Mark J Cox

Fedora or Android?

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 14:48:00 GMT

For a two day trip I decided to test using my Android tablet instead of also taking a laptop, and it worked out okay for the most part.

I was booked to go to Red Hat HQ in Raleigh, NC at the start of August for a two-day business trip, well more accurately two-days in the office and another two-days of travelling. I'd usually take my trusty ThinkPad x201 on the trip with me, it's small and light, but it's battery life isn't so great anymore. Earlier this year I'd bought an Android tablet, an ASUS Transformer Prime which with a long battery life would be perfect for movies, but could it replace my ThinkPad completely and save me travelling with two devices? I worked through my requirements and it seemed plausible in theory, so here is how it stacked up in practice:

Connectivity. In the UK you can only buy the Prime with the keyboard dock, the keyboard dock is great. The in-built wifi was okay for the airport, hotel, and office. I carry a USB network adapter anyway just in case the hotel has a physical connection. The wifi signal on the Prime is terrible compared to other things (like a phone) though, so be prepared to walk around a bit to the best signal. Partial Win.
In flight entertainment. I wanted something to watch movies (as US Airways transatlantic don't yet have seat-back video, really!). The large internal memory meant I could store a few films in decent quality to watch and battery life wasn't a problem. I'd used the tablet continously (without wifi) with the keyboard connected for 6 hours and wasn't even down to 50% battery. Although hardware decoding of videos was a bit hit-and-miss, and after trying a dozen apps only "BS Player" seemed to do a reasonable job. A couple of the movies I'd brought had low audio and I couldn't figure out a way to boost it enough to hear over the noise of the plane, even with decent in-ear noise blocking headphones. Having the keyboard dock helped considerably as with the tablet on the tray-table I could set a decent angle to watch a movie. Win.
Reading material. I had a few papers and magazines to read which I'd preloaded onto the tablet in PDF format. The Adobe PDF viewer is acceptable, but it seems a little sluggish for something running on a quad-core processor, and the screen resolution isn't really good enough for magazines. The new Transformer Infinity would help here. Partial Win.
Keeping in touch with home. The standard Android GMail app and Facebook app are okay, and I was able to use GMail talk to have video chats with my family from both the hotel and office. Win.
Working. With just a couple days away I figured all that was needed was the ability to read and send email and browse intranet internal web pages. The standard VPN client on the Prime worked perfectly, and along with the Firefox beta app gave me perfect access to internal sites. For email I prefer command-line text-window clients anyway, so I just needed to be able to connect to a work machine. "Connectbot" on Android works well enough for ssh, and there are a few forked versions you can get that work with the Prime keyboard. The AndChat app works for irc. Win.
Presentations. I was giving a presentation at a meeting, but fortunately they had a laptop set up with the projector and I didn't need to worry about taking a HDMI lead and hoping it was a recent projector. Unexpectedly I needed to edit an existing OpenOffice presentation to remove a couple of slides and then convert to PDF to send to another company. I had to ask a colleague to do it for me. There are apps that can view OpenOffice files, but no native OpenOffice suite for android. I'd probably make sure I had access to a VNC server in the future and use a VNC client for anything like this. Fail.
Privacy. My thinkpad has full-disk encryption but I didn't bother for Android as I wasn't going to be storing anything sensitive on the machine. My thinkpad has a 3M privacy filter, which is great for airplanes and airports to stop people either side and behind you looking at your screen. The same filters do exist for Android, but are not as straightforward (it of couse only works in one orientation and attaches like a screen protector, so isn't the easiest thing to continuously take on and off, and forces you to use your screen in portrait mode for everything). Fail.
Printing a boarding card. When it was time to return home I was able to use Firefox to check in online, and printing my boarding passes gave me a PDF file. I didn't have any printer apps set up, but it was easy enough to email a PDF to a colleague to print for me. Partial Win.

So in summary I think I got away with it; having just the tablet didn't stop me doing anything that had to be done on the trip and I'll definately do the same thing again in the future for very short trips. For anything more than a couple of days or where connectivity might be an issue I'd miss having a full-featured OS.

