Category: Open source

Prism break

Post author By dejvino
Post date 2013-06-14
4 Comments on Prism break

If you haven’t heard about the Prism scandal, you should read a bit about it. But basically, numerous large companies based in the US have allowed private information of their users to be accessible to the government (the NSA, to be more exact). Maybe even yours, if you’ve ever interacted with companies like Google, Apple, Facebook and others.

As mentioned on the Prism-Break website, there are lots of alternatives to the services and software most of us currently use. And surprisingly, it should’t be that hard to switch to a more secure and privacy-protecting solution to your daily internet-related needs.

Here is my personal ‘Prism break’ roadmap, or a security todo list:
Note: work in progress, subject to change.

Email

Biggest challenge as far as I can see. The concept itself is sadly not really that secure.

Must have:

highly reliable (so no self-hosted solutions are acceptable)
web client for easy accessibility
address based on own domain name (and email address), e.g. me at dejvino dot com
at least country-local hosting (i.e. here in Czech Republic for me)

Should have:

contacts
calendar

Could have:

email content encryption. Currently it seems pretty impractical, but who knows. Maybe there is a usable solution?

Some cheap web-hosting with emails? http://hosting.wedos.com/cs/webhosting.html

IM

Similar to email. Doesn’t require 100% availability.

Ideas:

own secure Jabber/XMPP server? Could be self-hosted / VPS. Expensive, hard to maintain.
rented server? server-side history is hard to come by. Only Google has got it all…

Should have:

encrypted transmission
secured history saved on server side

Web hosting

I’m currently using external paid services. I might switch to a more custom solution, i.e. home server.

Raspberry Pi anyone? … UPDATE: nope, it could work for really simple services, but running anything more sophisticated results in long response times. And since I’ve got big plans, it is not the right solution.

Cloud storage

Dropbox has been a great service — lots of free space, great tools on Windows as well as on Android.
I’m in the process of switching to a more controlled ownCloud server solution.

Must have:

web interface
handle large files
access restrictions
per-user space limits (quotas)
PC client (Windows)

Should have:

online music streamer
public file-linking capability
applications / plugins / extensions

Could have:

Android client
synchronization / backup support

Social media

Friendica is a project I’ve been using a bit and am planing to use a bit more. But the other “standard” ones still seem quite usable, to some extent.

Should have:

RSS-feed-reader-like view
responsive design / client for Android
integration of different social networks

TODO: move Friendica to a more powerful server. It is quite CPU-demanding.

Web browsing

Type	Current	New	Status
Browser	Google Chrome	Firefox	DONE
Passwords	KeePass	KeePass + KeeFox	DONE
Plugins	DoNotTrackMe, HTTPS Everywhere, … see FixTracking.com as a handy guide.		DONE

Open source PicoPosts Programming Technology

Inferno vs. Java

An interesting read back from the year 1996 about Inferno vs. Java – http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/historical_documents/website/infernojava

Infernos with its programming language (Limbo) seemed like such an awesome project. Why did it not take off and why do we use Java instead? I guess some concepts just come too soon, before it is their time to shine…

Linux Open source PicoPosts Raspberry Pi Technology Uncategorized

Distributed Pi

Plan 9 – distributed operating system, now ported to Raspberry Pi.

http://bendyworks.com/geekville/lab_projects/2012/11/getting-plan-9-running-on-the-raspberry-pi

…newly on my ToDo list.

Linux Open source Raspberry Pi Technology

Raspberry Pi – sound HOW-TO

Post author By dejvino
Post date 2012-11-10
2 Comments on Raspberry Pi – sound HOW-TO

Here are a few pointers on how to make the sound work on Raspberry Pi. I’ve gathered these bits and pieces along the way of using this tiny computer.

First of all – Arch Linux for ARM (i.e. alarm) is the best distro I’ve used on RasPi so far. Lightweight, starts in just a few seconds, has a lots of packages and you can install it just the way you want. And this is also the distro for which I am writing this short How-To.

How to add the sound module

To make the system see the integrated sound card you need to load the appropriate kernel module. Like so:

sudo modprobe snd_bcm2835

To check whether it is loaded, just check the output of lsmod. The command written above has to be executed every time the system starts. To make it “stick”, add the module to the list of automatically loaded modules. That is create a new file /etc/modules-load.d/sound.conf containing just a single line:

snd-bcm2835

That’s it. The sound module should now load every time you start your RasPi.

How to install Alsa

Most of the programs will be able to output sound using Alsa. To install it, issue this command:

sudo pacman -S alsa-utils alsa-plugins alsa-lib alsa-firmware

Now you can run speaker-test and it should produce a nice white noise on your speakers.

How to enable analog sound

If you want to select which sound output should be used (HDMI or analog 3.5mm jack), the command to use for Alsa and analog output is:

sudo amixer cset numid=3 1

Or substitute the last “1” for “2” if you want HDMI.

How to make VLC or mplayer work with Alsa

If you are getting messages like this:

alsa audio output error: cannot commit hardware parameters: Invalid argument
jack audio output error: failed to connect to JACK server
main audio output error: no suitable audio output module

All you have to do is fix the sound card configuration via creating a simple *.conf file: /etc/asound.conf with the following content:

pcm.!default {
   type hw
   card 0
}
ctl.!default {
   type hw
   card 0
}

For more info, take a look at this: http://elinux.org/R-Pi_Troubleshooting#Sound

Awesome Friendica Open source PHP PicoPosts

WPConn looking good

My Friendica –> WordPress Connector (wpconn) is looking good! It is able to assign the right categories to the post as specified in the original Friendica post.

For more info: https://github.com/Dejvino/friendica-addons/tree/master/wpconn