This page permanently redirects to gemini://gemini.techrights.org/2022/12/28/everyone-in-lastpass-at-risk-now/.

● 12.28.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 28/12/2022: Kraft Version 1.0 and Everyone in LastPass at Risk Now

Posted in News Roundup at 9:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

=> ↺ The Benefits of Choosing Linux Over Other Operating Systems

• Linux is a powerful, open-source operating system that is becoming increasingly popular among computer users of all kinds. It is known for its stability, flexibility, and security features.

• Speaking about security, did you know that the average global cost of a data breach is roughly $4 billion? Cyberattacks are more prevalent today and ever, and therefore, every internet user must possess the best VPN to combat the ever-rising cyber threat!

• Coming back to the OS, this article will explore why Linux can be your ideal operating system.

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ 6 reasons why Linux is an ideal solution for programming

• Today we will talk with you about Linux, an operating system that is gaining popularity simultaneously with the development of open-source software, and its main advantages. How can such operating systems be of interest to an ordinary user or developer?

• We have collected the most commonly accepted arguments that Linux is favored among developers and cited the top 6 points why many programmers value Linux so much.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ KDE Neon – The Flagship KDE Distro | Solid, Stable – Stunning – Invidious

• A video covering the newest release of KDE Neon. The flagship KDE distro that is released by the KDE team itself. With the latest available version of the KDE desktop this distro still is solid and stable. Take a look and let me know what you think below.

=> ↺ How to install Synfig Studio on KDE Neon – Invidious

• In this video, we are looking at how to install Synfig Studio on KDE Neon.

=> ↺ Connect to Wireless Internet, Pass it To Your Network | Raspberry Pi Wireless to LAN bridge – Invidious

• This guide will help you to connect to any wireless network and pass that internet into your LAN network. We have an option for using or not using a VPN in our setup.

=> ↺ Twitter Bans Accounts and Links to Mastodon Servers – Invidious

• In this video, I check out an article about how Twitter suspended its open-source competitor Mastodon. Mastodon is an open-source social networking platform that is similar to Twitter.

=> ↺ Customizing Steam Games in Linux – Invidious

• Installing steam games on Linux is easy but running executables inside those games to add mods, maps, and other Windows programs that enhance the gaming experience is essential.

=> ↺ XFCE For Wayland Will Happen… One Day – Invidious

• XFCE used to be one of the major Linux desktop environments but over time it’s faded into more and more obscurity but it’s not dead yet and a Wayland version is in the works.

=> ↺ LINUX MINT 21.1 Vera is WINDOWS, and I’m fine with that! – Invidious

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Linux Fu: Miller The Killer Makes CSV No Pest | Hackaday

• Historically, one of the nice things about Unix and Linux is that everything is a file, and files are just sequences of characters. Of course, modern practice is that everything is not a file, and there is a proliferation of files with some imposed structure. However, if you’ve ever worked on old systems where your file access was by the block, you’ll appreciate the Unix-like files. Classic tools like awk, sed, and grep work with this idea. Files are just characters. But this sometimes has its problems. That’s the motivation behind a tool called Miller, and I think it deserves more attention because, for certain tasks, it is a lifesaver.

=> ↺ How to Use the csplit Command to Split Files on Linux

• csplit is a popular Linux command-line utility used to split the contents of a file into two. The file you need to alter must be a text file with a “.txt” extension.

• The command is easy to use and works well on all Linux distributions. With the use of different flags available for csplit, you can also modify the output according to your need.

=> ↺ How To Install Stremio on Ubuntu 20.04 | 22.04 LTS

• In this guide, we will show you how to install Stremio on Ubuntu systems.

• Stremio is a modern media center that’s a one-stop solution for your video entertainment. You discover, watch and organize video content from easy to install addons.

• Movies, TV shows, live TV or web channels – find all this on Stremio.