Enterprise Linux 5.7 to 5.8 risk report

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 14:52:00 GMT

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8 was released today (February 2012), seven months since the release of 5.7 in July 2011. So let's use this opportunity to take a quick look back over the vulnerabilities and security updates made in that time, specifically for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is coming up to its fifth year since release, and is supported for another five years, until 2017.

Errata count

The chart below illustrates the total number of security updates issued for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server if you had installed 5.7, up to and including the 5.8 release, broken down by severity. It's split into two columns, one for the packages you'd get if you did a default install, and the other if you installed every single package (which is unlikely as it would involve quite a bit of manual effort to select every one). For a given installation, the number of package updates and vulnerabilities that affected you will depend on exactly what packages you have installed or removed.

So, for a default install, from release of 5.7 up to and including 5.8, we shipped 42 advisories to address 118 vulnerabilities. 4 advisories were rated critical, 13 were important, and the remaining 25 were moderate and low.

Or, for all packages, from release of 5.7 up to and including 5.8, we shipped 71 advisories to address 177 vulnerabilities. 7 advisories were rated critical, 16 were important, and the remaining 48 were moderate and low.

Critical vulnerabilities

The 7 critical advisories addressed 20 critical vulnerabilities across 4 different packages:

An update to OpenJDK 6 Java Runtime Environment, (October 2011) where a web site hosting a malicious Java applet could potentially run arbitrary code as the user.

An update to the MIT krb5 telnet daemon (December 2011) where a remote attacker who can access the telnet port of a target machine could use this flaw to execute arbitrary code as root. Note that the krb5 telnet daemon is not installed or enabled by default, and the default firewall rules block remote access to the telnet port. This flaw did not affect the more commonly used telnet daemon distributed in the telnet-server package.

Updates to PHP and PHP 5.3 (February 2012) where a remote attacker could send a specially-crafted HTTP request to cause the PHP interpreter to crash or, possibly, execute arbitrary code. This flaw was caused by the fix for CVE-2011-4885.

Three updates to Firefox (August 2011, September 2011, November 2011) where a malicious web site could potentially run arbitrary code as the user running Firefox.

Updates to correct 19 out of the 20 critical vulnerabilities were available via Red Hat Network either the same day or the next calendar day after the issues were public. The update to krb5 took 2 calendar days because it was public on Christmas day.

Overall, for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 since release until 5.8, 98% of critical vulnerabilities have had an update available to address them available from the Red Hat Network either the same day or the next calendar day after the issue was public.

Other significant vulnerabilities

Although not in the definition of critical severity, also of interest during this period were a couple of remote denial of service flaws that were easily exploitable:

A flaw in BIND, CVE-2011-4313, fixed by RHSA-2011:1458 (bind) and RHSA-2011:1459 (bind97). A remote attacker could use this flaw to cause BIND to crash.

A flaw in Apache HTTP Server, CVE-2011-3192, fixed by RHSA-2011:1245. A remote attacker could use this flaw to cause httpd to use an excessive amount of memory and CPU time.

In addition, updates to Firefox, NSS, and Thunderbird were made to blacklist a compromised Certificate Authority.

Previous update releases

To compare these statistics with previous update releases we need to take into account that the time between each update release is different. So looking at a default installation and calculating the number of advisories per month gives the following chart:

This data is interesting to get a feel for the risk of running Enterprise Linux 5 Server, but isn't really useful for comparisons with other major versions, distributions, or operating systems -- for example, a default install of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4AS did not include Firefox, but 5 Server does. You can use our public security measurement data and tools, and run your own custom metrics for any given Red Hat product, package set, timescales, and severity range of interest.

See also: 5.7, 5.6, 5.5, 5.4, 5.3, 5.2, and 5.1 risk reports.

Making of the SONIK Gravitation music video

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 18:02:00 GMT

The inspiration for the Sonik video for Gravitation came from a local friend of ours, a talented and world-renowned photographer, Adrian Brannan. Ade is famous for his analogue photo collages (please give him a 'like' on his Facebook page):

We often wondered how the same effect would look if rendered with video. With video you've got the extra element of time, each segment of the mosaic can be running from a different starting point, with a different speed, and even a different direction. In addition the segments themselves can move over time. Would this end up with an effect that was just too much of a mess? Or would it give an effect that helps visualise the consequence of spacetime?

