Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 04/09/2022: GNUnet 0.17.5 and KPhotoAlbum 5.9.0



  • GNU/Linux

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • Data SwampManaging a fleet of NixOS Part 2 - A KISS design

        Let's continue my series trying to design a NixOS fleet management.

      • Data SwampLocal peer to peer binary cache with NixOS and Peerix

        There is a cool project related to NixOS, called Peerix. It's a local daemon exposed as a local substituter (a server providing binary packages) that will discover other Peerix daemon on the local network, and use them as a source of binary packages.

        Peerix is a simple way to reuse package already installed somewhere on the network instead of downloading it again. Packages delivered by Peerix substituters are signed with a private key, so you need to import each computer public key before being able to download/use their packages. While this can be cumbersome, this also mandatory to prevent someone on the network to spoof packages.

        Perrix should be used wisely, because secrets in your store could be leaked to others.

      • Dan Langillensupdate - update failed: REFUSED - Dan Langille’s Other Diary

        A while back, the https://www.freebsddiary.org/topics.php#opteron – the colo facility was purchased and the new owners are not interested in donating services to open source projects.

        That host also acted as a DNS host for all my domain. I pressed a small VPS into service. It handled the query services fine, but updates were sluggish. It took a few hours for it to catch up to Let’s Encrypt renewals.

        To be fair, this $5 box does a decent job as an external monitoring host.

        Over the weekend, I configured another host as a name server.

        Monitoring proved it never lagged with updates.

      • Dan LangilleGetting Home Assistant running in a FreeBSD 13.1 jail - Dan Langille’s Other Diary

        Home Assistant is not friendly for plain installs. It seems designed for containers or running everything out of pip install. That, in itself, is a disturbing trend I’ve seen on several projects (what? you’re not running a git cloned image?).

        I’ve seen reports of people running containers etc. However, I want to run this on FreeBSD. I don’t want to muck about with installing containers etc. If containers are the only way for a project to run, you’re doing it wrong.

        I tried recently and eventually succeeded after several failures. Open source should not be this difficult. The devs seem unware of the problems. A previous attempt in June involved an Ansible playbook. After terrible install this past Tuesday night, I’m going to amend that playbook.

      • RoseHostingHow to Install OpenProject on Ubuntu 22.04 - RoseHosting

        OpenProject is an open-source and free project management software. It is designed to help individuals and businesses manage their project management, issue tracking, scheduling, and other entire project lifecycles. OpenProject is very helpful for team members to track their work and achieve their goals. With OpenProject, you can organize and prioritize your tasks and assign other tasks to other team members. In this tutorial, we will show you how to install OpenProject on Ubuntu 22.04.

      • ID RootHow To Install VeraCrypt on Linux Mint 21 - idroot

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install VeraCrypt on Linux Mint 21. For those of you who didn’t know, VeraCrypt is free open-source disk encryption software for Windows, macOS, and Linux. The software can create a virtual encrypted disk that works just like a regular disk but within a file. It can also encrypt a partition or the entire storage device with pre-boot authentication.

        This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of a VeraCrypt encryption tool on Linux Mint 21 (Vanessa).

    • Games

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • Bryan LundukeLinux, Alternative OS, & Retro Computing News - Aug 27, 2022
    • Bryan LundukeLinux, Alternative OS, - Retro Computing News - Sep 3, 2022

      I’m a big fan of AppImage’s — single .ISO images that contain a piece of software, and all of the necessary dependencies to run it on a reasonably modern Linux system. But a big issue is making them. While some tools exist to aid in the packaging of AppImage’s, the process hasn’t exactly been automatic.

      A new Python script entitled “arch2appimage” — gotta love on-the-nose naming — fixes this issue by taking an Arch package (such as from the AUR) and auto-magically turning it into an AppImage. Dependencies and all.

    • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

      • postmarketOS // v22.06 SP2: The One That Swipes

        Here it is, after a bit of delay to figure out why the new Phosh version didn't boot on the Samsung Galaxy S III. Now that the reason is known and a workaround is in place, we also happened to hit the timeframe where fixup versions of these huge Phosh and Phoc releases were made. Enjoy the following changes on stable!

