Table of contents for April 2018 in Linux Format

Sean Conway, Chilly Canada Would you like fries with that? This is a common up-sell question in many North America fast food establishments. I have concerns over how organisations collect and use information, because it impacts choice. What choice are we making, if what we’re given to choose from has been conditioned in the first place? Adam Oxford, Zuma-free South Africa There’s two schools of thought on state surveillance in South Africa. Either our spooks are operating without oversight and capturing everything, or we’re protected from their limitless powers by their own incompetence and lack of capacity. I believe the latter but preach the former. Mayank Sharma, Eerie India There are two kinds of surveillance: one that you’re aware of and one that you aren’t. Just because you aren’t cognizant…

“Do you mandate two- factor authentication (2FA) on the systems you manage? It’s ever easier to do, and thus there are ever fewer excuses not to. Take WordPress, for example. A very popular, flexible CMS used by some big businesses as well as smaller ones and individuals, and thus a popular target for crackers. Two simple actions make it significantly harder to compromise: remove or rename the “admin” user, and mandate 2FA for all admin logins. There are a number of 2FA plugins for WordPress: we use ‘Two-Factor’ by George Stephanis, an open source implementation that’s hosted on Github (no connection, just satisfied users). It supports 2FA using one-time passwords, such as the (excellent) “Authy” (Android, iOS) and – arguably even better – Universal 2nd Factor, such as the YubiKey.…

Anew major release of Godot (https://godotengine.org ), the free and open source engine for game developers, has been released. As the team admitted in a blog announcing the release (which can be read at https://godotengine.org/article/godot-3-0-released), Godot 3.0 was a much bigger release than they anticipated, and meant the team skipped releasing Godot 2.2 altogether, instead focusing on the major release. The features list of Godot 3.0 is impressively long, with a new physically-based 3D renderer, Mono/C# support, virtual reality support, bullet physics backend, a new networked multiplayer API, and more. Basically, pretty much any feature you’d need to build a modern game. The new 3D renderer is particularly impressive and helps make Godot 3.0 a powerful alternative to other game engines. It’s the first game engine to offer the full…

Too hot? Regarding HotPicks this month, and the program youtube-DL. Is it possible to find a program to convert YouTube videos into just music (MP3) files? One that comes complete with a GUI? I’ve never asked before in case it’s illegal, and I like to stay on the right side of the law. Ian Learmonth, via email Jonni says: There is a utility called youtube-dlg, available on GitHub, which is precisely a GUI for youtube-dl. You can find it at https://mrs0m30n3.github.io/ youtube-dl-gui. Legality varies from place to place and we’re not lawyers, so you’re best off ignoring everything we say. The site youtube-mp3.org – which did MP3 conversion online – was recently shut down. We’re pretty sure that if you like a piece of music that’s sold commercially then you…

1 NAS Club Q Two years ago I invested in a QNAP NAS as a way to store and back up my archive of family history, photographs, videos, and to generally back up the computers in the house. Our daughter and granddaughter live in Germany so having access over the web to the NAS seemed like a good idea. Everything was fine until last summer when I noticed that I was getting attempted logins from Russian IP addresses. I moved to two-stage verification using Google Authenticator, a very complex password and put blocks on IP addresses used within the NAS box settings. The attacks continued unsuccessfully over eight weeks, each with a different IP address and all coming from a small city in eastern Siberia and were hosted by Rostelecom.…

The Gnome wiki is home to a large FAQ on Empathy. It covers many different topics such as configuration, voice and video calling. You can also launch Help from within the program by pressing F1. It provides detailed instruction on account management, contact management, audio and video conversations and even advanced topics such as sending files. Jitsiusers can join the Users mailing list to connect with fellow users and developers to solve any problems. You’ll find a FAQ and tutorials on the GNU Ring website. The FAQ addresses a handful of common queries whereas the project hosts tutorials on installation and using GNU Ring to make calls. OpenMeetings provides installation instructions for all supported platforms. You’ll find PDF tutorials covering the installation for many distributions such as Mageia, Ubuntu and…

In this project we’re using two new Raspberry Pi-based technologies. The first is a live distro based on Debian 9 offering Raspberry Pi Desktop for x86 computers, while the second is an implementation of remote GPIO control over a network. Both are handy for those of us with spare computers and Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi Desktop experience is identical to that found on the Pi, with a few noticeable differences. First, there’s no Minecraft due to licensing. In the Raspberry Pi Configuration tool (the GUI and raspi-config) the Interfaces section only has SSH, which means no I2C, SPI, Camera and so on. This also means that any add-on boards that use these interfaces won’t work with this setup. For example, Pimoroni’s Explorer HAT, 4Tronix’s Picon Zero, PI Supply’s PiJuice…

