SMLR 328 – Home Automation projects

Downloads:

Show 323

Contact Us:

show (at) smlr.us or the Contact us page

On the Lawrence Systems Forums

Intro:

Tony Bemus, Tom Lawrence, Phil Porada and Jay LaCroix

Sound bites by Mike Tanner

Phils GitHub

The LawrenceSystems YouTube Channel Where videos
https://www.youtube.com/user/TheTecknowledge

Jay’s Site

https://protonmail.com/blog/android-open-source/

Jay’s Bash Prompt https://pastebin.com/kzPjE8y4

Show Notes

Wireguard-go on FreeBSD https://www.freshports.org/net/wireguard-go

Android App for Proton Goes Open Source

Netherlands commits to Free Software by default

https://fsfe.org/news/2020/news-20200424-01.html

[TOM]

Ubuntu 20.04 Supports Fingerprint Login, Improvements Planned

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/04/ubuntu-fingerprint-scanner-login-desktop

The Fedora Project and Lenovo are partnering to offer customers the option to buy a ThinkPad laptop with the Fedora Linux distribution pre-installed.

https://9to5linux.com/fedora-linux-will-soon-be-available-on-select-lenovo-laptops

[TOM]

2020 Open Source Conferences That Have Moved Online

If you’re going to stare at a screen, you can binge-watch Netflix – or you could attend one of these online open source conferences, most of which are now free or at a significantly reduced price.

https://www.itprotoday.com/devops-and-software-development/2020-open-source-conferences-have-moved-online

[Phil]

Cloudflare creates a tool to help the public shame their ISPs for not implementing BGP security

https://isbgpsafeyet.com/

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is responsible for looking at all of the available paths that data could travel and picking the best route. Unfortunately, it isn’t secure by default, and there are constantly major internet routing issues due to hijacking etc. ISPs and other major Internet players (Comcast, Sprint, Verizon, and others) would need to implement a system called RPKI. This tool shows large providers who are and are not implementing this security system. Conveniently there’s a post to twitter button to help shame providers into compliance!

[Jay]

There’s now over 6,000 Linux games on Steam plus thousands more playable with Steam Play Proton

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/theres-now-over-6000-linux-games-on-steam-plus-thousands-more-playable-with-steam-play-proton.16486?module=articles_full&title=theres-now-over-6000-linux-games-on-steam-plus-thousands-more-playable-with-steam-play-pr

[Tony]

Supreme Court To Consider Limiting America’s ‘Anti-Hacking’ Law

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-cybersecurity-202/2020/04/24/the-cybersecurity-202-there-s-finally-a-supreme-court-battle-coming-over-the-nation-s-main-hacking-law/5ea1ade6602ff140c1cc5f51/

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/04/25/226212/supreme-court-to-consider-limiting-americas-anti-hacking-law?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

[Phil]

Let’s Encrypt is hiring a Senior Software Engineer

https://www.abetterinternet.org/careers/le-sr-sw-eng/

[Phil]

OpenJardin is software for the management of a permaculture oriented garden. This software is written by a French developer. While a lot of the interface has been translated into English, some elements are still in French. You’re therefore at an advantage if you are fluent in French and English, particularly as the project’s manual is strictly a French only affair.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/openjardin/

SMLR 322: Stay 127.0.0.2

Posted by Tom Lawrence on April 13, 2020 in Show-mp3 | ∞

Podcast: Play in new window

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

Downloads:

Show 321

Contact Us:

show (at) smlr.us or the Contact us page

On the Lawrence Systems Forums

Intro:

Tony Bemus, Tom Lawrence, Phil Porada and Jay LaCroix

Sound bites by Mike Tanner

Phils GitHub

The LawrenceSystems YouTube Channel Where videos
https://www.youtube.com/user/TheTecknowledge

Jay’s Site

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/04/focal-fossa-familiar-face-wallpaper

Jay’s Bash Prompt https://pastebin.com/kzPjE8y4

Show Notes

News

Projects:

Tom: XCP-NG, new servers and new labs videos

Tony:

MagicMirror + HTMLbox + Gcalcli script | gcal-to-html.sh in https://github.com/tbemus/bin

pFsense + script to turn on/off rule + Mozilla webthings | pfb.php in https://github.com/tbemus/bin

