February 17th 2014 Desktop, NSA (again), BCB, AWK and Haiku

Brian used recordMyDesktop to demonstrate his Gnome desktop with the Cairo Dock desktop interface, BitTorrent sync syncing all his devices, Gigolo, a GUI for remote servers, to demonstrate how fast the Raspberry Pi is accessing a 2TB drive, and creating and applying a password in KeyPassX.

David S demonstrated the faulty redaction of the NSA Smartphone Analysis which meant that the author, Paula Kuruc, could be identified from her LinkedIn profile and Twitter account (now removed), along with her age, her marathon results, her husband, Jonathan (accounts also removed) and their address at 9199 Rolling Meadow Road MD 21122. In effect, he had used exactly the same principles as NSA or GCHQ would use to build up a profile of someone.

Further on in the PDF references to Al Quaeda in Mosul and exif tags had been redacted suggesting that the redactor had little understanding of the significance of the content.

David had also followed the NBC investigations into GCHQ, their techniques, including the ‘Royal Concierge’ programme to track diplomats’ hotel bookings in London, GCHQ’s Psychology programme, which included the Squeaky Dolphin programme to monitor YouTube and Facebook likes, NSA’s Turing Test Bot James M Titus which has a Twitter account and the ‘Rolling Thunder’ DDoS operation against Anonymous. Gabriella Coleman has commented on these latest revelations.

David C reported that BCB are probably going to update to Windows 7 and will probably only go to free software on the back of an offer of the necessary technical support. David has contacted Canonical about such support. The main problem is that they have 200 volunteers who will need retraining to use any new software.

He asked if there was any interest in extending the use of social media but there was no support for this among the members present.

Brian mentioned that, in KitKat, you can use the developer option to compile programs under Android ART to run faster. The downside may be that more space will be taken up by the compiled programs than when they were in their original form.

Darren demonstrated a Regex command which contains no letters or numbers:

awk '/\/*/,/\*\//' {filename}

which outputs all the comments in a C file.

John W drew our attention to the error messages in Haiku.

John H invited comments on his website which is an attempt to see how well a pure HTML5 site works.

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