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📅  The non-daily weblog published

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Caution Proprietary and untested third-party software sources (Linuxes) can threaten the system.

LibreOffice 7.2 "Community Edition" improves interoperability

The release of LibreOffice 7.2 Community, after more than six months of development, features two key areas of focus, around further improving compatibility with Microsoft Office document formats and a build for Apple Silicon processors. The release of LibreOffice 7.2 Community, after more than six months of development, features two key areas of focus, around further improving compatibility with Microsoft Office document formats and a build for Apple Silicon processors.

More than 60% of the LibreOffice 7.2 Community code contributions deal with compatibility with proprietary file formats. The new version offers a variety of minor improvements in interoperability with older DOC files as well as DOCX, XLSX and PPTX documents.

Packages for LibreOffice 7.2 Community for Linux, macOS and Windows are available on the Document Foundation download server. DEB and RPM packages are available for Linux.

25-Aug 2021

Raspberry Pi OS gets native SATA support

The kernel of Raspberry Pi OS, the standard operating system for the Raspberry Pi, now includes built-in support for SATA hard drives. Previously, achieving full SATA speed and using RAID with such drives required a custom kernel with compiled-in support for SATA and AHCI.

Until now, it was also possible to use SSDs with SATA with the Raspberry Pi via SATA-to-USB adapters. However, this meant losing 10-20% performance and RAID was not possible. With the now available kernel support, almost all PCI Express SATA adapters are supported.For already installed versions of Raspberry Pi OS, a simple sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade switch turns on SATA support. Thus, anyone with a Compute Module 4 can plug in a SATA card and connect and use hard disks or SSDs. Among other things, this makes the maintenance of a NAS with RAID much easier, because the constant maintenance of a separate kernel is no longer necessary. What doesn't work yet is booting from such discs. The Raspberry Pi boots from USB, microSD, eMMC or even NVMe on the latest Pi OS, but currently the Raspberry Pi bootloader does not scan SATA devices for booting.

Interesting for building a NAS in this context is the Wiretrustee SATA board, whose crowdfunding should start soon. It can connect 4 SATA SSDs and offers HDMI 2.0 and, in addition to MicroSD, 2 USB 2.0 ports. On the software side, a mesh based on WireGuard is used. The software can already be used on other devices. Packages for Debian and Fedora are available on GitHub.

03-Aug 2021

I got responses from the farest East of Asia

Tonight I felt bored again. So I thought, why not try something silly ? Normally I let unsolicited visitors (the most of them are dull bots) run into the 403 (Forbidden) page. But there has also the option to redirect 403 to anything else. Then I thought why not redirect 403 towards North Korea to our friend Kim Young-Ill at http://friend.com.kp . And it took no longer than ten minutes to get responses :

... and so on ... and it was still ongoing ... until I set rules in the firewall.

At least what I appreciate : Mr. Kim Young-Ill respects the robots.txt.

30-May 2021
Updated 01-Jun 2021

Mozilla Firefox rolls out tighter page isolation

Mozilla has already been working on Project Fission since April 2018 to improve the separation of content in the browser. The goal was that each rendering process could be limited to documents from a single domain. Shortly before, Google had already introduced page isolation with Chrome 67. This should make attacks via Meltdown and Spectre and similar time-sensitive attack scenarios more difficult.

Page isolation ensures that accesses from one website to another domain are always included in their own processes, each running in a sandbox that restricts the capabilities of the process. It also restricts the receipt of certain types of sensitive data from other websites. As a result, it becomes more difficult for malicious websites to steal data from other sites.

Mozilla had already started dividing rendering into several processes in 2016 with Electrolysis since Firefox 48 and successively expanded it in the later course up to Firefox 57 Quantum. This multi-process architecture currently consists of one process for the graphical user interface and up to eight processes for rendering the pages. In addition, four further processes are available for networking and other matters. The reason for limiting the maximum number of possible processes is that RAM consumption increases with more processes.

