An Ordinary User’s Adventures In Linux
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
I helped an elderly friend set up his new PC yesterday. His
previous machine, over a decade old, was running Windows XP. I had set
up an Ubuntu dual-boot a few years back, and he liked playing the games.
But then the Linux boot stopped working--there was a message to the
effect “hd0 out of disk”, which sounded like a GRUB problem (“hd0”
being a GRUB disk name, not a Linux disk name). I booted up
SystemRescueCD, and found that disk space was ample. I did an fsck on
the Linux volume, and found no filesystem problems. I ran a badblocks
scan, and it reported several bad sectors, though oddly they only seemed
to be in the Windows partition (if I interpreted the numbers
correctly).
Naturally I searched online, but the hits I found for that error
message didn’t seem very helpful. Reinstalling GRUB didn’t help, so I
concluded there were likely other hardware problems, so time for a new
machine.
He got an entry-level dual-core AMD box from PBTech--their own house
build, in a CoolerMaster case--for well under a grand. Nothing fancy,
but good enough for his needs--mainly Web browsing, e-mail, a little
bit of word processing, and those games.
The PBTech box came without an OS. He could have got Windows 10 for it,
but considering he would be facing a learning curve coming from XP
regardless, I suggested going 100% Linux for all his daily needs, to
see if that would work. He could always spend the $160-odd extra on
Windows later if need be.
So I set it up with Linux Mint, since that seems to be everybody’s
favourite :). He was already using Firefox on Windows, so moving all his
Web bookmarks across was easy. The Mint install put an icon for
Thunderbird on the desktop by default, so I decided to try that for
e-mail. Getting his address book across from Outlook Express was
fairly straightforward, once I figured out how to map the exported CSV
field names correctly. The mail messages were slightly more fiddly, but
I found this extension
<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/>
which directly loads Microsoft’s .dbx files, and that seemed to work OK.
Then he wanted to play CDs. When we put in an audio CD, it came up with
options to run Banshee (media player) or Brasero (disc burner). The
Banshee media player wouldn’t play the CD directly, it insisted on
ripping it to the hard drive first. This was not really what he wanted.
I had a look round, and found KsCD, which will indeed play audio CDs
without trying to rip them to audio files first. As far as I know, this
is the only GUI Linux app that can do so.
So, day 1 ended on a reasonably successful note. He was already
noticing how much faster the new machine was. So we’ll see how it goes
from here...
2 years, 8 months
On Internet Privacy, Be Very Afraid
by Peter Reutemann
'Cybersecurity expert and Berkman Klein fellow Bruce Schneier talked
to the Gazette about what consumers can do to protect themselves from
government and corporate surveillance. From the interview:
GAZETTE: After whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations concerning
the National Security Agency's (NSA) mass surveillance operation in
2013, how much has the government landscape in this field changed?
SCHNEIER: Snowden's revelations made people aware of what was
happening, but little changed as a result. The USA Freedom Act
resulted in some minor changes in one particular government
data-collection program. The NSA's data collection hasn't changed; the
laws limiting what the NSA can do haven't changed; the technology that
permits them to do it hasn't changed. It's pretty much the same.
GAZETTE: Should consumers be alarmed by this?
SCHNEIER: People should be alarmed, both as consumers and as citizens.
But today, what we care about is very dependent on what is in the news
at the moment, and right now surveillance is not in the news. It was
not an issue in the 2016 election, and by and large isn't something
that legislators are willing to make a stand on. Snowden told his
story, Congress passed a new law in response, and people moved on.
GAZETTE: What about corporate surveillance? How pervasive is it?
SCHNEIER: Surveillance is the business model of the internet. Everyone
is under constant surveillance by many companies, ranging from social
networks like Facebook to cellphone providers. This data is collected,
compiled, analyzed, and used to try to sell us stuff. Personalized
advertising is how these companies make money, and is why so much of
the internet is free to users. We're the product, not the customer.'
-- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/17/08/29/1725246
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/
2 years, 9 months
New Ryzen Running Stable On Linux, Threadripper Builds Kernel In 36 Seconds
by Peter Reutemann
'After AMD confirmed the a "performance marginality problem" affecting
some Ryzen Linux users, RMAs are being issued and replacement Ryzen
processors arriving for affected opensource fans. Phoronix has been
able to confirm that the new Ryzen CPUs are running stable without the
segmentation fault problem that would occur under very heavy
workloads. They have also been able to test now the Ryzen Threadripper
1950X. The Threadripper 1950X on Linux is unaffected by any issues
unless you count the lack of a thermal reporting driver. With the 32
threads under Linux they have been able to build the Linux kernel in
just about a half minute.'
-- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/17/08/29/184243
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/
2 years, 9 months
Cryptocurrencies And Autonomous Weapons
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
Al Jazeer’s “Counting The Cost” economics program this week
<http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/countingthecost/2017/08/cryptocurrenc...>
talks, among other things, a bit about:
* Cryptocurrencies (e.g. Bitcoin) -- is it too early to start regulating
them? Start worrying about their use for illegal activities? Start
investing in them?
* Autonomous military weaponry -- should we start banning the creation
of weapons that can take their own decision to shoot to kill? Or is
more research needed?
By the way, mentioned in passing in the latter segment is that
Samsung-made autonomous guns are already deployed along South Korea’s
border with its northern neighbour.
2 years, 9 months
How the NSA Identified Satoshi Nakamoto
by Peter Reutemann
'The 'creator' of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, is the world's most
elusive billionaire. Very few people outside of the Department of
Homeland Security know Satoshi's real name. In fact, DHS will not
publicly confirm that even THEY know the billionaire's identity.
Satoshi has taken great care to keep his identity secret employing the
latest encryption and obfuscation methods in his communications.
Despite these efforts (according to my source at the DHS) Satoshi
Nakamoto gave investigators the only tool they needed to find him --
his own words. Using stylometry one is able to compare texts to
determine authorship of a particular work. Throughout the years
Satoshi wrote thousands of posts and emails and most of which are
publicly available. According to my source, the NSA was able to the
use the 'writer invariant' method of stylometry to compare Satoshi's
'known' writings with trillions of writing samples from people across
the globe. By taking Satoshi's texts and finding the 50 most common
words, the NSA was able to break down his text into 5,000 word chunks
and analyse each to find the frequency of those 50 words. This would
result in a unique 50-number identifier for each chunk. The NSA then
placed each of these numbers into a 50-dimensional space and flatten
them into a plane using principal components analysis. The result is a
'fingerprint' for anything written by Satoshi that could easily be
compared to any other writing. The NSA then took bulk emails and texts
collected from their mass surveillance efforts. First through PRISM
and then through MUSCULAR, the NSA was able to place trillions of
writings from more than a billion people in the same plane as
Satoshi's writings to find his true identity. The effort took less
than a month and resulted in positive match'
-- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/08/28/1725232
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/
2 years, 9 months