We started by taking several videos at three different locations over the period of a year with a Kodak Zi8 camera. A motorway bridge over the M74, just outside the Buchanan shopping center in Glasgow, and a bench in Strathclyde park. Lining up the images was done roughly by using lines drawn on acetate stuck over the camera screen.

The software to do the mosaic effect was hand-written. We used a simple scripting language, Perl, and the image library GD. On a relatively modern Linux PC running Fedora 16 we can render near real-time 720p HD even when handling 300 segments of mosaic. A simple language controls which parts of the screen come from which video, and the first half of the music video uses this with simple effects having just a few boxes overlayed:

Later in the video things get more complicated, using randomisation to pick the location and movement of each segment:

We used our scripts to create a number of ~13 second segments, then put them all together using kdenlive. The intro and outro were taken from a different video from a hotel room in London Victoria; the intro using a 'miniature' effect, and outro using the randomised segments applied to a single video.

The Perl script and a 5 frame example is available to download: 2011-sonik-vid-example.tar.bz2 (1.4M)

Watch the full video, or click through to YouTube to see it in HD:

Vulnerability Acknowledgements for Red Hat online services

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 12:03:00 GMT

When we get notified of a security issue affecting a Red Hat product in advance we give an acknowledgement in the security advisory and in our CVE database.

We've now created a page to give acknowledgements to the companies and individuals that report issues in our online services, such as finding a cross-site scripting flaw in a Red Hat web site, or a vulnerability in OpenShift.

When do we push most advisories?

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 15:25:00 GMT

We pushed an update to Flash Player for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Supplementary today, on a Friday, because it fixed Critical vulnerabilities. But we try not to push updates on a Friday unless they are critical and already public.

So let's take a look at the most common times and days we push advisories for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, 5, and 6 (including Supplementary) using a heatmap:

The more advisories pushed for a given date and hour, the darker that section of the graph is. So the most popular times for pushing advisories are Tuesdays at 10am and 2pm Eastern US time, Fridays are pretty light for pushes, and there was nothing during the weekends. The spread of the graph shows that we push advisories when they are ready, rather than waiting to a fixed day and time, in order to reduce the risk to users.

All the data used to create this graph is available as part of our public metrics. Thanks to Sami Kerola for the R code from which I based my graph generation.

Red Hat's Most Serious Flaw Types for 2010

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 11:22:00 GMT

A few weeks ago the 2011 update to the CWE/SANS Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Errors was published. As part of our contribution to this update we analysed the most severe vulnerabilities that affected Red Hat since the last update and mapped each one to the appropriate Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) type.

The table below lists all vulnerabilities which have a CVSS score of 7 or more ('high'), that we fixed in any product during calendar year 2010.

Most common CWE were:

Buffer Copy without Checking Size of Input (CWE-120): 8 vulnerabilities.
Race Condition (CWE-362): 5 vulnerabilities.

