Edge TV Now Online-Only
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
If there is anybody else besides me who wondered what happened to Edge
TV, as of the beginning of this month it is no longer on Freeview, it
can now only be viewed as an online stream
<https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/tv-radio/113928839/the-edge-tv-remo...>.
In the last few days of June, there was a promo announcing that it
was going HD, but I don’t recall it mentioning that it was leaving the
broadcast airwaves.
Quote:
MediaWorks chief executive Michael Anderson says the move is in
line with audience trends, which show people primarily consume
music videos online.
While that may be mostly true, personally I would go look for videos on
YouTube after seeing them first on Edge TV.
1 month, 1 week
The State Of Video Streaming In NZ
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
Apple’s TV+ streaming service is coming soon, followed by Disney’s one
<https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=1226...>.
Note:
Disney+ will break Sky's longtime near-monopoly on Disney content
in these parts. Disney says that, ultimately, Disney+ will be the
exclusive home of its content.
So to get a comparable range of TV content to that you currently have
free-to-air, you are going to have to subscribe to two or three or
maybe more different streaming services. The increasing multitude of
things to pay for isn’t about choice, but about no choice at all.
3 months, 4 weeks
“Open Source” Journalism
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro
This week’s “Listening Post” on Al Jazeera (viewable here
<https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2019/09/xinjiang-story...>)
talks, in the latter part, about this new phenomenon of “open source”
journalism. My understanding is, the meaning of “source” here is not
that of “source code” familiar to software developers, but “source of
information” as understood by journalists.
That means getting information from public sources available to all.
Even a tightly-controlled society like China makes a surprising amount
of information freely available online--more than it really wants to
make available, sometimes. And this information can be pieced together
like a puzzle by perceptive investigators, to point to conclusions
which can be directly at odds with public pronouncements from
Government officials.
4 months, 3 weeks
Yahoo Groups Is Winding Down and All Content Will Be Permanently Removed
by Peter Reutemann
'Yahoo announced on Wednesday that it is winding down its long-running
Yahoo Groups site. From a report:
As of October 21, users will no longer be able to post new content to
the site, and on December 14 Yahoo will permanently delete all
previously posted content. "You'll have until that date to save
anything you've uploaded," an announcement post reads. Yahoo Groups,
launched in 2001, is a cross between a platform for mailing lists and
internet forums. Groups can be interacted with on the Yahoo Groups
site itself, or via email. In the 18 years that it existed, numerous
niche communities made a home on the platform. Now, with the site's
planned obsolescence, users are looking for ways to save their Groups
history.'
-- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/10/16/1928228
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/
5 months, 3 weeks
Google's Network Congestion Algorithm Isn't Fair, Researchers Say
by Peter Reutemann
'Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University say a Google algorithm
designed help reduce internet congestion is mathematically unfair,
resulting in network management systems that may disadvantage some
traffic over others. From a report:
Several years back, Google began work on a new open source congestion
control algorithm (CCA) designed to improve the way the internet
functions. The result was BBR, short for Bottleneck Bandwidth and RTT
(Round-Trip Time). The goal of the project: to improve how network
packets travel between servers to mitigate congestion on the internet.
CCAs have long been used to help manage congestion -- ideally while
treating all traffic equally. But in a study unveiled last week at the
Internet Measurement Conference in Amsterdam, researchers revealed
that BBR doesn't actually do a very good job of that last part. In
fact, they found that during periods of congestion, BBR connections
would take up 40 percent of the available bandwidth, leaving the
remaining 60 percent to be fought over by the remaining users on the
network.'
-- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/10/31/204226
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/
7 months
Text Editor Releases 'Free Uyghur' Edition, Gets Swamped With Chinese Spam
by Peter Reutemann
Something from the Windows open-source camp rather than Linux:
'This week, the developer of the popular text- and code-editing
software Notepad++ released a new version update. Nothing seemed
particularly strange about it, except maybe the name: Notepad++ v7.8.1
is the "Free Uyghur" edition. In a blog post announcing the updated
version, developer Don Ho writes about the plight of the Uyghur
people, an ethnic minority in China that's faced persecution from the
country's authoritarian government. China operates internment camps
that are used to detain Uyghur people throughout the country's
Xinjiang region.
Since the announcement, the software's GitHub "issues" page has been
bombarded with spam, much of it in the Chinese language. "Stop sending
meaningless political-related issues, it just makes you look like an
idiot," reads one comment. Another one simply reads, "Bye !
Uninstall." There's a litany of curses, and one asks, "What do you
know about China?" Others have moved in to criticize the Chinese
government in response. Ho told The Verge that the software's
dedicated site was also under a distributed-denial-of-service attack,
but that it has been stopped by an anti-DDoS service provided by the
site's host.
