August 2018 - Talk - lists.gtalug.org

GTATLUG talk about Atmel AVR
by Kevin Cozens 16 Aug '18

16 Aug '18

Greetings, Peter Hiscocks. I tried sending the following to your Ryerson email address but the message bounced so I am trying to get it to you this time via the GTALUG mailing list. I saw a video of your talk about Atmel AVR parts. Interesting talk. There are a few points you didn't make about the AVR microcontrollers. First, the instruction set is optimized for C. This is one of the reasons I chose to use AVR parts instead of PIC. That and no bank switching of memory with AVR. Second, you can use the AVR part without the need for an external crystal in many cases unless you are doing something requiring very precise timing. If you don't need precise timing you can use the built-in oscillator but it can also be calibrated to improve its timing accuracy. The real "Hello, World" program for hardware (such as microprocessors, microcontrollers, CPLDs, and FPGA's) is the blinking light. The question from the audience "Is the Atmel only on the Arduino?" was interesting. A lot of people associate the ATMEL AVR processors with Arduino when Arduino is more about the form factor and pinouts on a PCB and the software libraries, and programming method than about a given processor. You could have an Arduino board that doesn't use an ATMEL part. -- Cheers! Kevin. http://www.ve3syb.ca/ | "Nerds make the shiny things that https://www.patreon.html/KevinCozens | distract the mouth-breathers, and | that's why we're powerful" Owner of Elecraft K2 #2172 | #include <disclaimer/favourite> | --Chris Hardwick

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[GTALUG-Announce] GTALUG Meeting on Tuesday 14 August at 7:30pm
by hi＠gtalug.org 14 Aug '18

14 Aug '18

<http://gtalug.org/meeting/2018-08/> # Behind and Beyond Maker Festival with Eric Boyd I'm Eric Boyd, founder of maker festival, and serial entrepreneur. I grew up on a small farm in Ontario, and I've lived and worked in Silicon Valley. I co-founded StumbleUpon.com with friends in 2000, and in Toronto I've been president of Hacklab.TO, organizer of lots of different meetups (including Toronto Quantified Self). My interests span everything from technology to economics to leadership to gardening to cooking to travel. I'll talk about Maker Festival, why we do it, how we do, and what the impacts have been. Maker Festival brings together Toronto’s most creative people and projects, in order to inspire openness to possibilities, a sense of active participation in shaping our world, and a yearning for a more wonder-filled tomorrow. Makers of all types (electronics, robotics, sewing, paper crafting, glowy things, etc.etc) exhibit their DIY work and share their enthusiasm with the public. I'm happy to talk more broadly about technology and people. ## Location George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre 245 Church Street, Room 203 Ryerson University <http://goo.gl/maps/16oJ2> <http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/23447525> ## Schedule * 6:00 pm - Please discuss on the general mailing list (i.e. <talk(a)gtalug.org>) where you want to go for dinner. * 7:30 pm - Meeting and presentation. * 9:00 pm - After each meeting, a group of GTALUGers move to The Imperial Pub (54 Dundas St East) for refreshments and more socialising. # Code of Conduct We want a productive happy community that can welcome new ideas, improve every process every year, and foster collaboration between individuals with differing needs, interests and skills. We gain strength from diversity, and actively seek participation from those who enhance it. This code of conduct exists to ensure that diverse groups collaborate to mutual advantage and enjoyment. We will challenge prejudice that could jeopardise the participation of any person in the community. The Code of Conduct governs how we behave in public or in private whenever the Linux community will be judged by our actions. We expect it to be honoured by everyone who represents the community officially or informally, claims affiliation or participates directly. It applies to activities online or offline. We invite anybody to participate. Our community is open. Please read more about the GTALUG Code of Conduct here: <http://gtalug.org/about/code-of-conduct/>. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns about the GTALUG Code of Conduct please contact the GTALUG Board @ <board(a)gtalug.org>. --- GTALUG Announce mailing list announce(a)gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/announce

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"Golden Age for Computer Architecture"
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 14 Aug '18

14 Aug '18

This Turing Award Winners talk is quite insigtful. Full title: "A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture: Domain-Specific Hardware/Software Co-Design, Enhanced Security, Open Instruction Sets, and Agile Chip Development" The speakers are key figures in the RISC revolution. John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson <https://www.acm.org/hennessy-patterson-turing-lecture> Note: they mean that it is a golden age for researchers. Not so good for users.

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browsers
by o1bigtenor 10 Aug '18

10 Aug '18

Greetings I am not asking about how to solve Firefox issues (IMO the best way would be to get rid of the garbage) but am looking for some input. Firefox dies on me - - - and often. Am running a Debian testing box with 2 gpus and 4 monitors (and more than 20 GM of RAM) so I run the proprietary drivers (nouveau devs still seem to only use one monitor so they don't have any way that I know of to set up a four monitor 2 gpu setup). To have some privacy I run Noscript and only give limited approval for access. Firefox seems to be only set up to run on M$ systems. The sometimes 5 and more deaths (FF) per day are getting quite old. Are there any options for browsers that work? I'd use Chromium but I'm quite tired of google using me to get rich (especially when their search engine isn't near as good as they want me to think it is (I generally use Duckduckgo)) - - - so any ideas? I've tried Min, Opera, Vivaldi doesn't really work well (imo). Ideas/suggestions welcome! Regards Dee

