fidzu : computers

Guild Wars 2's crab-tossing, beach battling Southsun Cove questline is set to conclude next week, with the release of the Last Stand at Southsun update. From May 28th, ArenaNet will add a new solo story dungeon, asking players to infiltrate Canach's lair to bring down the "renegade" Sylvari. Hmm, are you still a renegade if you've got a lair? Surely you're at least miscreant, if not a full-fledged villain.

The post Guild Wars 2′s Last Stand at Southsun update to hold its ground next week appeared first on PC Gamer.

21 May 2013 11:44am GMT

Android/iOS/Web: A little music to keep you motivated while you work out is always a good thing, and FitRadio has that in spades. The app packs dozens of playlists from multiple genres, all engineered by professional DJs to help you keep your energy up and push through your exercise routine.

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21 May 2013 11:30am GMT

If you've ever sat in a plane on the tarmac only to have the flight cancelled, been bumped just before boarding, or landed at your destination only to be told your luggage will arrive sometime in the next 12 hours, you know how air travel can suck. In all of those cases, the airline owes you for your trouble. Sometimes it's good customer service, and other times it's the law. Here are some of the legal rights you may not know you have, and how to go about filing your claims or getting what's due to you if you've been wronged.

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21 May 2013 11:00am GMT

There are already an absurd number of possible empires in Civilization 5. The vanilla game came with a not-inconsiderable eighteen, DLC gave the option for another seven, and the Gods & Kings expansion raised the total by a further nine. Then there are mods, letting you play an astonishing range of leaders, from Stalin to Adventure Time's Princess Bubblegum.

The post Civilization 5: Brave New World expansion to add Indonesia and Morocco appeared first on PC Gamer.

21 May 2013 10:07am GMT

What starts as an authentically gruff assessment of a hero of the Wild West, soon becomes a ridiculously excitable celebration of violence, arcade action and skill shots. If you want to place the exact moment when the launch trailer for Call of Juarez: Gunslinger descends into over-the-top silliness, it's right around the line: "the face is one of Silas' favourite places to shoot people."

The post Call of Juarez: Gunslinger launch trailer and screenshots tell the tall tales of the Wild West appeared first on PC Gamer.

21 May 2013 9:23am GMT

judgecorp writes "German researchers from the Fraunhover and Karlsruhe institutes have achieved 40Gbps transfers over 1km using a wireless link. The new record raises the hope that point-to-point wireless could be used instead of expensive fibers in some rural broadband applications." Partially thanks to transmitting between 200GHz and 280GHz.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

21 May 2013 9:04am GMT

DavidGilbert99 writes "LulzSec's star burnt brightly in the short period it was active, but things quickly turned sour when its core members began getting arrested. Last week three of the six core members were sentenced in the UK, but this only served to highlight the fact that one member of the group, known as Avunit, has been able to remain unidentified despite the FBI having turned the group's leader Sabu into an informant. Who is Avunit? And does he hold the purse strings of the group's Bitcoin wallet which could have up to $180,000 in it?" As usual, be warned of the horrendous autoplaying video ads surrounding good content at the primary link.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

21 May 2013 7:13am GMT

richlv writes "Latvian police recently raided the home of a history teacher and confiscated his computer. The crime? Scanning a history book and making it available on his website covering various topics on history. The raid was based on a complaint from the publisher (Google Translate to English), which has a near-monopoly on educational materials in Latvia, often linked with shady connections in the Ministry of Education."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

21 May 2013 4:06am GMT

New pricing makes free accounts awesome; paid ones almost pointless.

21 May 2013 2:00am GMT

Nothing illegal here, just more of the same sketchy tax practices big corps employ.

21 May 2013 1:00am GMT

"I'm a rock star," said one prospective juror. "I like to throw parties."

21 May 2013 12:00am GMT

Readers offer their best tips for putting your laptop to sleep, keeping your gadgets in one place, and making your keyboard's number pad better.

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21 May 2013 12:00am GMT

The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.

20 May 2013 10:43pm GMT

PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.