The PiZ-Uptime and Pi-UptimeUPS comes with multiple LEDs to help you fathom what’s going on. There’s an orange LED that indicates the battery level. This starts off practically invisible, but glows brighter as the battery level drops to provide you with an early warning system. You’ll also find a small red LED that lights up after the hardware reset switch has been pushed to indicate the power reboot sequence. Three more LEDs can be found along the side. The blue LED will light up when running on battery to indicate low battery (under 3V of power). The green LED indicates mains power is connected – when it is, the blue LED switches function to indicate that the battery is being charged. When charging is complete, the yellow LED lights up…

Our expert Adam Oxford is a journalist and hobbyist photographer based in South Africa. As well as words and pictures, he’s also a Fellow with civic tech network Code for Africa. Every couple of years or so a familiar headline pops up in RSS readers all over the world. “Film photography is back”, the gadget magazines shout, and cite the popularity of Lomo cameras or the fact that Kodak is manufacturing 35mm again as proof of the fact. Unlike the resurgence of vinyl records, however, the film renaissance never quite lasts. Do you still use that Diana camera you bought in 2010? Or did you spot that Kodak was laying people off again over Christmas? Film’s inherent drawbacks compared to digital probably means a full-scale resurgence is unlikely. And yet…

No matter how advanced a new file format is, it won’t be accepted by a wider audience until industry-standard applications support it natively. Talking about FLIF, things are going quite well because we can already encode and decode *.flif files using ImageMagick (commands like mogrify and convert are part of it). We can’t guarantee that your current ImageMagick installation can handle FLIF right now, because many Linux vendors still consider FLIF an experimental format and don’t include some extra compilation flags when building their ImageMagick packages. But of course, it’s not that difficult to build your own copy of ImageMagick into Linux. Another big win could be an inclusion of FLIF support into the main tree of the Chromiumweb browser. Chromiumis the world’s most popular base technology for dozens of…

In the Quick tip (below left) we mentioned Linuxbrew, but there are also AppImages. They don’t require root privileges to install but can be quite large so be careful not to run out of quota space on your account. Every AppImage has also made an assumption as to what’s already installed on the target system, which can stop the AppImage from executing. In particular, you need to verify which glibc version you have on the system and make sure you have an AppImage compiled against that. In the worst case, you can compile a new AppImage yourself against the correct level of all packages that are required. The work required to get this done correctly is quite daunting, and so before you start, we recommend you ask the administrator of…

Version: 6.0.1 Web: www.libreoffice.org LibreOffice is the world’s most popular and widely adopted open source set of essential office applications, and its name carries weight well beyond the Linux ecosystem. The more observant among you will have noticed home-printed notices and adverts posted around the neighbourhood that feature the distinctive Liberation Serif font – which is the default one in LibreOffice Writer. It’s just one of the everyday pointers that indicate this office suite has gained tremendous popularity in recent years. The new release includes a raft of welcome features and updates. Perhaps the most talked-about visual change is the Notebookbar. It first made an appearance back in 2016, but now more than ever, is reminiscent of the Ribbon in Microsoft Office. To start using this new toolbar layout and…

Our expert Nate Drake his favourite game book, Creature of Havoc, concerns an unidentified beast with no concept of who or where they are. He identifies strongly with this. Pre-millenial readers may still remember the heyday of text adventure games. Unlike adventure game books that had a rigid plot and required, dice, pencil and eraser, video game players could navigate a vast world populated with sorcery, traps and foul monsters. This form of interactive fiction can trace its origins back to William Crowther and Don Woods’ 1976 Colossal Cave Adventure. For the first time players used natural language text commands to move their character such as “go south” as well as to interact items such as “pick up sword”. In this guide, thanks to the efforts of Developer Phillip Johnson,…

The UK’s “Snooper’s Charter” was described as “the most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy” by the Open Rights Group. The Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (DRIPA) has been ruled unlawful three times now: in the UK High Court, in the European Court of Justice and most recently by the UK Court of Appeal. It turns out the UK government simply has no right and is breaking the law by collecting the entire nation’s internet activity and phone records, and enabling public bodies to grant themselves access to these personal details when there’s been no crime or even suspicious activity, without incredibly any independent oversight whatsoever. The complete disdain given to people’s privacy is worrying. The flippancy of government in giving seemingly unfettered and unquestioned access is…