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ret2spec: Speculative Execution Using Return Stack Buffers
by Russell Reiter 09 Aug '18

09 Aug '18

More Intel woes. http://www.digitaljournal.com/tech-and-science/technology/new-security-flaw… Quote from the whitepaper link in the article. 3 GENERAL ATTACK OVERVIEW Before detailing specific attack scenarios, in this section, we introduce the basics of how RSB-based speculative execution can be achieved and be abused. We explore whether and how attackers may manipulate the RSB entries in order to leak sensitive data using speculative execution that they could not access otherwise. Similar to recent microarchitectural attacks [8, 10, 22, 26, 29], we trick the CPU to execute instructions that would not have been executed in a sequential execution. The goal is to leak sensitive information in speculation, e.g., by caching a certain memory area that can be detected in a normal (non-speculative) execution. The general idea of our attack can be divided into three steps: (A1) trigger misspeculations in the return address predictor, i.e., enforce that returns mispredict (A2) divert the speculative execution to a known/controlled code sequence with the required context (A3) modify the architectural state in speculation, such that it can be detected from outside (A1) Triggering Misspeculation: From an attacker’s perspective, enforcing that the return predictor misspeculates upon function return is essential to reliably divert speculative execution to attacker-controlled code (see A2 for how to control the speculated code). Misspeculations can be achieved in several ways, depending on the RSBs underflow behavior (as discussed in Section 2.3).

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OpenWRT 18.06 Released
by Scott Sullivan 06 Aug '18

06 Aug '18

https://openwrt.org/ To Quote: The OpenWrt Community is proud to present the OpenWrt 18.06 stable version series. It is the first stable version after the OpenWrt/LEDE project merger and the successor to the previous stable LEDE 17.01 and OpenWrt 15.05 major releases. The OpenWrt 18.06 series focuses on modernizing many parts of the system, on backporting network offload support for eligible targets and on laying the groundwork for regular future release updates. === I personally had switched to LEDE a very early in 2017. It was fresh and they met their goal of regularly updating the router distro. I've done periodic updates from 17.01.1 to 17.01.4. 17.01.5 is out, but I'm going to jump to 18.06. OpenWRT / LEDE has been keeping my D-Link DIR-825 in service for almost a decade now. Originally my home router for a several years, and then an upgrade (replacing a WRT54G) at my boyfriends home (until earlier this year, when an Archer C7 went in). It now sits as my test router, and humming happily away with 18.06. I'll start rolling this out to my fleet of TP-Link Archer C7 routers soon. -- Scott Sullivan

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Re: [GTALUG] blackmail
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 06 Aug '18

06 Aug '18

| From: ac via talk <talk(a)gtalug.org> | no, not really. by the time you receive the type of email you have, it is way too late. Probably. But the information that a site was hacked should still be useful to the site. | How sure are you that it was Canada Computers? Are you saying that that | was the only place you used that password? Yes. (I said that in my original posting.) | And, is it a current | password (dollars to donuts says: no...) It was. No longer. | and with Google hacked, Yahoo | hacked, Microsoft hacked, it matters very little anyway... Change your | passwords every 30 days (or less) I find that too much bother. Experts have waffled on this policy. | and never use the same password | twice (or even anywhere else) - If they sent me my google/yahoo/etc | password - I would even be able to tell you from which week it came :) For real security, use something other than passwords. But that doesn't seem to be in place for most sites. Single-sign-on makes multi-factor authentication more feasible. I don't trust the monopoly power of single-sign-on providers. And I don't trust the resulting "one compromise to rule them all" ecosystem. And I'm not attached at the hip to a mobile phone (SMS is the usual second factor for consumers). I can imagine that client certificates for TLS could help, and I assume that the TLS supports this feature. But I don't know that any important sites expoit them. And the certificate hierarchy provides for monopoly abuse.

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"Nobody" Problem
by Stephen 06 Aug '18

06 Aug '18

I have a share on Ubuntu Linux. From Windows copy files to the share. Files have owner of "Nobody" How do I have them default to the owner of the Public directory? Thanks -- Stephen

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An LibreOffice question.
by Alvin Starr 05 Aug '18

05 Aug '18

Does anybody know how to display and work with SI numbers like 10k or 20M or 40G within LIbreOffice? I have had little luck searching with google et al. While I am at it how about engineering notation? -- Alvin Starr || land: (905)513-7688 Netvel Inc. || Cell: (416)806-0133 alvin(a)netvel.net ||

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blackmail
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 05 Aug '18

05 Aug '18

I received a blackmail message by email. It claimed that they hacked my system and had compromising videos from my computer's camera. As proof, they gave me what they claimed was my password. But I only used that password on two sites: canadacomputers.com and xpresscanada.com (a long-dead Canada Computers site). So I'm not worried. I informed CC about three weeks ago. They seemed to ignore the report. I phoned again two weeks ago, and they were interested. I told them if I didn't hear that they'd informed their customers that I'd publicize this security breach. I've heard nothing else. So I presume that they have not announced it to their customers. Today I got another blackmail message with the same password. What do you think that I should do? PS: my password is a random string generated by mkpasswd(1) so it would not have been discovered by an online exhaustive search. They most likely filched the password file from CC. PPS: I'm glad that I don't reuse passwords!

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