CVE	CWE	2011 top 25?	CVSS base score	Fixed in
CVE-2007-4567	CWE-476	no	7.8	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (kernel)
CVE-2009-0778	CWE-770	no	7.1	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (kernel)
CVE-2009-1385	CWE-191	no	7.1	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (kernel)
CVE-2009-3080	CWE-129	no	7.2	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4, 5, MRG (kernel)
CVE-2009-3245	CWE-252	no	7.6	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4, 5 (openssl)
CVE-2009-3726	CWE-476	no	7.2	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, 5, MRG (kernel)
CVE-2009-4005	CWE-127	no	7.1	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (kernel)
CVE-2009-4027	CWE-362	no	7.8	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (kernel)
CVE-2009-4141	CWE-416	no	7.2	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, MRG (kernel)
CVE-2009-4212	CWE-191	no	10.0	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4, 5 (krb5)
CVE-2009-4272	CWE-764	no	7.8	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (kernel)
CVE-2009-4273	CWE-78	yes	7.9	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (systemtap)
CVE-2009-4537	CWE-120	yes	7.1	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, 5, MRG (kernel)
CVE-2009-4895	CWE-362	no	7.2	Red Hat Enterprise MRG (kernel)
CVE-2010-0008	CWE-606	no	7.8	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, 5 (kernel)
CVE-2010-0291	CWE-822	no	7.2	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (kernel)
CVE-2010-0738	CWE-424	no	7.5	JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 4.2, 4.3
CVE-2010-0741	CWE-20	no	7.1	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (kvm)
CVE-2010-1084	CWE-120	yes	7.2	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (kernel)
CVE-2010-1086	CWE-20	no	7.8	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, 5 (kernel)
CVE-2010-1087	CWE-362	no	7.2	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (kernel)
CVE-2010-1166	CWE-823	no	7.6	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (xorg-x11-server)
CVE-2010-1173	CWE-120 *	yes	7.1	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, 5 (kernel)
CVE-2010-1188	CWE-416	no	7.8	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4, 5 (kernel)
CVE-2010-1436	CWE-120	yes	7.2	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (kernel)
CVE-2010-1437	CWE-362	no	7.2	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, 5 (kernel)
CVE-2010-2063	CWE-823	no	7.5	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4, 5 (samba)
CVE-2010-2235	CWE-77	no	7.1	Red Hat Network Satellite Server 5.3 (cobbler)
CVE-2010-2240	CWE-788	no	7.2	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4, 5, MRG (kernel)
CVE-2010-2248	CWE-682	no	7.1	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, 5 (kernel)
CVE-2010-2492	CWE-805	no	7.2	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, 6 (kernel)
CVE-2010-2521	CWE-805	no	8.3	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, 5, MRG (kernel)
CVE-2010-2798	CWE-476	no	7.2	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (kernel)
CVE-2010-2962	CWE-823	no	7.2	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, MRG (kernel)
CVE-2010-3069	CWE-129	no	8.3	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4, 5, 6 (samba)
CVE-2010-3081	CWE-131	yes	7.2	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4, 5, 6, MRG (kernel)
CVE-2010-3084	CWE-120	yes	7.2	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (kernel)
CVE-2010-3301	CWE-129	no	7.2	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (kernel)
CVE-2010-3302	CWE-120	yes	7.1	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (openswan)
CVE-2010-3308	CWE-120	yes	7.1	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (openswan)
CVE-2010-3432	CWE-805 *	no	7.8	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, 5, 6, MRG (kernel)
CVE-2010-3705	CWE-788	no	8.3	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, MRG (kernel)
CVE-2010-3708	CWE-77	no	7.5	JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 4.3, SOA Platform 4.2
CVE-2010-3752	CWE-78	yes	7.1	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (openswan)
CVE-2010-3753	CWE-78	yes	7.1	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (openswan)
CVE-2010-3847	CWE-426	no	7.2	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, 6 (glibc)
CVE-2010-3856	CWE-426	no	7.2	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, 6 (glibc)
CVE-2010-3864	CWE-362	no	7.6	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (openssl)
CVE-2010-3904	CWE-822	no	7.2	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, 6 (kernel)
CVE-2010-4170	CWE-88	no	7.2	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, 5, 6 (systemtap)
CVE-2010-4179	CWE-862	yes	7.5	Red Hat Enterprise MRG (cumin)
CVE-2010-4344	CWE-120	yes	7.5	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, 5 (exim)

* - in both these cases the outcome is not a buffer overflow as the possible overflow is detected and instead converted into an abort (DoS)

Enterprise Linux 5.6 to 5.7 risk report

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 12:32:00 GMT

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 was released last week (July 2011), six months since the release of 5.6 in January 2011. So let's use this opportunity to take a quick look back over the vulnerabilities and security updates made in that time, specifically for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server.

Errata count

The chart below illustrates the total number of security updates issued for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server if you had installed 5.6, up to and including the 5.7 release, broken down by severity. It's split into two columns, one for the packages you'd get if you did a default install, and the other if you installed every single package (which is unlikely as it would involve quite a bit of manual effort to select every one). For a given installation, the number of package updates and vulnerabilities that affected you will depend on exactly what packages you have installed or removed.

So, for a default install, from release of 5.6 up to and including 5.7, we shipped 27 advisories to address 109 vulnerabilities. 3 advisories were rated critical, 12 were important, and the remaining 12 were moderate and low.

