We chat with the chief technology officer behind Mycroft, an open source artificial intelligence for everyone. Then discuss Android’s adoption of Vulkan and the major impact it could have on desktop Linux & the nice new Linux exclusive features coming to Firefox.

Plus we revisit file syncing under Linux & discuss the really great options that have cropped up recently.

Thanks to:

• Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

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Show Notes:

Pre-Show:

• Mycroft: An Open Source Artificial Intelligence For Everyone by Joshua Montgomery — Kickstarter

Uses natural language to control Internet of Things. Built on Raspberry Pi this whole home A.I. plays media, controls lights & more.

Catch Up:

Kali linux 2.0 Released

We now find ourselves smack in the middle of the most significant release of Kali since 2013. Today is the day that Kali 2.0 is officially released.

Kali Linux is a Debian-based distribution oriented toward penetration testing and related tasks; the 2.0 release is now available. “There’s a new 4.0 kernel, now based on Debian Jessie, improved hardware and wireless driver coverage, support for a variety of Desktop Environments (gnome, kde, xfce, mate, e17, lxde, i3wm), updated desktop environment and tools – and the list goes on. But these bulletpoint items are essentially a side effect of the real changes that have taken place in our development backend. Ready to hear the real news? Take a deep breath, it’s a long list.” At the top of that list is that Kali is now a rolling distribution.

GNOME Announces Search for Executive Director

The GNOME Foundation is looking for qualified candidates for the position of Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. The Executive Director is critical for the Foundation, the public face of GNOME, the liaison to the GNOME Advisory Board

DigitalOcean

• DigitalOcean: SSD Cloud Server, VPS Server, Simple Cloud Hosting

Syncing Under Linux Revisited

• Ubuntu One file syncing code Open Sourced | Ubuntu Insights

Today, we’re happy to be open sourcing the biggest piece of our Ubuntu One file syncing service.

• Release Notes for 17 July 2015: SpiderOakONE 6.0

• Syncthing

Syncthing replaces proprietary sync and cloud services with something open, trustworthy and decentralized. Your data is your data alone and
you deserve to choose where it is stored, if it is shared with some third party and how it’s transmitted over the Internet.

• tinc wiki

• Run your own Firefox Accounts Server — Mozilla Services

The Firefox Accounts server is deployed on our systems using RPM packaging,
and we don’t provide any other packaging or publish official builds yet.

TING

• Ting – mobile that makes sense

Android Developers Blog

In order to address some of the sources of CPU overhead and provide developers with more explicit control over rendering, we’ve been working to bring a new 3D rendering API, Vulkan(tm), to Android.

• Gnomes per second in Vulkan and OpenGL ES – Imagination Blog

• Rich Geldreich’s Tech Blog: Things that drive me nuts about OpenGL

Here’s a brain dump of the things that sometimes drive me crazy about OpenGL.

• Metal for Developers – Apple Developer

Metal provides the lowest-overhead access to the GPU, enabling you to maximize the graphics and compute potential of your apps on iOS and OS X.

Linux Academy

• Linux Academy | Linux and AWS Online Training

Firefox — Notes (40.0) — Mozilla

Runs Linux from the people:

• Send in a pic/video of your runs Linux.
• Please upload videos to YouTube and submit a link via email or the subreddit.

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The post Vulkan the Metal Slayer | LINUX Unplugged 105 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Hypocrisy abounds this episode as new methods of tracking citizens by governments have been revealed & the campaign to shut down cop reporting on Waze has gone public.

Plus the amazing mesh network in Cuba, bullet proof vest for batteries in a smartphone & much more!

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Show Notes:

France Seeks to Sanction Web Companies for Posts Pushing Terror

President Francois Hollande said Tuesday in Paris the government will present a draft law next month that makes Internet operators “accomplices” of hate-speech offenses if they host extremist messages.

Researchers Tie Regin Malware To NSA, Five Eyes Intel Agencies

Researchers at Kaspersky Lab have discovered shared code and functionality between the Regin malware platform and a similar platform described in a newly disclosed set of Edward Snowden documents 10 days ago by Germany’s Der Spiegel. The link, found in a keylogger called QWERTY allegedly used by the so-called Five Eyes, leads them to conclude that the developers of each platform are either the same, or work closely together. “Considering the extreme complexity of the Regin platform and little chance that it can be duplicated by somebody without having access to its source codes, we conclude the QWERTY malware developers and the Regin developers are the same or working together,” wrote Kaspersky Lab researchers Costin Raiu and Igor Soumenkov today in a published report.

Police Organization Wants Cop-Spotting Dropped From Waze App

“The Register reports on a request from the US National Sheriffs’ Association, which “wants Google to block its crowd-sourced traffic app Waze from being able to report the position of police officers, saying the information is putting officer’s lives at risk.” From the article: “‘The police community needs to coordinate an effort to have the owner, Google, act like the responsible corporate citizen they have always been and remove this feature from the application even before any litigation or statutory action,’ AP reports Sheriff Mike Brown, the chairman of the NSA’s technology committee, told the association’s winter conference in Washington….Brown called the app a ‘police stalker,’ and said being able to identify where officers were located could put them at personal risk. Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, said his members had concerns as well. ‘I can think of 100 ways that it could present an officer-safety issue,’ Pasco said. ‘There’s no control over who uses it. So, if you’re a criminal and you want to rob a bank, hypothetically, you use your Waze.'”

DEA cameras tracking hundreds of millions of car journeys across the US

A U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration program to keep tabs on cars close to the U.S.-Mexican border has been gradually expanded nationwide and is regularly used by other law enforcement agencies in their hunt for suspects.