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • GNU Projects

      • GNUnetGNUnet 0.17.5

        This is a bugfix release for gnunet 0.17.4..

        [...]

        Note that due to mirror synchronization, not all links may be functional early after the release.

    • Programming/Development

      • Matt RickardThe Value is in the API

        Not the implementation. At my first job, I spent a lot of time digging into the fintech stack. I had become convinced that reverse engineering mobile banking APIs was the technically superior option to screen-scraping. I even took my unsolicited opinion to Hacker News, running into one of the Plaid founders (Plaid, like Yodlee before it, originally used screen-scraping). Plaid turned out to be wildly successful. I learned that the value is in the API, not the implementation. Sometimes a dirty implementation gets the job done.

      • Bozhidar BatsovnREPL 1.0

        Yesterday I released nREPL 1.0. I hadn’t really planned to have the release then, but after cutting CIDER 1.5 (“Strasbourg”) a bit earlier that day, I decided that this was The Day.

        [...]

        This was quite the journey and I’m happy that we’ve made it to this massive milestone. If I knew how much work I’d need to put in to make nREPL 1.0 a reality back in 2018, I’d probably wouldn’t have volunteered for this task. But I’m very glad that I did! Working on nREPL was much trickier than working on CIDER in many ways and taught me a lot about patience2 and the value of maintaining backward compatibility. Outside of the initial namespace changes we didn’t break backward compatibility at all! Following in the footsteps of my one of my Clojure Heroes (Chas) wasn’t easy either, as I had quite the shoes to fill!

        I’m really glad that mine & Chas’s theory that moving nREPL out of Clojure Contrib would result in more contributions turned out to be correct. We got where we did through the work of many people and I am thankful to all of them! And recently we’ve celebrated the 12th million download of nREPL after it’s development was restarted and I became the project’s maintainer. I hope this means we’re doing something right.

      • Matt RickardHow to Increase Developer Velocity

        Developer velocity is something that every engineering organization wants, but the steps aren't always clear on how to get it.

      • Xe's Blogwaifud Progress Report #2 - Xe

        One of the biggest pain points in waifud for me has been the fact that I've needed to SSH into one of my development machines in order to do things with it. This is fine, most of the time I usually have an SSH session open to one of those machines and can easily do what I need while hacking away.

      • Rolisteam - Rolisteam Monthly update #3 - August 2022

        Short introduction, the RCSE allows you to create charactersheet for any TTRPG. It is based on a visual editor to draw fields directly upon an image of the charactersheet. The editor part is using: QGraphicsView/QGraphicsScene and a table view to edit each field. Then the final result can be generated to get the sheet in QML.

      • Jussi PakkanenJussi Pakkanen: Questions to ask a prospective employer during a job interview

        Question: Do developers in your organization have full admin rights on their own computer?

        Rationale: While blocking admin rights might make sense for regular office workers it is a massive hindrance for software developers. They do need admin access for many things and not giving it to them is a direct productivity hit. You might also note that Google does give all their developers root access to their own dev machines and see how they respond.

        Question: Are developers free to choose and install the operating system on their development machines? If yes, can you do all administrative and bureaucracy task from "non-official" operating systems?

        Rationale: Most software projects nowadays deal with Linux somehow and many people are thus more productive (and happier) if they can use a Linux desktop for their development. If the company mandates the use of "IT-approved" Windows install where 50% of all CPU time is spent on virus scanners and the like, productivity takes a big hit. There are also some web services that either just don't work on Linux or are a massive pain to use if they do (the web UI of Outlook being a major guilty party here).

      • Perl / Raku

        • Assuming optionality | Playing Perl 6␛b6xA Raku

          PWC 180 Task 1 asks us to find the first unique character in a string. I wanted to have a nice interface where I would write:

          [...]

          The idea was to curry postcircumfix:<{ }> so it will be bound to a BagHash and always ask for :!exists. Alas, .assuming doesn’t do the right thing if the proto contains optional positions. I found a workaround utilising once.

      • Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

        • Getting USB TEMPer2 temperature sensor readings into Prometheus (on Linux)

          For reasons outside of the scope of this entry, we recently decided to get some inexpensive USB temperature sensors (we already have a number of old, industrial style temperature sensor boxes). What we wound up getting is the PCsensor TEMPer2; this model and PCsensor's USB temperature sensors in general seem to be a quite common choice (often resold under some other name). Getting our model going on Linux and getting metrics into our Prometheus setup took some work and head scratching, which I'd like to save other people.

    • Standards/Consortia

      • Daniel AleksandersenTP-Link band-steers 2,4 to 5 GHz Wi-Fi even when the radio is off

        My TP-Link EAP653 (available on Amazon) Wi-Fi access point (AP) has some features that don’t work well together. Who would have thought that its proprietary extensions to the Wi-Fi standard would cause compatibility issues with clients?

        I’ve configured the AP to power down the fast 5 GHz radio at night to reduce its power consumption. The 5 GHz band uses less power than 2,4 GHz (faster means shorter transmission time). However, not all devices are compatible with the former. The power savings is about the same during off-peak hours anyway. Clients should fall back to the slower 2,4 GHz network and remain connected throughout the night.

      • Business WireUSB4 Version 2.0 Announced
  • Leftovers

    • Ruben SchadeRubenerd: The Mentour Pilot on responsibility

      Petter produces my favourite aviation videos on YouTube. He’s sincere, thorough, avoids sensationalism, and takes the time to explore human and procedural factors when discussing everything from incidents to aircraft design. He’s also just really engaging and fun to watch, and has been responsible for getting me back into playing flight sims again.

    • Security

      • Ruben SchadeRubenerd: Answering “yeah, but is the solution secure?”

        Secure from what? From whom? Where? And for how long?

        Moving from dev and ops to solution architecture has been an eye-opening experience. The first thing you notice is that prospective clients rarely know what they want, and those that do may be confused, have conflicting requirements, or are acting under dangerous misconceptions. I’m sure everyone from business analysts to support engineers know exactly what I’m talking about.

        The challenge with being the interface between sales and engineering is being able to speak to both groups. The former are motivated by KPIs and balance sheets to say “yes!” to everything, and the latter need to build something to a spec. But a sales person who commits to something infeasible is as useful as an engineer who implements an unworkable solution with bad data.

        Security is a perfect example of this struggle in practice. Nobody wants insecure systems, save for pen testers and bounty hunters! Yet ask a businessperson to quantify what they mean when they say a system “has to be secure”, and most can’t. You may get some vague references to encryption, firewalls, VPNs, keys, securing data in flight and at rest, and maybe a tender for flavour, but nothing about how it fits together, or what problems each component is attempting to solve atomically and in aggregate.

      • EarthlyKube-Bench

        CIS security is a community driven and non-profit organization that aims at improving security around the internet. It is the one that creates and updates CIS controls and CIS benchmarks. You can read more about the CIS

      • VideoEnterprise Linux Security Episode 40 - Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery - Invidious

        Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery is huge concept when it comes to application deployment nowadays, and with good reason. Automating the compilation, testing, and other aspects of the development process increases efficiency and reliability. Security is another layer of a good CI/CD system, and in this episode, Jay and Joao discuss CI/CD and the security aspects of the popular deployment style.

    • Defence/Aggression

      • Ruben SchadeRubenerd: Latvia’s Soviet-era monument removed 🇱🇻

        I’ve talked about this many times, but I have tremendous affection for the Baltic states, and Latvia in particular. It’s had an oversized influence over my life, from family friends I grew up with and consider family, to schoolmates, colleagues, and their excellent contributions to my industry. I wrote most of my high school assignments on the country and their Lithuanian neighbours, much to the chagrin of one teacher who “had to do extra work” to grade it. 🎻

        I always smiled when I saw Latvia in the headlines, but recently those feelings have turned to concern. Their country, and their neighbours, border an increasingly hostile state, and their NATO allies are connected by a strip of land far too small for comfort, and incursions into their airspace and political sphere are all too common.