=> ↺ How To Install Ubuntu Cleaner on Ubuntu 20.04 | 22.04 LTS

• Hi, this post is about how to install Ubuntu Cleaner on Ubuntu 20.04/22.04

• Ubuntu Cleaner is a tool that makes it easy to clean your Ubuntu system.

=> ↺ How to track project time using use this OpenProject tool

• Most project management tools include so many great features that it’s easy to overlook a standout feature — that was the case for me with OpenProject’s Time and Cost tool. With this tool, you can easily see how much labor and cost is going into a project; plus, you can add a widget to your dashboard that shows how many hours have gone into a project, so you can quickly glance at those numbers.

=> ↺ How To Install Hiri Email Client on Ubuntu 20.04 | 22.04 LTS

• In this guide, we will show you how to install Hiri in Ubuntu systems. Hiri is a linux email client for Exchange and Office 365 Email, Calendar, Contacts and Tasks. All in one.

• Hiri was (now defunct) a business focused desktop e-mail client for sending and receiving e-mails, managing calendars, contacts, and tasks. It was developed as an alternative to existing e-mail clients and calendar applications such as Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird.

=> ↺ How to install MetaTrader 5 with the Vantage Broker on a Chromebook

• Today we are looking at how to install MetaTrader 5 with the Vantage Broker on a Chromebook.

=> ↺ 2 Ways to Install QOwnNotes on Ubuntu 22.04 or 20.04

• QOwnNotes is an open-source application that we can install on Linux such as Ubuntu. The USP of it is the users can jot down their notes in a plain-text markdown file on a PC or laptop. The best part it not only comes with markdown support but also offers a to-do list manager and can work with Nextcloud and OwnCloud personal clouds for syncing notes across multiple devices. It supports spellchecking as well.

=> ↺ How To Install InfluxDB on Rocky Linux 9 – idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install InfluxDB on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, InfluxDB is a popular open-source time series database that is often used for storing and analyzing time-stamped data, such as performance metrics and sensor data. InfluxDB is written in the Go programming language and is optimized for fast, high-availability storage and retrieval of time series data. It can run on a variety of platforms, including Linux.

• 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 the InfluxDB open-source database on Rocky Linux. 9.

=> ↺ How to Install and Play GOG Games on Linux

• Gaming on Linux has made great strides in the last few years. Gone are the days when playing Steam or GOG games on Linux was unimaginable. Playing GOG’s huge library of games on your Linux machine is not only possible—it’s also surprisingly easy.

• Thanks to Linux apps like Lutris and the Heroic Games Launcher, you can install and play GOG games in a breeze.

=> ↺ How to deploy a self-hosted instance of the Passbolt password manager

• A password manager can keep your sensitive information in-house. Here’s how to deploy Passbolt to your data center or cloud-hosted service.

• Passbolt is a password manager you can use for team collaboration, and it offers plenty of the features you’ve grown accustomed to having at your fingertips, such as a random password generator, team collaboration, folders, tags and user access control. This password manager is designed specifically for Agile and DevOps teams, and it’s application programming interface-centric and developer-first.

=> ↺ Install Redshift to Get Night Light on Linux

• Looking to the default blue light emitted by computers all the time is not recommended; as it leads to eye strain and other health issues. You will notice this the most if you try to use your computer at night, and you will get blinded by the strong bright blue light coming out of it.

• Night light is a layer that replaces part of the blue light emitted by computer monitors at night with red light, so that they become more comfortable to the human eye to work with, especially at night.

• Redshift is a software that enables night light on Linux. It is free and open source, and works on almost all Linux distributions.

• You can easily install the software and use it on your distribution, which is what we’ll explain in this article.

=> ↺ Xfce 4.18 Coming to MX Linux in January: How to Install It Early

• However, on December 15, the brand-new version Xfce 4.18 was released as a significant update to the popular Xfce desktop environment, including many improvements.

• For example, the Thunar file manager can now display the count of containing files for directories in the “Size” column in the list view. Moreover, it can now undo and redo basic file operations such as move, rename, trash, link, and create actions.