Listener Feedback

Jay: Home Lab

Tony: magic mirror

https://distrowatch.com/

Tom: Tails

News:

Ubuntu 20.04 Features the Return of a VERY Familiar Face…

Jay: ‘Pop Shell’ Wants to Bring Proper Tiling Window Features to GNOME Shell

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/03/pop-shell-wants-to-bring-proper-tiling-window-features-to-gnome-shell

Tony: Git. The open source distributed version control system was first released on April 7th 2005, and thus today marks its 15th anniversary – 15 years aiding software developers to collaborate on projects large and small no matter where on the globe they may be.

https://www.itwire.com/the-linux-distillery/git-version-control-system-hits-15-year-milestone.html

TOM: New Kernel Features WireGuard
Linux 5.6 adds support a bunch of new SoCs and developer boards, including the Pine HardRock64, SolidRun’s HoneyComb LX2K workstation, and the Qualcomm sc7180

There are also thermal sensor updates for a range of Rockchip and Allwinner platforms, as well as the Broadcom BCM2711 used in the Raspberry Pi 4 (among others).

Logitech devices that use the HID++ protocol can now report battery voltage on Linux, and the Logitech MX Master 3 Mouse will now “just work” out of the box.

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/02/linux-5-6-kernel-features

TOM: Foliate 2.0 is a MASSIVE update to this GTK-based .epub reader. It adds a crop of major new features, including a redesigned interface, new reading options, new navigation behaviour, more control, more choice, more everything.

https://github.com/johnfactotum/foliate

Order Pizza From The command Line

https://github.com/harrybrwn/apizza

Tony:

Interesting News site

https://alltop.com/linux

Jitsi Meet features update, April 2020

https://jitsi.org/news/features-update-april-2020/

Smart-Doorbell

https://www.hackster.io/hackershack/smart-doorbell-video-intercom-system-e5aa61

https://github.com/HackerShackOfficial/Smart-Doorbell

https://youtu.be/NteJ33ETxmA

SMLR 321: Stay 127.0.0.1

Posted by Tom Lawrence on March 27, 2020 in Show-mp3, Show-ogg | ∞

Podcast: Play in new window

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

Downloads:

Show 321

Contact Us:

show (at) smlr.us or the Contact us page

On the Lawrence Systems Forums

Intro:

Tony Bemus, Tom Lawrence, Phil Porada and Jay LaCroix

Sound bites by Mike Tanner

Phils GitHub

The LawrenceSystems YouTube Channel Where videos
https://www.youtube.com/user/TheTecknowledge

Jay’s Site

https://www.redhat.com/en/enterprise-open-source-report/2020

Jay’s Bash Prompt https://pastebin.com/kzPjE8y4

Show Notes

News

[Tom]

Use of proprietary software is ‘plummeting’, finds Red Hat report

[Phil] Protect our Speech and Security Online: Reject the Graham-Blumenthal Bill

https://act.eff.org/action/protect-our-speech-and-security-online-reject-the-graham-blumenthal-bill

Members of Congress have mounted a major threat to your freedom of speech and security online. Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) recently introduced a bill that would undermine key protections for Internet speech in U.S. law. It would also expose providers of the private messaging services we all rely on to serious legal risk, potentially forcing them to undermine their tools’ security.

The Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act (EARN IT Act) would create incentives for companies to “earn” liability protection for violations of laws related to online child sexual abuse material.
It’s basically FOSTA/SESTA from 2018
The so-called EARN IT Act (Senate bill 3398) is anti-speech, anti-security, anti-innovation, and unnecessary.
- https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/3398

[Tom] Cloud’s Full

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/24/azure_seems_to_be_full/

Customers of Microsoft’s Azure cloud are reporting capacity issues such as the inability to create resources and associated reliability issues.

Outage-tracking website Down Detector shows quite a few reports about UK Azure issues today, yet the official Azure Status page is all green ticks. The inability to provision resources does not count as an outage as such – though it is more than an annoyance since it is not always feasible to create the resource in an alternative Azure region. Some types of resource have to be same region in order to work correctly without a lot of reconfiguration.

