mailing list difficulties
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
5 years, 6 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...
5 years, 6 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.
5 years, 6 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
5 years, 6 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
5 years, 6 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
5 years, 6 months
