How to show the fingerprint hash of a key
2019-08-01 | Link to post | Author: W. Clear
ssh-keygen -l -E (md5 or sha256) -f <public file name (e.g. /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key.pub)>
Who would win?
2019-07-31 | Link to post | Author: W. Clear
Who would win in a fight for your attention?
Large companies with teams of some of the smartest people on Earth with years of your data and the data of billions of other internet users using artificial intelligence whose value is correlated with their ability to capture and hold your attention…
or
Your brain?
If you feel bad about over-using social media, games, or other technologies, just remember it’s basically your intelligence against the combined intelligence of some very smart people embedded into some of the most sophisticated systems – it’s not your fault that you slip up sometimes, your behaviour has been, do a degree, designed by technology companies. But do try and put your own systems in place to regain control of your time and make sure your attention is going to places you want to be spending it.
‘Fixed’ computer graphics problem by removing graphics card
2019-07-04 | Link to post | Author: W. Clear
The situation: occasionally my screen would black out. Sometimes there were obvious graphics errors (e.g. patches of random colour scattered across parts of the screen). In the worst cases, the computer would black out or show graphic errors, then crash. After a while, my computer started making loud noises, during boot especially. Opening the computer up and listening carefully revealed that the noises were coming from the graphic card – no surprise given the other problems.
I didn’t know if removing the graphics card would make it impossible to use the computer, but I thought it was worth a shot. The graphics card sounded like it was about to catch fire.
I de-installed the graphics drivers and shut down the computer. I turned the power off and remove the cords. Carefully, the graphics card came out. I plugged the HDMI cable into the motherboard’s HDMI slot and powered the computer back on.
It looks like, after a couple of restarts, Windows realised a graphics card was missing and automatically installed an Intel HD Graphics driver. At first, I had very rudimentary graphics, now things seem to be pretty much back to normal.
Quickly resizing windows with rich graphics, an action that occasionally triggered the problems described above now works flawlessly.
I’m sure if I was editing videos or playing games with rich graphics I would notice the missing graphics card; but until then I am very happy that I can resume normal usage of my computer without graphic errors, crashes, and loud sounds. 👌
Trusted vs Trustworthy
2019-07-02 | Link to post | Author: W. Clear
Recently heard a talk* which concisely pointed the difference between trusted and trustworthy in the context of trusted computing vs trustworthy computing. A trusted system is one that you trust; it does not necessarily imply anything about the trustworthiness of that system. The implication of this subtle difference is that, if you must have a trusted part of a system, you should try to minimise it so you can keep an overview of it and keep its attack surface to a minimum.
- *Design and Implementation of a Secure Linux Device Encryption Architecture; Christian Stüble (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Marcel Winandy (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) and Michael Scheibel (Sirrix Security Technologies AG); https://media.ccc.de/v/linuxtag06-268-design_and_implementation_of_a_secure_linux_device_encryption_architecture
Personal carbon dioxide budgets
2019-07-02 | Link to post | Author: W. Clear
A personal carbon dioxide budget is the amount of carbon dioxide that an individual is allowed to produce over a given time frame or the plan for how this emission allowance will be allocated.
To avoid the climate change crisis escalating to globally catastrophic levels, I think this budget is limited to about 1 to 2 tonnes per person per year according to remarks made by polar researcher Maria-Elena Vorrath during in her Global Warming Sucks talk*. According to The World Bank, the current level of CO2 emissions per capita is about 5 tonnes and the United States of America emits about 16.5 tonnes per person†.
The aim of setting a personal carbon dioxide budget is to take a fair approach to share the effort in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and avoid worsening the climate crisis. Everyone gets their fair share of carbon dioxide emissions to spend how they choose and the overall impact on Earth’s ecosystem is limited.
Limitations of personal carbon dioxide budgets
- Carbon dioxide is one of many greenhouse emissions we produce in modern life; focusing on reducing just one may result in losing site of the big picture which is to reduce greenhouse gases overall and prevent the current climate crisis from getting much worse.
- It is hard for people to know what produces a lot of carbon dioxide and what produces little. At the moment the information available is very rough. For example, it is known that a vegan diet is
Background
The idea for a personal carbon dioxide budget came to me when I was wondering if eating a vegan diet for a year would offset an international flight‡. I saw that the vegan diet did not offset the international flight. I further wondered what would be a fair amount of carbon dioxide over the year to emit. That is, would would be the allowable amount of carbon dioxide emissions if everyone limited their personal emissions to a certain amount to avoid catastrophic climate change? I could not find a concrete answer.
