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Yesterday
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22:00
ICA bookmarked Dairy farmers talks - Sky News Australia
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07:45
MJRay wrote RFID Security and Stability
While developing an RFID extension for the Koha library catalogue system over the last few months, I’ve learned a lot about I-Code tags and security systems, but I’ve not yet looked into Mifare yet, which is the other big RFID product line from NXP. I have been seeing several reports of problems with Oyster (which is Mifare-based) and a crack to be published.
I thought Mifare was meant to be a much tougher product than I-Code. I’m surprised and disappointed that NXP’s reaction to a hack was to try to prevent publication. I haven’t heard from any suppliers about vulnerabilities, so I doubt that NXP are passing the message on to all Mifare-operators yet. They should tell Mifare operators so that they can protect themselves. It looks like the head-in-sand approach to security, which is very worrying.
At least one of our RFID systems is Mifare-capable (which is why I think we should have been told about this vulnerability), so I’ll look into that when I get some spare time (March 2012 perhaps?) unless someone points me at a link with juicy details.
August 5th, 2008
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03:32
ICA wrote Featured Member: Centro de Estudios y Capacitación Cooperativa R.L. (CENECOOP) of Costa Rica
The Centro de Estudios y Capacitación Cooperativa R.L. (CENECOOP) of
August 4th, 2008
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17:03
MJRay wrote Firefox 3 Online Banking List Updates and Wordpress 2.6 Upgrades
Software Cooperative News has been upgraded to Wordpress 2.6 (and other co-hosted sites too), the “subscribe to comments” plugin has been activated and all comments will be pre-moderated from now on. There’s a few more changes to come, but hopefully nothing as dramatic.
WP-2.6 has a few more SALTs and KEYs in the config file, but it was a local change to the wp-settings.php to make virtual hosting work across many domains which took us off-line for a few minutes this morning. Sorry if you missed us. There seem to have been a few changes to the rich text editor (the Icon to add align-left etc has disappeared from blog text editor and some users can’t word wrap) which I need to check, too.
In other website news, updates from three people have gone onto the list about Online Banking with GNU/Linux, Firefox-based browsers or Free Software - Firefox-3-related breakages at NatWest and Norwich and Peterborough and a report that Nationwide works with FF3. Thanks to those contributors - as usual, I won’t say who told me what, in order to avoid telling people who banks where, but I’ve added more names to the credits.
July 31st, 2008
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07:29
MJRay wrote Debian 4.0-updated (”etch and a half”)
“The Debian project is pleased to announce the fourth update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (codename etch). In addition to correcting several security problems and a few serious defects in the stable release, for the first time in Debian’s history an update for a stable distrubtion also adds support for newer hardware by giving users the option to install newer drivers.”
Read the full announcement for full information, links to release notes and upgrade instructions and so on. All of our debian servers are already running this. It’s worth upgrading.
(My contribution was just suggesting a few minor changes to the draft announcement, as far as I know. Hopefully it’s an easy enough read!)
July 30th, 2008
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07:07
MJRay wrote SPI Election Result and Apology
Regular readers may remember that I stood in the board election of Software in the Public Interest, the main democratic free software corporation, a few weeks ago. Well, the result is posted with David Graham and Jimmy Kaplowitz are re-elected. Well done and good luck to both.
Thanks to the other board members for running the election and restarting the voting machine as necessary. The postponed July meeting might happen in irc.oftc.net #spi today (Wednesday) at 1900UTC, but I expect they’ll announce it in the usual place before it happens.
Naturally, I’m disappointed that more news, members’ panels and the annual report weren’t attractive enough to get more votes, and that old untruths were being reposted to some forums, but I can’t get too upset about this year’s result because both elected candidates had fine manifestos. I’m glad that Jimmy Kaplowitz’s platform includes posting more news and look forward to seeing that.
Slightly worrying are the low turnout (down for the third year) and that over 80% of those few voters were from debian (my estimate). I’ve my suspicions why, but I’d love any non-voters to leave me a comment telling me why you think it is.
The apology: the summary of responses to my questions about SPI membership will appear next week because I made a mistake on one site, set the closing date a week late and I don’t see any way to edit surveys after they’ve opened. Oops. Sorry. (Now, if that site was running free software, I’d see if I could fix the user interface to allow previews.)
(Aside: I was going to include a bar chart of the voting, like last year, but Wordpress’s stupid post editor strips style attributes from li tags. I’ll go looking for that with a hack-axe Real Soon Now, before it causes me serious trouble.)
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