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Mozilla hit with privacy complaint over Firefox user tracking
  • Because hosting costs money, and sustainable services need revenue sources.

    News we read was put together by a team of journalists, editors, etc.

    Video streaming takes a lot of storage, bandwidth, processing, licensing.

    And so on.

    Price gouging is bad, but reasonable income is necessary.

    Billboard ads that don't target users and don't track effectiveness are dangerous financially for advertisers, and would pay much less to ad hosters.

    Anonymous, aggregated tracking is a healthy compromise.

  • Waydroid is pretty awesome
  • I'll be honest here: I switched my main laptop from slow roll to Linux Mint to install it several months back to install wayDroid. I've been happy with the switch. Here are my thoughts:

    1. I'd installed Linux Mint + wayDroid on the laptop of various family members, and really liked what I saw
    2. Runa-chin has done a great job providing instructions and packages to install it on tumbleweed, but it has quirks that I didn't feel like fighting. It just works out of the box in Mint.
    3. I like having KDE plasma 6 on slow roll, but the cosmetic difference from plasma 5 is minimal (it's more performance/longer term). I'm ok with sticking with plasma 5 if I get a painless wayDroid installation
    4. Slow roll is generally stable, but updates have burned me a few times in the past year. More stability is always nicer
    5. Flatpak + appimage + snap (yes, I don't mind using whatever is officially recommended on the project website of whatever I'm trying to install, though it would be nicer to have more official flatpaks) make it such that while my base is stable, I can still get some pretty recent packages
  • Waydroid is pretty awesome
    waydro.id Waydroid | Android in a Linux container

    Waydroid - Android in a Linux container

    I've been using it for months now .. I love that I can play droidfish (cuckoo chess engine is great for lower rated games.. really good practice partner). I started with the default (degoogled) image, but gave in and installed the Google play enabled one. Now I can read google play/kindle/o reilly/blinkist.

    Recently installed Minecraft education for a young family member... Runs like a charm too.

    Go waydroid!

    2
    Mozilla hit with privacy complaint over Firefox user tracking
  • Kudos for putting together good reasons that you don't like PPA, while also acknowledging that Mozilla is trying to solve a problem.

    Yours is one of the very few reasonable objections I've read IMO - when the PPA outrage first erupted, I read through how it worked. Unique ID + website unaware of interaction, but browser recognizing, then feeding it to an intermediate aggregator that anonymizes data by aggregating from multiple users without sharing their IDs, with the aim of trying to find a middle ground seems fair to me. Especially with the opt-out being so easy.

    However, your points about classes clickbait encouragement, SEO feeding, and the uncertainty that this will solve the web spamminess as it is are valid concerns.

  • FOSS AI painting with Krita
  • This is the caveat for me for now.

    To run locally a powerful graphics card with at least 6 GB VRAM is recommended. Otherwise generating images will take very long!

    I've got decent RAM on an I9, but my graphics card, which is what matters here, isn't up to par.

  • Stable, consistent workstation recommendations?
  • Linux Mint Debian Edition would be a pretty solid, pre-customized distribution.

    I've had great experiences with Linux on Lenovo over the years: would be my first recommendation.

    I currently use a Dell Inspiron, while it's works great, I had to do some extra work occasionally. I love that I can get fingerprint login with it on Linux though.

  • How fast is Plasma on old hardware?
  • Why not try it for yourself on Linux mint first by installing plasma? Plasma 5 is available on mint - I believe Fedora has plasma 6.

    I use plasma 6 on my Opensuse Slowroll laptop and plasma 5 on my LMDE desktop.

    Overall, I've found plasma 6 to run slightly better (I was on plasma 5 on Slowroll too for a long time).

    Once you install and try plasma 5 on your current install, that will be a much less disruptive way to see how well it works for you.

    After ricing, both plasma 5 and 6 are pretty similar on my setup. The cube desktop effect isn't there by default on plasma 5 of course.

  • Linux GUI termserv
  • Sorry, good catch.

    It had been a while since I had played briefly with kiosk mode in a VM: I misremembered the project (the one I played with was still available)

    I had found it interesting, and had set it up... Probably been around a year or so.

    The project I used was Gnome kiosk, not Fedora kiosk.

  • Fwupd Will Use Zstd Compression
  • They do. They did. What do you do when a 'good guy' is really a bad guy? Happens outside of software too. Someone inserts themselves into an organization while secretly working against its interests.

    Here's a good summary. However, you should read a few articles - plenty have been going around, including on Lemmy.

  • Fwupd Will Use Zstd Compression
  • As with all definitions, there is a gray area where people will have different boundaries on exact meanings. To you - a supplier relationship needs an explicit payment, which is a fair definition.

    However, the more widely used definition that most people, including me, refer to, is not necessarily focused on the supplier, but on the supply - what we use in our toolchains is a supply - regardless of how it was obtained.

    When there is an issue in a trusted supply, even if it was not a commercial relationship (a prerequisite by your definition), it is a supply-chain attack by the more widely used definition.

