JNIOR Updates

[Harold Hallikainen]

I know very little about encryption. I did use a library from Microchip to allow the LSS-200 to do an https post, but the encryption method went out of date, so that does not work anymore. I have not dug into it since.

I like the idea of modem negotiation as you establish an SSH connection!

On the Commodore 64, I reverse engineered the serial bus between the C64 and the Commodore 1541 disk drive. The 8 in the load command was the serial bus address of the drive. I implemented the program save and load, including overlays, in the DRC-190. This was using the MC6802 processor running at something like 3.8 MHz.

My first teaching job was assembly language programming on the PDP-8. I very much remember keying in the loader using the front panel toggle switches, then reading in another loader from punched tape, then reading in the program. We would read in an editor to create or edit our source code using a Teletype 33. The resulting source was then punched to tape, the assembler loaded into core from tape, then the source tape run through twice (two pass assembler) to generate the executable tape, which was then read into core. Debugging consisted largely of single stepping and watching lights on the front panel. Fun times!

[Bruce Cloutier]

Back on topic... We have a virus scan issue.

There is a new release of the Support Tool (7.16) available.

Prior to this the Support Tool included a terminal program (console.exe) that would be invoked for Telnet access to JNIOR. This program for some reason is now being flagged for a couple of different trojans (Lazy something or others). This is recently causing downloads of the MSI installer from our website to be blocked. PC scans might locate the file itself in addition to any copy of the installer.

We believe that this is a false-positive. We don't know what exactly the application does that the scanners are now complaining about. The console.exe file that we distribute has been in use (unchanged) for a long time. But... oh well.

So, we are forced to abandon it. The Support Tool will now launch PuTTY at least for the time being. If you do not have PuTTY installed it will prompt you to get it.

Of course, you don't have to go through the Support Tool to connect to the JNIOR console. Ergo the whole SSH discussion above.

[Bruce Cloutier]

The Support Tool 7.16 download is not being blocked but some scanning services are still complaining about something undefined. We think the issue is that we are still using Visual Studio 2010 and the installer capability it has that generates the MSI. That old tech apparently is just now being flagged. They must think that no one is using that and if you do you must be up to something. Even much older Support Tool MSI files are being flagged. We are working on a release with a more current installer hoping to put this behind us. This is hard to do without having to pay monthly for no definitive reason.

I am not a real fan of situations where something works just fine and then it doesn't because some corporation someplace finds a way to generate more revenue.

I guess we are more of a cult than a corporation in that respect. I have actually been accused of that after a social media post trying to find employees.

[Bruce Cloutier]

The HELP system is updated for JANOS v2.5 as well. Make sure that your update projects push the /flash/manpages.zip file to your JNIORs.

The JNIOR can generate its own User's Manual that can be saved to a PDF. There is a PDF on the site (if you happen to look in the right place... I didn't). Here is the link
https://jnior.com/wp-content/uploads...Manual-2.5.pdf

And, of course, we're so DIY that we print these in-house. No need to get quotes and wait for some shop to get around to printing them. It is almost 300 pages complete with Table of Contents and Index. They are a little hand-made looking but do the trick...

PXL_20240614_195342888.MP~2.jpg
Would anyone be interested in a signed copy? Ha. Didn't think so.

The PDF is much more handy but not as cool to have around.

[Bruce Cloutier]

FYI

If you downloaded any of the update projects with JANOS v2.5, please download those again. They have been updated.

After an update the STATS command should report JANOS v2.5 Build 1.

There was just a quick update fixing an issue with TLS connections requiring elliptic curve. My bad. You might first notice it if you have the JNIOR send email securely and the target email server is one of those forcing higher security and therefore elliptic curve.

One thing about optimizing code... sometimes a statement that appears extraneous IS NOT. Ugh!

There are also application updates for cinema etc. worth grabbing.

I am not happy when we have problems at sites immediately after an update. In our case though, the response can be swift. We had the solution before the location could finish their showing and the tech could get himself into a position where he could do an update. This glitch has been in place since January and it amazes me that it defied detection all this time and we had left it to our customer to encounter. Not good.

Sorry.

[Bruce Cloutier]

Just a note that we are planning to release JANOS v2.5.1 for the Series 4 JNIOR at the beginning of December. You can plan your updating accordingly. You should update. I swear we are NOT Microsoft. The update will only benefit you. Well, it does make our support tasks a little easier.

I actually have two JNIORs connected directly to the open Internet at honeypot.integpg.com and aux.integpg.com. Both are running the release candidate for v2.5.1. Both are serving the Help System by default. Yeah, I know, old-school not really formatted HTML. You can get to the updated Printable User's Manual through that. There is some new tech on those units (to be optionally available in v2.5.1) that I have developed that thwarts something like 98% or the malicious network traffic. I was trying force out a paper for publishing the details.

In both cases GoogleBot has been relentlessly crawling those pages. I have been pleasantly surprised that if you search for something unique to JNIOR like a Registry Key (in quotes) you definitively get pages from these units.

I am really surprised by AI and how much it apparently knows about JNIOR. If you are bored ask it about it. We haven't been proactively marketing our products. Not since COVID and Rick. I am not a fan of AI but I was thinking that it does a better job than we could positioning the product. The product does really well selling itself. And that without the retail polish (that I would love to have).

If you go to these external JNIOR with HTTPS you will get the warning. You can delve into the certificates. There is now an INTEG Root Certificate and if you import that to your Trusted Root Certificate store (at least on Windows) you will be able to open any JNIOR running v2.5.1 securely and fully trusted. I do have a bug registered with the Chromium people relating to this. They can't fix anything no matter how obviously wrong it is. Linux is a bit screwed up as to how it handles root certificates. There is a bit of a dispute as to where those should be stored and how they are employed. Browsers there end up doing their own thing.

BTW, I would hire someone from Cinema to handle our marketing if you would be willing to move to Western PA. JNIOR gets into a lot outside of this market. That makes it harder to find the right expertise. Aerospace companies purchase JNIORs we were assuming for lecture and conference rooms but later discover our involvement in some really interesting things that they officially couldn't tell us about. Hmmm...

Well, I should be enjoying the holiday but...