Linux Format

Matthew Holder The smartest thing in my house, is certainly not me! The Raspberry Pi 4 that runs my Home Assistant installation and camera management has been a true workhorse and deserves plenty of praise. This hub enables everything else to happen, automating all the things. Michael Reed My house is mostly analogue – I press the light switch myself. As for ‘smart’ tech, an app (Sleep As Android) monitors my sleep. Heart rate and steps are recorded with a fitness band (Amazfit 5), while Fitotrack records runs. I visualise the data with Python/Matplotlib. Nate Drake I recently encountered a smart toaster that pings an app when both rounds are a perfect shade of golden brown. Now I’m not just living the dream – I’m toasting it. These little slices…

Every tech startup and their dog seems to want to start a smart-home ecosystem, which is terrible because you end up with a smorgasbord of apps trying to independently control each aspect of your home. Amazon, Google and Apple have swooped in and tried to corner their own patch of your smart home, which helped streamline control but you’re at the whim of Big Tech and its monitoring. Open protocols like Zigbee have helped consolidate control: buy your smart bulbs, install smart switches, wire inline controls to the mains and centrally control them, but how? We’re taking the mighty open source Home Assistant, a Pi and a Zigbee dongle and will explain just that, so you can have a glowing fully lit smart home in time for the dark winter…

THIS ISSUE: Canonical climbs high » New GIMP creeps closer » Zeroing in on 0.0.0.0 Day » Rust adoption tarnished As a limited liability company, Canonical annually submits financial reports to Companies House in the UK. The most recent reveals a total turnover of $251 million in 2023, a $46 million improvement on the previous year. The overall profit for the financial year was $12.5 million, a considerable increase from $3.9 million in 2022. The figures are particularly impressive given that just five years ago Canonical reported that it was operating at a loss, with only around half the revenue and employees it enjoys today. Speaking of personnel, from 2022 to 2023 the staff also increased from 858 to 1,034. Part of this success is no doubt thanks to businesses…

On 20th August, GIMP entered ‘string freeze’ for version 3.0.0. The following day, the development preview (2.99.18) was released for testing purposes. The stable version of 3.0 is likely still a few months away but the development release has tantalised us with some major and very welcome changes. Chief among these is a revamped welcome screen, no doubt in response to criticism that GIMP can be very unfriendly to beginners. It has been overhauled with four new sections. These include a Personalise section to easily change features such as colour and icon themes. The Create section displays the eight most recently accessed images, with the option to launch any of them. There’s also a Contribution section and a link to easily access the release notes. GIMP will also now include…

In early August, Oligo Security researchers publicly disclosed the 0.0.0.0 Day vulnerability. This exploit, which impacts Mac OS and Linux devices, allows websites crafted by bad actors to bypass browser security and interact with local network services. The implications are serious, given that attackers could potentially remotely execute any arbitrary code. Both Chrome and Firefox allow external websites to access local resources. However, Windows versions of the browsers aren’t affected as the OS itself blocks the IP 0.0.0.0. Google’s PNA (Private Network Access) feature is designed to prevent exploits of this kind, but while PNA blocks 127.0.0.1 and certain other localhost addresses, the 0.0.0.0 exploit can bypass its security features. Technically, any application that runs on localhost and can be reached by 0.0.0.0 is vulnerable to remote code execution. Oligo…

“LibreOffice 24.8 has just been announced, with several last-minute new features that were not yet ready when we covered the major release in August. This is the first major release available for ARM-based Windows PCs in addition to Intel and AMD-based PCs, so LibreOffice is now available for all flavours of Windows PCs. In terms of privacy, if the option Tools > Options > LibreOffice > Security > Options > Remove Personal Information On Saving is enabled, any personal data is not exported. Calc adds the following new functions: FILTER, LET, RANDARRAY, SEQUENCE, SORT, SORTBY, UNIQUE, XLOOKUP and XMATCH, and improves performance for threaded calculations and optimisation of redraw after a cell change by minimising the area to be refreshed. Impress enables you to scroll between slides in Normal view,…