Red Hat, Inc has bought CoreOS for $250 million. In a press release (http://bit.ly/core-os), Red Hat says its acquisition of CoreOS “will further its vision of enabling customers to build any application and deploy them in any environment with the flexibility afforded by open source.” Red Hat was also clear that its main focus with the acquisition was to strengthen its position when it comes to supporting containerised applications. CoreOS, which was founded in 2013, specialised in containerised applications and lightweight distributions, such as Container Linux. CoreOS is also responsible for the Docker-alternative rkt, and CoreOS Tectonic is a Containers as a Service, hybrid enterprise Kubernetes platform. Kubernetes is an open source system for deploying, scaling and managing containerised applications, and Red Hat’s own OpenShift (www.openshift.com) platform utilises it. With…

Mozilla is arguably one of the biggest success stories from the open source community, so it’s heartening to see that it’s giving back so much to the open source and free software movement. In a blog post (which can read more about at http://bit.ly/mozilla-blog), it’s revealed that the Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) program – which was created to celebrate and support open source projects that contribute to Mozilla’s work and to the health of the Internet – has invested $1.65 million in 2017. In the blog post, a number of worthy recipients of the MOSS program are listed, including Buildbot (https://buildbot.net), a Python-based continuous integration server. Another Python-based recipient was the Python Package Index, which provides essential support to the Python ecosystem by supporting the download of over 100…

VLC 3.0 A major release of the popular open source video player is now available to download, and brings a huge amount of new features for enjoying modern media files. It supports video resolutions up to a whopping 8K, HDR support for compatible screens, and the ability to play 360-degree video (with 360-degree audio). Perhaps more usefully, it can now also stream videos to a Chromecast, and is available to download from www.videolan.org/vlc/releases/3.0.0.html. One of the best media playing applications has just got even better. ZEVENET 5.0 The team behind this load balancer and application delivery system, which is based on Debian, has announced a new version with an improved web GUI frontend, named Angular. It also features new API JSON+REST capabilities, a new Local Service Load Balancer (LSLB) module…

I’m a (relatively) new subscriber to your wonderful magazine and have been loving the back issues and the monthly goodness coming through my letterbox. However, I was dismayed that I couldn’t find anything about VFIO GPU passthrough in any of the back issues? Is it really that niche? It might be controversial to say, but I would really appreciate some coverage of running a Windows virtual machine for those pesky games that don’t run natively on Linux. My desktop is now an Ubuntu server and I can hear it crying out for a monitor and keyboard once again. Dual-booting isn’t an option, sadly. Scott Stevenson, via email. Jonni says: Sadly?! GPU passthrough is a little niche, but that didn’t stop me covering it in my Virtualisation feature in LXF227. It…

Don’t let the inclusion of Empathy, which has not seen a new release in years, lead you to believe that there aren’t other tools that offer similar functionality. In fact, if you’re running either Ubuntu or Debian, then Retroshare is an excellent choice. Although similar to Jitsi and GNU Ring, the program’s formidable learning curve, coupled with its lack of support for Fedora and other distributions pushed it out of contention. If you like what OpenMeetings has to offer then Big Blue Button is also a viable alternative. It’s already proven popular with teachers, who are using it to impart lessons and by businesses for making presentations to staff in different locations. Also being actively developed is Linphone, which is available for all the major desktop and mobile platforms. There…

Authorities are quick to point out that “it’s only metadata” that’s collected during bulk surveillance operations, whether that’s through IMSI-catchers, passive taps on cables or tit-for-tat sharing arrangements with other agencies to circumvent pesky laws on spying on your own subjects. Metadata typically consists of the “who” and the “when” rather than the “what”. So things like phone numbers, IP addresses, hostnames and timestamps, rather than emails/voicecalls or complete URLs. Thanks to advances in processing huge datasets, combined with so much of our lives being carried out online, this metadata can still paint a worryingly accurate picture of what an individual is up to. Simply logging all phonecalls and text messages made in a given area over a few days will produce a social graph showing everyone’s circles. If someone…

As always HTTPS is one of our greatest allies in the quest for privacy and security. Thanks in large part to Let’s Encrypt, millions of sites are now served with everything after the domain name encrypted. This is far from a silver bullet, especially if it’s configured without Perfect Forward Secrecy (using ephemeral keys so that even if one is recovered it could only decrypt a fraction of any data harvested), but in some sense it’s the best that we’ve got. It does a good job of halting man-in-the-middle attacks, and it’s easy to explain to your parents: “Just look for the green padlock!” The EFF and Tor Project provide a browser plugin – HTTPS Everywhere – which ensures everything that can be served securely is. Email is all well…