Ho writes in the announcement that he anticipated potential pushback,
saying "talking about politics is exactly what software and commercial
companies generally try to avoid," but decided to take the step
anyway. "The problem is," Ho writes in the announcement of the Free
Uyghur edition, "if we don't deal with politics, politics will deal
with us.'
-- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/10/31/0037247
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/
7 months
Fedora 31 Released
by Peter Reutemann
'Fedora 31 has just rolled out the door. From a report:
Is it an exciting release? No, not really. Sure, enthusiasts will find
themselves thrilled withe inclusion of the GNOME 3.34 desktop
environment (with Qt Wayland by default), Linux 5.3 kernel, and Mesa
9.2, but otherwise, it is fairly boring. You know what? That's not a
bad thing. In 2019, Fedora is simply a mature and stable operating
system that only needs to follow an evolutionary path at this time --
not revolutionary. It stands alone as the world's best desktop Linux
distribution. "Fedora 31 Workstation provides new tools and features
for general users as well as developers with the inclusion of GNOME
3.34. GNOME 3.34 brings significant performance enhancements which
will be especially noticeable on lower-powered hardware. Fedora 31
Workstation also expands the default uses of Wayland, including
allowing Firefox to run natively on Wayland under GNOME instead of the
XWayland backend as with prior releases," says The Fedora Project.'
-- sources: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/10/31/168259
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/
7 months
Appeal
by john
Western community center has recently had all the computers upgraded.
However there are ten machines but only five working mouse (mice?) I
would find the job easier if there a couple of five port switches
available. If any one feels they can help with either or both of these
please contact me (can travel)
Cheers John..
7 months
New 'Unremovable' XHelper Malware Has Infected 45,000 Android Devices
by Peter Reutemann
'Over the past six months, a new Android malware strain has made a
name for itself after popping up on the radar of several antivirus
companies, and annoying users thanks to a self-reinstall mechanism
that has made it near impossible to remove. Named xHelper, this
malware was first spotted back in March but slowly expanded to infect
more than 32,000 devices by August (per Malwarebytes), eventually
reaching a total of 45,000 infections this month (per Symantec). The
malware is on a clear upward trajectory. Symantec says the xHelper
crew is making on average 131 new victims per day and around 2,400 new
victims per month. Most of these infections have been spotted in
India, the U.S., and Russia.
According to Malwarebytes, the source of these infections is "web
redirects" that send users to web pages hosting Android apps. These
sites instruct users on how to side-load unofficial Android apps from
outside the Play Store. Code hidden in these apps downloads the
xHelper trojan. The good news is that the trojan doesn't carry out
destructive operations. According to both Malwarebytes and Symantec,
for most of its operational lifespan, the trojan has shown intrusive
popup ads and notification spam. The ads and notifications redirect
users to the Play Store, where victims are asked to install other apps
-- a means through which the xHelper gang is making money from
pay-per-install commissions.
What's interesting about xHelper is that it gains access to an Android
device via an initial app and installs itself as a separate
self-standing service. Furthermore, you can't remove the app, as the
trojan reinstalls itself every time, even after users perform a
factory reset.'
-- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/10/29/2121244
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/
7 months
How a months-old AMD microcode bug destroyed my weekend [UPDATED]
by Peter Reutemann
'This weekend, I was excited to deploy my first Ryzen 3000-powered
workstation in my home office. Unfortunately, a microcode
bug—originally discovered in July but still floating around in large
numbers in the wild—wrecked my good time. I eventually got my Ryzen
3700X system working, and it's definitely fast. But unfortunately,
it's still bugged, and there's no easy way to fix it.
Not long after the product launch, AMD Ryzen 3000 customers started
noticing problems with their shiny new CPUs. Windows users couldn't
successfully launch Destiny 2 (due to a power-management bug,
unrelated to the one sidelining my system), and Linux users in many
cases couldn't even get their system to boot. Jason Evangelho covered
the initial discovery and report of the bug at Forbes back in July,
and an AMD representative provided him with a statement by email:
"AMD has identified the root cause and implemented a BIOS fix for an
issue impacting the ability to run certain Linux distributions and
Destiny 2 on Ryzen 3000 processors. We have distributed an updated
BIOS to our motherboard partners, and we expect consumers to have
access to the new BIOS over the coming days."
This sounds happy and upbeat, but the reality isn't quite so simple.
When there's a bug in the CPU microcode, you're at the mercy of your
motherboard vendor to release a new system BIOS that will update it
for you—you can't just go to some download link at AMD and apply a fix
yourself.
AMD responded to the bug in July. As far as I can tell, AMD did so
only by direct email response; there's no press release about it—and
the company's response made it sound like everything would be fixed in
a week or two.
I have the unfortunate duty of reporting to you, three months later,
that it is not.'
-- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/10/how-a-months-old-amd-microcode-bu...
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/
7 months
