wireless – Jupiter Broadcasting

Carolyn went from working in data science to mobile developer at Lookout Mobile. She discusses writing “magic hands” to automate her old job & what it’s like to self teach.

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Transcription:

ANGELA: This is Women’s Tech Radio.
PAIGE: A show on the Jupiter Broadcasting Network, interviewing interesting women in technology. Exploring their roles and how they’re successful in technology careers. I’m Paige.
ANGELA: And I’m Angela.
PAIGE: So, Angela, today we talk to Carolyn and she is a recent mobile developer at Lookout. She comes from a data scientist background and we have some really interesting chat about her transition and just all the things that she’s gotten into; what’s been hard, what’s been awesome, and it’s a really good time.
ANGELA: Yeah. And before we get into the interview I just want to mention that you can support Women’s Tech Radio by going to Patreon.com/today. It is a subscription based support of our network. It supports all the shows, but specifically this show, Women’s Tech Radio. So go to Patreon.com/today.
PAIGE: And we got started by asking Carolyn what she’s up to in technology these days.
CAROLYN: Yeah, so I have sort of an interesting story of, or at least I think it’s interesting, of how I got into tech. I was a business major, not sure what I wanted to do with my life. Ended up in operations at a big company, but I always really, really loved data and I just loved spreadsheets and i met someone that let me, sort of taught me SQL and taught me how to be faster with what I was doing with SQL and I found out I really loved SQL. So I sort of just started building from there. I ended up at Lookout which is a mobile security anti malware company and just sort of opened my eyes to a lot of technology. I started as a data analyst. Started managing the data warehouse and then earlier this year just moved over to Android development. So I’m learning a lot. So I’m new to engineering, but I have been speaking engineer, that’s what I say, for a very long time. So right now I”m working on a side project which we’ll be releasing at the end of this year and currently learning RxJava, which is pretty new. It’s really cool, but there’s definitely not really a lot out there about it. So I spend my days currently just really doing a lot of learning.
PAIGE: All right. So I will admit, I am not familiar with RxJava. How is it different than normal Java?
CAROLYN: It deals with like streaming data and so it’s really good for when you’re trying to chain things together without, you know, the data might not be available yet.
PAIGE: Oh, okay. So it’s Java non-blocking?
CAROLYN: Yeah.
PAIGE: Cool. You can probably continue explaining that for the audience.
ANGELA: And me.
PAIGE: Oh yeah.
CAROLYN: Well I’m still wrapping, I was just, like, so I, earlier this year did an online Android boot camp while I was still doing my data job and managing the data team and just sort of doing 20 things at once. And now, once I started to feel like I really got a foothold in Java, we decided to use RxJava and now I’m relearning a lot of things. So it’s still, I’m still feeling like I’m in a foreign country where I don’t speak the language. So I’m definitely, it’s made me actually have this huge respect for Netflix, because they are the ones that wrote the Android library for it and they’re just doing so much cool stuff over there. And they have a lot of good tutorials about it. So I definitely recommend, there’s a podcast about it and the head at Netflix is talking about RxJava. It’s really interesting. So I can add that to the show links for you guys too.
PAIGE: Netflix is really interesting because they, essentially their stack, they’re really stack agnostic where they look at their teams and they say do what you need to do to get your job done. And find the best way to do it. So I know that they have angular, amber, you know, they have imbedded team. The have the RxJava team and they all just kind of talk together because they really piece these pieces out. It’s really fascinating how they’re kind of making that work with being probably one of the biggest data companies in the world right now.
CAROLYN: Yeah. Well they’re definitely finding, you know, if there’s not a tool out there that meets their needs, they’ll build it. I have a friend who’s a doctor and I was explaining this concept to her and she was like this is so weird. She was like, why would they build it and open source it? You know. For me, personally, one of the things I actually stumbled upon in the tech community, which I didn’t really realize, is just the amount of support that people are willing, and companies are willing to give each other. I mean, there’s obviously companies that are competing and hate each other, but at the same time, I’m sure if you got their engineers together they would talk shop and share things they’re doing and it’s really cool. When I decided to be an engineer, late last year, I had so many people that were giving me free materials and helping me and the tech community, like every night of the week you can go to a meetup and have dinner and meet people and have people help you. Which was sort of a happy accident to find out about the tech community in general.
PAIGE: Yeah. I totally love that. And I love that it comes out of some of our roots of open source and being able to reach out and touch each other’s projects and just help out. I was listening to a podcast recently, ironically, and they were talking about how they’d opened sourced their website, kind of, It’s a paid service. The guy was like, I”m shocked because every week we get somebody who just pops in and was like hey I forked your website and made this change, because I found this problem and here it is back. And this guy that fix things is a paid customer of theirs, but he’s still jumping in to fix things for the company. It’s just like-
CAROLYN: Yeah.
PAIGE: Really awesome.
CAROLYN: Yeah. Actually, the boot camp that I did, um, is Code Path, which is a link in the show notes. And what they do is they go out to companies and do consulting and then they also have a boot camp if you are an engineer that you can, if you’re already two or three years in you can go. So I wasn’t like a candidate to be part of their boot camp. And even part of the consulting, my company said they’d pay for it, but they said you really need to learn Java before you do this boot camp. So they gave me all the materials for free. And they just said I could learn it on my own, which was pretty awesome. And had calls with me and sort of got me started on my path, just totally pro bono, which is really awesome.
ANGELA: That is really awesome.
CAROLYN: Yeah.
PAIGE: Very cool. Okay. So as a developer, I have to ask, how is it that it was SQL that grabbed your attention, because most developers I know just absolutely hate working in SQL, like we will avoid it like the plague. I actually kind of got my start in SQL as well, so I do like it, but most people I talk to they’re like I love all this web stuff, please don’t make me write SQL.
CAROLYN: Yeah, so what’s funny is the engineers on my team, when I see the SQL queries are writing I’m like, I’m so happy because that’s a place I can teach them and be like whoa this is not good. So what happened was, I was working for Williams Sonoma, which is, they also own Pottery Barn and they run it as this big monolithic company where they don’t really care if people are efficient and they would be perfectly happy with people just entering data all day instead of making efficient processes or systems. It was my first job out of college so I didn’t really know that life didn’t really have to be like that. So I was spending a lot of time manually going in and doing things and I just so happened to meet someone in my company named Mark Grassgob [ph] who really opened the door for me. He’s like just learn SQL and you can do this job that took you all day, you can do it in like 20 minutes. So it was more just a fact of me being like this is pretty powerful. These people are really living in the dark ages. So we literally wrote a script that would do our jobs for you. We called it magic hands. And then we’d go to coffee and no one that i worked for really — they just wanted us to get the work done. They didn’t know that we could eliminate everyone’s jobs and we’re like — we called it magic hands. It was so funny. We’d unleash magic hands on three computers and then realize oh the system couldn’t take that much input so we’d bring it down to two. And then it would enter in a price of a million dollars for a couch instead of $1,000 or something and so we’d get a call from like, you know, tech team in India overnight when something process blew up, so we definitely had to fine tune magic hands. Then I moved over to the technical team after that, because they sort of saw she can actually be on this team and do this without having really a background. And then once I moved into data, it’s like SQL is king no matter what anyone says about big data and all these big data tools. It really, the backbone of everything is really SQL. So learning how to do efficient queries will make your job so much happier. If you write SQL wrong you’re going to give people wrong answers. So on the data side, you know, SQL just, to me, just made so much sense. But I guess it was sort of the first real programming I ever got my hands on. I love it.
PAIGE: I actually have had a couple friends recently who have asked me, because I kind of learned SQL the hard way by just throwing my head against Access, which is probably the worst interface ever.
CAROLYN: Yeah.
PAIGE: But do you have any good recommendations for books for online resources for SQL, because it’s kind of like this weird black hole where i can learn almost everything else online and I can’t seem to find anything good for SQL.
CAROLYN: The thing about SQL is that you will not be good at it. You will not really get your hands around it until you actually use it. So it’s one of those things where you need access to a dataset and you need questions to answer and then you’ll get it. So there are resources out there. I actually, when I was hiring data analyst as a manager I just created my own dataset and posted it for people and then had them answer some questions to show me they knew SQL or not. It’s really a learning by doing kind of thing. Which I guess most things are. But if you don’t have an interesting dataset to work with and you’re not trying to solve interesting problems, you’re just never going to pick it up. But I haven’t really found, there are available datasets out there and as bad as Access is and it gives you the graphical interface, don’t use that, you need to actually physically write it out. If you use Access, if you get access to a dataset dump it into Access and then use the, just handwriting the SQL, you know, you’ll get it.
PAIGE: Yeah, totally.
ANGELA: So in the form that you filled out before the show you said that you’re still trying to figure out why you never thought to be an engineer before.
CAROLYN: Yeah.
ANGELA: I think there’s a lot of people that don’t know that the way their personality and skills would make them perfect for a position. What would you recommend people do to figure out what best to be or do or try?
CAROLYN: I’ve been thinking about his a lot, actually. When I was younger, I grew up in San Diego and it was very much a beach culture, like very dude broey. It wasn’t cool to be smart when I was a kid. That’s how I felt. I was networking the internet in my parent’s house, like running the wireless, created their wireless, and I was one of the first people on Napster stealing music and creating CDs. I had this little computer in my room and my friends would come over and they’d be in their bikinis like beep, beep, let’s go to the beach. Did you make us CDs? I’m just like, you know, like stealing music off the internet. But to me, it was like, I mean this is like 1998 so I was really probably one of 10,000 people doing this.
PAIGE: We might have shared that stolen music together.
ANGELA: Yeah, I was just going to say, yeah 1998, that was golden year too for Napster and WinAmp.
CAROLYN: Yeah, totally.
PAIGE: It’s really kicks the llama’s ass.
ANGELA: Yeah.
