Update Flash won't fix security flaws!

Another Flash update in Debian today, but Flash is still insecure- there's still an active 0-day exploit- and blocked by default by Mozilla.

Update Flash fix security flaws!

Adobe pushes emergency fix for active 0-day.

No, this isn't a duplicate of the previous post.

It looks like I'll be saying exactly the same thing next week too, according to Brian Krebs.

For the second time in a week, Adobe Systems Inc. says it plans fix a zero-day vulnerability in its Flash Player software that came to light after hackers broke into and posted online hundreds of gigabytes of data from Hacking Team, a controversial Italian company that’s long been accused of helping repressive regimes spy on dissident groups.

In an advisory published late Friday evening, Adobe said it plans to issue another Flash patch the week of July 13, 2015.

Update Flash fix security flaws!

Adobe pushes emergency fix for active 0-day.

ars technica UK

How to update Flash in Debian.

Brian Krebs survives A Month Without Adobe Flash Player.

Firefox can block tracking cookies- but not by default

I read an article on the BBC News website about ad blocking in web browsers recently and was interested to read a claim that blocking tracking cookies in Firefox can speed up page load times by about 44%. Whatever you may think about the privacy concerns of tracking cookies, this seems to be a big hit on performance. The article doesn't mention how to activate tracking protection in Firefox (it's not enabled by default, or an easy preferences option), but the information is available on this Mozilla Support page.

This feature requires a recent version of Firefox to work- the ESR version in Debian Jessie didn't support it. I had to install the release version from the Debian Mozilla Team. As a bonus, I get to play with the new video chat feature, and preferences in a tab.

Things that are broken in Debian Jessie 2

Gnome Calendar:

bugzilla.gnome.org


Gnome Calendar causes random authentication request popups (without identifying where they have come from), as documented at stackexchange.com.

The first attempt at entering a password fails, even if it is correct; the popup disappears at the second attempt but returns later.

Looks like this is fixed in Gnome 3.16.

Things that are broken in Debian Jessie

Bummers for Debian Jessie users- these things are broken.

Update notifications:

lists.debian.org

Bluetooth file transfer from phone to computer:

bugs.debian.org bug=774796 and bugs.debian.org bug=bug=757633

Split Flac audio file: errors, solutions and workarounds

I've previously split some Flac files with the following command:

 shntool split -f *.cue -o flac *.flac

But I recently tried the same command on some other Flac files and got the following error message:

shntool [split]: error: m:ss.ff format can only be used with CD-quality files

A suggestion on linuxquestions.org was to use a similar command to this (where you have one Flac file and one cue file; you'll have to specify the names if you have more than one in the folder obviously):

cuebreakpoints *.cue | sed s/$/0/ | shnsplit -o flac *.flac

However, I ran into a similar error as another poster there:

shnsplit: warning: error while transferring -4195974166 bytes of data shnsplit: error: failed to split file

I noticed that in both cases it was the final track that failed to split.

A workaround is to add a extra dummy track to the end of the cue file, using the track length of the origianl Flac file from file properties.

The final track is then spit successfully and the error message appears when the program tries to slit the dummy track.

Once the Flac file is successfully split, to add tag information to the split files from the cue file, use this command:

cuetag *.cue split-track*.flac

To change the file names to track titles from the cue file, use this script:

#!/bin/bash
for f in *.flac; do
track=`metaflac "$f" --show-tag=TRACKNUMBER | sed s/.*=//g`
artist=`metaflac "$f" --show-tag=ARTIST | sed s/.*=//g`
title=`metaflac "$f" --show-tag=TITLE | sed s/.*=//g`
mv "$f" "`printf %02g $track` - $artist - $title.flac"
done

 Author: Ruben Verweij