- *https://media.ccc.de/v/fusion19-7862-global_warming_sucks
- †As of 2014 data: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?most_recent_value_desc=true
- ‡A vegan diet did not even come close to offsetting the international flight I wanted to take. According to a CO2 calculator from the German state government of Bavaria, a vegan diet reduces my emissions by .74 tonnes – which is a sizeable impact – but an international flight halfway across the world and back produces about 10 tonnes – 13 times the reduction in emissions from the vegan diet. https://lfu.co2-rechner.de/de_DE/
Note to self: check out which open source projects the EU is supporting from time to time
2019-06-26 | Link to post | Author: W. Clear
This is seems to be the current list:
https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/eu-fossa-2/news/ready-challenge
Idea for a story
2019-06-26 | Link to post | Author: W. Clear
I was just thinking about how unaware we are that our everyday actions relate to climate change. That got me thinking about a story where several groups of characters go about their lives in parallel: one drives a large car, one flies to an exotic location for a holiday, one enjoys some time on a cruise shop, and one heavily consumes media over the internet. As a sort of epilogue to each story, the emissions from the various activities are followed through the atmosphere as they combine with the emissions from other people undertaking similar activities all around the world and hang around in the atmosphere and cause various catastrophes around the globe: floods, droughts, wild fires, storms, heatwaves, among other things – all directly or indirectly affecting the original characters decades after the opening scenes. It ends with the all the characters getting caught out in a tropical heatwave and dying as the heat causes irreversible damage to the enzymes and proteins in their bodies. The story progresses from a time of carefree enjoyment to catastrophe based on how scientists are currently describing the next 70 years.
Some things I learned about at a recent WordCamp – 2019-06
2019-06-23 | Link to post | Author: W. Clear
Docker
Config with Docker can be seen in layers like this conf files > docker compose > Lando (or something like that, I’m not sure I quite understood).
Use Docker Hub for preset images on lots of stuff including an official WordPress container.
Thoughts:
- Docker doesn’t really seem to solve I a problem I have as a freelancer and adds a bunch of overhead.
- I don’t like that I have to register/login to download Docker.
- Continually updating versions in docker config files in situations where webhosts or an update command would have done this for you seems like extra maintenance.
- Installing all dependencies in one command from a preset image and running software in lightweight virtual machines is a cool concept but brings with it more maintenance on top of what I am already doing for my current projects.
Modernising PHP Code
This was a great talk and the speaker really knew her stuff! Some things I found most interesting were: check out php-scoper, use classmaps for namespaces for performance, fully qualify the namespace, also for core PHP functions to improve performance (the computer then knows which function you’re after at compile time instead of working it out on the fly), dumping is the most optimised way to use namespaces, classmaps come second – but classmaps seem to be more recommended.
Random note
Check out Advanced Custom Fields. I’m pretty sure I’ve used it before, but someone mentioned it and I had forgotten about it so I’ll have another look.
Landing page design
Think like the person visiting the landing page. How specific is what your are offering to the thing they are looking for? That you this landing page offers to answer to a very specific problem should be apparent from the first impression. Examples of things to consider: is it the right country? Is it the right variant of the product or service? Is it for towns or cities? Further down the page, you can counter specific objections.
SEO
I don’t know what these mean but: semrush (may be spelled incorrectly), sistrix. Don’t create separate pages for terms that are synonymous, one page should include mentions of variations of that term.
Blocks
The Gutenberg project block icons are based on material design outline icons – they are good starting point when designing one’s own. If no designer is available, also see if dash icons can be used. There are lots of Gutenberg settings that can be used to customise icons.
Privacy Starter’s Pack
2019-06-20 | Link to post | Author: W. Clear
It’s both a horrible time for privacy and a wonderful time for privacy. It’s a horrible time because some large organisations in tech are addicted to our data and doing everything they can to get more of it and maximise their utilisation of it: to sell us more stuff and hold our attention for as long as possible. It’s also a wonderful time for privacy because the tools that return control of user data to the users are maturing and, in many cases, provide just as much benefit as their data-gobbling equivalents.