• Furthermore, Xfce 4.18 brings to the scene a file highlighting, making the user experience more colorful in the literal sense. Under the hood, scaling has been improved with UI scaling support, and there is a newly redesigned Clock plugin which includes a sleep monitor and a new binary time mode.

• MX Linux’s developers announced today that its users would receive Xfce 4.18 as an update in January. Fortunately, for the most impatient, there is a way to install Xfce 4.18 early on MX Linux, and here I’ll show you how to do it.

• However, keep in mind that installing pre-release software can be risky, as it may contain bugs and other issues that still need to be addressed.

=> ↺ LaTeX spreadtab cells reference

• When I create LaTeX files containing complex tables with many correlated numbers, I use spreadtab. Overall, I like the package, but it often needs better documentation, not because features are not documented but because it’s hard to find what you are looking for. Cells references are an example of this, but it is a critical topic for this package, so those are the ways I’ve discovered to sum a column of values. To do so, I’ll take the example of page 19 of the package documentation.

=> ↺ How to install Linux Mint 21.1 “Vera” Cinnamon – Invidious

• In this video, I am going to show how to install Linux Mint 21.1 “Vera” Cinnamon.

=> ↺ How to install Signal on Linux

• Signal is a free and open source messaging application developed by the Signal Foundation: it is available on all the major operating systems such as Linux, Windows, Android and iOS, and supports all the major features one can expect, such as encryption, the ability to send files and make group calls. All the infrastructure behind Signal is open source, including the messaging protocol and the server software: the source code is available on github.

• In this tutorial we learn how to install the Signal desktop application on the major Linux distributions, using native, snap and flatpak packages.

=> ↺ How to set up Kodi media center on a Chromebook

• Kodi media center is an excellent, free, and open-source app perfect for managing your media. It can handle movies and TV show files locally, or over a network via NFS, SMB, FTP, etc. If you’d like to set up Kodi on your Chromebook to watch your favorite local media, this guide is for you.

=> ↺ How to Install Otter Browser on Manjaro Linux

• Otter Browser is a browser that strives to recreate the best aspects of Opera 12.x using the QT5 framework. The following tutorial will teach you how to install Otter Browser on Manjaro Linux using the command line terminal.

=> ↺ How to Install Pinta on Manjaro Linux

• Pinta is an open-source image editing tool available for free, and it has quickly become a favorite among novice and experienced users. The following tutorial will teach you how to install Pinta on Manjaro Linux using cli commands.

=> ↺ curl -w certs | daniel.haxx.se

• When a client connects to a TLS server it gets sent one or more certificates during the handshake.

• Those certificates are verified by the client, to make sure that the server is indeed the right one: the server the client expects it to be; no impostor and no man in the middle etc.

• When such a server certificate is signed by a Certificate Authority (CA), that CA’s certificate is normally not sent by the server but the client is expected to have it already in its CA store.

=> ↺ How to Install Blender 3.4 on Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Alma Linux

• This beginner tutorial demonstrates how to install Blender 3.4 on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Alma Linux 9, Linux Mint 21, and more.

=> ↺ How to Install Python 3 on Kali Linux – Linux Nightly

• Learn how to install the latest version of Python 3 and pip on Kali Linux.

Games

=> ↺ New Steam Games with Native Linux Clients – 2022-12-28 Edition – Boiling Steam

• Between 2022-12-21 and 2022-12-28 there were 25 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 233 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 10.7 % of total released titles.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ Kraft Version 1.0

• It is a pleasure to announce that Kraft Version 1.0 was released last week.

• [...]

• Kraft is free software to create office documents like offers and invoices in an efficient way. It runs on the Linux desktop and suits small businesses of all kinds.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ CoverflowAltTab Extension for GNOME Shell Gets a Major Update

• The updated CoverflowAltTab extension debuts a redesigned Preferences panel using libadwaita. The extension’s settings are now organised by relevance and divided into pages to make navigation easier. This GUI rejig is necessary as there are more features and settings to play with.