CAROLYN: But for some reason it never crossed my mind that I was really good at this. I was way more interested in it than any of my friends. But instead I just was like, I’m just going to go to the beach and we’re going to try to get beer and do all these things. And I’m trying to figure out why it never crossed my mind to do that. But I also think it was a different time and technology wasn’t, people weren’t talking about technology. People weren’t interested in talking about apps. You know, like 1 in 20 people had a cell phone back then.
ANGELA: Right.
CAROLYN: So I think maybe it was just kind of like that time. When I went to college I was a business major and I thought I would just do business. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do. I think I had all the tools and I knew that i loved computers and I loved building things, but I never really had someone set me down. I never really had that career thought. I just sort of followed the path that I thought was laid out. And it really wasn’t until like mid last year that I thought I could really be an engineer and do it. It was really — what sort of tipped me was all these boot camps coming out and people just going and doing it. I had this deep — this thought of what would I do if I could do anything and I wasn’t scared to do it? To me, engineering was it. Lookout was incredibly supportive and let me move teams, which was really great and sort of a rare find in a company that would support someone to do this. So I got really lucky. But, you know, I think now with Women Who Code and a lot of organizations asking these questions of why women aren’t engineers, I think it’s because no one ever asked me and I never asked myself. And now that it’s sort of becoming the norm, you know, I’m hoping that more women will sort of naturally follow the path to be an engineer, because I think if there would have been more of that growing up that I probably would have found that path earlier.
PAIGE: That’s actually a part of why we started the podcast is because, you know, you say oh it was a different time then. And it was actually my conversation with a 16 year old that spawned me to start this, because I had this conversation and the 16 year old is good at math, enjoyed science, liked tech stuff, you know, didn’t do the assembling computers thing because nobody really do that anymore. But I was like, well have you considered being a programer? And she was like, no that’s for boys, right? And I was like, whoa.
ANGELA: Yeah.
PAIGE: And this was last year.
CAROLYN: Yeah.
PAIGE: But I do think it’s changing. I think organizations like Women Who Code Girl Develop It, Chick Tech, all these different things are kind of getting in there and saying hey guys, or hey ladies you can do this too. And there’s no reason, like — like I like to say, girls type just as well as boys.
ANGELA: So I haven’t been to a boot camp, but it seems like that might be, aside from trying to join Women Who Code or another place like that that would support you, but the boot camp might help you. Is it like a conference where you can go and listen or watch different parts of development?
CAROLYN: I did a lot of research on boot camps at the end of last year and there’s some good and — there’s a lot of good, but there’s also a lot of bad. You can’t expect to just go somewhere for three months and then come out and be a fully fledged engineer and be ready to work, you know. So this boot camp is just a once a week for two hours for eight weeks kind of thing. Or I think it’s twice a week for two hours for eight weeks. But they are teaching mobile development to people who are already engineers. They just gave me — they record their lectures and they have all their assignments online and they just gave me access to their materials so I could write — I could work on apps on my own. I’d say it definitely took me a lot longer to get through it and I ended up just doing the parts of the boot camp that really applied to what I”de be working on at Lookout so I could just get up to speed faster, but, you know, their boot camp, there would be like a week of work would take me three weeks or something just to get done. Definitely was like, it took me a while to get through it. But it really is, I couldn’t say enough good things about Code Path. They do some really cool stuff. And they’re really smart guys. Actually, all men, but they do have a lot of women that go to their boot camps, so.
PAIGE: There’s definitely a really wide range of what we’re calling a boot camp right now. We have Codepath which is this kind of part-time thing. ANd there will be other online part-time things. And then there’s even in-person part-time things where you can go in the evenings and it’s a full five days a week. The boot camp that I worked out of is full five days a week. It’s a 16 week program if you do it at night or a 12 week program if you do it in the day. And it is full stack development. You go from the front end all the way through the back end. And I think that’s probably the most common is that it’s essentially two to three months. Some of them go out as far as six months of get in there, get your hands in code, have a portfolio at the end kind of a thing. But agree with you, Carolyn, that you can’t go into a boot camp expecting to come out the other end like a full fledged developer unless you work your butt off. And there are companies hiring beginners. I think that the market is getting a little bit saturated, because there are so many boot camps.
CAROLYN: Yeah.
PAIGE: I’m in Portland, it’s a fairly small city, and I think right now we have five boot camps.
ANGELA: Wow.
PAIGE: And one of them is turning out two classes of 60 people each every 10 weeks.
ANGELA: Wow.
PAIGE: So it’s getting a bit saturated, but the market is still there.
CAROLYN: Yeah, and so I have friends in San Francisco that are recruiters and when I was switching over they were like whoa, whoa, whoa, don’t do boot camp. Don’t do it. We can’t hire people out of boot camps. There’s like 1 out of 20 that are hireable, you know. And so I was like, okay. And I had some talks with them and they were like, you have to — if you’re going to do a boot camp you also have to have another strategy of how you’re still going to become and engineer, you know. You do the boot camp but where are you going to — who is going to take you on as a junior developer? You need to have all those things sort of lined up.
ANGELA: Right.
CAROLYN: Or else you’re just going to do the boot camp and then go do something else.
PAIGE: Yeah. And I think that there are some things coming into the market that are trying to fill that. There’s a couple places like Thoughtbot has apprenticeship programs. A couple of the other bigger dev shops have that where you can kind of transition from beginner into intermediate. And then there’s some online stuff like Think Full or Upcase where you can kind of build those skills after boot camp. And, of course, I’m always a fan; I think the biggest thing in our industry and most industries is mentorship. Like finding a mentor. Finding those people and going out and shaking hands.
ANGELA: Which you’d likely find at Women Who Code or Meetups or-
PAIGE: Totally.
ANGELA: The social aspect of it.
PAIGE: Meatspace as we like to call it.
CAROLYN: Yeah.
PAIGE: For nerd speak.
ANGELA: Whenever I hear meetspace I picture M-E-A-T.
PAIGE: That’s what it means.
ANGELA: Oh. Not M-E-E-T?
PAIGE: No. It’s it’s M-E-A-T.
ANGELA: Oh.
PAIGE: Meatspace.
ANGELA: Why?
PAIGE: Because we’re nerds and it’s not digital, so it’s fleshy, so it’s meat.
ANGELA: Oh my gosh. Okay. Interesting. Okay.
PAIGE: Sorry.
ANGELA: Wow, that’s a great, I’m glad, okay. Continue with the interview.
PAIGE: Yeah. So you talked a little bit. You’ve moved over to the Android team. What’s fun and what’s hard about Android? I haven’t really dug in on Android development. I’ve done some iOS.
CAROLYN: What’s really fun about Android is, you know, day one you can open up your Android Studio and download the STK and create a page. It has like a button, you know, and you can click the button and it can like play a song. You can do that in two days. You can publish it to the app store. You could put it on your phone. There’s definitely this — you can hit and API and pull data back. You know, you could do that in a couple days, learn all that from scratch. So there’s a very easy sort of, like, you know, there’s a link on Learning to Code in the notes where it’s a graph of — at first you, like, peek. It’s like a honeymoon at first. ANd everything seems really easy, but as you sort of start to unfold things, Android is really complicated and there’s 9,000 versions of Android that people are running out there and different sized devices and tablets and people are going to be using your app only on Wifi, and there’s so many things to think about. As you want to do more, you get royally confused very quickly. So it’s cool to just sort of get up and running and get started, but there’s a lot to learn. There’s things you have to think about like battery usage and memory and all these things that you don’t really deal with if you’re a web developer. So it’s definitely a lot to get started. I work on a team where there’s a lot of senior engineers and a lot of people that really know what’s going on, so it’s like, it’s fun but it’s also — you know, you take some hits to your ego a little bit, because I feel like I used to know everything about the data warehouse and stepping into something where you don’t know what’s going on and you really have to feel your way through it, it can be a shot to your ego and how you feel about yourself. I always say, like, sometimes i feel like Tom Hanks, like when I get code reviews, like in a League of Their Own where he’s like, “There’s no crying in baseball.”
PAIGE: Uh-huh.
CAROLYN: Like, I literally have to tell myself, there’s no crying in coding when I get a lot of comments on a code review or I just totally, like — it’s a lot of falling down. A lot.
PAIGE: I’m so glad I’m not the only person that says, there’s no crying in coding.
CAROLYN: Yes, I say that to myself all the time.
PAIGE: Me too.
CAROLYN: It makes me feel better, because at least I’m out there. I’m out there and I”m like, they’re always like, oh no you’re doing really, really good, you just have this — where you just want — I want to be — I don’t want to say, I want to be perfect, but I want to be contributing and I don’t — I want to be getting things done and moving forward and writing really good code and you’re not going to do that when you move into engineering for like a year or two, you know. So just setting those expectations. You just have to lower your expectations for yourself a little bit.
PAIGE: Yeah. I think — this is a talk that I have with a lot of — I meet a lot of junior developers through Women Who Code and explaining to them, like listen I”ve been doing coding for a lot of years as a professional now, and there’s rarely a week that goes by where I don’t go, wow I feel like I know nothing.
CAROLYN: Yeah.
PAIGE: I”m totally Jon Snow. It’s not fun.
CAROLYN: But then when I share that feeling with other developers they’re like, welcome to being an engineer.
PAIGE: Yep, exactly.
CAROLYN: That’s what everyone says to me. They’re like oh you were frustrated all day and the last 10 minutes of your day everything made sense and you got it to run, like that’s your life.
PAIGE: Uh-huh.
CAROLYN: And I kind of love that. Like, personally. I actually really love that. I love working all day on a problem . To me, the day goes by in 30 minutes to me, even if I want to cry sometimes. It’s fun and I feel like I’m using more of my brain than I ever did before.
PAIGE: Yeah, it’s like 30 minutes of success after an entire day of the crying game.
CAROLYN: Yeah.
PAIGE: It’s totally, it’s where you’re at. And I think that knowing that going in, I like to say that programmers need to be eternally optimistic because it will work this time, I swear.
ANGELA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Women’s Tech Radio. Remember you can find a full transcription of this show over in the show notes at JupiterBroadcasting.com. YOu can also subscribe to the RSS feeds.
PAIGE: And while you’re there you could also reach out to us on the contact form. Let us know what you think about the show or any guests you might like to hear. Don’t forget, we’re also on iTunes and if you have a moment leave a review so we know how we’re doing and how we can improve the show. If you’d like to reach out to Angela and I directly, you can use WTR@JupiterBroadcasting.com for an email or check us at at Twitter, @HeyWTR. Thanks for listening.

