KUL team cracks WPA2

The crypto team at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven found a flaw in WIFI encryption, compromising its security. Anyone who can capture the signals during the handshake can decrypt the traffic and in some configurations insert and modify data sent over the protocol.
The crack replays message 3 (of 4) in the handshake of WPA2 that establishes the crypto channel.  The message is used to reinstall the encryption key and reset the nonce and replay counters.
Linux and Anroid implementations suffer most from the attack as another bug sets the new key to all zero's rendering decryption trivial.
The protocol can be patched in a backward compatible way. Look out for updates on all your WIFI devices!

Oracle handing over java products and standards

Oracle is reducing its Java costs and commitment. The latest platform releases (Java SE 9 and Java EE 8) were surprisingly low key.
With the releases out of the door, Oracle is drastically reducing its teams and handing over control of related products.

• The Netbeans IDE, always the first to implement new standards, is handed over to the Apache Foundation.
• The Java EE standard itself (!) is handed over to the Eclipse foundation under the EE4J (Enterprise Eclipse For Java) project.

Given that the EE spec moves to an organisation whose main product is a Java IDE, Apache seems a second choice for Netbeans.

cloud prices compared

MS Word: keep tables on one page

Page breaks are an annoyance in word. Whenever you update your document they shift and mess up your layout.
Easily to avoid this by using the paragraph properties keep with next & keep lines together (and I don't know why these do not appear in the ribbon for east access).
But for some reason I never got tables to work with this.
Easy enough to select the table with the little cross in the left top that appears on hovering and setting the paragraph properties, but they did not take effect.
In a document with many small tables they kept on splitting across pages, and I had to revert to page breaks.
The solution: you have to make sure that in the table properties Text Wrapping is set to None. Now all is well!

UK: insurance for self driving cars

UK plans to have a car insurance that does not care whether you or the car is driving. In both cases, an accident is an accident, and you are insured either way by a uniform car insurance.
This is a major step towards the general acceptance of self driving cars.
more...

Excel 2016: this workbook contains links to one or more external sources that could be unsafe

I get this message sometimes when opening a workbook. Often the reason is that I have copied a formula from another workbook (instead of a value).

First I always want to check where these links are before modifying and possible breaking things.

I used a Microsoft support article (ignored the Edge borwser promo) to find the external links:

1. Type CTRL+F (opens Find and Replace Window)
2. Click [Options >>]
3. Fill in these values:
1. Find What: \[
1. the MS article uses [, but I got some false positives from that
2. Within: Workbook
3. Look in: Formulas
4. Click [Find Next] to search

If after verification of these links you want to get rid of the warning, use the advice you get when you click the Help button in the warning message box. In other words:

1. On the Data tab, in the Connections group, click Edit Links
   Here you can optionally update (and break) the links, but you do not see in which cells they are used (that is why I searched for them first).
2. Click [Startup Prompt...]
3. Select the option that you want
   
   
   
   
   

Amazon Go: shops without checkout

Amazon Go is Amazon's new concept of a brick and mortar shop.
Here's the manual:

1. walk in
2. pick your stuff
3. walk out