To counteract this, Mozilla launched the side project Fission MemShrink in 2018 and has been able to halve the RAM consumption of processes on average since the first attempts. Those who would like to test the current RAM consumption with Fission themselves can already unlock the current version. The necessary steps for Firefox Nightly and Firefox Beta can be read in Mozilla's Security Blog.

24-May 2021

Nothing special at all | Now certified by »LetsEncrypt's certbot« to use SSL and TLS

🔐 This web server applies now encrypted »https« among its clients & host. And it's time to type down a new article about »certbot«.
https web server on port 443

  Enable HTTPS-Only Mode in all windows

  Enable HTTPS-Only Mode in private windows only

  Don't enable HTTPS-Only Mode

Improve the Mozilla Firefox web browser.

The installation of the SSL certificate was actually quite smooth, only the adaptation of the HTML5 and CSS codes in the existing web pages was tedious. Various popular search engines need at least (!) one month or two months to learn and add the »new contents« to their databases for spilling out to the publicity.

13-May 2021
Updated 19-May 2021

Wormhole - simple, private file sharing | An alternative to Firefox Send (discontinued)

Mozilla finally discontinued the popular file-sharing service Send in September 2020, after it had already been stopped in July. The reason was that the service was becoming increasingly popular as a malware slinger and Mozilla was unable to get to grips with the problem even after revising it.

Wormhole lets you share files with end-to-end encryption and a link that automatically expires. So you can keep what you share private and make sure your stuff doesn't stay online forever.

In April, another competitor appeared, the app Wormhole by the start-up Socket Inc., which, like Firefox Send before it, uses E2E with 128-bit AES-GCM and offers some improvements to the Mozilla concept. Besides the security provided by E2E, which is described in detail on the website and whose code has been published on GitHub, the developers are concerned with speed.

https://wormhole.app/

With Wormhole, the sender already receives a link at the beginning of the transfer, which he can send by email or share elsewhere. The recipient can start downloading as soon as he has received the link, even if the transfer to Socket's server has not yet been completed. The amount of data allowed has also been increased to 10 GBytes compared to Send.

In the future, the business model of Socket Inc. foresees, among other things, offering larger amounts of data for transfer against payment. Advertising and trackers are categorically excluded. The two developers Feross Aboukhadijeh and John Hiesey are of the opinion that the problems with the potential misuse of the platform are manageable, as services such as Signal already demonstrate. If necessary, a client-side virus check should help protect downloaders from malware.

The developers' roadmap includes internationalisation, the possibility of viewing pictures and films without downloading them, and apps for Android and iOS. In addition, fast P2P transfer via WLAN or Bluetooth is to be offered in the third quarter if both computers are in the same network.

08-May 2021

Brackets code editor | End-Of-Life notice

Adobe is committed to delivering exceptional software and services to our customers. It is in our nature to innovate and try new things, and it was in this spirit that we introduced Brackets, a modern open-source code editor for HTML, CSS, and Javascript, in 2014. Brackets was among the first web-based code editors, but the market has matured and other solutions have eclipsed some of the roles Brackets had focused on. As we re-focus on products that broadly provide our customers with the most value, Adobe is announcing the end of support for Brackets as of September 1, 2021.

You can read the full statement and as well as the user comments about this.

https://blog.brackets.io/brackets-eol-notice/

25-Apr 2021

DeepL Translators expanded to include 13 new European languages

We are very pleased to announce that the DeepL translator now provides thirteen new European languages: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Hungarian, Finnish, Greek, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian and Swedish. Over the years, many people have asked us to add more languages to our translator so that they can benefit from DeepL's accurate translations. We are very pleased to be able to fulfil several requests for more languages at once with the launch of the new languages.

With the new languages, DeepL now reaches around 105 million more native speakers worldwide with natural-sounding, high-quality translations. This further realises the company's vision of breaking down language barriers and bringing cultures closer together.