Transcribed by Carrie Cotter | Transcription@cotterville.net

The post No Crying In Coding | WTR 39 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Level Up Your LAN | LAS 377

chris — Sun, 09 Aug 2015 10:01:02 +0000

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We take a deep dive into the basics of getting a home network up and running. It you’ve lived with whatever the ISP has given you have no fear, not only are we going to show you how to do it, it’s going to be all done from Linux!

Plus Firefox has a major flaw that impacts Linux users, an update on the Jolla tablet, we discuss our big format experiment & more!

Thanks to:

Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

Direct Download:

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— Show Notes: —

Brought to you by: System76

Overview

Default configurations are less secure and limited
Ability to setup VPN
Ability to setup DNS
Most consumer equipment is a modem/router/switch/access point all in one (Spork Syndrome)

Default Settings on Mikrotik

IP 192.168.88.1
username: admin
no password

Default Settings on (most) Linksys

IP 192.168.0.1
username: admin
password: admin

DHCP – Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol

Useful to push information to the clients about the network.
Can be setup on most routers
Comes setup by default
Linksys limits you to /24 meaning a maximum of 254 clients.

DNS – Domain Name Service

Phonebook of the internet
Useful to point non-registered hostnames to IP addresses
Can be used (somewhat) to block access to websites.

Firewall

Used to block traffic
Can be used on enterprise routers to separate switchports

Static IP (If your ISP allows it)

What is and Setting static IP
What is and Setting net mask
What is and Setting Default Gateway

Setting up an Access Point

Enable wireless on Mikrotik or Linksys
Purchase separate access point and use WebUI
Proper Channeling
Proper Power
POE

Easy Linux Networking

IPFire

From a technical point of view, IPFire is a minimalistic, hardened firewall system which comes with an integrated package manager called Pakfire. The primary task of Pakfire is to update the system with only a single click.

It is very easy to install security patches, bugfixes and feature enhancements, which make IPFire safer and faster – or simply, better.

Another task of Pakfire is to install additional software that adds new functionality to the IPFire system.
Some useful of them are:

File sharing services such as Samba and vsftpd
Communications server using Asterisk
Various command-line tools as tcpdump, nmap, traceroute & many more.

Smoothwall.org

The goals of the project can be summed up as:

Be simple enough to be installed by home users with no knowledge of Linux
Support a wide variety of network cards, modems and other hardware
Work with many different connection methods and ISPs from across the world
Manage and configure the software using a web browser
Run efficiently on older, cheaper hardware
Develop a supportive user community
Use sponsorship from Smoothwall Limited to further these goals

The Smoothwall Open Source Project is funded and supported by Smoothwall Limited.

Smoothwall Express Download

— PICKS —

Runs Linux

School Bell in the UK – Runs Linux!

Fantastic show, keep up the good work.
I wanted to share my own small runs Linux with you. I’m an IT Tech working in a secondary school in the UK. I got fed-up of our old outdated lesson change bell system from the 70’s so i made a pi powered one. It uses cron to run a python script that turns the relay on for a set amount of time. The cron file is edited via the UI that runs on php, MySQL on top of Apache. Photos of the UI and the project build attached.
its been in production since feb and still going strong.

Hope you like it

Thanks

Sent in by Robin T.

Desktop App Pick

Zoiper

Our VoIP softphone will look everywhere for your contacts and will display them in a combined list for easy access. Outlook, windows/mac, LDAP, XMPP, XCAP, android, iOs. You name it, we got it and we will lookup incoming calls as well so you know who calls before you answer.

