For quite a while now, I’ve been annoyed by the system notification
volume going to 100% on my Debian systems, regardless of my attempts to
set it to a lower level. For example, when I open the KDE System
Settings app, change something, then try to close the window, the sound
that accompanies the save/discard/cancel alert is always startlingly
loud.
I think I have finally found a fix: in your /etc/pulse/daemon.conf,
put in a line saying
flat-volumes = no
(You should find an existing comment “; flat-volumes = yes” that
indicates the default.)
You can make this new setting take effect in the current session
immediately without having to logout or reboot, by executing the
following as the currently-logged-in user:
pulseaudio -k
(This kills and restarts the PulseAudio daemon for your user session.)
There are several discussions of the pros and cons of this issue online,
going back some years. For example, here
<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1265267>. Also a mention
about the “flat-volumes” setting in the ever-reliable Arch Linux Wiki
here <https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio>.
Seems the Wi-Fi Alliance is having yet another crack at coming up with
a really secure protocol, this time to be called WPA3
<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/09/wi_fi_wpa3/>.
Does anybody care? Remember that on the Internet, security is
implemented between the endpoints, the protocols are designed not to
care that everything in-between might be pawed through by
eavesdroppers, or even active attackers trying to inject fake data.
'Long-time Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein argues that fixing
Facebook may be impossible because "Facebook's entire ecosystem is
predicated on encouraging the manipulation of its users by third
parties who posses the skills and financial resources to leverage
Facebook's model. These are not aberrations at Facebook -- they are
exactly how Facebook was designed to operate." Meanwhile one fund
manager is already predicting that sooner or later every social media
platform "is going to become MySpace," adding that "Nobody young uses
Facebook," and that the backlash over Cambridge Analytica "quickens
the demise."
But Slashdot reader silvergeek asks, "is there a safe, secure, and
ethical alternative?" to which tepples suggests "the so-called
IndieWeb stack using the h-entry microformat." He also suggests
Diaspora, with an anonymous Diaspora user adding that "My family uses
a server I put up to trade photos and posts... Ultimately more people
need to start hosting family servers to help us get off the cloud
craze... NethServer is a pretty decent CentOS based option."
Meanwhile Slashdot user Locke2005 shared a Washington Post profile of
Mastodon, "a Twitter-like social network that has had a massive spike
in sign-ups this week."
Mastodon's code is open-source, meaning anybody can inspect its
design. It's distributed, meaning that it doesn't run in some data
center controlled by corporate executives but instead is run by its
own users who set up independent servers. And its development costs
are paid for by online donations, rather than through the marketing of
users' personal information... Rooted in the idea that it doesn't
benefit consumers to depend on centralized commercial platforms
sucking up users' personal information, these entrepreneurs believe
they can restore a bit of the magic from the Internet's earlier days
-- back when everything was open and interoperable, not siloed and
commercialized.
The article also interviews the founders of Blockstack, a
blockchain-based marketplace for apps where all user data remains
local and encrypted. "There's no company in the middle that's hosting
all the data," they tell the Post. "We're going back to the world
where it's like the old-school Microsoft Word -- where your
interactions are yours, they're local and nobody's tracking them." On
Medium, Mastodon founder Eugene Rochko also acknowledges Scuttlebutt
and Hubzilla, ending his post with a message to all social media
users: "To make an impact, we must act."
Lauren Weinstein believes Google has already created an alternative to
Facebook's "sick ecosystem": Google Plus. "There are no ads on
Google+. Nobody can buy their way into your feed or pay Google for
priority. Google doesn't micromanage what you see. Google doesn't sell
your personal information to any third parties..." And most
importantly, "There's much less of an emphasis on hanging around with
those high school nitwits whom you despised anyway, and much more a
focus on meeting new persons from around the world for intelligent
discussions... G+ posts more typically are about 'us' -- and tend to
be far more interesting as a result." (Even Linus Torvalds is already
reviewing gadgets there.)
Wired has also compiled their own list of alternatives to every
Facebook service. But what are Slashdot's readers doing for their
social media fix? Leave your own thoughts and suggestions in the
comments.
Is there a good alternative to Facebook?'
-- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/03/25/0039218
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/
'Neowin reports of Adobe's recent announcement of its new Marketing
Cloud Device Co-op initiative:
The announcement of the new solution for tracking customers across
devices was made at the Adobe Summit this week in Las Vegas to a
digital marketing conference. According to an Adobe blog post released
earlier this month citing Forrester, consumers are increasingly
accessing multiple devices before making a purchase decision -- an
average of 5.5 connected devices per person. This behavior creates a
challenge for retailers, who cannot easily target people in their
marketing campaigns, ultimately depending on Facebook or Google to
track people instead of devices. Both Facebook and Google are able to
do this job because of the massive amount of users logged into their
ecosystems regularly, so most retailers have been opting to use those
platforms as a way to reach potential customers. But Adobe's approach
is to provide a platform agnostic solution acting as a glue between
the world's biggest brands' own data management platforms.
In order for Device Co-op to work, each company that has joined the
initiative will provide Adobe with "cryptographically hashed login
IDs" and HTTP header data, which Adobe claims will completely hide the
customer's identity. This data will be used to create groups of
devices used by the same person or household, which will then be made
available to all the members of the initiative so they can target
people on different devices, instead of creating one customer profile
per device, as can be seen from the example given in the image above.
Until now, some 60 companies have joined the Adobe initiative,
including brands such as Subway, Sprint, NFL, Lenovo, Intel, Barnes &
Noble, and Subaru. Also, preliminary measurements made by Adobe
indicate that Device Co-op could link up to 1.2 billion devices
worldwide, based on the amount of accesses seen by current members.