• For instance, you can now choose to highlight the window under the mouse, and optionally raise the app window under mouse to the top, so you can tell which one you’re about to focus.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

=> ↺ Manjaro Linux 22.0 “Sikaris” Released

• The Manjaro Linux team has released Manjaro Linux 22.0 “Sikaris” as the latest rolling-release version of its Arch Linux-based distribution, reports Marius Nestor.

• Manjaro Linux “Sikaris” is powered by the new Linux 6.1 kernel series with editions featuring the Xfce 4.18 desktop environment, Gnome 43.2, or KDE Plasma 5.26.

• Manjaro Linux 22.0 is available for download from the official website.

Red Hat / IBM

=> ↺ Top 10 sysadmin troubleshooting guides of 2022 | Enable Sysadmin

• Find solutions to your Linux, Kubernetes, Ansible, and other systems problems in Enable Sysadmin’s top troubleshooting articles.

=> ↺ Red Hat lowers barriers to hybrid cloud adoption with expanded public offerings in AWS marketplace

• Red Hat, Inc. the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced an expansion of its open solutions publicly available in AWS Marketplace, a digital catalog with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors that make it easy to find, test, buy, and deploy software that runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Furthering Red Hat’s commitment to customer choice and flexibility across the open hybrid cloud, customers can now use committed AWS spend to purchase and run Red Hat offerings directly through AWS Marketplace. This provides customers with an easier path to digital transformation and more efficient operations, while being better able to meet dynamic market demands.

=> ↺ 8 ways IT leaders embraced artificial intelligence in 2022

• 2022 is the year artificial intelligence (AI) went from experimental to essential. Of the many technologies with the potential to deliver significant value in the near future, artificial intelligence seems firmly planted atop the list for CIOs.

• Against that backdrop, we’ve gathered the top articles from our community this year that showcased how IT leaders embraced AI in 2022. Check out our 2023 AI predictions to see what we believe is in store for the future of AI.

=> ↺ Remote work: 3 cultural benefits – and potential risks

• For better or worse, remote work seems to be here to stay. What arose out of necessity has evolved into a new way of working and living.

• Remote work has given us new worlds of efficiency, unprecedented levels of access, and endless convenience. As long as we keep an eye on the costs of these improvements, we can reap the cultural benefits while staying connected at a human level.

=> ↺ Fedora Magazine: GitHub Actions: Use Podman to run Fedora Linux

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Ubuntu Touch Isn’t Dead Yet

• Ubuntu developer Canonical tried years ago to make its way to the smartphone game with Ubuntu Touch. It failed to take off, but independent developers have kept the dream alive. Now, we have a build based on Ubuntu 20.04.

• A release candidate build of Ubuntu Touch based on 20.04 has been released by the independent developers at UBports, letting you make your phone Linux-powered. That’s not the newest version of Ubuntu, as it was first released in 2020. However, Ubuntu Touch has been stuck in 16.04 since Canonical abandoned the project, so this is the first time the underlying OS has actually been updated since UBports began maintaining it.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Banana Pi BPI-Pico-RP2040 – Raspberry Pi Pico replica gets USB-C port, I2C connector, and RGB LED – CNX Software

• Banana Pi BPI-Pico-RP2040 is basically a clone of the original Raspberry Pi Pico, but with the addition of an RGB LED and a 4-pin I2C connector, and the company replaced the micro USB port with a Type-C connector.

• The rest of the board, also called Banana Pi Pico, is exactly the same up to the through holes and castellated holes for the I/Os, and has a similar form factor as the Banana Pi BPI-PicoW-S3 that adds WiFi and Bluetooth through the ESP32-S3 wireless microcontroller.