  • Fwupd Will Use Zstd Compression
  • The article states reasons which aren't limited to what happened. I understand and agree with your sentiment about the supply chain issue being something that could happen anywhere - those were my initial thoughts too.

    The reasons for shifting are related to speed, other mainstream software already having made that switch years ago (pre incident), and unfortunately... More robustness in terms of maintainers.

    Open source funding and resilience should be mainstream discussions. Open source verification and security reliability should be mainstream discussions: here's a recent mastodon thread I found interesting:

    https://ruby.social/@getajobmike/112202543680959859

    However, people switching from x to z (I did see what you did there) is something that is going to happen considering the other factors listed in the article that I summarized above.

  • Fwupd Will Use Zstd Compression

    Linux Firmware Update Utility Fwupd Will Use Zstd Compression for Future Releases

    The devs are also considering enforcing signed commits in an attempt to prevent supply chain issues like the XZ backdoor.

    Edit: note for downvotes: I understand some of you disagree with the need for a switch. However, are you downvoting the news itself (i.e. shooting the messenger?)

    27
    BRABIX - the Linux Mascot! (Happy April 1st)

    I've gotta hand it to the new GNU Linux mascot replacing Tux as of today, brabix. Love the matrix themed T-shirt!

    Ref: this post celebrating the first of the fourth 🍀

    Edit: The Big Day is over. For those of you (I'm kinda guessing there were quite a few) who weren't sure what this was (and for everyone else too, thanks for being a sport) (Happy??) April Fools! (please tell me you already knew this!)

    4
    Commuting across timezones
    goo.gl OnTimeZone.com North American Time Zone borders – Google My Maps

    Accurate, detailed time zone borders for North America, including Daylight Saving time observance and unofficial local exceptions to official time. Magenta lines represent constant time zone borders. Cyan (light blue) lines represent those that apply only during Daylight Saving Time. Dark blue li...

    OnTimeZone.com North American Time Zone borders – Google My Maps

    I realized (as I was commuting) this morning, that some people must live near timezone borders.

    How does that work for you? Do you think in work time at home? Home time at work?

    It must be easier these days with smartphones and smart watches automatically adjusting time according to you location?

    Share your experience please, I'm curious!

    20
    CUPS mirror image printer setup

    I'll need to mirror print stuff regularly (flip across the vertical axis), and I'm trying to make the process convenient.

    The manual way to mirror print would be by invoking lp, e.g.

    lp -o mirror myfile.pdf

    Invoking lp would work for images, PDF, ps etc. But but for application (open office draw) files. Unfortunately, I don't see an obvious way to mirror print within the application itself.

    I'm thinking of setting up a mirror printer in CUPS that would automatically apply the -o mirror to any documents that hit it.

    I suspect this would require some tinkering with CUPS filters - I'll dig into it sometime.

    I can't be the only one who's needed this at some point in time.

    Has anyone here done something similar? Looking forward to your thoughts!

    3
    SpiralLinux - It's really Debian underneath the hood!

    I recently ran across SpiralLinux - GitHub page, and found the concept of how the maintainer is packaging it very cool.

    The maintainer has been maintaining Gecko Linux for a while now - it has the same underlying concept.

    The gist is - you're basically installing Debian, but with customizations that the maintainer(s) thought would be very helpful. Basically - better out of the box experience for new users, but also less work to do even for experienced users, and it comes with different download flavors - Gnome, Plasma, XFCE, Mate, etc.

    Bit more detail by the maintainer in this Reddit comment:

    > Exactly. It's like I went over to your house and installed and configured Debian on your computer, and then you kicked me out of your house as soon as I finished. ;-) The installed system no longer has any connection whatsoever with me or the SpiralLinux project, which is good because you wouldn't want your entire system to depend on a random single developer maintaining it.

    (original Reddit comment has more details).

    I thought this was pretty cool. I'm still trying to read up online on trying to find how the package lists are maintained, etc., and I might be interested in contributing if I'm able to in the future.

    Just wanted to share!

    40
    Certificate management

    How are y'all managing internal network certificates?

    At any point in time, I have between 2-10 services, often running on a network behind an nginx reverse proxy, with some variation in certificates, none ideal. Here's what I've done in the past:

    • setup a CLI CA using openssl
      • somewhat works, but importing CAs into phones was a hassle.
    • self sign single cert per service
      • works, very kludgy, very easy
    • expose http port only on lo interface for sensitive services (e.g. pihole admin), ssh local tunnel when needed

    I see easy-RSA seems to be more user friendly these days, but haven't tried it yet.

    I'm tempted to try this setup for my local LAN facing (as exposed to tunnel only, such as pihole) services:

    • Get letsencrypt cert for single public DNS domain (e.g. lan.mydomain.org).. not sure about wildcard cert.
    • use letsencrypt on nginx reverse proxy, expose various services as suburls (e.g. lan.mydomain.org/nextcloud)

    Curious what y'all do and if I'm missing anything basic.

    I have no intention of exposing these outside my local network, and prefer as less client side changes as possible.