CVE stands for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures. It was brought to life in 1999 by MITRE, a non-profit organisation that operates research and development centres sponsored by the US federal government. The purpose of CVE is to identify and catalogue vulnerabilities in software or firmware inside a database in a bid for companies to improve their security. In other words, the aim of the CVE database is to standardise the way each known vulnerability or exposure is identified. Each entry in the CVE database contains the standard identifier number along with a status indicator, a brief description and references to related vulnerability reports and advisories. The CVE database lists only publicly known vulnerabilities and exposures. Organisations that identify and hand out CVE IDs for inclusion in first-time public announcements of…

The Raspberry Pi was released six years ago and has made a huge impact in the technology sector. Some might say that the Year of the Linux Desktop has arrived. Seventeen million Raspberry Pis have been sold in six years, and these are now in the hands of users from a diverse background of ages, abilities and interests. Some of these users are seasoned Unix/Linux users who want to continue exploring what their favourite operating system can do with such a low-power device. But there are a percentage of users who are new to Linux: adults and children who are taking their first steps in learning how to explore the world of computers. This is their first taste of an operating system that enables them to learn at their own…

Naturally, the Vero 4K can serve double duty as a live TV and PVR – you can even purchase a branded USB DVB-T2 TV tuner from the Vero Store for under £30. It works from the get-go – once plugged in and connected to your aerial, head to the My OSMC screen, select Store and install the TVheadend backend server in just a few clicks. This is deceptively simple, because your next task is to configure the backend through a remote web browser (192.168.x.y:9981 since you asked, substituting 192.168.x.y with your Vero 4K’s IP address). Log in using both ‘osmc’ for the username and password. TVheadend will then run a setup wizard that should detect your TV tuner – plus any other network tuners you may have set up (such…

Our expert Nick Peers is slightly annoyed he found the PiZ-Uptime after he’d resolved his recent electricity supply issues. This might have saved his Volumio music player from being borked. Your Raspberry Pi is particularly sensitive to power outages. Added to the inconvenience of suddenly losing access to your Pi or half an hour’s work, there’s the possibility your shutdown will corrupt your microSD card, forcing you to wipe it and start again from scratch. This is where a battery rides to the rescue. It provides your Pi with an independent source of power when the main supply is interrupted, whether through a power cut, tripped MCB or simply by accidentally yanking out the power cable. While it’s possible to jury rig your own battery supply, why go to all…

Our expert Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in Delhi and avid Arch Linux user. He’s always on the hunt for geeky memorabilia. At its most basic, a task manager is designed to help you maintain a list of all errands or work that you have to accomplish. For many users, this translates into an ever-expanding text file that’s ultimately abandoned and replaced with a new file. However, if you prefer the simplicity of the text file-based task manager, but want additional features such as the ability to assign priorities to tasks, or identify and archive completed tasks, then Todo.txt is meant for you. You can even use the tool to create projects and assign multiple tasks to such projects. One of the best things about Todo.txtis that it requires…

1 Find the tool Once you’ve edited your images in Darktable, you’ll want to share them. That means exporting them in a file format such as JPG for use on the web, embedded in an email and so on. This is done from the Lighttable part of the application, where you can select multiple images to export. 2 Create filenames The Export tool is bottom-right. You may need to close the metadata editors to see it clearly, but once it’s open the use is fairly self-explanatory. You can resize images on export, and add details such as date to the filename using strings, such as picture$(SEQUENCE) to create picture1, picture2 and so on. 3 Control colours One option to try is the Intent drop-down menu. This tells Darktable how you…

Our expert Alexander Tolstoy is a desktop Linux enthusiast and a big fan of open source software. He still remembers where /dev/fd0 pointed to… Despite the popularity of cloud storage, many Linux users store their image libraries on their hard drives – then wonder how they can optimise the footprint of their files. In this tutorial we tackle a massive photo library that have been incrementally growing for years, an ideal job for server admins who maintain large amounts of user data, or whoever needs to store lots of images. We’ll show how to get more free space without compromising image quality, and reveal how to browse your new optimised image library with comfort and convenience. We’ll look at ways of removing duplicate files with simple and reliable tools, then…

