wlug November 2014

wlug@list.waikato.ac.nz

16 participants
31 discussions

by Ian Young

Greets, On the last occasion I tried to send a message to the list, it was impounded as there was a suspect word or somesuch in the subject line. Robo was wrong, utterly nonsensical. I think there was some reference in the rejection blurb to (possibly non-existent?) moderation. The message never appeared afaik. Never got around to following it up, but it was a nuisance. Subsequently I stopped bothering to post. And as I press Send now, I find myself wondering whether this message will ever appear. ~ IsY

6 years, 8 months

Computer History

by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Anybody interested in talks by and about computer pioneers should look at this YouTube channel <http://www.youtube.com/user/ComputerHistory>, run by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. All kinds of fun stuff, from the experience of building a working version of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No 2 (designed in the 1830s), to the 30th anniversary of the Cray-1 supercomputer, to an interview with Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki. And if you want to see how far computer graphics has come, try this one: <http://www.youtube.com/user/VintageCG/>. Some old classics there. But boy, have we come a long way since characters made out of spheres and cylinders...

6 years, 8 months

Shall We Talk About Moving This List To Another Server?

by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

As I recall, the suggestion made last night was to put this list on Google Groups.

6 years, 8 months

Bitcoin uses the Bitcoin Core open source software

by Ian Stewart

Hi wlug folks, FYI: The latest release of Bitcoin is currently version 0.9.3 which was released 27 September 2014. You can download a suitable binary version of the Bitcoin Core from: https://www.bitcoin.org/en/download It is open source code and you can obtain it from: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin cheers, Ian. PS: This e-mail is a test to see if the spam filtering software blocks it being distributed to the wlug email list. From my experience about a year ago, I found that mails that contained the word "bitcoin" would be blocked.

6 years, 8 months

DragonFly BSD 4.0 Released

by Peter Reutemann

"From the release page: Version 4 of DragonFly brings Haswell graphics support, 3D acceleration, and improved performance in extremely high-traffic networks. DragonFly now supports up to 256 CPUs, Haswell graphics (i915), concurrent pf operation, and a variety of other devices." -- source: http://bsd.slashdot.org/story/14/11/26/184238 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

6 years, 8 months

AGM tomorrow

by Peter Reutemann

Hi everyone This year's AGM will take place tomorrow on November 24th, usual place at uni, MS4.G.02. Agenda: - President's Report - Treasurer's Report - Election of 2015 Committee - Consumption of pizza http://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/214504372/ Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

6 years, 8 months

Crowdfunding project promises a “laptop that respects essential freedoms”

by Peter Reutemann

'What price can you put on freedom? If you’re talking about software freedom, a new San Francisco-based computer company prices it at $1,949 and up. Purism has turned to the crowdfunding site Crowd Supply to fund and launch its first-ever product—a laptop that's as open source friendly as it is technically feasible. Advertised as a "Free and Open Source laptop that respects your essential freedoms," Purism’s Librem 15 laptop, now in prototype and ready for manufacture, is designed to run entirely with open source software, requiring no proprietary drivers. The only proprietary code on the laptop resides in its Intel firmware. ... It will ship with Purism’s own distribution of GNU/Linux based on Trisquel—an Ubuntu derivative that only includes free software. Purism will ship the Librem with Tor installed and turned on by default.' -- source: http://goo.gl/8COuog Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

6 years, 8 months

Using a password manager on Android? It may be wide open to sniffing attacks

by Peter Reutemann

'In early 2013, researchers exposed some unsettling risks stemming from Android-based password managers. In a paper titled "Hey, You, Get Off of My Clipboard," they documented how passwords managed by 21 of the most popular such apps could be accessed by any other app on an Android device, even those with extremely low-level privileges. They suggested several measures to help fix the problem. Almost two years later, the threat remains viable in at least some, if not all, of the apps originally analyzed. An app recently made available on Google Play, for instance, has no trouble divining the passwords managed by LastPass, one of the leading managers on the market, as well as the lesser-known KeePassDroid. With additional work, it's likely that the proof-of-concept ClipCaster app would work seamlessly against many other managers, too, said Xiao Bao Clark, the Australia-based programmer who developed it. While ClipCaster does nothing more than display the plaintext of passwords that LastPass and KeePassDroid funnel through Android handsets, a malicious app with only network privileges could send the credentials to an attacker without the user having any idea what was happening.' -- source: http://goo.gl/CsjkC8 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

6 years, 8 months

AGM next week

by Peter Reutemann

Hi everyone This year's AGM will take place next week on November 24th, usual place at uni, MS4.G.02. Agenda: - President's Report - Treasurer's Report - Election of 2015 Committee - Consumption of pizza http://www.meetup.com/WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup/events/214504372/ Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

6 years, 8 months

A Brilliant Mind: SUSE's Kernel Guru Speaks

by Peter Reutemann

"The man who in every sense sits at the nerve centre of SUSE Linux has no airs about him. At 38, Vojtch Pavlík is disarmingly frank and often seems a bit embarrassed to talk about his achievements, which are many and varied. He is every bit a nerd, but can be candid, though precise. As director of SUSE Labs, it would be no exaggeration to call him the company's kernel guru. Both recent innovations that have come from SUSE — patching a live kernel, technology called kGraft, and creating a means for booting openSUSE on machines locked down with secure boot, have been his babies." -- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/14/11/20/203259 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

6 years, 8 months

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wlug November 2014