20 May 2013 9:50pm GMT

Tired corporates prefer predecessor, says analyst

Windows 8 won't become an enterprise IT standard as customers dump Microsoft's legacy PC operating system XP. Instead, corporate IT departments will stick to what they know and install Windows 7.…

20 May 2013 12:04pm GMT

The day has finally come! Jolla has finally announced the launch device for its Sailfish operating system - and by god this is a looker. It's decidedly different from other phones out there, but it has good specifications and carries a relatively reasonably price tag - EUR 399, and it's up for pre-order today, shipping in the fourth quarter of this year.

20 May 2013 11:29am GMT

As Google is discontinuing their Google Reader I needed to look for alternatives and after some looking I went for Tiny Tiny RSS, which I can run on one of my web servers. At least this was the theory . The problems I faced were that Tiny Tiny RSS seems to have problems with a half-way secure PHP setup, and I needed therefore to make some changes to get it working. As I didn't find that much documentation on this topic and it seams the Tiny Tiny RSS developers are not really security affine.

1. open_basedir is not supported

I did as described in the Install Notes and went to the http://your.site.com/tt-rss/install/ URL to use the installer to configure my Tiny Tiny RSS, but I was prompted with this error message:

PHP configuration option open_basedir is not supported. Please disable this in PHP settings file (php.ini).

I searched through the Internet and it seams that some obscure errors can occur if you use open_basedir. But to me it seem more like: I (=developer) don't have the problem and the user has it and he has open_basedir activated so this must be the problem. Anyway, open_basedir is an imported security measure for PHP hosting, do not ever disabled it, specially if you have more than one vhost. I running with enabled open_basedir for 2 weeks now without getting any obscure errors (or any errors at all). At the time of writing this blog post I was running PHP 5.3.23 and 5.3.25 on this server.

After these preliminary words - how did I get rid of this error messages? Simple I just commented raising of the exceptions out. For this open the install/index.php in a text editor and search for the line containing "option open_basedir is not supported", comment it out like this:

And you need to do the same in the include/sanity_check.php file:

2. passthru disabled

I wanted to call the ./update.php --daemon command from the command line but I got following error message:

PHP Warning: passthru() has been disabled for security reasons in /var/www/xxxx/html/update.php on line 150

This is because a secure configured default php.ini has following set:

disable_functions = exec, passthru, shell_exec, system, proc_open, popen, curl_exec, curl_multi_exec, parse_ini_file, show_source

I remove disabled functions per vhost so I don't have the least common denominator for security. In this case needed to make sure that the update.php called via the command line uses a custom made php.ini. I therefore created this bash script.

#!/bin/bash
export PHPRC="/var/www/php/xxxx/"
./update.php --daemon

In this directory a special php.ini is located which has passthru enabled.

3. undefined function posix_getpid

I wanted to use the update_daemon2.php script as it is recommended but I got following error message:

[09:48:30] [MASTER] installing shutdown handlers
PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function posix_getpid() in /var/www/xxxx/html/update_daemon2.php on line 223
PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function posix_getpid() in /var/www/xxxx/html/update_daemon2.php on line 236
PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function posix_getpid() in /var/www/xxxx/html/update_daemon2.php on line 99

The solution on Centos/RHEL/SL is easy, just install the posix package for php:

yum install php-posix

I hope this post helps others which move to Tiny Tiny RSS and still want a reasonably secure PHP setup.

20 May 2013 10:03am GMT

A convenient online search facility is now available for the enormous amount of data that was accumulated during a port scan of the entire internet

20 May 2013 9:01am GMT

<div class="feedflare"> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/SecurityThoughts?a=_OJRf84LMPQ:WlINvs0cc80:yIl2AUoC8zA"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/SecurityThoughts?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/SecurityThoughts?a=_OJRf84LMPQ:WlINvs0cc80:I9og5sOYxJI"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/SecurityThoughts?d=I9og5sOYxJI" border="0"></img></a> <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/SecurityThoughts?a=_OJRf84LMPQ:WlINvs0cc80:qj6IDK7rITs"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/SecurityThoughts?d=qj6IDK7rITs" border="0"></img></a> </div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/SecurityThoughts/~4/_OJRf84LMPQ" height="1" width="1"/>

20 May 2013 8:04am GMT

{% img left http://dl.dropbox.com/u/261312/Blog-images/woodcutting.jpg 'Cutting wood' %} I posted a couple of weeks ago about Building Vim and how, using ABS and makepkg it is possible to customize packages in the repositories to suit your individual requirements, in that case with a specific feature set.