[Tom]

GIMP 2.10.18 Released, Includes New 3D Transform Tool

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/02/gimp-2-10-18-arrives-with-major-changes-including-a-new-3d-transform-tool

[Jay] Ubuntu Data Collection Report is Out! Read the Interesting Facts

https://itsfoss.com/ubuntu-data-collection-stats/

Average Ubuntu install takes 18 minutes: Take that Windows 10 Update
Not many dual boots only 7.8%, even less encrypt the disk, only 3.8%
USA has the most number of users followed by Brazil, India, China and Russia.

[Tony]

Diagram with anyone, anywhere.

diagrams.net is open source, online, desktop and container deployable diagramming software

https://www.diagrams.net/

[Tom]

Pet the cat, own the bathrobe: Linus Torvalds on working from home

https://www.zdnet.com/article/pet-the-cat-own-the-bathrobe-linus-torvalds-on-working-from-home/#ftag=RSSbaffb68

Torvalds admits that when he started, “I worried about missing human interaction — not just talking to people in the office and hallways, but going out to lunch etc. It turns out I never really missed it.”

[Phil] Let’s Encrypt CAA Rechecking Bug aka the mass revocation event

https://letsencrypt.org/caaproblem/

What is CAA?
- CAA is a type of DNS record that allows site owners to specify which Certificate Authorities (CAs) are allowed to issue certificates containing their domain names. It was standardized in 2013 by RFC 6844 to allow a CA “reduce the risk of unintended certificate mis-issue.” By default, every public CA is allowed to issue certificates for any domain name in the public DNS, provided they validate control of that domain name. That means that if there’s a bug in any one of the many public CAs’ validation processes, every domain name is potentially affected. CAA provides a way for domain holders to reduce that risk.
BR §3.2.2.8
- As part of the issuance process, the CA MUST check for CAA records and follow the processing instructions found, for each dNSName in the subjectAltName extension of the certificate to be issued, as specified in RFC 6844. If the CA issues a certificate, they MUST do so within the TTL of the CAA record, or 8 hours, whichever is greater.
The bug:
- When a certificate request contained N domain names that needed CAA rechecking, Boulder would pick one domain name and check it N times. What this means in practice is that if a subscriber validated a domain name at time X, and the CAA records for that domain at time X allowed Let’s Encrypt issuance, that subscriber would be able to issue a certificate containing that domain name until X+30 days, even if someone later installed CAA records on that domain name that prohibit issuance by Let’s Encrypt.
Impact:
- 2.6% active certificates that were potentially affected by the bug, totalling approximately 3 million certificates
What did we do and what was our decision:
- Notifications were sent out to subscribers as fast as possible at the time
- 1.7 million affected certificates were replaced in less than 48 hours
- We chose to not revoke the remaining 1+ million certificates there were not renewed. Those remaining 1+ million certificates are evaluated weekly, some are revoked, and some will naturally expire due to the 90 day life times.
What does this mean? Should you trust Let’s Encrypt?
- That’s really up to you. It’s definitely worth reading the post-mortem and minute by minute playback on the community forum.

[Tony]

Penguicon 2020 Has been Canceled

https://2020.penguicon.org/2020/03/canceled/

[Tony]

Coronavirus Impact: Can We Run Out of the Internet Because of People Working From Home?

https://gadgets.ndtv.com/internet/news/coronavirus-impact-can-we-run-out-of-the-internet-because-of-people-working-from-home-2199980

US Government Sites Give Bad Security Advice

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/03/us-government-sites-give-bad-security-advice/

Track Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Statistics From Commandline

https://www.ostechnix.com/track-coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19-statistics-from-commandline/

SMLR 320: Rtcwake

Posted by Tom Lawrence on February 9, 2020 in Show-mp3 | ∞

Podcast: Play in new window

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

Downloads:

Show 320

Contact Us:

show (at) smlr.us or the Contact us page

On the Lawrence Systems Forums

Intro:

Tony Bemus, Tom Lawrence, Phil Porada and Jay LaCroix

Sound bites by Mike Tanner

Phils GitHub

The LawrenceSystems YouTube Channel Where videos
https://www.youtube.com/user/TheTecknowledge

Jay’s Site