Our expert Tim Armstrong is the Network and Systems Architect at Nerdalize. He specialises in ISP Networks and Cloud Environments. Every day, new IoT devices are hitting the market, from home assistants to Internet-connected toasters, but there’s always something missing; Either you can’t find the product that meets your needs, or when you find something it’s from a manufacturer that has been plagued by poor security or privacy issues. Sometimes if you want something done right, you just have to do it yourself. Which brings us on to the subject of this tutorial series: creating an Internet connected “Thing” (that won’t DDoS, or get DDoSed by your toaster). The goal here is to explore the practical side of making a simple IoT device, and not get too bogged down in…

All these programs are great, but they need to be installed on your system and may be heavy for travel. In case you want to be able to use your machines remotely with computers you can’t or don’t want to install software to, use a USB stick. You can use many distros for a live USB stick, but the smallest you can use is Tiny Core Linux. Adding just a few packages and combining them into a stick that can run with as little as 256MB of memory, gives you the possibility to use it on any system. With these packages, you can create both a command line and menu-based setup that runs with systems of many capabilities, without touching the installed system. There are only six extensions you need…

Certain prefixes are allocated but reserved, such as the 2001:DB8::/32 prefix reserved for documentation. This is used in RFCs, books and documentation, for example. The IPv6 address range 2001:678::/29 is reserved for provider-independent addresses where an address may be assigned to an organisation independently of an internet service provider. There’s also a site-local address allocation (fec0::/10) reserved for the provision of private addresses, but its use is deprecated. The block fc00/8 is also reserved for future allocation of unique local addresses. The IPv6 address allocation is maintained by IANA and may be viewed at: www.iana.org/assignments/ipv6-address-space/ipv6-address-space.xhtml.…

Most text adventures have an in-game combat system whereby you have to fight enemies in order to leave an area or so you can loot their cold, dead bodies. Both the player and any enemies have a certain amount of HP (Hit Points). The player and the enemy take it in turns to hit one another until someone’s HP reaches zero. Mercifully, any monsters that you’ve previously killed stay dead. The amount of damage dealt by the Player is determined by the weapon they’re currently holding. The script that manages player attributes (player.py) automatically selects your best – in other words the most harmful weapon – using the variable best_weapon. The attributes defining the kind of enemies you meet in game are listed in enemies.py such as the Giant Spider.…

Our expert Kent Elchuk is an experienced web artisan whose works include the building and maintaining custom apps for colleges and an abundance of web authorship. Although Wordpress is the most popular content management system in the world, there’s much more it can do than build a website with text, images and video. One of the major options for a website is to build an ecommerce site, which is the prime focus on this tutorial. Throughout the tutorial, we’ll discuss how to make an ecommerce website. This will includes installing Wordpress with a free plugin call Woocommerce, and setting it up so that it works as it should. We’ll then go into all the relevant details such as items, categories, tax rates, shipping and integrating a point of sale system.…

A single shipping rate for each item won’t scale to a decent shipping rate, because it’ll probably be too expensive. Luckily, the cost box does enable us to write formulas to handle multiple items. For example, if we write 5 * [qty] in the cost box located at Woocommerce>Settings> Shipping>Shipping Method>Edit, and save it, the shipping fee will rise $5 for each additional item. Although the last shipping rate was flexible, there are more options, too. For example, a formula like 5 + ( 2 * [qty] ) would mean the initial rate is $5, then $2 for additional items. Another formula is 5 + [fee percent="10” min_ fee="5"] . This formula has a $5 base fee plus 10 per cent of the total order when a customer spends at…

“Many of the mitigations for Spectre and Meltdown would result in reduced performance…” The Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, which affect a huge range of processors and the machines that run on them, have been known for a while now, and the technology world is still reeling from the ramifications. Since last issue, where we delved into the vulnerabilities, a number of patches have been release by both hardware and software makers to help mitigate these issues. Some of these fixes have been more successful than others. Intel had to ask people not to download its initial update, when it was discovered that it was causing machines to crash. It’s since released a working fix, as described in a blog post (https://newsroom.intel.com/news/security-issue-update-progresscontinues-firmware-updates) that outlines the progress the chipmaker has made in…

“We’ve seen several years running from The Linux Foundation and Dice Open Source Jobs Report that there’s a significant skills shortage in open source. More developers, DevOps professionals and sysadmins are needed to maintain existing open source systems and expand new ones. The Linux Foundation has partnered with edX to help address this talent gap, and we are proud to report the effort seems to be working. Recently, the number of students enrolled in Linux Foundation training courses through edX has surpassed one million. That’s a million more individuals with knowledge of Linux, cloud, containers, blockchain and more. The fact that most of these courses are available free of charge has made professional open source training available to masses of people who were unable to afford it previously, with students…