One of Arch's real strengths is in the flexibility that makepkg and PKGBUILDs provide the community; the ability to adapt official packages-or unofficial ones in the AUR-as you see fit. As PKGBUILDs are just shell scripts, the entry level to start playing around with them is quite low¹.

A fairly standard, and simple, example of the type of customization that I might make is with dmenu, the suckless dynamic menu, where the standard package in the Arch repositories is not patched for Xft support. There is a patch for this on the suckless wiki, so it is just a case of making the requisite changes in the PKGBUILD from ABS and building it.

As you can see from the diff below, there is not a lot involved in this exercize; essentially, adding libxft as a dependency, sourcing the patch from the suckless site (and including the hash for it), and then in the build function ensuring that the patch is applied and the Makefile updated with the new library:

{% codeblock lang:diff %} --- PKGBUILD 2013-05-18 09:33:07.156328812 +1200 +++ PKGBUILD 2012-11-14 09:25:15.915335588 +1300 @@ -11,16 +6,22 @@ pkgdesc="A generic menu for X" url="http://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/" arch=('i686' 'x86_64') +groups=('modified') license=('MIT') -depends=('sh' 'libxinerama') -source=(http://dl.suckless.org/tools/$pkgname-$pkgver.tar.gz) -md5sums=('9c46169ed703732ec52ed946c27d84b4') +depends=('sh' 'libxinerama' 'libxft') +source=(http://dl.suckless.org/tools/$pkgname-$pkgver.tar.gz +http://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/patches/$pkgname-$pkgver-xft.diff) +md5sums=('9c46169ed703732ec52ed946c27d84b4' + 'd448ec9120718b0aedbdb338f4fa69ba')

build(){ cd $srcdir/$pkgname-$pkgver + patch -p1 < ../$pkgname-$pkgver-xft.diff + sed -i 's:-I/usr/local/include/freetype2:-I/usr/include/freetype2:' config.mk + make \ {% endcodeblock %}

Running makepkg -i will build and install dmenu with Xft support. This is the most straightforward approach. I also, primarily by way of experimentation and in an effort to try an understand how this actually works, have slightly more convoluted examples. msmtp, the SMTP client has a couple of makedepends in libgnome-keyring and texlive-core; the former I have zero use for and the latter is only installed on my desktop, so I have no wish to install it on my laptop just to be able to send emails…

In this case, I modified the PKGBUILD to completely remove the libgnome-keyring dependency and to only build the msmtp documentation in .pdf and .html if texlive-core was already installed on the machine. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to test for the presence of texlive-core with the standard utilities like type or which, so-as it is installed on all my boxes-I went with expac (pacman -Q would also work):

{% codeblock lang:diff %} --- PKGBUILD 2013-05-18 09:32:07.393095131 +1200 +++ PKGBUILD 2013-05-18 09:31:55.449986364 +1200 @@ -1,7 +1,8 @@ arch=('i686' 'x86_64') +groups=('modified') license=('GPL3') url="http://msmtp.sourceforge.net" -makedepends=('texlive-core' 'gsasl' 'libgnome-keyring') +makedepends=('gsasl') source=(http://download.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/msmtp/${pkgbase}-${pkgver}.tar.bz2) sha1sums=('c0edce1e1951968853f15209c8509699ff9e9ab5')

@@ -12,19 +13,24 @@

build() { cd ${pkgbase}-${pkgver} - ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --with-ssl=gnutls + ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --with-ssl=gnutls --without-gnome-keyring make - make -C doc html pdf + if [[ -n $(expac -Q '%n' texlive-core) ]]; then + make -C doc html pdf + fi }

package_msmtp() { pkgdesc="A mini smtp client" - depends=('gsasl' 'libgnome-keyring') + depends=('gsasl') install=msmtp.install

cd ${pkgbase}-${pkgver} make DESTDIR="${pkgdir}" install + + if [[ -n $(expac -Q '%n' texlive-core) ]]; then make DESTDIR="${pkgdir}" -C doc install-html install-pdf + fi

# Installing example configs and scripts to /usr/share/doc/msmtp {% endcodeblock %}

It isn't necessarily an attractive solution, but it works for me… On the subject of unattractive solutions, as of pacman 4.1, released last month, the packaging standards for VCS PKGBUILDs have been changed, principally around how sources and versioning is handled. For the couple of VCS packages I maintain in the AUR², I have been experimenting with how to capture the pkgver in a way that conforms to the standards and provides people with a meaningful version number.