Weekly Spotlight

SeaFile

Organize files into libraries. A library can be selectively synced into any device. Reliable and efficient file syncing improves your productivity.

A library can be encrypted by a password chosen by you. Files are encrypted before syncing to the server. Even the system admin can’t view the files.

Sharing into groups and collaboration around files. Permission control, versioning and activity notification make collaboration easy and reliable.

The core of Seafile server is written in C programming language. It is small and has a fantastic performance.

Upgrade can be done via running a simple script within a few seconds. Seafile records very few items in database. No huge database upgrade is needed.

AD/LDAP integration, group syncing, fine-grained permission control make the tool easily applied to your enterprise environment.

Celebrate BSD Now’s 2 year Anniversary!

BONUS SPOTLIGHT

Privacy Badger, an Addon That Algorithmically Blocks Online Trackers

Online tracking has become a pervasive invisible reality of the modern web. Most sites you load are likely to be full of ads, tracking pixels, social media share buttons, and other invisible trackers all harvesting data about your web browsing. These trackers use cookies and other methods to read unique IDs associated with your browser, the result being that they record all the sites you visit as you browse around the internet. This sort of tracking is invisible to most web users, meaning they never get the option to agree to or opt-out of it. Today the EFF has launched the 1.0 version of Privacy Badger, an extension designed to prevent these trackers from accessing unique info about you and your browsing.

— NEWS —

Firefox exploit found in the wild | Mozilla Security Blog

Yesterday morning, August 5, a Firefox user informed us that an advertisement on a news site in Russia was serving a Firefox exploit that searched for sensitive files and uploaded them to a server that appears to be in Ukraine. This morning Mozilla released security updates that fix the vulnerability. All Firefox users are urged to update to Firefox 39.0.3. The fix has also been shipped in Firefox ESR 38.1.1.

LibreOffice 5.0 Released!

It is also the first version to come in 64 bits for Windows. As such LibreOffice 5 serves as the foundation of our current developments and is a great platform to extend, innovate and collaborate with!

LibreOffice 5.0 ships an impressive number of new features for its spreadsheet module, Calc: complex formulae image cropping, new functions, more powerful conditional formatting, table addressing and much more. Calc’s blend of performance and features makes it an enterprise-ready, heavy duty spreadsheet application capable of handling all kinds of workload for an impressive range of use cases.

New icons, major improvements to menus and sidebar : no other LibreOffice version has looked that good and helped you be creative and get things done the right way. In addition, style management is now more intuitive thanks to the visualization of styles right in the interface.

LibreOffice 5 ships with numerous improvements to document import and export filters for MS Office, PDF, RTF, and more. You can now timestamp PDF documents generated with LibreOffice and enjoy enhanced document conversion fidelity all around.

LibreOffice 5 combines innovative features and long term efforts towards enhanced stability. As a result, expect both improvements in performance and in stability over the lifetime of the 5.0.x series.

LibreOffice under the hood: progress to 5.0

Gtk3 backend: Wayland

An very rough, initial gtk3 port was hacked together long ago by yours truly to prototype LibreOffice online via gdk-broadway.
However thanks to Caolán McNamara (RedHat) who has done the 80% of the hard work to finish this, giving us a polished and complete VCL backend for gtk3.
His blog entry focuses on the importance of this for running LibreOffice natively under wayland – the previous gtk2 backend was heavily tied to raw X11 rendering, while the new gtk3 backend uses CPU rendering via the VCL headless backend, of which more below.

OpenGL rendering improvements

The OpenGL rendering backend also significantly matured in this version, allowing us to talk directly to the hardware to accelerate
much of our rendering, with large numbers of bug fixes and improvements.
Many thanks to Louis-Francis Ratté-Boulianne (Collabora), Markus Mohrhard, Luboš Luňák (Collabora), Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora), Jan Holesovsky (Collabora), Tor Lillqvist (Collabora), Chris Sherlock & others.
It is hoped that with the ongoing bug-fixing here, that this can be enabled by default as a late feature, after suitable review, for LibreOffice 5.0.1 or at the outside 5.0.2.

LibreOffice 5.0 Is a Milestone Release for Ubuntu Touch

LibreOffice will land on Ubuntu Touch

The developers from The Document Foundation haven’t gone into much detail about their plans, but they have said that the office suite is coming to Android. Coupled with the things we already know about Ubuntu Touch, we can safely say that LibreOffice 5.0 will bring some very interesting changes to the mobile platform from Canonical.

“A new version for new endeavours: LibreOffice 5.0 is the cornerstone of the mobile clients on Android and Ubuntu Touch, as well as the upcoming cloud version. As such, LibreOffice 5.0 serves as the foundation of current developments and is a great platform to extend, innovate and collaborate!” reads the announcement from The Document Foundation.

Jolla Tablet – First Batch out of Factory

Last week was very busy for Jolla, but few issues delaying the process by couple of days were catch up during the weekend by hard working Sailors. The first batch of Jolla Tablets is now complete and is told to look great! This batch is pre-production batch delivered to selected developers and internal test personnel

July 27th all the components were ready to be mounted on the circuit boards in China. All that was missing was the circuit boards themselves, as the flight delivering them was delayed by couple of hours. This delay was short, and assembling the boards was started as planned without major issues.

Earlier delays with material preparation and board delivery forced Jolla to agree on a new schedule with the assembly factory. July 30th, circuit boards were tested and the batch was sent to factory to be assembled on the next day. Surprise came with a glue machine, display assembly wasn’t possible

Jolla Tablet

White House Petition to use FOSS whenever possible

We believe that the federal government, for the security of the information it manages and the efficient allocation of the public’s funds, should divest itself of costly proprietary software contracts wherever possible.

Healthcare.gov’s initial failings had much to do with the old, proprietary infrastructure that government contracting details required the application be built on. The US Navy recently spent considerable amounts of taxpayer money to extend support for Windows XP and Office 2003, both inherently obsolete and insecure.

Use of proprietary software costs our taxpayers needless money. It’s become clear that governments such as those of the UK and much of the European Union can adopt open source software and be better off for it. We should join them.

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Some crazy LAS idea
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Chris Fisher (@ChrisLAS) | Twitter

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Google Wireless All The Things | Tech Talk Today 161

chris — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 13:57:37 +0000

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The rumors around Google’s own wireless services are on fire, we speculate on Google’s possible path to world domination one mobile at a time.

Plus the trouble with rooting your Galaxy device & why we’re trying to sell a MacBook Pro like its hot!

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Google Set to Unveil Wireless Service – WSJ

Google Inc. GOOGL 0.63% is set to unveil its new U.S. wireless service as early as Wednesday, pushing the Internet giant further into telecom and injecting fresh uncertainty into a wireless industry already locked in a price war.

In a key development, the service is expected to allow customers to pay only for the amount of data they actually use each month, people familiar with the matter said—a move that could further push carriers to do away with lucrative “breakage.”

Thinking of rooting your Galaxy S6 or S6 edge? Don’t, or you’ll lose this important feature – SamMobile

If you think that Samsung Pay is of no use to you, think again. Samsung Pay debuted with the Galaxy S6, and makes use of your fingerprint to authorize payments through your smartphone at payment gateways. Just like Apple Pay you would think, but that is not the case. Samsung Pay is better than its competitors — Apple Pay and Android Pay — as it is compatible with MST (Magnetic Secure Transmission) as well as NFC based payment systems.

Microsoft Announces Device Guard For Windows 10

Microsoft has announced a new feature for Windows 10 called Device Guard, which aims to give administrators full control over what software can or cannot be installed on a device. “It provides better security against malware and zero days for Windows 10 by blocking anything other than trusted apps—which are apps that are signed by specific software vendors, the Windows Store, or even your own organization. … To help protect users from malware, when an app is executed, Windows makes a determination on whether that app is trustworthy, and notifies the user if it is not. Device Guard can use hardware technology and virtualization to isolate that decision making function from the rest of the Windows operating system, which helps provide protection from attackers or malware that have managed to gain full system privilege.” It’s intended to be used in conjunction with traditional anti-virus, not as a replacement.