=> ↺ $4 DshanMCU Pitaya Lite board comes with MM32 Arm Cortex-M3 microcontroller – CNX Software

• DshanMCU Pitaya Lite is an MCU development board based on yet another STM32 alternative: MindMotion MM32 Arm Cortex-M3 microcontroller that is said to be compatible with STM32.

• The MCU can be clocked at up to 120 MHz, embeds 128KB SRAM, 512KB flash, and the board offers two USB Type-C ports for USB and DAP debugging, a MicroSD card slot, a few buttons, I/Os are routed via through holes as well as a mini PCIe connector that can be used to connect a display.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ OnePlus Nord CE 2 Lite picks up Android 13 update

=> ↺ Unofficial LineageOS 20 brings Android 13 with microG to the Fairphone 4

=> ↺ The Sony WH-1000XM5 are Android Police’s 2022 headphones of the year

=> ↺ 9 Android Features We Want to Get in 2023

=> ↺ Why You Should Not Buy a Budget 5G Android Phone in 2023

=> ↺ Choose the best phone charger. Here’s how.

=> ↺ What devices are Android Authority readers using? (2022 Edition)

=> ↺ 5 Common Android Problems and How to Fix Them

=> ↺ 7 Discontinued Android Hardware Features That We Want Back

=> ↺ How to use Nearby Share feature in your Android smartphone

=> ↺ Wallpaper Wednesday: Android wallpapers 2022-12-28 – Android Authority

=> ↺ Samsung to wrap up Android 13 One UI 5 rollout before 2023

=> ↺ The ghost of LG’s mobile division lingers as Android 13 is coming to the LG Velvet

=> ↺ The Best Android Gaming Handhelds of 2022 – Droid Gamers

=> ↺ What devices are Android Authority readers using? (2022 Edition)

=> ↺ Android phone callers can be spied on via the motion sensors – PhoneArena

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to Google Contacts

• Google has a firm grip on the desktop. Their products and services are ubiquitous. Don’t get us wrong, we’re long-standing admirers of many of Google’s products and services. They are often high quality, easy to use, and ‘free’, but there can be downsides of over-reliance on a specific company. For example, there are concerns about their privacy policies, business practices, and an almost insatiable desire to control all of our data, all of the time.

• What if you are looking to move away from Google and embark on a new world of online freedom, where you are not constantly tracked, monetised and attached to Google’s ecosystem.

• In this series we explore how you can migrate from Google without missing out on anything. We recommend open source solutions.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

=> ↺ Deleting All Types of Contents from Calc Range using Macro

• This tutorial explains how to delete contents from cells or ranges in LibreOffice Calc using macro.

• Using a macro, you can clear everything that contains in a cell or in a range of cells. In this tutorial we will clear every type of contents from a range. Before clearing out contents from ranges, the macro needs to determine the type of cell contents. Because if you want to delete everything from cells, you need to consider the value, the formatting styles, etc.

=> ↺ Date and Time Processing in LibreOffice Calc using Macro

• This tutorial explains the basic date and time processing in basic macro in LibreOffice Calc.

• In basic, a Date is a datatype that stores date and time values. By default, it holds Jan 1 year 0001 midnight. We will pick any date and process it in different ways. Let’s explain the concept using some examples.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Kubernetes 1.26: Job Tracking, to Support Massively Parallel Batch Workloads, Is Generally Available | Kubernetes

• The Kubernetes 1.26 release includes a stable implementation of the Job controller that can reliably track a large amount of Jobs with high levels of parallelism. SIG Apps and WG Batch have worked on this foundational improvement since Kubernetes 1.22. After multiple iterations and scale verifications, this is now the default implementation of the Job controller.

• Paired with the Indexed completion mode, the Job controller can handle massively parallel batch Jobs, supporting up to 100k concurrent Pods.

• The new implementation also made possible the development of Pod failure policy, which is in beta in the 1.26 release.