DeepL works continuously to ensure that translation quality remains exceptionally high for all languages and that the translation process is seamless for all our users. And if your desired language is not yet offered, don't worry, DeepL will add more languages in the future.

06-Apr 2021

SUSE to be listed on the stock exchange in early summer ?

The Nuremberg-based software company SUSE is to go on the stock exchange in the next few months. The current owner, the Swedish private equity firm EQT AB, had only bought SUSE in 2019 from the British IT company Micro Focus for 2.535 billion US dollars.

Founded in 1992, the company recorded double-digit percentage growth in turnover last year to more than 450 million dollars. In particular, contracts worth more than one million dollars increased by 35 %. Under the leadership of CEO Melissa Di Donato, SUSE completed the acquisition of container specialist Rancher Labs, which has developed a management platform for Kubernetes clusters, in December 2020. Di Donato had joined SUSE in 2019 from SAP, where she replaced Nils Brauckmann.

An IPO of SUSE could flush around five billion euros into the coffers of EQT, which would thus recoup twice the purchase price for SUSE in a short time. The Swedish group is said to have already commissioned several banks to prepare the IPO, which could start in May.

The company was founded 26 years ago as Gesellschaft für Software und Systementwicklung mbH in Fürth near Nuremberg by four students and abbreviated as S.u.S.E.. The first self-developed product was an extension of the distribution Slackware. Today, the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) is the company's main product.An IPO of SUSE could flush around five billion euros into the coffers of EQT, which would thus recoup twice the purchase price for SUSE in a short time. The Swedish group is said to have already commissioned several banks to prepare the IPO, which could start in May.

The first acquisition by Novell followed at the end of 2003, and two years later the openSUSE community project was started. In 2011, Novell's acquisition of SUSE moved it into Attachmate's portfolio, only to be owned by Micro Focus in 2014. Despite changing owners, SUSE has always managed to retain a certain independence.

12-Mar 2021

»AnyDesk« web client | A further simplifies remote access

In the ongoing pandemic, graphic remote maintenance of computers from friends and family often becomes the only available means of support in case of problems. Provider AnyDesk continues to expand its offering in this regard. AnyDesk 6 with 2FA and Wake-On-LAN is now followed by simplification in the form of a new web client that allows access to remote computers and mobile Android devices without the need to install AnyDesk.

The service is called go.anydesk.com and has already had more than 200,000 hits from the community at the beginning. The new service facilitates, for example, the use of AnyDesk on devices on which software downloads are not permitted due to security policies. The web client is supported in all major browsers and under Linux, macOS and Windows.

In addition to the security features known from the desktop application, such as Perfect Forward Secrecy and TLS Encryption, go.anydesk.com has a number of other functions that make remote access and working on the move easier. For example, both mouse and keyboard input as well as switching between monitors are possible. Users can also share their screens and easily transfer texts, files or audio content. The clipboard is synchronised.

go.anydesk.com is a WebAssembly application (WASM) based on native C++ and the AnyDesk desktop application. This makes the further development and implementation of new functions comparatively easy. Currently, outgoing sessions from laptops or PCs are possible with go.anydesk.com. The application will be further expanded in the coming months.

I would find it even more interesting if this would also work the other way round, i.e. if the web client on the controlled device would be sufficient for maintenance from outside. A request to AnyDesk regarding this is in progress. Alternatives to AnyDesk are the well-known Teamviewer and the open source application DWService, which also runs in the browser and does not require installation on the client side.

Edit: AnyDesk replied to my query: This case is called "Incoming sessions for go.anydesk" and is currently not possible. However, in the future we plan to include a limited form of incoming sessions, in the form of screen transfer without remote control. This would make it possible to switch from one screen to another during a session. But even here, controlling the mouse and keyboard (remote control) is generally not technically possible for incoming sessions on go.anydesk. To our knowledge, no other manufacturer offers this either.

01-Mar 2021

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