objects original creator. What if the same funding mechanism could be applied to open source projects?Â In March of 2022, Max and his co-founder launched Tea, a sort of spirtual successor to Homebrew. It has a lot of new features Max wanted in a package manager, plus a blockchain based approach to ensuring that creators, maintainers, and contributors of open source software can all get paid for their efforts. You can read Max's launch post on Tea here and yes, of course there is a white paper. The paper describes the proposed solution as "a decentralized system for fairly remunerating open-source developers based on their contributions to the entire ecosystem and enacted through the tea incentive algorithm applied across all entries in the tea registry." And the launch post calls tea "our revolution against a failing system," arguing "We're taking our knowledge of how to make development more efficient and throwing innovations nobody has ever really considered before. "Package managers haven't been sexy. Until now. Most importantly, we're moving the package registry on-chain (relax, we'll use a low-energy proof of stake chain). This has numerous benefits due to the inherent benefits of blockchain technology." For starters, decentralized storage will make the packages always-available and immutable, signed by maintainers themselves. But there's more: web3 has enabled novel new ways to distribute value, and with our system people who care about the health of the open source ecosystem buy some token and stake it. Periodically, we reward this staking because it is securing our token network. We give a portion of these rewards to the staker and a portion to packages of their choice along with all the dependencies of those packages. Note that no portion goes to us. We're not like the other app stores.... tea is the home to a DAO that will ensure the open source maintainers that keep the Internet running are rewarded as they deserve. An introduction to the white paper adds that in the spirit of the open source movement, "we're inviting developers, speculators, and enthusiasts alike to contribute to our white paper and help brew the future of the internet. This is our revolutionary undertaking to create equitable openâsource for web3, and we want you to be a part of laying its groundwork."' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/11/19/2047223 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Can Mastodon Be A Twitter Alternative?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 18 Nov '22

18 Nov '22

This article <https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/11/7/can-mastodon-be-a-twitter-alter…> says: With Twitter in disarray since the world’s richest person took control of it last week, Mastodon, a decentralised, open alternative from privacy-obsessed Germany, has seen a flood of new users. Nevertheless, this “flood” is a mere trickle compared to the torrent of users that is Twitter -- a million or so active monthly users on the one, versus over 200 times that on the other. The decentralization of Mastodon means that no single entity can take control of it. But it also makes it harder for users to find their way around. [Mastodon creator] Rochko, whose Mastodon foundation runs on a shoestring crowdfunded budget topped up with a modest grant from the European Commission, has found a particularly receptive audience among privacy-conscious European regulators. Germany’s data protection commissioner is waging a campaign to get government bodies to close their Facebook pages, since, he says, there is no way of hosting a page there that conforms to European privacy laws. Authorities should move to the federal government’s own Mastodon instance, he says. The European Commission also maintains a server for European Union bodies to toot from. Yeah ... “toot” ...

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DuckDuckGo’s anti-tracking Android tool could be “even more powerful” than iOS
by Peter Reutemann 17 Nov '22

17 Nov '22

'Privacy-focused search site DuckDuckGo has added yet another way to prevent more of your data from going to advertisers, opening its App Tracking Protection for Android to beta testers. DuckDuckGo is positioning App Tracking Protection as something like Apple's App Tracking Transparency for iOS devices, but "even more powerful." Enabling the service in the DuckDuckGo app for Android (under the "More from DuckDuckGo" section) installs a local VPN service on your phone, which can then start automatically blocking trackers on DDG's public blocklist. DuckDuckGo says this happens "without sending app data to DuckDuckGo or other remote servers."' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/duckduckgos-android-anti-tracking-t… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Fedora 37 Now Available With GNOME 43 Desktop, Official Raspberry Pi 4 Support
by Peter Reutemann 17 Nov '22

17 Nov '22

'Fedora 37 is now officially released. From a report: Fedora 37 brings the GNOME 43 desktop to Fedora Workstation 37, updated toolchain components like Glibc 2.36 and LLVM 15 and Binutils 2.38, official support for the Raspberry Pi 4, retiring 32-bit ARMv7 support, Fedora CoreOS has been promoted to a Fedora Edition, Perl 5.36, Python 3.11, RPM 4.18, LXQt 1.1, and a wealth of other updated packages.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/22/11/16/1744258 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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