=> ↺ Shell Programming Secrets Nobody Talks About

• Most tutorials about shell programming are often part of larger guides on Linux. They gloss over the numerous ways that your code might work but still fail under certain circumstances. Given that shell scripts are used to manage billions of dollars of assets, it is important to learn how to write clean and safe code with them.

• Last year, I wrote a book on Linux command-line tips and tricks, and made several updates to it. Annoyingly, I continue to discover something new and important about the Bash shell program almost every week. I did not want this happening after I had ordered my author copy. The discoveries made me wonder what I have been doing all these years without knowing these bash secrets.

Python

=> ↺ How to Read Text Files in Python

• While working with the Python application, you would be required to read and write text files in Python. You can refer to our other tutorial to write a text file in Python. Reading a text file in Python is a simple process that can be accomplished using a few different methods.

Rust

=> ↺ This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 475

Standards/Consortia

=> ↺ Jonathan Dowland: dark mode

• I was pleasantly surprised to find that the crux of the technical side was to define “alternate stylesheets”, something I was playing around with 20 years ago. If your browser supports it (Firefox does at least: View → Page Style) you can select one of “dark”, “light” or “default”, the last of which follows what your OS settings/preferences are.

• The last puzzle piece was a CSS media type query prefers-color-scheme to activate stanzas of CSS depending on the browser/OS light/dark preference. There is some awkwardness around this which is mitigated in my case by using a CSS pre-processor, in my case Sass.

Leftovers

=> ↺ A Genuine Link To The Past

• 2022 was not a great year for my family. We lost my father in mid-April (on Easter Sunday). That itself was unexpected and devastating. He’d been dealing with some health issues, but we didn’t see it coming. In the aftermath, we had to sort through his life and find a way to move on. When things finally started to seem like they were improving, my father-in-law—who was like a second father to me—also passed. And my aunt passed away about a week ago. In the face of all this, I found solace in family, friends, writing, therapy, and (much to my surprise) video games. I began revisiting the Legend of Zelda series because it has a special meaning to me. And although it wasn’t something over which my father and I bonded much, it still managed to help me cope with some of my grief (so much so that my therapist actually recommended I play Breath of the Wild more frequently). Today’s Tedium is going in a slightly different direction. It’s a story about how three different Legend of Zelda games somehow managed to help me process and understand my own grief. But more than that, it’s a story about my life and some things I haven’t thought about for a very long time.

=> ↺ [Old] Blockchain has no place in Land Registries | Stop at Zona-M

• I had already covered another application of this particular snake oil last year, but now there is a recent post on Medium that gives even more excellent explanation why the whole general idea is crap, no matter what use case you dump it on.

• [...]

• Conflicts about the property of a house “require a central party (acting on behalf of the state and the rule of law) to update the register without the owners’ consent forcefully”. But that does not require a blockchain at all to happen. Quite the contrary actually. Throwing a blockchain into the handling of house property disputes would be just “technical convolution for no reason”.

• Inside this domain or, again, any other kind of property “the blockchain offers absolutely nothing over traditional databases”. As I said, further details are here, and I repeat the invitation to read them all.

=> ↺ Favourite books of 2022: Classics – Chris Lamb

• As a follow-up to yesterday’s post detailing my favourite works of fiction from 2022, today I’ll be listing my favourite fictional works that are typically filed under classics.

Hardware

=> ↺ Building a New Retro Styled Computer – CubicleNate’s Techpad

• Computers are a lot more fun when they are personal and have a bit of personaltity to them. You can’t get much more personalized than 3D printing your very own retro styled computer. This was all inspired by watching an episode on the YouTube channel, Retro Recipes, where LadyFractic built herself a retro computer, my daughter wanted to build a computer for herself. I wasn’t sure how serious she was on it but she kept watching the two part series over and over again which indicated to me that this was a project that had to be completed. When I asked what color she wanted, her face lit up and she said “pink” that cemented the deal for me. We are making one of these in pink and I think it is going to look pretty darn cool.