At this year’s FOSDEM, SiFive (www.sifive. com) announced the HiFive Unleashed – the first Linux-ready RISC-V System on Chip (SoC), which features a quad-core, 64-bit Freedom U540 chip. It costs $999 and can be bought from Crowd Supply (www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unleashed), with deliveries around 30 June 2018. The board features the first multi-core RISC-V processor that supports Linux, and comes with four 1.5GHz U54 RV64GC CPU cores and an E51 RV64IMAC management core with Sv39 virtual memory support. 8GB of DDR4 RAM, 32MB quad SPI flash, a microSD slot, Gigabit Ethernet port and FMC connector round out the features.…

“ In late January 1998, Netscape surprised everyone by releasing the source for Communicator, its web browser, making it readily available to all. That marked the birth of a new term in software development: open source. Coined by Christine Peterson, its introduction was meant to “make this field of endeavour more understandable to newcomers and to business”, clearing the confusion that often accompanied the term free software, and “viewed as necessary to its spread to a broader community of users.” Two decades later, open source is the driving force behind today’s rapid technological advancements. It powers leading products across all industries. It will continue to enable all of us to create, tinker and lead our future. Open source thrives because of its collaborative and democratic nature, giving software developers and…

Preston Hackspace Get your hands on maker tools a-plenty! Preston Hackspace started in late 2015/early 2016 after members of the local Geekup community, itself a monthly social meeting for local tech experts, wanted to create a central hub for makers to meet and work together. The first meeting for the makerspace took place in the pub and centered around a 3D printer. Preston Hackspace isn’t just a place where you can learn how to use a 3D printer. One of the success stories for the group is their Code Up group, a social outreach project created by Claire Wicher to help adults learn how to code. Preston Code Up now operates thanks to the knowledge and time of Chris Dell, a local developer and maker, who also donates resources and…

The advantage of web-based software is that you don’t have to run any specific operating system to use them. But the same isn’t true for the tools on our list. Empathy is exclusively for Linux distros. Yet since it has support for Jabber, XMPP and various other protocols, you can use alternate tools on Android and Windows machines to connect with Empathy. GNU Ring, in addition to rpm and deb packages, also provide 32- and 64-bit installers for Windows 7, 8, 8.1 and 10. You also get the choice of installing it using the Universal Windows Platform installer on Windows 10 and Surface devices. A similar installer is available for Mac 10.10 and later and you can find it in the Android Play Store as well. You will find Jitsion…

Back in 2003 in a small room in a San Francisco AT&T office, Internet traffic was covertly being siphoned off from fibre optic trunk circuits, fed to a (then) state-of -the-art Narus Semantic Traffic Analyzer, and then, it’s widely accepted, forwarded to the NSA. Access to the legendary room 641A, and others like it in other offices across the US, was highly restricted, so few employees knew anything about it besides its official “SG3 Secure Room” designation. But technician Mark Klein, using a combination of cable maps, equipment lists and water cooler banter, deduced this was part of the surveillance apparatus enacted by the Bush administration’s Patriot act. Mark didn’t speak publicly about it until 2005, and joined the EFF’s legal action against AT&T. They and other telcos were granted…

If you run your own Linux server, whether it’s a Raspberry Pi at home or a VPS in the clouds somewhere, then you’ll no doubt be familiar with SSH. What may be a surprise though, is that the SSH daemon can forward local or remote traffic over the encrypted connection, so that (potentially unsecured) services running on either client or server can be securely forwarded. Another of SSH’s lesser-known tricks is that it can run a SOCKS5 proxy in the background, so your server can be used as a proxy. If your SSH server is a machine at home, then this can be used to secure public Wi-Fi connections, so long as you trust your ISP more than public Wi-Fi. If your SSH server is remote, then this can be…

Igalia is an open source consultancy that has been fighting the good fight for nigh-on 16 years. It’s contributed extensively to (and maintained) the WebKitGTK project and does all manner of other impressive work in areas from multimedia to virtualisation. Last month Igalia co-founder Alberto Garcia gave us the lowdown on some of his work with Qemu, as well us making us nostalgic for ZX Spectrum games. This month, his colleague and fellow co-founder Juan José Sánchez takes the mic (you mean “affordable smartphone” – Ed) to tell us about the gains Wayland is making in the embedded sphere, and the ongoing effort to support it in the open source Chromium browser, as well as its own embedded effort, WPE. Juan has a Ph.D. in computer science, understands functional programming…

