Ubuntu 17.04 is out! Debian contributor Dmitry Bogatov gets detained, MSI learns a colourful lesson, and the Pi Zero goes to 11. All this, plus your feedback.
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Colour key – Venn Pedro Mathieu Jordan
Notes:
Russia
https://www.debian.org/News/2017/20170417.en.html
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2017/04/10/mathematics-teacher-accused
- Maths teacher Dmitry Bogatov was arrested for running a TOR exit node.
- Debian has removed keys assigned to developer Dmitry Bogatov after he was arrested / detained.
- Looks like they threw in some extra charges because Russia.
- This proves, once again, that using Tor is more dangerous than helpful, especially for those running an exit node.
- It paints quite the target on your back.
- Do not run an exit node at home. Unless you are 100% sure your government will don’t care about it (this already eliminates most of the world already)
- Do it in Portugal, internet is cheap and if you pay for a business connection, you can run a high traffic “server” without your ISP giving you crap.
UDP hax
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/14/new_critical_linux_kernel_flaw/
http://www.zdnet.com/article/real-linux-bug-false-security-concerns/
- Tech journalists are eagers to find vulnerabilities because it scares people and fear generate clicks.
- In this case, the bug had already been fixed years ago, and even with the vulnerability still around you had to be running software listening to specific instructions and then your system would be vulnerable to another attack, which was likely to succeed if the stars aligned correctly.
- Of course, Linux users being the paranoid people they’ve always been, it’s always funny to watch them scream and run around in total panic as if the world was on fire.
- And by the time these stories started cropping up, the new vulnerability, which was introduced by a little coding oops, had already been patched as well.
- I was going to say this might affect android but can’t think of anything that uses MSG_PEEK.
OBS 18
https://launchpad.net/~obsproject/+archive/ubuntu/obs-studio
- They finally updated the PPA.
- Though, the PPA version isn’t compiled with NVEnc support.
- OBS doesn’t have anything to do with NVEnc. It’s compiled to use a particular version of ffmpeg which may or may not have NVenc enabled
- I know a thing or two about this, I co-wrote a bash script.
- And how does that invalidate what I said?
- If you compile OBS against a non-nvenc ffmpeg does it not end up being compiled without nvenc support?
- Next time you want to debate semantics, make sure you’re at least not being pointlessly pedantic.
- The changelog doesn’t really show anything that would justify rebuilding OBS. I’d suggest to only upgrade if you need to re-install the software.
- Agreed, if 16.X is working don’t bother fixing it.
- Important bit here is, it works.
- Yesterday’s stream of Salt and Sanctuary I did was done with this version.
Cartography
https://github.com/westnordost/StreetComplete
- I find it kinda sad that there isn’t a good, feature complete, OpenStreetMap based mapping software.
- StreetComplete is useful but fulfills a single functionality which should be part of a larger scale project.
- I almost started such a project but stopped myself right in time, I can only manage so many projects.
- “finds wrong, incomplete or extendable data in the user’s vicinity and provides the tools to complete these easily and directly”
- It can even be used offline.
Blowback
https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/852990256265691137
https://twitter.com/VennStone/status/852990219339128833
- He deleted the original tweet and that’s the only reason I’m bringing it up.
- It was something along the lines of
- I try to install Linux on a laptop every two years but it always fails. What should I try this year?
- Blow has never been very good at Linuxing
- Makes me wonder why he even bothers. Icculus took care of Braid, why not hire him again? I was a perfect port!
- Bzzzt! It lacked gamepad support for the longest time.
- If he’s going into that kind of trouble, could we hope for a native port of The Witness? Preferably before I get to finish the game using Wine. I test it every 2 weeks and it’s making visible progress very fast
- He said if he ever decided to rebuild the Witness with Vulkan he’d consider it.
- So, no.
- Blow basically said “Linux sucks, am I right” forgetting that it is 2017.
- He was expecting @replies agreeing in unison… but this was not to be.
- For it was, in fact, 2017 and even the little Winbros mocked poor Blow for being unable to install Linux on not one, but three laptops.
- Now after realizing he done goofed Mr. Blow moved the field goal.
- His new complaint was that he should not have to configure anything after installing Linux.
- At this point I could not tell if he was trolling or being stupid on purpose because that operating system simply does not exist be it Win/Mac/Lin
- Yes, it does, it’s called Ubuntu MATE 17.04
Reverse RGB
https://kazlauskas.me/entries/i-reverse-engineered-a-motherboard.html
- Mobo used a Nuvoton IO chip and dude wanted his pretty RGB.
- Nuvoton said bug MSI and MSI pulled a shrug emoticon.