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • Michael West MediaVale Mikhail Gorbachev - a true leader who gave us hope

        Mikhail Gorbachev was not a man of grand gestures, nor an orator who could move the masses. But he single-handedly changed the world to a more peaceful place, at least for a few short years. He was undone by the greed for power of those that didn’t understand him, nor appreciated the magnitude of what he wanted to achieve.

        Even his biographer, William Taubman, failed to adequately explain how it was possible for a man of pacifist leanings, a true believer in socialism (but not in Stalin or communist dogma) managed to survive and eventually thrive in the Soviet system of distrust and division. He survived the aggressions of Nikita Khrushchev and the oppressive ways of Leonid Brezhnev, and continued his slow ascendancy to the top job as general secretary in 1985.

      • Michael West MediaRex Patrick: will Timor-Leste become China’s latest aircraft carrier? - Michael West

        In the wake of Scott Morrison and Marise Payne’s disastrous foreign affairs stewardship, Penny Wong jets to Timor-Leste today in what may be another rescue mission to save a Pacific neighbour from China’s expansion in the region. Rex Patrick has long warned the young nation might spurn Australia in favour of Chinese investment.

        When Penny Wong arrives in Timor-Leste today, I’d like to think she’s had the good sense to refuse to allow the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to accompany her, because the problem she’s going there to solve, China taking a larger foothold in Timor, is a problem of DFAT’s exclusive making.

      • Michael West MediaPunishment by partiality: Lendlease white-collars stick to the right side of the law no matter what

        The law is meant to wear a blindfold, meting out equal treatment to rich, poor and everyone in between. And the taxman is supposed to make rulings without fear or favour. Does the handling of corporate high fliers show otherwise? Michael West reports on the big Lendlease tax scam.

        The Australian Tax Office published its latest Tax Crime Prosecution Studies just last month. It features a South Australian man receiving a criminal conviction for providing false documents, a swimming teacher going to jail for attempting to claim $250k of false GST refunds, a doctor sentenced to seven months jail for non-lodgements, a bank manager sentenced to three years’ jail for trying to defraud the Commonwealth of $390,000, a NSW man in for two years for defrauding $171,000, and so on.

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • Peter Eckersley, may his memory be a blessing - Praise - Let's Encrypt Community Support

        I'm devastated to report that Peter Eckersley (@pde), one of the original founders of Let's Encrypt, died earlier this evening at CPMC Davies Hospital in San Francisco.

        Peter was the leader of EFF's contributions to Let's Encrypt and ACME over the course of several years during which these technologies turned from a wild idea into an important part of Internet infrastructure. He also took a lot of initiative in coalescing the EFF, Mozilla, and University of Michigan teams into a single team and a single project. He later served on the initial board of directors of the Internet Security Research Group.

        You can find a very abbreviated version of this history in the Let's Encrypt paper, to which Peter and I both contributed.

      • LWNPeter Eckersley RIP [LWN.net]

        Peter Eckersley, one of the original founders of the Let's Encrypt non-profit TLS certificate authority, has died suddenly, as reported by Seth Schoen

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • Music over the years

        Long term music life: 1981 we moved to Portugal and my parents had a tape of Elvis and I loved him. There was also a tape with Icelandic folk songs. A friend of my sisters gave me a tape copy of Bruce Springsteen‘s Born in the USA and Live/1975–85. Back to Switzerland somewhere around 1987, then off to Thailand in 1991. Before we left we bought a CD player and I remember a disc or two of Vangelis and The Cure‘s Desintegration. Back in Switzerland in 1991 I remember getting into U2 with Achtung Baby and Zooropa, as well as discovering The Doors. My interest in Arab music came via Transglobal Underground with singer Natacha Atlas. My wife started oriental dancing around that time and we had a gazillion CDs with music from Morocco to Turkey as she started teaching.

    • Technical

      • —God damn, the Google Play Store is so frustrating…

        God damn, the Google Play Store is so frustrating at times. The other day I wrote about how fast our (Vivaldi browser's) turn around was for getting out a new build with a critical security fix from upstream. Well to be clear we have a build out for desktop but not Android. Why? … because our build, which was ready at the same time as desktop, is stuck in "review" in the Play Store and hence cannot be made live. This is despite the fact that it has a single fix (for the security issue). A fix I might add that was written by a Google dev and is included in Chrome, which they immediately updated.