There’s been a lot of grumbling on the discovery to the communication and fixing. Greg shared his concerns in a blog post: “As for how this was all handled by the companies involved, well this could be described as a textbook example of how NOT to interact with the Linux kernel community properly. The people and companies involved know what happened, and I’m sure it will all come out eventually, but right now we need to focus on fixing the issues involved, and not pointing blame, no matter how much we want to.” Linus Torvalds was annoyed at Intel’s attempt to pitch the vulnerability as a feature with an optional flag to disable it. “All of this is pure garbage. Is Intel really planning on making this s**t architectural?” Yet…

Our expert Les Pounder works with organisations such as the Raspberry Pi Foundation to promote maker skills. He blogs at www.bigl.es. The Raspbian operating system, based upon Debian, has long powered the Pi, and now it’s available for desktops and laptops, reviving tired old computers with a light and usable operating system called Raspbian Desktop. In this tutorial we shall use Raspberry Pi Desktop on a spare computer and then attach a Raspberry Pi Zero as a GPIO expander device using the micro USB port of the Zero in USB OTG (On The Go) mode as a USB gadget. This will give our laptop the same OS as our Pi, and grant it access to the GPIO for projects. Getting started Downloading the Raspberry Pi Desktop is easy. Visit www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspberry-pi-desktop…

Batteries aren’t supplied, and it’s crucial you use the correct ones. The Pi-UpTimeUPS uses 18650 non-protected batteries. There’s room for two, but you can get by with just one. Recommended capacities are 2,000-3,500mAh per battery. In return, the UPS can deliver both 5V power via a micro USB port (using pin 2) and 3.3V (700mA) of power via the Pi-UpTimeUPS itself. In contrast, the PiZ-UpTime uses just a single 14,500 Li-ion battery – capacity 700mAh to 2,000mAh. Don’t be fooled by their appearance – they may look like regular AA batteries but they’re not, so don’t be tempted to use standard batteries. Both types are available from a range of sources, including eBay, Amazon and Maplin. Remember, the higher the capacity, the longer your Pi (and any connected add-ons) will…

You can also extend Todo.txtwith plug-ins, while a large repository of such user-contributed add-ons are listed on the project’s wiki (https://github.com/todotxt/todo.txt-cli/wiki/Todo.sh-Add-on-Directory), which is hosted on GitHub. You must first create the ~/.todo.actions.d directory. Next, you must inform Todo.txtof the location of the add-ons directory. This is done in the todo.cfg file. Open the file in your favourite text editor and scroll down to the #export TODO_ACTIONS_ DIR="$HOME/.todo.actions.d" line. Remove the leading # so that the line isn’t ignored and save the file. You can now store the add-ons you wish to use in the ~/.todo.actions.d directory. Navigate to the said directory and clone the due plug-in with the git clone https://github.com/rebeccamorgan/due.git command. When adding tasks to the list, you can use the due:YYYY-MM-DD format to add the due date: todo…

We’ve covered only the most intriguing and efficient ways of optimising images using next-gen technologies, which are yet to be adopted by the wider public. However, there are other projects for doing exactly the same that have been around for longer, but often under perform when compared to the solutions mentioned here. Still, you should try Jpegoptim (www.github.com/tjko/jpegoptim), which slims down JPEG files by optimising Huffman’s algorithm (used to make JPEG the compact files they are). Optimising the Huffman table is a lossless process that doesn’t affect image quality. For less tech-savvy users there are certain tools that automatically re-encode JPEG files using the lowest acceptable quality ratio while trying to maintain good visual quality. There’s a special Github project for a set of such tools at www.github.com/danielgtaylor/jpeg-archive. Jpeg-recompress does…

Our expert Mats Tage Axelsson has finally realised that one computer isn’t enough for his needs, so he’s spreading his bets all over the web. Watch out world! We all want to work from wherever we tend to be, so access systems remotely is a handy skill. Many remote working systems are for connecting to and configuring other nodes. This is ideal for businesses, but what do hobbyists want it for? Of course, as enthusiasts, we want to have more than one machine and in this case, it can be useful to connect over your own network or even over the web. There are some applications that we don’t want to have running on our own machine. There could be a large number of reasons for this: for example, you…