Or, for all packages, from release of 5.6 to and including 5.7, we shipped 58 advisories to address 172 vulnerabilities. 4 advisories were rated critical, 20 were important, and the remaining 34 were moderate and low.

Critical vulnerabilities

The 4 critical advisories addressed 34 critical vulnerabilities across just 2 different packages:

An update to OpenJDK 6 Java Runtime Environment, (June 2011) where a web site hosting a malicious Java applet could potentially run arbitrary code as the user.

Three updates to Firefox (March 2011, April 2011, June 2011) where a malicious web site could potentially run arbitrary code as the user running Firefox.

Updates to correct all of the 34 critical vulnerabilities were available via Red Hat Network either the same day or the next calendar day after the issues were public.

Overall, for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 since release until 5.7, 97% of critical vulnerabilities have had an update available to address them available from the Red Hat Network either the same day or the next calendar day after the issue was public.

Other significant vulnerabilities

Although not in the definition of critical severity, also of interest during this period were a couple of flaws that were easily exploitable:

A flaw in dhcp, CVE-2011-0997, fixed by RHSA-2011:0428, where a malicious DHCP server could send a response that could lead to arbitrary code execution on connecting clients.

A flaw in glibc, CVE-2011-0536, fixed by RHSA-2011:0412, where a local user could gain root privileges.

In addition, updates to Firefox and NSS were made to blacklist a number of compromised SSL certificates.

Previous update releases

See also: 5.5 to 5.6, 5.4 to 5.5, 5.3 to 5.4, 5.2 to 5.3, 5.1 to 5.2, and 5.0 to 5.1 risk reports.

Hiring three Security Response Team members

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 11:57:00 GMT

Red Hat has an unrivaled security record when it comes to addressing security flaws in our products. We reduce the risk to customers using our products by constantly monitoring for vulnerabilities and threats, triaging their impact to our customers, and addressing those that matter the most quickly. The Red Hat Security Response Team are responsible for dealing with security vulnerabilities in Red Hat products and services and has a team spanning nine countries.

We've currently got three positions in the team currently open. One is focused on Java (JBoss) technologies, another on our new Cloud services, and a final one on our Enterprise Linux product.

Would you like to be part of our dynamic team, and help protect Red Hat's customers and the open source community as a whole from security vulnerabilities?

Each of the positions are challenging and demanding; every day you'll be investigating different issues affecting different products and codebases, having to manage your time on the issues with the greatest impact.

Some of the tasks of the job include (but are not limited to):

Rapidly responding to new security issues. You'll need to be able to think fast, analyze complex problems, use your judgement to assess vulnerability severities and risks, and switch your priorities to ensure that serious issues get immediate attention.
Investigating how security flaws specifically impact your products. Research how the flaws can be exploited by attackers; by code analysis, testing exploits, or writing proof of concept tests.
Communicating about flaws with our software developers, managers, quality engineers, upstream project developers, as well as our peers in the security response teams of other vendors.
Developing advice and technical documentation for security advisories.
Responsibility for tracking vulnerabilities through the entire update release lifecycle and ensuring that customers get the right fixes with the right advice at the right time.

We can be flexible with working location. So if this interests you, email me a CV/resume (to mjc at redhat.com) as not all the jobs are on our careers page yet.

Enterprise Linux 5.5 to 5.6 risk report

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 11:37:00 GMT

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 was released last week (January 2011), nearly ten months since the release of 5.5 in March 2010. So let's use this opportunity to take a quick look back over the vulnerabilities and security updates made in that time, specifically for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server.

Errata count

The chart below illustrates the total number of security updates issued for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server if you had installed 5.5, up to and including the 5.6 release, broken down by severity. It's split into two columns, one for the packages you'd get if you did a default install, and the other if you installed every single package (which is unlikely as it would involve a bit of manual effort to select every one). For a given installation, the number of package updates and vulnerabilities that affected you will depend on exactly what you have installed or removed.

So, for a default install, from release of 5.5 up to and including 5.6, we shipped 57 advisories to address 206 vulnerabilities. 10 advisories were rated critical, 27 were important, and the remaining 20 were moderate and low.

