Innehållsförteckning för January 2023 från Linux Magazine

Government surveillance, attacks by criminals, and tracking by the advertising industry are raising concerns about the security and anonymity of user data. These concerns are amplified in professions where the user is legally responsible for securing communication. Several free projects have addressed these concerns by offering innovative technical approaches to anonymizing data. We decided to take a look at a few of the leading solutions. Anonymized networks establish tunneled and encrypted connections between individual nodes, ruling out typical attack vectors, such as man-in-the-middle attacks. In the process, these an-onymization solutions build a two-way point-fixed overlay network through which the participants exchange data. These solutions support common transport protocols, such as UDP or TCP, as well as the Internet layer protocols IPv4 and IPv6. In some cases, BitTorrent and blockchain technologies…

One way that programmers can help others use their software is to add multi-language support. I’m not talking about programming languages; I mean spoken languages. For example, you may have written your open source program to print information and error messages in English, but what if your user speaks only Spanish? Does your open source program also “speak” Spanish? What about German, French, Italian, and all the other languages spoken around the world? To make programs truly useful, programmers should support internationalization. An easy way to do that is with the catgets library [1], the original Unix method for a program to retrieve messages and other strings in the user’s preferred spoken language. The GNU library also includes a similar function called gettext, which uses a different lookup method.…

I actually wanted to write a terminal user interface (UI) for this issue that would show me important data relating to the system status and world events using widgets. But what a shock when I saw online that there is already an open source tool named WTF [1] (or wtfutil, as it was originally called) that has been able to do all this for a long time. Written in Go, WTF can be easily extended with new widgets. Huzzah, I’ll just jump on the WTF bandwagon this time! Figure 1: A fully configured installation of the WTF terminal dashboard (Source: GitHub). © Chris Cummer, https://wtfutil.com To talk the terminal dashboard WTF into filling its tiles with various widgets, as shown in Figure 1, you first need to drop the compiled…

Bluetooth LE, or BLE for short, comes with a whole new world of terms on top of the new technology. Before getting started with some practical examples, I first need to discuss the theoretical background. Without all of this BLE speak, you can’t evaluate the many application examples available on the web and adapt them to your needs. Bluetooth is a short-range technology for use between two devices [1]. Before a connection is established, a system can be either a peripheral device or a central device. Powerful devices such as PCs, tablets, and laptops can assume both roles, while less powerful devices are limited to the peripheral role. Each peripheral sends advertisements at regular intervals, such as “I am sensor ABC and provide heart rate data.” Alternatively, the message could…

Mozilla Firefox is a web browser that can be configured with great granu-larity, while respecting a user’s privacy, unlike Google Chrome. This is why the Tor Browser is also based on Firefox. If you don’t want to use the Tor network, but still want your privacy to be protected, setting this up involves some fairly complex Firefox configuration work. Alternatively, you can let the LibreWolf [1] web browser, a modified Firefox, do the work for you. It does away with gimmicks in the default settings and has been thoroughly hardened by its developers. LibreWolf is available for various Linux distributions, but also for macOS, OpenBSD, and other operating systems. On Linux, various packages are required for the install depending on the distribution. You also can use an AppImage or…

In this article, I will show you how I used a Python application programming interface (API) to migrate my music library from an SQL relational database to a NoSQL document database. Using the Python X DevAPI in the MySQL Shell application, I will highlight some basics about document databases, the Python methods that I used, and the database tool that enables migration. Readers who should get the most out of this article are those that have some basic familiarity with the structured query language (SQL) and with the Python programming language. Why Migrate from SQL to Document? I have my existing personal music library in an SQL relational database containing music metadata – artist, song title, album title, track number, genre, release year – that I want to migrate to…

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Machine learning models that could recognize objects in images – and even create entirely new images – were once no more than a pipe dream. Although the AI world discussed various strategies, a satisfactory solution proved illusive. Then in 2014, after an animated discussion in a Montreal bar, Ian Goodfellow came up with a bright idea. At a fellow student’s doctoral party, Goodfellow and his colleagues were discussing a project that involved mathematically determining everything that makes up a photograph. Their idea was to feed this information into a machine so that it could create its own images. At first, Good-fellow declared that it would never work. After all, there were too many parameters to consider, and it would be hard to include them all. But back home, the problem…

Security has many facets and angles, and if you really want to be safe, you need to be aware of them all. One important skill is to become familiar with the logfiles on your system and the information they might reveal (see the box entitled “All About Logs”). But the attackers have become increasingly sophisticated in recent years, and to stay ahead of them, you need all the help you can get. Another important source of information is the MITRE ATT&CK website [1]. MITRE ATT&CK is a structured, globally available knowledge base describing tactics and attackers. In addition to tracking the various attack methods used in the wild, MITRE ATT&CK also provides clues that will help you look for evidence. Searching for Evidence It’s best to learn from examples. One…

