I think I recently wrote about this topic. Today, I came across a blog entry by Bozhidar Batsov on why Firefox is currently the only alternative to Chrome and the Chromium rendering engine. I totally agree with the author's points. A web completely dominated by Google wouldn't be a good thing and, as far as I can see, Firefox is the only true open alternative to avoid that dystopia. {link to this entry}

Recently, while checking the technology news, I read on ArsTechnica that DuckDuckGo wants to stop apps tracking you on Android. Now, I may be getting something wrong, but I'm not sure this offers anythin that is not already present in Firefox's own tracking protection features. If anything, the news article makes it sound as if DuckDuckGo's approach will block trackers on all apps running on the device, while Firefox can only block trackers within the browser itself. However, when I downloaded and installed the DuckDuckGo browser on my own Android phone, the settings didn't appear to go as far. Perhaps the feature is only available to a limited subset of users? In any case, it may be a good idea to keep an eye on this. {link to this entry}

Interesting tip. If you start a job on the shell that seems to be taking much longer than expected (e.g., transferring a very large core file) and it's too late to use nohup, perhaps the command disown will do the trick. The problem, truly, is that you cannot use nohup retroactively (i.e., when the job is already running). And the thing to remember is that the command disown acts on the job ID, not the PID. So, for example:

server:~ # yes > /tmp/yes.txt &
[1] 19898
server:~ # jobs
[1]+  Running                 yes > /tmp/yes.txt &

server:~ # disown %1
server:~ # ps auxw | grep yes
root      19898 48.4  0.0   7360   648 pts/0    D    11:51   0:06 yes

server:~ # exit
logout
Connection to server closed.

(...)

$ ssh root@server
server:~ # ps auxw | grep yes
root      19898 21.1  0.0   7360   648 ?        D    11:51   0:06 yes

{link to this entry}

Kelly Conaboy writes how Jay-Z immediately deletes Instagram in history's first correct use of social media, and links to an older article by Alex Balk titled Stop Twitting Yourself which contains some powerful arguments:

I know that many of you will defend your use of Twitter as something you are forced to endure for work (journalists, for example, use Twitter for the invaluable purposes of promoting their stories, showing how connected they are and finding out what other people are saying about them) so let me just tell you up front that if what you do for a living requires you to dip your head into a polluted stream twenty times a day and take a big sip before you personally defecate in the water you either need to find another career or admit to yourself that there is something about you that enjoys drinking from the same river where you shit. The other excuse I’ve heard is that it is important to stay on Twitter to know what is happening in the world, so this is where I want to pass along the valuable knowledge I’ve gained from avoiding it: 1) There is nothing important that happens on Twitter that you will not learn about eventually. 2) There is nothing you will eventually hear about from Twitter that will make you think, “Gosh, I wish I knew that earlier.” You are not missing anything. You do not need to march in the mediocrity parade of frustrated comedians trying to make the same stupid joke a fraction of a second before anyone else. Your image does not need curation, because all you are doing is broadcasting your desperation. No one is cool on Twitter. It is a giant assemblage of sad people trying too hard in real time. You do not need to do anything in front of an audience.

I know. Since everyone (well, almost everyone) does it, you feel scared. Although I have a Twitter account, I rarely ever did anything at all with it. Yet, I honestly feel as if I didn't miss anything at all. The world went on. Life went on. And I was still informed, at least of what mattered. As for Facebook, the same thing applies there too. I didn't post anything in a long time. Yet, I was too afraid of closing the account. Until I finally disabled it a few months back. Did anything go wrong in my life? Not really. I'm sorry to break it to you, but all these websites are just noise. Nothing else. Yes, sure, they (and their followers) make a lot of noise, and it does seems as if important stuff is happening there. In reality, nothing that matters is happening there. You are not going to miss anything if you abandon ship. {link to this entry}

While checking Reddit today, I came across a discussion on what may be stopping the NSA from flooding the Tor network with thousands of entry nodes, relays, and exit nodes to de-anonymize the users. As expected, the answer was quite of an eye-opening to some:

What makes you think the majority of the network isn't operated by intel services? Look at the bandwidth of some of the top exit nodes. Who do you think affords and foots six-figure monthly bills on those servers?

Tor does not defend against the NSA, nor against any adversary capable of global network surveillance. Anyone who believes otherwise would be well served reading the Tor design spec about how low-latency anonymizing networks work.

The same user (by the name of "Time500") later added:

There's no objective way to determine whether a VPN logs, just like there's no way to determine of a piece of the Tor network is owned by an adversary. You're taking and accepting the risk when you use these tools.

Tor primarily defends against censorship (the local network operator does not know what sites you visit) and provides anonymity from the server you're reaching (by obscuring your originating IP through the network). However, an adversary capable of observing traffic at various points in the global network can absolutely isolate and identify users. You would need a lot more spycraft than Tor alone to conceal your identity from nation state actors.

Morale: do not rely on Tor for illegal activities. It does provide some level of anynoymity from network and server operators but, if the governmment wants to track you, it still can do it. {link to this entry}

If, at any given point, you installed the BlueJeans videoconferencing application, there is a good chance that you have started noticing the presence of the file BluejeansHelper.log in your home directory. As far as I can see, that's bad enough. Why would an app create its own log file right in the root of my home directory, instead of using its own directory somewhere? But it gets worse. You can delete the file and, even if you don't ever use the app again, it keeps popping up on a daily basis. The solution is documented here. It looks as if BlueJeans also adds itself to the autostart folder just because. So, you will need to remove the Bluejeans*.desktop file under ~/.config/autostart/. Gotta love these apps! {link to this entry}

I think I may have written about this topic before. For some reason, there is this idea out there that people from the younger generations are very "computer literate". Just because. Because they are young and are glued to a digital device all day long, it seems. While I concede that this may be proof that they are "early adopters" and "strong uses" of the new technologies, I don't see that as being the same as "literacy". At least, that has not been my experience so far. Well, today, I read that Students don't know what files and folders are, professors say. It doesn't surprise me. Like I said, they may be "heavy users", but that is not the same as "literate". Oh, and one more thing. I disagree with the idea that it doesn't truly matter. That as long as they know how to search for things, everything is OK. First of all, because I've needed to access the filesystem on my own smartphone a few times already. Sure, it doesn't happen often. But sometimes it is necessary. And, second, because without having a clue how these things work underneath, it shouldn't surprise us if these very same people who are using the devices all day long are easy prety to hackers of all sorts. {link to this entry}

Here is a weird behavior a coworker ran into when booting a RHEL 8.0 system. He configured the mount in the fstab file by following these directions. Then, he rebooted the system, and it didn't mount the filesystem. However, he could manually run mount -a, and it would work. He asked me for assistance. So, it seemed clear that he had used the correct syntax in fstab, since he could manually mount the filesystem by running mount -a. Also, we checked to see if there was any problem with the network by running the command showmount against the NFS server, as well as checking the firewall configuration with iptables. Everything appeared to be OK. Yet, the NFS filesystem failed to mount on boot, and there was no trace of any problem anywhere in the logs. This was already a clue that the issue was most likely related to systemd. And, sure enough, it turned out to be this problem discussed in a Red Hat web forum. He didn't even need to use the _netdev mount option. All he had to do was start the netfs service.

Now, to be clear, although I'm not truly very hard set in favor or against it, I must say that, overall, systemd does strike me as a giant behemoth of intricate (perhaps needless) complexity and too obscure. I mean, the fact that the fstab contained a clear order to mount a filesystem, the mount failed, and we never saw any error anywhere is, to me, unacceptable. {link to this entry}