Star Trek 3 Will Be Titled Star Trek Beyond

Well, according to TrekMovie.com, who admittedly has a pretty good track record with Trek movie rumors. The title matches the volume-number-less installment of Star Trek Into Darkness, but seems to confirms the new Enterprise crew will finally be going on its five-year mission to explore strange new worlds, etc.

Apple MacBook Pro | eBay

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Google “Watch” Me | Tech Talk Today 157

chris — Tue, 14 Apr 2015 10:30:50 +0000

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Google Wireless rumors are getting hot, with interesting details leaking out. Apple Watch outsells Android Wear in a day & the long-term reason Android Wear might be the better bet.

Plus some good Bitcoin news & much more!

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Google’s wireless service could charge you for only the exact amount of data you use

According to details uncovered by Android Police thanks to a leaked app that will be used to support the service, Google’s wireless network — referred to as Nova in many previous rumors, but also now known as Project Fi — could charge you only for the exact amount of data you use. That is to say, there won’t be any unlimited data (as much as we would all hope from an internet-strong company like Google), but instead a “pay-as-you-go” approach.

Google’s MVNO to offer pay-per gigabyte plans, rollover data, accompanying app, more

Apple Watch sales beat Android Wear yearly shipments in a day

In 2014, all manufacturers using Google’s smartwatch operating system — including Motorola, LG, and Samsung — sold 720,000 units.

In contrast, Apple sold an estimated 957,000 Apple Watches on the first day the devices were available for preorder.

Apple bans selfie sticks, monopods from WWDC 2015

In an update to the rules for Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple is banning 2015 attendees from using selfie sticks or any other kind of photo monopod within the bounds of either Moscone West or Yerba Buena Gardens.

New Bitcoin Foundation Director Bruce Fenton Pledges Fiscal Reform

Elected by a 5-to-1 vote, Fenton succeeds interim executive director Patrick Murck and outgoing executive director Jon Matonis, the latter of whom resigned on 30th October amid financial turmoil and ahead of staff cuts at the industry’s top trade organization.

In interview, Fenton stressed that his greatest asset to the Bitcoin Foundation would be his ability to serve as a “bridge” between the organisation’s individual and corporate members. He cited his full-time position as CEO of Atlantic Financial and involvement in bitcoin as a technology enthusiast as factors.

For art’s sake! Photoing neighbors with zoom lens not a privacy invasion | Ars Technica

The appeals court called it a “technological home invasion” but said the defendant used the pictures for art’s sake. Because of that, the First Department of the New York Appellate Division ruled Thursday in favor of artist Arne Svenson, who snapped the pics from his lower Manhattan residence as part of an art exhibit called “The Neighbors.” The ruling says:

Hillary’s Hard Drive : techtalktoday

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Chronicles of a Linux Switcher | LAS 360

chris — Sun, 12 Apr 2015 17:09:16 +0000

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We follow the journey of users who have just made the switch to Linux. We document what went great & what hasn’t worked.

Plus a big announcement is made, great news for Ubuntu MATE, a quick look at Elementary OS Freya Beta & more!

Thanks to:

Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

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Brought to you by: System76

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Runs Linux

Mall Kiosk Runs Linux

Sent in by sent by Ricardo R.

Walking through a mall I found a kiosk that is running Ubuntu

Desktop App Pick

Gramps Genealogical Research Software

Gramps is a free software project and community. We strive to produce a genealogy program that is both intuitive for hobbyists and feature-complete for professional genealogists. It is a community project, created, developed and governed by genealogists.

Sent by Adrian

Weekly Spotlight

BitPay’s Internal Mining Pool

At BitPay we are huge proponents of open source software and of course cool gadgets! To do some of our internal testing, we built a small pool of bitcoin miners that run raspbian. Those two miners each have a powered USB hub and a few usb miners each. They are cooled by a pair of simple USB fans. All of which sits neatly on the corner of my desk! Gotta love how easy it is to deploy something like this in such a small form factor on linux… It’s reliable, fast, and just plain looks awesome sitting on my desk!

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Our Past Picks

These are the weekly picks provided by the Jupiter Broadcasting podcast, the Linux Action Show.

This site includes a separate picks lists for the “Runs Linux”, Desktop Apps, Spotlight Picks, Android Picks, and Distro Picks.

— NEWS —

Ubuntu MATE Inks First Hardware Deal

Entroware laptops __start from £379.99. __This bags an ‘Orion’ laptop powered by an Intel Pentium 3550M (Haswell) processor running at 2.3GHz, 4GB DRR3 RAM, a 500GB 5400RPM HDD and integrated Intel graphics. Desktops begin at £299.

Ubuntu MATE hardware partnership with Entroware | Ubuntu MATE

Ubuntu MATE forges exciting partnership with Linux hardware startup Entroware.

elementary OS Freya Available For Download, See What`s New

For those not familiar with elementary OS, this is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution (with Freya being based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, supported until April 2019) which ships with its own desktop environment, called Pantheon, and its own custom application for the most part, which look great, integrate very well with the desktop and ship with sane defaults so the user doesn’t have to tweak anything.

Evolve OS Changes Name due to Legal Warning

Thank you everyone for helping us in the naming process!
In that time, one name cropped up time and time again. A name we do own, and one indicative of our history and roots.

Solus Project

Valve games for Mesa/DRI developers

Hi,
At Collabora (my lovely dayjob), we’ve been working with Valve on
SteamOS. Valve are keen to give back to the community, and we’ve been
discussing ways they can help do that, including providing free access
to Valve games on Steam to Debian developers last year.

We’re happy to say that this has been extended to Mesa developers as
well, to say thanks for all the great work. If you have 25 commits or
more (an arbitrary number) to Mesa0 in the past five years, please
drop me an email (with ‘Steam’ in the subject) with your freedesktop
username and Steam username. We can then get you access to all past
and future Valve-produced games available on Steam[1].
Thanks for all the great work, and enjoy.
Cheers,
Daniel

Gnome 3.16 Hits

My Updated 3.16 Packages for GNOME Extensions by Michael Tunnell aka RottNKorpse

GNOME, desktop environment project, released their latest version of 3.16 recently so I decided to make an update to my previous extension package releases. I made a similar post last year for the GNOME 3.14 Release because some of my extension broke. Unfortunately, some of those extensions are still unmaintained and thus not updated for 3.16 either. So I am continuing to update some extensions for myself and anyone else who wants them.

Intel Compute Stick, world’s smallest PC, will cost $150 with Windows, $110 with Linux

Intel Atom quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage and 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi. It plugs directly into a monitor or TV via HDMI, and is powered through a Micro USB jack on the side of the stick. There’s also a full-sized USB port, and Bluetooth 4.0 for connecting a mouse and keyboard.

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Get A Job, You Linux Bum! | LAS 359

chris — Sun, 05 Apr 2015 06:46:02 +0000

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Have you ever thought it’s better to create a job then apply for one? This week we dive into what it takes to build a business that runs on open source & supports open source.

Plus Microsoft’s surprise move, openSUSE jumps ahead, running just about any Android app under Linux & more!

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— Show Notes: —

Jump to Noah’s On Location Video

https://youtu.be/xgVp2YM5CFE?t=44m43s

Best Enterprise Router for the Money

Mikrotik

Best Autonomous Access Points For the Money

EnGenius

Best Cloud Access Points for the Money

UBNT – Ubiquiti Networks

Best Display for Internet Kiosk

Asus VS248H-P 24-Inch Full-HD LED-lit LCD Monitor

Best PC for Internet Kiosk for Internet Kiosk

Intel NUC DN2820FYKH with Intel Celeron N2820

Best USB Wifi Dongle

Panda 300Mbps Wireless-N USB Adapter

Brought to you by: System76

Ubiquiti Networks – Wireless networking products for broadband and enterprise

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Runs Linux

Bowling Alley Runs Linux

Sent in by douglascodes

I was at a work party at a bowling alley last night. There were some problems with the alley score system and they had to reboot, so I took some pics of the startup. I wasn’t able to catch it in these pictures. But it is running Ubuntu 10.10.