    21
    Linux advocacy discussion (mastodon)
    mastodon.social Ondine Bruch (@veroandi@mastodon.social)

    Why don't more people use desktop Linux? I have a theory you might not like "There might be a very simple explanation for why the masses have yet to adopt Linux as their desktop operating system and it's one the open-source community won't like" https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-dont-more-people-u...

    Two main points:

    • no one unified distro to keep things simple (thread OP)

    VS

    • people don't care. Someone else needs to advocate, sell, migrate, and support (medium term) Linux (whichever distro they want) for the intermediate term (few months at least) - thread response).

    I think a lot of the 97% desktop market share is like this, instead of the hands on 2-3%.

    33
    Tetris on termux on Android phone

    I never imagined I'd like playing Tetris on the command line, on a terminal on my phone (termux), but here I am!

    I couldn't find any Tetris app on fdroid, and just checked if pkgs had one. Lo and behold! It asked me to run pkgs install vitetris, and when I did, the tetris command was there to launch the game.

    It's a two step process, as opposed to just launching an app, but it is very lightweight, no tracking, and FOSS.

    For anyone with termux already installed and feeling a bit nostalgic, might be worth trying it out.

    39
    DEV stickers I recently bought for $10 on Amazon (206 count)

    I have mixed feelings about calling this one a tip.. but I've recently been interested in giving a shout out (think passive advertising) to open source technology I use and like (🐧, 🦎, vim, etc..).

    I bought this set of 206 stickers from Amazon a few weeks ago for $10 (9.99, but that's really 10).

    The stickers are very hard to peel off till you get the hang of it, but can vouch.

    Inspired by this Lemmy post

    0
    Quotes @lemmy.ca GravelPieceOfSword @lemmy.ca
    "Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everyone agrees it's old enough to know better." - Anonymous
    0
    Rabbitholes

    browse Lemmy

    !1000018943

    check the hole out

    !1000018945

    try digging in a bit

    !1000018941

    profit!

    4
    nixos @lemmy.ml GravelPieceOfSword @lemmy.ca
    NIX Question: NIX installed package on a non-nixos system - Using with vscode and compiling source

    I couldn't find a nix community, so I'm hoping it is ok that I'm posting on the nixos one instead. I'll switch to mailing list/discord if necessary, but I have a lemmy app on my phone, and it is much easier to have an ongoing conversation from here, so I decided to give it a shot. Here goes!

    While I have a NixOS laptop, I primarily use other systems (e.g. OpenSuse Tumbleweed) as of now.

    I love the ability to define the packages I want installed, with home-manager managing my command line utilities (e.g mtr, dig, protobuf etc).

    I've been playing around a bit with protobuf recently, and after generating some c++ code using protoc, I loaded up the generated code in vscode, which understandably wasn't able to find the development headers for protobuf (since they are in the nix store - /nix/store/h2h5fs8iv2a8rmlkfhr6id6y4jxwd5i1-protobuf-3.21.12/include/google/protobuf/io)

    I tried to compile the code anyways on the command line, and got some errors.

    I might need an OS specific protobuf install just for the development headers, but I'm pretty sure I should be able to, and just don't know how. Here's what I get when I try to compile:

    $ g++ searchReq.pb.cc In file included from searchReq.pb.cc:4: searchReq.pb.h:10:10: fatal error: google/protobuf/port_def.inc: No such file or directory 10 | #include | ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ compilation terminated.

    Any tips/pointers would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!

    ===========================================

    Edit: Thank you all, particularly @Xephopiqua@lemmy.ml and @chayleaf@lemmy.ml for the help. After setting the include path (compile) and LD_LIBRARY_PATH (link), things work great.

    I ended up writing a small Makefile for convenience in the short run:

    ```Makefile INC_FLAGS:=-I$(HOME)/.nix-profile/include -Icpp LD_FLAGS:=-L$(HOME)/.nix-profile/lib -l protobuf

    run: task LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$(HOME)/.nix-profile/lib ./task

    task: g++ $(LD_FLAGS) $(INC_FLAGS) main.cpp cpp/searchReq.pb.cc -o task

    regen: protoc --python_out=python --cpp_out=cpp searchReq.proto ```

    That's enough to get me going for now.

    TODO - read up the NIXOs Wiki C page in more detail

    8
    Listen to lolcat fortune turtle

    fortune | cowsay -f turtle | lolcat is a fun thing to have in your .bashrc

    10
    Teens Hacked Boston Subway’s CharlieCard to Get Infinite Free Rides
    www.wired.com Teens Hacked Boston Subway Cards to Get Infinite Free Rides—and This Time, Nobody Got Sued

    In 2008, Boston’s transit authority sued to stop MIT hackers from presenting at the Defcon hacker conference on how to get free subway rides. Today, four teens picked up where they left off.

    Teens Hacked Boston Subway Cards to Get Infinite Free Rides—and This Time, Nobody Got Sued
    46
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)GR
    GravelPieceOfSword @lemmy.ca
    Posts 24
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