The extent of the system, which is said to contain hundreds of millions of records on motorists and their journeys, was disclosed in documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union as part of a Freedom of Information Act request. Much of the information disclosed to the ACLU was undated, making it difficult to understand the growth of the network, which is different from the cameras used to collect traffic tolls on expressways.

Batteries Made With Bulletproof Kevlar Fibers May Never Explode

The researchers at the University of Michigan layered nanofibers extracted from Kevlar on top of each other to create very thin insulating sheets. And it turns out the microscopic pores on this new material are actually far too small to allow the tips of those fern-like dendrite structures to poke through and make contact with other electrodes. Individual lithium-ions can still squeeze through as needed, but nothing else.

The post Two Waze Street | Tech Talk Today 122 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Researchers develop an ultrasonic mesh network to extract data from computer networks, Feedly and Evernote get attacked, and something is amiss with Windows 7.

Then its a great batch of your feedback, our answers, and much much more!

Thanks to:

— Show Notes: —

Exfiltrating data using an ultrasonic mesh network

• Researchers at the Fraunhofer institute in Germany have developed a protocol based on an underwater communications protocol, to pass messages between laptops using their speakers
• Fraunhofer Institute is famous for having invented the MP3 audio codec and being a significant contributor to the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video codec.
• The paper describes a ‘Covert Channel’ that can be used to circumvent firewalls and intrusion detection systems
• The system uses ultrasonic sound, emitted by laptop speakers and received by laptop microphones
• The range is about 20 meters and the provides about 20 bits/second of bandwidth
• The general principle is to create a mesh network of laptops in order to exfiltrate data from a protected network or location
• The proof of concept was created by installing a keylogger on a laptop, which would then send the data back to the attacker by emitting the ultrasonic (inaudible to the human ear) sounds, which would then be picked up by another infected machine and repeated, extending the transmission range
• Eventually the signal may be able to reach a machine outside of the protected area or network, and be received by the attack, or re-transmitted by regular means
• As a countermeasure, they suggest possibly disabling the speakers/microphone entirely
• As a more useful countermeasure, they suggest a low-pass filter that would either remove the ultrasonic frequencies from the output, or shift them down to audible range so they can be detected by humans
• The paper also discusses a host-based intrusion detection system that analyzes audio input and output for suspect signals
• Full PDF

Feedly And Evernote Go Down As Attackers Demand Ransom

• After restoring its services after Wednesday’s attack, the Feedly team reported in a blog post Thursday morning that it had been hit by a second DoS attack. As of late Thursday morning, Feedly is down again.
• On Thursday June 12th Feedly Posted to their Blog: “2:04am PST – Criminals are attacking feedly with a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). The attacker is trying to extort us for money to make it stop. We refused to give in and are working with our network providers to mitigate the attack as best as we can.”
• In Evernote’s case, the company noted yesterday evening that it was unavailable, and that it was working to neutralize a denial of service attack. A few hours later, a message on Evernote’s Twitter account said its service was restored – but it’s not out of the woods yet. “There may be a hiccup or two for the next 24 hours,” the tweet warned.
• At least in Feedly’s case the attackers demanded a ransom to stop the attack.
• It’s unknown as of now if the hackers are demanding ransom from Feedly on day two of the attack. The company has not responded to a request for comment.
• Denial of service attack [Neutralized] – Feedly Blog
• Feedly, Evernote And Others Become Latest Victims Of DDoS Attacks
• BBC News – Feedly and Evernote struck by denial of service cyber-attacks
• EuroBSDCon 2013 — Allan Jude — Mitigating DDoS Attacks at Layer 7

Microsoft patching flaws in Windows 8, but not Windows 7?

• Researchers found the gaps after they scanned 900 Windows libraries and uncovered a variety of security functions that were updated in Windows 8 but not in 7. They said the shortcoming could lead to the discovery of zero day vulnerabilities.
• The missing safe functions were part of Microsoft’s dedicated libraries intsafe.h and strsafe.h that help developers combat various attacks.
• Researcher Moti Joseph and malware analyst Marion Marschalek (@pinkflawd) developed a capable diffing (comparison) tool dubbed DiffRay which would compare Windows 8 with 7, and log any safe functions absent in the older platform.
• In a demonstration of DiffRay, the researchers found four missing safe functions in Windows 7 that were present in 8.
• Including:
  • bcrypt.dll!ConvertRsaPrivateBlobToFullRsa
  • netlogon.dll!NlpAddResourceGroupsToSamInfo
  • twext.dll!EscapeField (possible unpatched interger overflow in Windows 7, fixed in 8)
• Slides
• Video – What happens in Windows 7, stays in Windows 7

Feedback:

• SSD read-caching at hardware RAID level?

• What would you do to make a SoHo server the most reliable?

• GPG and Email encryption

• Regarding secure FTP clients…

• MPLS or VPN

Round Up:

• Replicating NSA’s gadgets using open source
  
• iOS 8 strikes an unexpected blow against location tracking
• Cisco patches cross-site-scripting flaws in security appliances that allowed unauthenticated remote code execution
• Massive TweetDeck outage may have been ‘accident’ caused by teen’s experiment
• Google engineer: We need more Web programming languages
• Microsoft Protests Order to Disclose Email Stored Abroad
• Juniper Networks Partner caught selling beta and pre-release hardware to Cisco. Cisco reverse engineering Junipter products to try to blunt competitive edge, claims it was looking for IP infringment
• Cyberbullying law would let police ‘remotely hack into computers, mobile devices, or cars’
• NSF Researcher banned after caught using super computers to mine bitcoins
• Canada: 14-Year-Olds Hack ATM Using Default Password Available on the Internet
• Krebs — P.F. Changs latest victim in credit card breach, started in March

The post Demilitarized Tone | TechSNAP 166 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.