Desktop App Pick

ClipGrab – Free YouTube Downloader & Converter

ClipGrab is a free downloader and converter for YouTube, Vimeo, Metacafe, Dailymotion and many other online video sites.

It converts downloaded videos to MPEG4, MP3 or other formats in just one easy step.

Weekly Spotlight

Go For It!

Go For It! is a simple and stylish productivity app, featuring a to-do list, merged with a timer that keeps your focus on the current task. To-do lists are stored in the Todo.txt format. This simplifies synchronization with mobile devices and makes it possible to edit tasks using other front-ends, like my Todo.txt Kupfer Plugin. If you already use Todo.txt, beware of the fact, that Go For It! automatically archives completed tasks to the done list!

Project belong to community member mank319

Sent in by dardevelin

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Our Past Picks

These are the weekly picks provided by the Jupiter Broadcasting podcast, the Linux Action Show.

This site includes a separate picks lists for the “Runs Linux”, Desktop Apps, Spotlight Picks, Android Picks, and Distro Picks.

— NEWS —

Microsoft Adopts ODF

Microsoft has confirmed it will start supporting the Open Documents Format (ODF) in the next update to Office 365, following a lengthy battle against the UK government.
In 2014, Microsoft went against the government’s request to support ODF, claiming its own XML format was more heavily adopted. The UK government refutes the claim, stating that ODF allows users to not be boxed into one ecosystem.

Gnome 3.16 systemd-journal coming in next Tumbleweed snapshot

It’s official, Gnome will be in the next Tumbleweed snapshot and the development experience is highly anticipated. A clean installation works, but the guys are working on one last test before its released. We’re not promising an early Easter gift, but Tumbleweed users won’t have to wait long for Gnome’s latest upgrade.

A small change to Linux can be seen in Tumbleweed with a change from the syslog to systemd-journal; the systemd-journal as a binary file needs special tools to look at it.

systemd-journal has been in Fedora since Fedora 18

Audacity 2.1.0 Released

For a long time, we have wanted Real-Time Preview for effects.
It seemed nearly unachievable without major restructuring.
But with Audacity 2.1.0, we have it in
LADSPA, VST, and Audio Unit (OS X) effects!
Thanks to Leland Lucius for these great new capabilities!

Much improved
Noise Reduction
effect replaces Noise Removal. Thanks to new contributor Paul Licameli!

Lots of other improvements to effects, also thanks to Leland, including:

VST: FXB preset banks, hosting multiple plugins

All effects can now be used in Chains, and can be sorted on name, publisher, or class.

Most Nyquist effects now have Preview button.

Redesigned Meter Toolbars show a lot more information in smaller area. Thanks, Leland Lucius and James Crook!

Spectral Selection
in Spectrogram view. Thanks to Paul Licameli!

How to Install and Run Android Apps in a Linux OS

Basically, anyone with a computer will be able to get an APK file and get it running inside the Google Chrome browser with a minimum amount of effort. What’s even more interesting is that the app only needs Google Chrome installer, it doesn’t need it to run. If you check the background processes, you will notice that a Chrome one is running along with the Arc Welder.

ARC Welder – Chrome Web Store

Gentoo, after 10 years, has a new website! – not April Fools this time!

Blender New Version 2.74 Is Out With New Tools And Improvements

The Blenders Institute’s sixth open film

The Blender Institute’s sixth film project, codenamed Gooseberry, is in deep into the most open production from the Blender Institute yet. If you’ve been following the project so far, then you already have a sense of what Blender means by an “open production”—lots of sharing.

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op5 IT monitoring – eliminate time thieves on Vimeo

“Built on top of Nagios you say?”
Yes, with some added features like proper report generation, a sweet REST API, easy to use load-balancing/redundancy, a business logic engine and of course commercial support!

PS: I managed to sneak in a JB shout-out in one of our cheesy promo videos: https://vimeo.com/107821073

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Canadian On Tap | Tech Talk Today 124

chris — Thu, 29 Jan 2015 11:01:52 +0000

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Microsoft goes all in on Android & we breakdown the big questions behind the apps. Intel announces wireless docking at the chipset level & Canada’s covert operation of tracking downloads and uploads all over the world is revealed.

Plus a few tangents & the biggest “disruption” of the year!

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Microsoft Launches Outlook For iOS And Android Based On Its Acompli Acquisition

Microsoft today launched Outlook for Android and iOS phones and tablets, based on the application it acquired when it bought Acomplilast December. These new applications will go live in their respective app stores over the course of the next few hours.

Microsoft Office now available for Android tablets – Liliputing

Microsoft says its mobile Office apps should run on devices with Android 4.4 or later, 1GB of RAM or more, and ARM-based processors. Support for Intel chips is in the works and Microsoft says it plans to add support for Intel-based tablets within the next few months.

Peeing My Way Around New York City With Airpnp, The App For Bathroom Emergencies – BuzzFeed News

Airpnp is the worst-designed app I’ve ever used. It’s also the most profound.

Vacation Rentals, Homes, Apartments & Rooms for Rent – Airbnb

AnandTech | Intel Announces Broadwell vPro Processors: Wireless Docking and More

ntel Wireless Docking could be the most exciting new feature. Using four channels of 802.11ad at 60 GHz radio frequency, Intel claims a total bandwidth of 7 Gbps. All data passed between the dock and device is protected with 128-bit AES hardware encryption, and two monitors plus USB 3.0 are supported. Intel has not yet provided information yet about supported resolutions, however they do provide an impressive video demonstrating a video file streaming from a USB stick to a laptop from the wireless dock, then back to the wireless dock for display.

This docking implementation is particularly interesting as it is implemented at the chipset level instead of the OS level. Intel’s low level control of peripherals allows them to enable no-brainer functionality such as closing the laptop lid and not entering sleep mode after establishing the dock connection.

Canada Casts Global Surveillance Dragnet Over File Downloads – The Intercept

The covert operation, revealed Wednesday by CBC News in collaboration with The Intercept, taps into Internet cables and analyzes records of up to 15 million downloads daily from popular websites commonly used to share videos, photographs, music, and other files.

Drone Maker Enforces No-Fly Zone Over DC, Hijacking Malware Demonstrated – Slashdot

A recent incident at the White House showed that small aerial vehicles (drones) present a specific security problem. Rahul Sasi, a security engineer at Citrix R&D, created MalDrone, the first backdoor malware for the AR drone ARM Linux system to target Parrot AR Drones, but says it can be modified to target others as well. The malware can be silently installed on a drone, and be used to control the drone remotely and to conduct remote surveillance. Meanwhile, the Chinese company that created the drone that crashed on the White House grounds has announced a software update for its “Phantom” series that will prohibit flight within 25 kilometers of the capital.

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Google’s Candy Van | Tech Talk Today 121

chris — Fri, 23 Jan 2015 10:37:52 +0000

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Google wants to get into the wireless business & while we are more than a little intrigued by the idea, we also have some major questions. We kick around the very real possibility that Google Wireless could become a thing.

Plus a few zero day exploits for OS X, the bad news for RT users & more!

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Report: Google to launch wireless service this year | Ars Technica

Reports about a rumored Google wireless service are cropping up again. The Information (subscription required) is reporting that Google plans to resell Sprint and T-Mobile services as a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO).

Google to Sell Wireless Service in Deals With Sprint, T-Mobile – WSJ

Google drops three OS X 0days on Apple | Ars Technica

In the past two days, Project Zero has disclosed OS X vulnerabilities here, here, and here. At first glance, none of them appear to be highly critical, since all three appear to require the attacker to already have some access to a targeted machine. What’s more, the first vulnerability, the one involving the “networkd ‘effective_audit_token’ XPC,” may already have been mitigated in OS X Yosemite, but if so the Google advisory doesn’t make this explicit and Apple doesn’t publicly discuss security matters with reporters.