Proprietary

=> ↺ Cameyo adds support for Linux apps to their Cloud Desktops – OnMSFT.com

• Cameyo, a Virtual App Delivery provider, today is announcing support for Linux apps for the first time. The company’s platform has already allowed “delivery of Windows, SaaS, and internal web apps to any device,” now adds Linux apps, which for companies that don’t rely on apps needing to be run on Windows Servers, could significantly reduce costs.

=> ↺ [Fixed] Failed to connect to raw.githubusercontent.com port 443: Connection refused

Linux Foundation

=> ↺ Linux’s AgStack Project will build dataset of field boundaries

• The Linux Foundation announced its AgStack Project, which will host an open-source code base, along with a fully automated, continuous computation engine that will maintain a global dataset of boundaries for agricultural fields. The AgStack Asset Registry dataset will aid food traceability, carbon tracking, crop production, and other field-level analytics.

Security

=> ↺ Security updates for Wednesday [LWN.net]

• Security updates have been issued by Fedora (curl) and SUSE (curl, freeradius-server, sqlite3, systemd, and vim).

=> ↺ LastPass breach: The significance of these password iterations | Almost Secure

• LastPass has been breached, data has been stolen. I already pointed out that their official statement is misleading. I also explained that decrypting passwords in the stolen data is possible which doesn’t mean however that everybody is at risk now. For assessing whether you are at risk, a fairly hidden setting turned out critical: password iterations.

• LastPass provides an instruction to check this setting. One would expect it to be 100,100 (the LastPass default) for almost everyone. But plenty of people report having 5,000 configured there, some 500 and occasionally it’s even 1 (in words: one) iteration.

=> ↺ QR Code Scam – Schneier on Security

• An enterprising individual made fake parking tickets with a QR code for easy payment.

Monopolies

Copyrights

=> ↺ Top 10 Most Read Pieces from 2022 – The Public Domain Review

• From a 1904 study of queer Berlin to the mysteries of a hole-punched archive, a rundown of the ten most read pieces we published this year.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ Sofa repair

• This is the second time I’ve grabbed my sons and repaired the sofa in the basement movie room. I’m

• stubborn, I think. The thing is, the kids have loved to launch themselves onto the sofa, which has

• caused considerable damage. I’ve tried to explain it to them…

=> ↺ Meeting the Luthier

• I play the violin (for pleasure; I took lessons for 10yrs as a kid, but those skills have long since

• gathered dust), and recently noticed that my sound post seemed a little askew. Without much hope of

• finding anyone to help closer than 1.5hrs away in the big city, I hopped on Google to see if I could

• locate a luthier who could make an ajustment.

• To my utter amazement, I found that there is a luthier a couple miles from my house, right here in

• my little mid-Missouri city! I have no idea what the odds are of this happening, but I’m fairly

• certain they’re small. After some digging around, I sent him an email.

• [...]

• My bridge was not quite right either, I learned.

=> ↺ 🔤SpellBinding: ACMOPTU Wordo: LIVED

Politics

=> ↺ Identity

• Identity can be complicated; consider the humble tomato, which, in certain jurisdictions, has the honor of being both a fruit, according to Botany, and a vegetable, according to the Supreme Court of the United States of America. The court relied on the so-called ordinary meaning, presumably that a majority of the human population use the plant part as they do some plant parts, but not other plant parts. The no-so-humble tomato got drunk and set the hotel room on fire.

Technical

=> ↺ Pump the brakes!

• I brought out the enTourage pocket eDGe (ebook reader) this evening from the archives. It has been awhile since I used this device. I try to keep some charge in it, and it still seems to be handling well for its age. This was a quirky device when it came out, having 2 screens, one resistive LCD and the other an eink display. There seemed to be more odd-ball kinds of devices before than now. These days, they all seem basically the same. I think the world needs a better selection of odd-ball devices.

=> ↺ Overpass

• Overpass is an interface used to query OSM data. Overpass Turbo is an Overpass web client you can use to query OSM data, export it, &c.