Here are some privacy-friendly replacements for common products/services that I use regularly:
Instead of Google: Duckduckgo – why
Instead of WhatsApp, Snapchat: Signal – why
Instead of Gmail: Posteo – why
Instead of Chrome: Firefox – why
Instead of Microsoft Office: LibreOffice – why
Instead of iOS, Android: LineageOS – why
Instead of Google Maps: OpenStreetMap and local public transport websites – why
Instead of Google Drive: Firefox Send and Tresorit – why
(Instead of my current operating system: Qubes – Still to come)
Why I use Duckduckgo
As it states: it’s the search engine that doesn’t track you. I’ve found that most of the time I still find helpful results very quickly.
Why I use Signal
Signal is the closest thing to a privacy-first tech product that I have ever seen. They provide a full set of messaging features while going out of their way to protect every last bit of user data. For example, not even Signal servers are able to tell who sent a message, only who it’s for – and, of course, that message’s content is encrypted. WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) does not do this and even has a financial incentive not to implement it: this meta data is used to target advertising to its users. With Signal’s privacy measures, that is not even possible.
Why I use Posteo
I coincidentally discovered the Posteo email service because I saw that they had funded an security audit of Thunderbird. That was a very promising sign for me: that they supported open source software, they had the financial stability to fund such a project, and that they cared about security. It costs money, but it’s the way it should be: I’m not paying for the service with my privacy but with a very reasonable financial transaction.
Why I use Firefox
Firefox positions itself as a privacy friendly browser – and recently they’ve taken action on that in multiple ways: end-to-end encryption of the profile data, setting up the Firefox Send service allows files to be sent without signing in, also using end-to-end encryption, and enabling relatively strict tracking by default.
Why I use LibreOffice
Just a generic motivation for this one: it’s free and open software, it has a large community and developed by a not-for-profit organisation funded by donations . Therefore, it has much less motivation to track its users either for license compliance reasons or to increase profit. I’ve found it is pretty feature-complete for the tasks I need to do in my documents and spreadsheets.
Why I use LineageOS
Google is deeply integrated with Android, LineageOS gives you the option to remove a lot of this integration. (Although, I think, even with all Google software removed, there’s still a call made to Google servers every now and then to check connectivity). The way I set it up (as much Google software removed as possible) means giving up the Play Store; instead, I use F-Droid for apps – and far fewer apps. Overall, this reduces the data I am sending to big tech companies and increases the proportion of free and open source software I am using, offering greater transparency over the software that accompanies me in my pocket every day.
Why I use OpenStreetMap
Basically the same reason as LibreOffice: it’s free and open source. The downside to OpenStreetMap is, however, it does not have allow for searching for public transport. Therefore, I use local public transport websites to find my way around a city and OpenStreetMap to get an idea of where things are, get walking directions, and see what’s around.
Why I use Firefox Send and Tresorit
No login, end-to-end encrypted sending of files. Files are temporary, both in the number of days they are hosted and the number of downloads they are available for. The files can be optionally be protected by a password. I honestly don’t know if there is any down side to this service yet.
Unlike most other items on this list, Tresorit is not open source (DuckDuckGo is also not completely open source). However, they do provide end-to-end encrypted sync between devices which I find adequate for my current privacy requirements.
NodeJS Syntax, Method and Function Changes
2019-06-20 | Link to post | Author: W. Clear
For reference to get an idea of when new things were added to NodeJS. Note, this is only new things, things that were removed are not included.
NodeJS Version 4.0.0 – 2015-09
copyWithin(), every(), fill(), filter(), find(), findIndex(), forEach(), indexOf(), join(), lastIndexOf(), map(), reduce(), reduceRight(), reverse(), slice(), some(), sort() added to TypedArray prototype. from() and of() added to TypedArray.
Arrow functions: items.map(item => item.prop).
NodeJS Version 5.0.0 – 2015-10
3 decimals of accuracy added to console.time().
File descriptor accepted as first argument for fs.readFile*() fs.writeFile*() and fs.appendFile*().
HTTP methods and header names must conform to RFC 2616: /^[a-zA-Z0-9_!#$%&'*+.^`|~-]+$/.
NodeJS Version 6.0.0 – 2016-04
Buffer.prototype.lastIndexOf() method added.
dns.resolvePtr added to query plain DNS PTR records.
Methods added to EventEmitter.prototype: prependListener() and prependOnceListener()
NodeJS Version 7.0.0 – 2016-10
Not so much.
NodeJS Version 8.0.0 – 2017-05
async_hooks module in core.
Many Buffer methods accept Uint8Array as input.
Zero-fill new Buffer instances: new Buffer(num) and Buffer(num)
Native Promise instances are Domain aware.