today's leftovers

• openSUSE.Asia Summit 2019

  This year, openSUSE.Asia summit 2019 host in Indonesia again.

• Why Taking Responsibility for Our Carbon Emissions Means Promoting the Right to Repair

  In our global system of production, consumption and premature disposal, using products for longer should be considered a pillar of global climate justice, and in an even broader sense, environmental justice.Saturday 19 October 2019 marks the third International Repair Day, and the theme this year is “Repair for Future”. | By Janet Gunter

• The Most Important Right-to-Repair Hearing Yet Is on Monday

  The Massachusetts state legislature is holding a three-hour hearing on the Digital Right to Repair act, a bill that would require electronics manufacturers to sell repair parts and tools, make repair guides available, and would prevent them from using software to artificially prevent repair.

  So far this year, 19 other states have considered similar legislation. It hasn’t passed in any of them. But Massachusetts is one of the most likely states to pass the legislation, for a few different reasons. Most notably, the legislation is modeled on a law passed unanimously in Massachusetts in 2012 that won independent auto shops the right to repair, meaning lawmakers there are familiar with the legislation and the benefits that it has had for auto repair shops not just in Massachusetts but around the country.

• [Older] GNS Technical Specification Milestone 1/4

  We are happy to announce the completion of the first milestone for the GNS Specification. The objective is to provide a detailed and comprehensive guide for implementors of the GNU Name System. The initial milestone consists of documenting the cryptographic principles of GNS data structures. This includes the specification of the GNS record wire and serialization formats as well as internationalization.

• GNUnet project invited to ICANN66

  We are delighted to announce that ICANN has invited the GNUnet project to speak at the next ICANN Annual General Meeting. We have been invited to join a panel discussion on Emerging Internet Identifier Technologies in order to share our ideas and work on the GNU Name System (GNS). ICANN generously offered to cover travel and accomodation. The meeting will take place in Montreal between 2 - 7 November. The panel will tentatively be help on November 6th.

• AWS Dangles Free Credits to Lure Open Source Developers

  Amazon Web Services is taking steps to improve its relations with open source software developers, offering them free service credits and sponsoring a popular programming language.

• Opmantek Expands IT Audit Capabilities With Open-AudIT Cloud

• Help! They’re about to obliterate us!

  Don’t let Yahoo fool you, with what they say, “Oh, just click here and download your content.” It’s not that simple. They have been breaking things to prevent us from leaving for years, and they are not making it easy now either. We live in a broken interface, and rescuing our content, especially quickly, is not at all easy.

• USB-C Has Finally Come Into Its Own

  Even so, the road has been bumpy. Just because USB-C can do all these things doesn’t mean that it always does. Take charging. While the body that governs USB protocol, the USB Implementers Forum, sets a Power Delivery standard, manufacturers have come up with their own unique implementations as well. Qualcomm has Quick Charge, Samsung has Adaptive Fast Charging, and so on. The result, as nicely detailed by Android Authority earlier this year, is a landscape where you’re never quite sure what you’re going to get, especially once you reach for a third-party cable. Your phone will still charge, just not as fast as advertised if all of the involved components aren’t built for the same spec. And in extreme cases, some dodgy cables have been capable of frying devices altogether by drawing too much power for a specific task.

Security Leftovers

• 6 top OSINT tools: Find sensitive public info before hackers do

  The same OSINT tactics used for spycraft can now be applied to cybersecurity. Most organizations have vast, public-facing infrastructures that span many networks, technologies, hosting services and namespaces. Information can be stored on employee desktops, in legacy on-prem servers, with employee-owned BYOD devices, in the cloud, embedded inside devices like webcams, or even hidden in the source code of active apps and programs.

• 3 steps toward improving container security

  As developers increasingly make use of containers, securing them becomes more and more important. Gartner has named container security one of its top 10 concerns for this year in this report, which isn’t surprising given their popularity in producing lightweight and reusable code and lowering app dev costs. In this article, I’ll look at the three basic steps involved in container security: securing the build environment, securing the underlying container hosts, and securing the actual content that runs inside each container. To be successful at mastering container security means paying attention to all three of these elements. If you step back a moment, container security isn’t all that different from ordinary application security. If you replace the appropriate words in the above paragraph, you could have written this post 10, 20, or even 30 years ago with a few other modifications. But containers do have a few oddities and new twists that are worth highlighting. To get started, I suggest you listen to the recorded talk by Red Hat’s Dan Walsh about general container security considerations.

• Good guy, Microsoft: Multi-factor auth outage gives cloudy Office, Azure users a surprise three-day weekend

  Microsoft is battling to fix its knackered multi-factor authentication system that today blocked customers from logging into their Microsoft 365 and Azure services. The Redmond giant confirmed on Friday an unspecified glitch prevented customers in North America from receiving the multi-factor auth (MFA) codes they need to sign into their cloud-based accounts. Obviously, those not using MFA are not affected. Though Azure and Microsoft 365 MFA users initially were locked out, by mid-day US Pacific Time, Azure was said to be working again, leaving 365 subscribers trying to log in high and dry. "We've taken multiple actions to mitigate impact and are working to validate service restoration," Microsoft told Microsoft 365 aka Office 365 customers. "In parallel, we're continuing to review system logs and service telemetry to better understand the underlying root cause."

• Update Warning Issued For Millions Of Microsoft Windows 10 Users

  At this stage, it isn’t clear what is the cause with users citing BSOD failures with cldflt.sys, Affinity applications and more but all have found that uninstalling KB4517389 fixes the problem, which pins the source squarely on this already troubled update. Needless to say, the problem with a BSOD bug is you may not be lucky enough to get back to your desktop to do this. If you are, then navigate to Control Panel > Programs > Programs and Features > Installed updates > KB4517389 > Uninstall KB4517389 has already rolled out to millions of users but for hundreds of millions who have not received it yet, use Microsoft’s Show or Hide updates tool to block it from installing on your PC.

LibreOffice: Continuous Endnotes in Writer and AutoCorrect Dialog

• Continuous endnotes in Writer

  What you can see is that endnotes unconditionally start after the end of the document content in Word, while endnotes are unconditionally on separate endnote pages in Writer. The new ContinuousEndnotes layout compatibility flag in Writer allows rendering endnotes the Word way. This new flag is enabled by default for DOC files, disabled otherwise. All this is available in LibreOffice master (towards 6.4), so you can try it out right now, if interested.

• [LibreOffice] AutoCorrect Dialog

  In addition to an better placement the Word Completion Tab should be now easier to understood.