Or, for all packages, from release of 5.5 to and including 5.6, we shipped 80 advisories to address 300 vulnerabilities. 12 advisories were rated critical, 34 were important, and the remaining 34 were moderate and low.

Critical vulnerabilities

The 12 critical advisories addressed 49 critical vulnerabilities across just 3 different packages:

An update to the Exim Internet Mailer, (December 2010), where an unauthenticated remote attacker could run arbitrary code as root on a server. Exim is not a default package or enabled by default. There is a public exploit for this issue which worked on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

Two updates over three advisories to Samba, (June 2010 for Samba 3.0 and Samba 3.3, September 2010 for Samba 3.0 and Samba 3.3), where a malicious client could send a specially-crafted SMB packet to the Samba server, potentially resulting in arbitrary code execution with the privileges of the Samba server. I'm not aware of any working public exploits for these issues.

Eight updates to Firefox (March 2010, June 2010, 20 July 2010, 23 July 2010, September 2010, 19 October 2010, 27 October 2010, December 2010) where a malicious web site could potentially run arbitrary code as the user running Firefox.

Updates to correct 48 out of the 49 critical vulnerabilities were available via Red Hat Network either the same day or the next calendar day after the issues were public. The update to fix Exim took 3 calendar days from the date of the report to the Exim developers.

Overall, for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 since release until 5.6, 97% of critical vulnerabilities have had an update available to address them available from the Red Hat Network either the same day or the next calendar day after the issue was public.

Other significant vulnerabilities

Although not in the definition of critical severity, also of interest during this period were several kernel flaws that where an local user could gain root privileges. The following had publicly available exploits:

A fix for CVE-2010-2240 was provided by RHSA-2010-0661 (August 2010). The public exploit did not work against Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, but it may be possible to create one that does.

A fix for CVE-2010-3081 was provided by RHSA-2010-0704 (September 2010). The public exploit worked against Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

A fix for CVE-2010-3904 was provided by RHSA-2010-0792 (October 2010). The public exploit did not work against Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 but it is possible to create one that does.

Previous updates

To compare these statistics with previous update releases we need to take into account that the time between each update is different. So looking at a default installation and calculating the number of advisories per month gives the following chart:

See also: 5.4 to 5.5, 5.3 to 5.4, 5.2 to 5.3, 5.1 to 5.2, and 5.0 to 5.1 risk reports.

alpine-disable-pavlovian.patch

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 15:00:00 GMT

You have a new email! (ping!)

Hold on a second. It might be important. I'd better go and read it. Oh it's just a note confirming some meeting for next week. Deleted. Now, what was I working on?

A few years ago, when I was analysing where my time was going, (and why I was working 60+ hour weeks), I figured out that the context switching caused by being unable to concentrate on a task for more than a few minutes was a major productivity drain.

It's hard to resist a new email. My new cellphone takes great delight in having 'push' email and would really like to beep on each new message I receive. The web is full of gmail notifier applications designed specifically to interrupt you to some important new mail. Even my favourite command-line email client, Alpine, likes to ping you about new mail arriving in your inbox even if you're busy in some other mailbox or composing a mail.

Alpine ought to have some sort of "don't notify me" option, but in the meantime I apply the brute-force patch below to disable it.

This 5-minute patch has saved me several hours of task switching every week, and although this means it can sometimes be an hour or two between me checking my inbox, no one has really noticed.

--- alpine-2.00/pith/newmail.c.orig	2010-07-19 16:47:01.127480500 +0100
+++ alpine-2.00/pith/newmail.c	2010-07-19 16:47:35.657602347 +0100
@@ -680,7 +680,7 @@
     }
 
     format_new_mail_msg(folder, number, e, intro, from, subject, subjtext, sizeof(subject));
-
+#if 0
     if(!for_new_mail_win)
       q_status_message5(SM_ASYNC | SM_DING, 0, 60,
 		      "%s%s%s%.80s%.80s", intro,
@@ -706,6 +706,7 @@
 #endif
     }
 #endif
+#endif
 
     if(pith_opt_icon_text){
 	if(F_ON(F_ENABLE_XTERM_NEWMAIL, ps_global)