Our expert John Lane prepares for impending doom by crafting IPv6 addresses from dead beef. The Internet Protocol, or just IP, is the internet working (connecting distinct networks together) protocol that enables the internet as we know it to exist. Version four, now referred to as IPv4, is what the internet uses today. It uses 32-bit addresses and the availability of unassigned addresses is under pressure. Version six of the protocol, what we call IPv6, addresses this issue with a much larger 128-bit address space. First specified back in 1995, IPv6 adoption has been slow, but is finally gaining traction. In this tutorial we’ll explore IPv6 to explain how it works and show how you can start using it. However, you may already be using it without knowing. You can…

The Internet Protocol as we know it today has a history dating back to 1974, with the fourth version being documented in September 1978 as Internet Experiment Note 54 and standardised as the DoD Standard Internet Protocol by RFC760 in January 1980. An IPv4 address is a 32-bit number (between zero and 2^32 , or 4,294,967,296) usually represented in a dotted-decimal notation as four period-separated octets; decimal numbers between 0 and 255. For example, 145.131.132.70 represents the address 2441315398 (http://2441315398 is a valid URL – try it if you have your doubts!). As well as aiding legibility, the dotted decimal representation of the IP address carried semantic meaning. The first octet was a network identifier with the rest being a host identifier (it was actually called the rest field!). Hosts…

Version: GIT Web: http://bit.ly/phaser-quest Phaser Quest is a game that wears its influences on its sleeve. The name refers in part to Phaser, a great HTML5 framework for indie and retro-style games that can use WebGL capabilities of modern browsers. The second part is a nod to Browserquest, a popular online multi-player game from Mozilla. Phaser Quest is nearly identical in terms of graphics, artwork, characters and setting. It reproduces the original Browserquest game but works with substantially different technologies under the hood. Technically, the game is an example of how a Phaser client can be made to interact with a Node.js server using Socket.io and handle animations, user input, sounds and so on. In the game, you control a knight who’s making his way through woods, deserts and mountains…

After Colossal Cave Adventure, the developers at MIT created the intrepid Zork in 1977 for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. Zork was set underground, “in the ruins of an ancient empire” and contained many features similar to Colossal Cave such as the emphasis on searching for treasure and battling monsters, Yet it also had a more sophisticated text interface that supported prepositions. For example, HIT TROLL WITH ROCK. The ultimate goal of the player is to attain the rank of Dungeon Master. Zork also established the jokey in-game currency of Zorkmids, that would later become the money of choice for other dungeon-themed games such as NetHack. Zorkwas large and memory-intensive by 1980s standards. Games Developer InfoCom overcame this limitation with the Z-Machine, a virtual machine capable of compiling game code written…

Let’s kick things off by installing Wordpress, which can be downloaded from www.wordpress.org. After that, we need to set up a mySQL database with a username and password. Once we download Wordpress and unzip the file, we can upload and rename the folder to any server where we want the Wordpress site. We can use a hosting account or build the website on our local web server. After setting up the database, we simply open the folder for which the installation takes place, such as localhost/wordpress or http://example.com. You’ll now see a page and a ‘Let’s Go’ button on the bottom on the screen. Once we click the Let’s Go button, we’re prompted for our database settings. These include the database name, username, password, database host and table prefix. Once…

Regular readers will know that the Bookshelf has been a feature of Linux Format DVDs for many years, but the list of books we include has changed little over the years. They may be good books, but many of you will have seen them all before. So the plan is to add a new book for each issue. It will be our Book of the Month, which we will highlight on the DVD and in these pages, and then keep on the list for future issues. We’d love to hear back from you on this, both as feedback on the books that we include but also suggestions for books you think would be a good choice. Just remember that they must be available under a suitable licence because Linux Format…

Producing Open Source Software This month we have an interesting treatise on Producing Open Source Software. It’s not a coding manual (there are enough of those), and it’s not about writing the software. Instead, it deals with the intricacies of managing a project and all those who participate, or wish to participate, or even those you wish to participate. It covers diverse subjects such as choosing a licence, setting up communication channels and forums, free versus open source and even the importance of choosing a good name (please don’t get me started on that topic). As well as technical topics like choosing a VCS, financial areas- both costs and income - are also covered. Reading matter Bookshelf Advanced Bash Scripting Guide Go further with shell scripting. Bash Guide for Beginners…

Machine learning We dive into the future of smart systems and our robot overlords. Sexier than computational statistics! Get a better NAS We love network-attached storage, you love it and our mum loves it! So let’s get the best NAS performance. Contain this! It seems the entire Linux world is going container mad. We explore this new exciting technology. Cloud backup made easy Secure, robust and easy backups are the dream. Time to make that a reality with an LXF bespoke solution. Contents of future issues subject to change – we might be too full of delicious pie to compute pi on our Pis.…