But it is important to note that the initiative is currently
collecting data of U.S. and Canada users only.
Adobe is claiming the initiative will not disclose a user's identity
to its members, including any personal data, but, given the recent
Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal, many will be skeptical of
those claims. Thankfully, Adobe is allowing users to completely opt
out all of their devices from the services via this website.'
-- source: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/18/03/31/0059259
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/
'Each year the Free Software award goes to someone making "a great
contribution to the progress and development of free software, through
activities that accord with the spirit of free software." This year's
winner is a former executive of the GNOME Foundation, Karen Sandler.
Jeremy Allison - Sam, Slashdot reader #8,157, brought this
announcement.
Richard Stallman, President of the FSF, presented Sandler with the
award during a ceremony. Stallman highlighted Sandler's dedication to
software freedom. Stallman told the crowd that Sandler's "vivid
warning about backdoored nonfree software in implanted medical devices
has brought the issue home to people who never wrote a line of code.
Her efforts, usually not in the public eye, to provide pro bono legal
advice to free software organizations and [with Software Freedom
Conservancy] to organize infrastructure for free software projects and
copyleft defense, have been equally helpful."
In her acceptance speech, Sandler spoke about her dedication to free
software as a patient, advocate and professional. "Coming to terms
with a dangerous heart condition should never have cost me fundamental
control over the technology that my life relies on", said Sandler...
"This issue is personal not just for me but for anyone who relies on
software, and today that means every single person." '
-- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/03/31/0322217
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/
'The founder of Rendition Security believes his daughter "is more safe
on a Chromebook than a Windows laptop," and he's not the only one.
CNET's staff reporter argues that Google's push for simplicity, speed,
and security "ended up playing off each other." mspohr shared this
article:
Heading to my first security conference last year, I expected to see a
tricked-out laptop running on a virtual machine with a private network
and security USB keys sticking out -- perhaps something out of a scene
from "Mr. Robot." That's not what I got. Everywhere I went I'd see
small groups of people carrying Chromebooks, and they'd tell me that
when heading into unknown territory it was their travel device... "If
you want prehardened security, then Chromebooks are it," said Kenneth
White, director of the Open Crypto Audit Project. "Not because they're
Google, but because Chrome OS was developed for years and it
explicitly had web security as a core design principle...." Drewry and
Liu focused on four key features for the Chromebook that have been
available ever since the first iteration in 2010: sandboxing, verified
boots, power washing and quick updates. These provided security
features that made it much harder for malware to pass through, while
providing a quick fix-it button if it ever did.
That's not to say Chrome OS is impervious to malware. Cybercriminals
have figured out loopholes through Chrome's extensions, like when
37,000 devices were hit by the fake version of AdBlock Plus. Malicious
Android apps have also been able to sneak through the Play Store. But
Chrome OS users mostly avoided massive cyberattack campaigns like
getting locked up with ransomware or hijacked to become part of a
botnet. Major security flaws for Chrome OS, like ones that would give
an attacker complete control, are so rare that Google offers rewards
up to $200,000 to anyone who can hack the system.
The article argues that "Fewer software choices mean limited options
for hackers. Those are some of the benefits that have led security
researchers to warm up to the laptops...
"Chrome OS takes an approach to security that's similar to the one
Apple takes with iOS and its closed ecosystem."'
-- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/03/31/0443257
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/
'Google, Qualcomm, and Samsung "are among 80 tech companies joining
forces to develop a new open-source chip design for new technologies
like self-driving vehicles," writes Seeking Alpha, citing a
(pay-walled) report on The Information. "Western Digital and Nvidia
also plan to use the new chip design for some of their products,"
while Tesla "has joined the RISC-V Foundation and is considering using
the tech in its new chip efforts."
MIT Technology Review adds that while Arm had hoped to bring their
low-power/high performance processors to AI and self-driving cars,
"The company that masterminded the processor inside your smartphone
may find that a set of free-to-use alternative designs erode some of
its future success."'
-- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/03/31/0622248
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/
'Microsoft's January and February security fixes for Intel's Meltdown
processor vulnerability opened up an even worse security hole on
Windows 7 PCs and Server 2008 R2 boxes. From a report:
This is according to researcher Ulf Frisk, who previously found
glaring shortcomings in Apple's FileVault disk encryption system.
We're told Redmond's early Meltdown fixes for 64-bit Windows 7 and
Server 2008 R2 left a crucial kernel memory table readable and
writable for normal user processes. This, in turn, means any malware
on those vulnerable machines, or any logged-in user, can manipulate
the operating system's memory map, gain administrator-level
privileges, and extract and modify any information in RAM. The
Meltdown chip-level bug allows malicious software, or unscrupulous
logged-in users, on a modern Intel-powered machine to read passwords,
personal information, and other secrets from protected kernel memory.
But the security fixes from Microsoft for the bug, on Windows 7 and
Server 2008 R2, issued in January and February, ended up granting
normal programs read and write access to all of physical memory'
-- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/03/28/2010240
Time to move to another operating system...
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/
From
<https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/windows-leader-terry-myerson-out-as…>:
The Windows platform has many masters. It is important for both
Microsoft's client and server businesses, of course, but it's also
fundamental to the Azure platform. While it has become increasingly
unified, responsibility for its development (and financial
reporting) has often been split between divisions.
Conway’s Law says that any piece of software reflects the
organizational structure that produced it. The fact that there is no
single mind in charge of the overall product will inevitably manifest
itself in discontinuities in the characteristics of that product.
Yes, I know: scratch that future tense. It already has.