      • Managing a fleet of NixOS Part 3 - Welcome to Bento

        I finally wrote an implementation for the NixOS fleet management, it's called Bento.


* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.



Recent Techrights' Posts

SoylentNews Grows Up, Registers as a Business, Site Traffic Reportedly Grows
More people realise that social control media may in fact be a passing fad
 
Garden Season Starts Today
Outdoor time, officially...
More Information About Public Talks That Richard Stallman Gave This Week in Europe
Two talks in Switzerland
Engadget is Still a Spamfarm, It's Just an Amazon Catalogue (SPAM/SEO), a Sea of Junk Disguised as "Articles" With Few 'Fillers' (Real Articles) in Between
Engadget writes for bots now, not for humans
Richard Stallman's Talks in Switzerland This Week
We need to put an end to 'cancer culture'; it's trying to kill people and it is even swatting people
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, March 28, 2024
IRC logs for Thursday, March 28, 2024
[Meme] EPO's New Ways of Working (NWoW), a.k.a. You Don't Even Get a Desk at Work and Cannot be Near Known Colleagues
Seems more like union-busting (divide and rule)
Hiding Microsoft's Culpability in Security Breaches and Other Major Blunders (in the United Kingdom, This May Mean You Can't Get Food)
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is vast
Giving back to the community
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 28/03/2024: Sega, Nintendo, and Bell Layoffs
Links for the day
Open letter to the ACM regarding Codes of Conduct impersonating the Code of Ethics
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
With 9 Mentions of Azure In Its Latest Blog Post, Canonical is Again Promoting Microsoft and Intel Vendor Lock-in, Surveillance, Back Doors, Considerable Power Waste, and Defects That Cannot be Fixed
Microsoft did not even have to buy Canonical (for Canonical to act like it happened)
Links 28/03/2024: GAFAM Replacing Full-Time Workers With Interns Now
Links for the day
Consent & Debian's illegitimate constitution
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
The Time Our Server Host Died in a Car Accident
If Debian has internal problems, then they need to be illuminated and then tackled, at the very least in order to ensure we do not end up with "Deadian"
China's New 'IT' Rules Are a Massive Headache for Microsoft
On the issue of China we're neutral except when it comes to human rights issues
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, March 27, 2024
IRC logs for Wednesday, March 27, 2024
WeMakeFedora.org: harassment decision, victory for volunteers and Fedora Foundations
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 27/03/2024: Terrorism Grows in Africa, Unemployment in Finland Rose Sharply in a Year, Chinese Aggression Escalates
Links for the day
Links 27/03/2024: Ericsson and Tencent Layoffs
Links for the day
Amid Online Reports of XBox Sales Collapsing, Mass Layoffs in More Teams, and Windows Making Things Worse (Admission of Losses, Rumours About XBox Canceled as a Hardware Unit)...
Windows has loads of issues, also as a gaming platform
Links 27/03/2024: BBC Resorts to CG Cruft, Akamai Blocking Blunders in Piracy Shield
Links for the day
Android Approaches 90% of the Operating Systems Market in Chad (Windows Down From 99.5% 15 Years Ago to Just 2.5% Right Now)
Windows is down to about 2% on the Web-connected client side as measured by statCounter
Sainsbury's: Let Them Eat Yoghurts (and Microsoft Downtimes When They Need Proper Food)
a social control media 'scandal' this week
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, March 26, 2024
IRC logs for Tuesday, March 26, 2024
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
Windows/Client at Microsoft Falling Sharply (Well Over 10% Decline Every Quarter), So For His Next Trick the Ponzi in Chief Merges Units, Spices Everything Up With "AI"
Hiding the steep decline of Windows/Client at Microsoft?
Free technology in housing and construction
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
We Need Open Standards With Free Software Implementations, Not "Interoperability" Alone
Sadly we're confronting misguided managers and a bunch of clowns trying to herd us all - sometimes without consent - into "clown computing"
Microsoft's Collapse in the Web Server Space Continued This Month
Microsoft is the "2%", just like Windows in some countries