Still, the exploits could be combined with a separate attack to elevate lower-level privileges and gain control over vulnerable Macs.

Surface RT Devices Won’t Get Windows 10

In its announcement of Windows 10, Microsoft indicated not all devices would get the updated operating system. Now, Microsoft says its Surface devices running Windows RT won’t be receiving full updates, though it does plan to roll some new functionality into them. “Given that Windows RT and RT 8.1 were designed for power economizing devices sporting 32-bit ARM architecture, and never had the same functionality — to many users’ frustration — as full-blown Windows 8 and 8.1, it comes as little surprise that the RT versions of the operating system should be left out of the latest update loop. In fact, a week before Microsoft’s big Windows 10 reveal on January 21, the company released firmware updates for all three models of its Intel-powered Surface Pro series, but neither of the ARM-based Surface tablets — the Surface 2 or Surface RT — received any new updates this month.” The Surface Pro line of tablets, which run a normal version of Windows, will be getting an update to Windows 10.

Plasma 5.2 – The Quintessential Breakdown | Ken Vermette

KDE is one of the oldest open-source desktop projects which can be found today, and over the years it has established a rich history of highs and lows. During some points it has been the undisputed ruler of the desktop world, while other times it had fallen behind or faced hard trials.

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Dark Age of the Internet | Tech Talk Today 96

chris — Mon, 24 Nov 2014 11:11:47 +0000

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Samsung files to block Nvidia chips from entering the US, a judge unseals 500+ Stingray records potentially by mistake. Plus Comcast’s big plans to get you to use the Internet less.

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Samsung Files Complaint to Block Nvidia Chips From U.S. – Bloomberg

Samsung filed a complaint yesterday against Nvidia with the
U.S. International Trade Commission in Washington, according to
a notice on the agency’s website. A copy of the complaint wasn’t
immediately available.

The legal battle began in September when Nvidia filed its
own ITC complaint against Qualcomm Inc. and Samsung over
patented ways to improve graphics. It’s asking the agency to
block imports of the latest Galaxy phones and tablets that use
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon graphics processing units or Samsung’s
Exynos processors.

Samsung retaliated Nov. 4 with a patent-infringement suit
in federal court in Richmond, Virginia. In that case, Suwon,
South Korea-based Samsung claims Nvidia and one of its customers
infringe as many as eight patents. That lawsuit targets Nvidia’s
Shield tablet computers.

Each company has denied using the other’s technology. In a
Nov. 11 statement, Nvidia called Samsung’s lawsuit “a
predictable tactic.”

‘We have not seen the complaint so can’t comment, but we
look forward to pursuing our earlier filed ITC action against
Samsung products,” Hector Marinez, a spokesman for Santa Clara,
California-based Nvidia, said in an e-mailed statement.

Judge Unseals 500+ Stingray Records

A judge in Charlotte, North Carolina, has unsealed a set of 529 court documents in hundreds of criminal cases detailing the use of a stingray, or cell-site simulator, by local police. This move, which took place earlier this week, marks a rare example of a court opening up a vast trove of applications made by police to a judge, who authorized each use of the powerful and potentially invasive device

According to the Charlotte Observer, the records seem to suggest that judges likely did not fully understand what they were authorizing. Law enforcement agencies nationwide have taken extraordinary steps to preserve stingray secrecy. As recently as this week, prosecutors in a Baltimore robbery case dropped key evidence that stemmed from stingray use rather than fully disclose how the device was used.

Eyes-on with Streaming Photoshop: Adobe’s plan to bring PS to the cloud | Ars Technica

“Streaming Photoshop” is Adobe and Google’s plan to bring the incomparable photo editor to Chrome OS and the Chrome Browser.

“Streaming Photoshop” is a Chrome App that you download from the Chrome store (provided you are whitelisted). The app opens in a window that looks just like a local version of Photoshop—there’s no browser UI of any kind. Photoshop lives on a computer in the cloud, and a video feed of it is streamed to the Chrome app. The app captures clicks and sends them to the server. It sounds like using it would be a clunky mess, but the whole process looked indistinguishable from a local install of Photoshop.

Chrome OS has taken off as a competitor to Windows—the NPD’s last estimate put it at 35% of commercial notebook sales—but it lacks a few killer apps like Photoshop. The other benefit is that you can now run Photoshop on just about any computer without having to worry about RAM and CPU usage, since all the computer has to display is a video stream. Adobe says even the $200 Chromebooks on the market today should be fast enough to handle Streaming Photoshop.

Three to 4MB/s will get you the best results, and Adobe says Streaming Photoshop should still be usable on connections as slow as 1MB/s. There’s no offline support, of course.

Streaming Photoshop runs version 15.2.1 (the latest version) on a Windows box from Google Compute Engine.

That means you’ll be getting the Windows title bar and menus regardless of what your host OS is. The app will remap hotkeys, though, so other than a few minor visual differences, it shouldn’t feel too weird. Right now there’s no GPU support, so things like 3D functions are currently off-limits—the whole menu was grayed-out. There’s also no way to print directly from Photoshop.

Storage used Google Drive—it does not currently work with Creative Cloud—and if your file is in Google’s cloud, it opens instantly, no uploading required. We’d imagine most people have their Photoshop files backed up 24/7 in Creative Cloud, Dropbox, or Google Drive, so this shouldn’t be a big change for most people. Adobe says Creative Cloud support is coming, but for now, on Google’s platform, Drive support comes free.

What XFINITY Internet Data Usage Plans will Comcast be Launching?

In the Tucson, Arizona market, we announced in 2012 that the data amount included with Economy Plus through Performance XFINITY Internet tiers would increase from 250 GB to 300 GB. Those customers subscribed to the Blast! Internet tier, have received an increase in their data usage plan to 350 GB; Extreme 50 customers have received an increase to 450 GB; Extreme 105 customers have received an increase to 600 GB. As in our other trial market areas, we offer additional gigabytes in increments/blocks of 50 GB for $10.00 each in the event the customer exceeds their included data amount.

In Huntsville and Mobile, Alabama; Atlanta, Augusta and Savannah, Georgia; Central Kentucky;Maine;Jackson,Mississippi;Knoxville and Memphis, Tennessee and Charleston,South Carolina, we have begun a trial which will increase our data usage plan for all XFINITY Internet tiers to 300 GB per month and will offer additional gigabytes in increments/blocks (e.g., $10.00 per 50 GB). In this trial, XFINITY Internet Economy Plus customers can choose to enroll in the Flexible-Data Option to receive a $5.00 credit on their monthly bill and reduce their data usage plan from 300 GB to 5 GB. If customers choose this option and use more than 5 GB of data in any given month, they will not receive the $5.00 credit and will be charged an additional $1.00 for each gigabyte of data used over the 5 GB included in the Flexible-Data Option.