=> ↺ Merry Christmas!

• Merry Christmas! Hristos se naște! С Рождеством! Feliĉan Kristnaskon! Веселого Родженја!

• Hey Gemini! Hoping your holidays have been merry and bright. I’m at another conference, this time as staff of a sort. I’m helping with post-lecture small group discussions, kinda like a TA. The first session I ran went well, and the bishop joined the group too. He’s a great guy.

=> ↺ Thoughts on Privacy Exploits in Gemini

• For the purpose of this post, I’m going to ignore the possible ways companies could add their own “extensions” to the Gemini protocol to get around privacy and surveillance limitations. I’ll only look at ways existing standards and practices could be abused.

• Yesterday Sean responded^ to a older post by Ainent about a potential security issues in Gemini. Specifically, big tech could use marketing and PR campaigns to push their own browsers, browsers that auto-generate client certificates and attach them to every request the browser makes. Sean pointed out that such a practice might be more correctly considered a privacy issue, and that there are other, simpler ways to track users, such as analyzing IP logs and page requests.

=> ↺ Project and Study Updates

• I haven’t posted here for a while, so here are a few updates on what I’ve been working on:

• Stargazing and astronomy studies have been a big one. Details on that are pretty well covered by my Star Log gemlog.

=> ↺ sudo make install

• But when I was trying to compile some documents, the neatpdf PDF postprocessor couldn’t find the requested fonts and it looked all wrong with weird or no fonts. Everything was installed in $(BASE) correctly. I could compile the same document in the git source directory and get the right results, so it had to be something to do with the way in which contents of files are changed for being used from $(BASE).

Science

=> ↺ More binocular astronomy

• Compared to just a few months ago when I made my last post, night time now comes a lot sooner and gets a lot darker, which means I don’t need to be content with looking at the moon or tremendously bright things like Jupiter. I have spent a lot more time with my binoculars outside at night.

=> ↺ Binocular observation of Jupiter and the moon

• When I was young, I used to be quite into astronomy (I was into a lot of things before computing came along and hypnotised me to the exclusion of much else for a big chunk of my life which I’ll never get back). I never owned a telescope or even, as far as I recall, binoculars, and to be honest I’m not sure I even felt the need. I grew up somewhere moderately remote, where light pollution wasn’t really an issue, so you could just go outside and look up on a clear night and behold the Milky Way whenever you felt like it. Shooting stars and satellites were things you could easily spot multiple times on any given night. I had one of those little rotating cardboard wheel star chart things, and I learned my way around the sky pretty well and spotted plenty of planets. I guess maybe all of this is more what you would call “stargazing” rather than amateur astronomy per se, although maybe that’s a bogus and snobbish distinction to draw. I guess it took a while even after the internet and computing appeared in my life for this interest to completely wane, I remember taking a degree of geeky pride in making the objectively unwise decision to interrupt my sleep at some ungodly hour the night before my final high school physics exam in order to watch a meteor shower (I still did fine). And I was even in my university’s astronomy club, although to be honest that was mostly just a social club for hypernerds and any kind of genuine astronomy-based event was outnumbered more than ten to one by quiz nights, video nights, fundraising BBQs, etc. Good times, to be sure, but I spent more time staring at the skies by myself as a kid. Until very recently, it had been definitely over a decade since I’d done anything like any of the above.

Internet/Gemini

=> ↺ introducing booji.mutated.net

• OK, and we’re back! I had a bunch of sysadmin stuff I needed to do with my gopherspace and that’s the reason why it’s been “Under Construction.” I basically offloaded my past phlog phosts and projects over to my own server, which I have been meaning to do for quite some time. My current phlog updates will remain as part of the sdf hosted gopher.club / Internet Gopher Club Underground Syndicate. There probably won’t be much noticable difference, aside from the server name for the older stuff.

• Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

=> Techrights

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