- A student copy of Win10 and RWEverything later we now have msi-rgb.
- I’ll pass…
- … but I’m not really surprised that the guy runs a blog powered by Haskell
- To be fair, if what he wanted was just the RGB bits, he could have specified it when he poked MSI about it.
- Instead he asked for the entire spec sheet for a proprietary chip which was developed and licensed by yet another party. There’s no way they’d share that much.
- That’s kinda how it works.
- It’s even more unrealistic to think they would take the time to look something up.
Puny Gods
http://thehackernews.com/2017/04/unicode-Punycode-phishing-attack.html
- I’ve seen people on Twitter blaming the ability to have Unicode domain names.
- No, it’s not the problem. The problem is with how Unicode domain names are handled in browsers.
- The problem has been patched in Chrome, your turn Firefox.
- In Firefox you can go to about:config and disable Punycode handling, for the time being.
- Edge, Safari and Vivaldi were not vulnerable.
17.04
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/04/ubuntu-17-04-review-new-features
- I’ve been pretty much ok with Ubuntu releases just being updates to software I already run.
- What I’m really waiting for is 17.10, Ubuntu will drop their Unity specific patches to Nautilus and whatnot and we’ll finally get a fully up to date install for Gnome.
- And with Canonical stepping away from phones and convergence, we might finally see some new stuff on the desktop. (or maybe not, it will probably be mostly LXD and Snaps improvements)
- Don’t get me wrong, this is still the best Ubuntu version ever released, just as every Ubuntu release was better than the previous one.
- My turn to be pedantic and remind you that 11.04 was in fact worse than 10.10.
- Yeah, well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.
- To be honest, I was into heavily customizing my distros back then, I have no idea how the default experience was.
- My turn to be pedantic and remind you that 11.04 was in fact worse than 10.10.
- And by Ubuntu I actually mean Ubuntu Gnome, I haven’t even given Unity a chance with this one.
- Ubuntu desktop team manager Will Cooke confirmed Ubuntu will be moving to Wayland.
- Will hold off until 18.04, like a sane person.
Polaris 10
https://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-rx-580-570-560-550-specs-gaming-benchmarks-official-leak
https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/Radeon-RX-580-8GB-Review-Polaris-Populism
- AMD benchmarks their next gen GPU against the GTX970, GTX750Ti and an Intel chipset, this is a bit sad.
- The reason for that is probably because the 1050Ti is curbing the RX560 up and down the street.
- It’s also $10 cheaper on the MSRP than the 750ti was at launch.
We are all made of stars
https://blog.docker.com/2017/04/introducing-the-moby-project/
- I don’t get why they are making a big deal of being open, Docker and all the technologies around have always been open source
- This projects looks neat, it’s a framework providing swappable components to build containers.
- But this is something meant to be used by Docker “power users”
Slice of Pi
IDEPi
https://hackaday.io/project/20774-netpi-ide
- Now you can have Dropbox on your 286
Make your own
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/04/nintendo-hates-money-discontinues-the-nes-classic/
- This is nothing new, Lakka and RetroPie have been around for longer than the Pi. People wanted the NES classic because it was Nintendo branded (and extremely short controller cables)
- Build your own with a RasPi 3 and you get both WiFi and bluetooth for a cordless controller.
- You know, besides it being faster, fully featured and being able to play many MANY more games.
Speed
http://blog.everpi.net/2017/04/raspberry-pi-zero-overlock-extremo-1600mhz.html
- Oh meu Deus, mil e seiscentos megahertz, tal velocidade!
- The original Pi was locked to 1500MHz max but you could unlock it.
- The Zero, even though it has the same SoC as the original Pi, just in a smaller packaged, does seem to have a few other differences.
- The Pi zero is locked to 1600MHz and using the old tricks to remove that limitation, didn’t work.
- The current record for this particular SoC, not the Pi zero, is 1620MHz.
- He used an old Athlon 2600 heatsink, dunked it in frozen salt water, and it seems to have worked since it kept the running temperatures at around 15ºC.
- He needed 2.06-2.07 V to reach the 1600MHz.
Feedback
Droid
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?SenoEdB
- So Genymotion is still the best option when it comes to running Android games on Linux?
Thunder
http://linuxgamecast.com/bradley/?W4oVjrn
- I have Thunderbird open almost all day, with 6 mail accounts and several online calendars, Runs just fine.
- Have you checked your extensions?
- No, you don’t need to run your own Mastodon instance, actually, it demands quite a lot of server resources to do so.
- Don’t worry about Mastodon, it’s been a week and everyone has forgotten about it.
- And by everyone, you mean yourself