If you are looking for an open source note-taking app, the Internet abounds with options ranging from simple, plain text apps to ones that let you display a wide variety of media. Some users, who consider special applications superfluous, find editors such as Vim, Kate, or gedit totally up to the task. Fans of open source alternatives to the proprietary top dog Evernote, currently in beta for Linux [1], want apps that offer advanced functions such as displaying images, playing back audio and video, and viewing tables or web content. And then there are proprietary networked knowledge bases such as Roam Research and Obsidian. Logseq [2], licensed under the AGPL 3.0, offers an open source alternative to Roam Research and Obsidian. It describes itself as an open source knowledge management…

Debian package repositories are organized along two axes. The first axis controls the degree of software freedom in the installation. Newly installed, a Debian system includes only packages from the main section of the repository, which contains only free-licensed packages. However, you can enable the contrib section, which houses free packages that depend on non-free packages, and non-free, which houses packages with restrictive licenses, by editing the URLs for repositories in/etc/apt/sources. list (Figure 1). Little harm can come from this editing, and, in fact, it is necessary if you want to use the advanced proprietary hardware drivers. The second axis, though, is another matter. Tinkered with carelessly, it causes more re-installs than any other aspect of Debian. This second axis is the main Debian repositories themselves. By default, a…

One of the principles of the open source movement is “don’t reinvent the wheel.” If an application does what you need to do, use it. Thousands of free applications are available within the open source community, and if you look around, you can probably find a tool that does exactly what you want. But what if you can’t find a tool that does what you want? Another principle of the open source movement is “do it yourself.” This month’s tutorial on converting a homegrown SQL database to the more versatile JSON document format will give you some practical experience with data formats, as well as Python APIs. Also in this month’s Linux Voice, we introduce you to the LibreWolf alternative web browser and dust off the RustDesk remote access app.…

SSH has been considered the gold standard for managing remote machines at the command line on Linux for years. If you prefer a graphical approach, you can use, say, VNC. As long as this all happens on your organization’s network, there are rarely any problems. Access to other computers via a public network is different. Because the remote stations on private networks cannot normally be easily reached via the Internet, an go-between is required, such as Team-Viewer or AnyDesk. This is a public server that knows the clients’ IDs and how to reach the clients. But these two candidates have two issues in common: The sources are not open, and the commercial versions are quite expensive. For example, Team-Viewer charges just under $40 per month for a single-user license, while…

Last issue, I described the complexities of Puppy Linux [1], with help from project members. Unlike most distributions, Puppy is a collection of sub-projects, and explaining the structure left no room for examining how the sub-projects differ from each other. This month, I am remedying that lack with a brief look at some of the most popular Puppy distributions and how they differ from each other. My hope is that this information might help users trying to decide which one to use. Figure 1: If you’ve seen a review of Puppy Linux, FossaPup is the Puppy distribution being examined. All the Puppy distributions on the home page [2] share certain features: • They all are built with woof-CE, which builds a distribution using another distribution’s binary. Several official Puppy distributions…

If you encrypt, you are probably familiar with Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) [1] or its clone GNU Privacy Guard (GPG). Most likely, you have used one of these tools to generate public and private keys and to encrypt email and files. The Free Software Foundation explains these tools in its Email Self-Defense Guide as a first step towards privacy [2]. However, despite PGP and GPS being ubiquitous when it comes to privacy, some people believe that these tools are counter-productive and little more effective than the feeble default protection available for PDF files when it comes to modern computing. Ironically, as PGP and GPG become more widely used, some security experts are advocating for their replacement with Actual Good Encryption (age), at least for file encryption [3]. Why do some…

Virtually nobody uses a computer without Internet access. Unfortunately, the network of networks is teeming with malicious programs that exploit vulnerabilities in operating systems, firmware, and application programs looking to inject malware or steal personal data. Sys admins protect their systems against these attacks as part of their daily grind. Home users also need to protect their systems by keeping their computers up to date and running an occasional security scan to detect any vulnerabilities. Lynis [1], a free software tool from CISOfy, covers a wide range of problem scenarios and lets you perform regular system checks in no time at all. First Launch Lynis, a command-line program, comes with a collection of scripts for Unix-style systems. These scripts check various vulnerable system components for insecure settings and display color-coded…

Python is great for a number of computing tasks: rapid proto-typing, quick calculations, and data formatting, just to name a few. If the output of your perfect project needs to be more polished or ready to review immediately, you can use two libraries to generate unique outputs directly from Python. The ReportLab [1] toolkit generates PDF files, and Panda3D [2] creates a Python-controllable 3D world for dynamic computer graphics. For the purposes of this project, I will use the game of bingo as an example. To begin, a set of bingo cards is generated with Python and ReportLab (Figure 1), then a bingo caller is put together with Python and Panda3D. Bingo Card In the US, the bingo card is traditionally a 5x5 grid with the center space “free” or…