By default, the version number for these projects from their git repos is not that helpful:

{% codeblock lang:sh %} git describe --always 4861046 {% endcodeblock %}

After looking through the git logs, and playing around with awk to filter the results, I came up with this:

{% codeblock lang:sh %} pkgver() { cd "$gitname" printf '%s\n' "$(awk '/^ / {print $2}' <(git log --grep=version -1))\ $(git describe --always)" } {% endcodeblock %}

This prints a more, for me anyway, intelligble package version: vimprobable2-git 1.2.1_c5936cc-1 that relates back to the last stable release and appends the current commit. I'm sure that this could be improved upon; suggestions are welcome.

The other change to note in all of these PKGBUILDs is the inclusion of the groups variable. By adding all of the modified packages from the official repositories to the-imaginatively titled-modified group, I can then add a line to /etc/pacman.conf that prevents those packages from being overwritten on upgrade³:

{% codeblock lang:sh %} IgnoreGroup = modified {% endcodeblock %}

Issuing pacman -Syu, or running checkupdates from a cron job, will notify you that the packages have had a version bump and that they need to be rebuilt. The PKGBUILDs for all of these packages can be found in my bitbucket repo.

Notes

1. As my experiments attest…
2. Vimprobable2-git, Surfraw-git and ruby-build-git.
3. All credit to ataraxia for this idea.

Creative Commons image on Flickr by Wells P. Wilson

17 May 2013 10:10pm GMT

Won't be 'Blue,' but will include important features

We still don't know for sure what changes will arrive in Windows 8.1, the big OS update that's expected to ship as a preview in late June, but Microsoft has begun teasing a few details of the next update to Windows Phone 8.…

14 May 2013 7:10pm GMT

No, no, no need to thank us - we love you all

Microsoft has confirmed that it will issue its Blue update to Windows 8 without charge, with first code scheduled at the company's Build conference starting on June 26.…

14 May 2013 4:46pm GMT

I have deleted the [allanbroke] repository. It was started mainly to test the PGP signing implementation in pacman, which is now well established. Also, I would delay any packaging of release candidates or beta releases for this repository until I had enough free time and often official releases were made before that happened. The repository [...]

12 May 2013 5:00am GMT

What's that? It is now May and it has been for a few days… Better do this post then! News from the world of distributions: This relatively unknown distro got a release…. (Raring Ringtail) Although there might be a lack of co-operation between them and Debian Fedora 19 was slightly delayed. openSUSE is doing lots [...]

03 May 2013 4:21am GMT

On Sunday, May 20th 2012, people in a narrow strip from Japan to the western United States will be able to see an annular solar eclipse, the first in 18 years. The moon will cover as much as 94% of the sun. An Annular Solar Eclipse is different from a Total Solar Eclipse, when the [...]

20 May 2012 9:51pm GMT

In the last year the number of World of Warcraft subscribers has fallen in the from 12 million to 10.3 million...

09 Nov 2011 11:55am GMT

Assassin's Creed: Revelations will have first-person missions...

09 Nov 2011 10:58am GMT

Via YouTube user DarkSydeGeoff, we came across a Battlefield 3 exploit that allows friends to boost enormous amounts of experience in hardcore matches...

09 Nov 2011 1:43am GMT

Some words about history of Planet Sun. For round about six years Planet Sun has been an aggregation of public weblogs written by employees of Sun Microsystems. Though it never was a product or publication of Sun Microsystems itself. The website was powered by Planet and run by David Edmondson. On 01 Mar 2010 David [...]

13 May 2011 12:36am GMT

A warm welcome to our guests. This is your first wordpress post. We should edit or delete it, and then start blogging! Let's save our planet. Renewable energy is the future. Bio & Nature.

10 May 2011 10:18pm GMT