The post Dark Age of the Internet | Tech Talk Today 96 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

The Promised WLAN | BSD Now 55

chris — Thu, 18 Sep 2014 10:26:43 +0000

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Coming up this week, we’ll be talking with Adrian Chadd about all things wireless, his experience with FreeBSD on various laptop hardware and a whole lot more. As usual, we’ve got the latest news and answers to all your emails, on BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

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Headlines

FreeBSD 10.1-BETA1 is out

The first maintenance update in the 10.x series of FreeBSD is on its way
Since we can’t see a changelog yet, the 10-STABLE release notes offer a glimpse at some of the new features and fixes that will be included in 10.1
The vt driver was merged from -CURRENT, lots of drivers were updated, lots of bugs were fixed and bhyve also got many improvements from 11
Initial UEFI support, multithreaded softupdates for UFS and many more things were added
You can check the release schedule for the planned release dates
Details for the various forms of release media can be found in the announcement

Remote headless OpenBSD installation

A lot of server providers only offer a limited number of operating systems to be easily installed on their boxes
Sometimes you’ll get lucky and they’ll offer FreeBSD, but it’s much harder to find ones that natively support other BSDs
This article shows how you can use a Linux-based rescue system, a RAM disk and QEMU to install OpenBSD on the bare metal of a server, headlessly and remotely
It required a few specific steps you’ll want to take note of, but is extremely useful for those pesky hosting providers

Building a firewall appliance with pfSense

In this article, we learn how to easily set up a gateway and wireless access point with pfSense on a Netgate ALIX2C3 APU
After the author’s modem died, he decided to look into a more do-it-yourself option with pf and a tiny router board
The hardware he used has gigabit ports and a BSD-compatible wireless card, as well as enough CPU power for a modest workload and a few services (OpenVPN, etc.)
There’s a lot of great pictures of the hardware and detailed screenshots, definitely worth a look

Receive Side Scaling – UDP testing

Adrian Chadd has been working on RSS (Receive Side Scaling) in FreeBSD, and gives an update on the progress
He’s using some quad core boxes with 10 gigabit ethernet for the tests
The post gives lots of stats and results from his network benchmark, as well as some interesting workarounds he had to do
He also provides some system configuration options, sysctl knobs, etc. (if you want to try it out)
And speaking of Adrian Chadd…

Interview – Adrian Chadd – adrian@freebsd.org / @erikarn

BSD on laptops, wifi, drivers, various topics

News Roundup

Sendmail removed from OpenBSD

Mail server admins around the world are rejoicing, because sendmail is finally gone from OpenBSD
With OpenSMTPD being a part of the base system, sendmail became largely redundant and unneeded
If you’ve ever compared a “sendmail.cf” file to an “smtpd.conf” file… the different is as clear as night and day
5.6 will serve as a transitional release, including both sendmail and OpenSMTPD, but 5.7 will be the first release without it
If you still need it for some reason, sendmail will live in ports from now on
Hopefully FreeBSD will follow suit sometime in the future as well, possibly including DragonFly’s mail transfer agent in base (instead of an entire mail server)

pfSense backups with pfmb

We’ve mentioned the need for a tool to back up pfSense configs a number of times on the show
This script, hosted on github, does pretty much exactly that
It can connect to one (or more!) pfSense installations and back up the configuration
You can roll back or replace failed hardware very easily with its restore function
Everything is done over SSH, so it should be pretty secure

The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System

We mentioned when the pre orders were up, but now “The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, 2nd edition” seems to be shipping out
If you’re interested in FreeBSD development, or learning about the operating system internals, this is a great book to buy
We’ve even had all three authors on the show before!

OpenBSD’s systemd replacement updates

We mentioned last week that the news of OpenBSD creating systemd wrappers was getting mainstream attention
One of the developers writes in to Undeadly, detailing what’s going on and what the overall status is
He also clears up any confusion about “porting systemd to BSD” (that’s not what’s going on) or his code ever ending up in base (it won’t)
The top comment as of right now is a Linux user asking if his systemd wrappers can be ported back to Linux… poor guy

Feedback/Questions

All the tutorials are posted in their entirety at bsdnow.tv
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv – we’d love to hear from you!
Last week we mentioned that Ken was looking for help to port Lumina to other BSDs, and now it’s been done for OpenBSD and DragonFly – so now you can try it out there too
Antoine Jacoutot sent a screenshot of Lumina on OpenBSD
We’ll be at EuroBSDCon soon, so there will be a prerecorded episode next week
When we’re not in Europe, you can usually watch live Wednesdays at 2:00PM Eastern (18:00 UTC)

The post The Promised WLAN | BSD Now 55 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Engineering Nginx | BSD Now 51

chris — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 11:00:23 +0000

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We’ll be showing you how to set up a secure, SSL-only webserver. There’s also an interview with Eric Le Blan about community participation and FreeBSD’s role in the commercial server space. All that and more, on BSD Now – the place to B.. SD.

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– Show Notes: –

Headlines

Password gropers take spamtrap bait

Our friend Peter Hansteen, who keeps his eyes glued to his log files, has a new blog post
He seems to have discovered another new weird phenomenon in his pop3 logs
“yes, I still run one, for the same bad reasons more than a third of my readers probably do: inertia”
Someone tried to log in to his service with an address that was known to be invalid
The rest of the post goes into detail about his theory of why someone would use a list of invalid addresses for this purpose

Inside the Atheros wifi chipset

Adrian Chadd – sometimes known in the FreeBSD community as “the wireless guy” – gave a talk at the Defcon Wireless Village 2014
He covers a lot of topics on wifi, specifically on Atheros chips and why they’re so popular for open source development
There’s a lot of great information in the presentation, including cool (and evil) things you can do with wireless cards
Very technical talk; some parts might go over your head if you’re not a driver developer
The raw video file is also available to download on archive.org
Adrian has also recently worked on getting Kismet and Aircrack-NG to work better with FreeBSD, including packet injection and other fun things

Trip report and hackathon mini- roundup

A few more (late) reports from BSDCan and the latest OpenBSD hackathon have been posted
Mark Linimon mentions some of the future plans for FreeBSD’s release engineering and ports
Bapt also has a BSDCan report detailing his work on ports and packages
Antoine Jacoutot writes about his work at the most recent hackathon, working with rc configuration and a new /etc/examples layout
Peter Hessler, a latecomer to the hackathon, details his experience too, hacking on the installer and built-in upgrade function
Christian Weisgerber talks about starting some initial improvements of OpenBSD’s ports infrastructure

DragonFly BSD 3.8.2 released

Although it was already branched, the release media is now available for DragonFly 3.8.2
This is a minor update, mostly to fix the recent OpenSSL vulnerabilities
It also includes some various other small fixes

Interview – Eric Le Blan – info@xinuos.com

Xinuos’ recent FreeBSD integration, BSD in the commercial server space

Tutorial

Building a hardened, feature-rich webserver

News Roundup

Defend your network and privacy, FreeBSD version

Back in episode 39, we covered a blog post about creating an OpenBSD gateway – partly based on our router tutorial
This is a follow-up post, by the same author, about doing a similar thing with FreeBSD
He mentions some of the advantages and disadvantages between the two operating systems, and encourages users to decide for themselves which one suits their needs
The rest is pretty much the same things: firewall, VPN, DHCP server, DNSCrypt, etc.

Don’t encrypt all the things

Another couple of interesting blog posts from Ted Unangst about encryption
It talks about how Google recently started ranking sites with HTTPS higher in their search results, and then reflects on how sometimes encryption does more harm than good
After heartbleed, the ones who might be able to decrypt your emails went from just a three-letter agency to any script kiddie
He also talks a bit about some PGP weaknesses and a possible future replacement
He also has another, similar post entitled “in defense of opportunistic encryption“

New automounter lands in FreeBSD

The work on the new automounter has just landed in 11-CURRENT
With help from the FreeBSD Foundation, we’ll have a new “autofs” kernel option
Check the SVN viewer online to read over the man pages if you’re not running -CURRENT
You can also read a bit about it in the recent newsletter

OpenSSH 6.7 CFT

It’s been a little while since the last OpenSSH release, but 6.7 is almost ready
Our friend Damien Miller issued a call for testing for the upcoming version, which includes a fair amount of new features
It includes some old code removal, some new features and some internal reworkings – we’ll cover the full list in detail when it’s released
This version also officially supports being built with LibreSSL now
Help test it out and report any findings, especially if you have access to something a little more exotic than just a BSD system

Feedback/Questions

All the tutorials are posted in their entirety at bsdnow.tv
We want to give a special thanks to our viewer Remy for writing the basis of today’s tutorial
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Watch live Wednesdays at 2:00PM Eastern (18:00 UTC)
Final reminder: OpenBSD is moving to a new distributor in September (which is very soon!) so this is your last chance to buy any of their tshirts, CDs or posters – grab them now while you still can, and support the project

The post Engineering Nginx | BSD Now 51 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.