James'Techblog

 As seen in a report by the hacker news, yet another Linux trojan has been found. This trojan is using prehacked devices(specifically IoT) to spread spammed email documents. This brings me back to some other security incidents involving Linux. The past year you could say was the year of the kernel flaw. Google stores holding hundreds of malicious apps compatible with Android, various personal exploits, such as the one modeled after the Windows Wannacry were rewritten for Linux. Linux Mint’s own servers getting hacked to allow the attackers access to the Cinnamon edition in an attempt to clone the distro with additional goodies like backdoors. The IT world is full of malicious entities trying to gain access to personal information, including nefarious actors within world governments. Linux has been gaining a following recently and thus, this is why it is being targeted more and more these days. Windows still holds a large margin of the desktop computer share with Window...

In Linux, it seems that there are plenty of choices for media players. Banshee(no longer being maintained?), Clementine, Rhythmbox, VLC(Videolan), Gnome Player, Xplayer, Smplayer, Parole, and the list goes on. Depending upon your desktop environment, one may work better than another. What I have noticed is that Parole seems to work fine in almost any environment. Parole is also one of the lightest video players specifically that I have found. Regardless of your choice in media players, the thing that they are supposed to do is play media. I recently talked a little about manjaro making many improvements recently. Another big improvement with the latest release now upgraded to 17.05 is that VLC works perfectly again, as opposed to earlier this year, I tested it and it did not play movies, however, I was always able to convert music files into mp3 on it though. Clementine is another music specific player that I install on all my systems. Mainly for the system tray c...

If you have been considering trying out Arch linux but haven’t yet, you should give Manjaro’s new release a try. Philip Müller, the head of the development team for the OS, has done a great job fixing issues with KDE and bringing in upgraded packages. According to Phillip, the Calamares installer in 17.03 had a few issues that needed working out, he later found that KDE and Mesa weren’t exactly acting right, so he upgraded those and added the most up to date packages for his stable branch in 17.04. Manjaro and I have had ups and downs in the past, I was recently using Antergos and was skeptical, but when I first booted it up, I noticed a plethora of changes right off the bat. One of the said changes that caught my eye, the theme had had a facelift. Firefox was still a bit buggy, so I installed a stock firefox from the mozilla site and found that it works slightly better(I’m planning on writing about how to do that in the up coming weeks). I noticed also that Qupzil...

There are becoming an increasing number of privacy concerns in regards to email and communication in general. Popular Text apps are hopping on the trend of end-to-end encryption and so too are many web mail sites. There is even an email service that uses a disposable, throwaway system, such as Mailinator. Communication has come a long way, from the first working electric telegraph, using static electricity, built by Francis Ronalds, in 1816, to the first computer network in 1969. Communication separated our primal ancestors from other early hominids. But as the internet of things continues to fill our lives, we often forget who or what we are talking to, and through what intermediary we make that connection. In the early parts of the 2016, United States elections, emails containing sensitive material were negligently leaked over insecure networks. The emails were supposed to be sent using PGP encryption but this failed to be implemented. Later on we read in various articles about...

Firefox, a browser loved by developers as well as noobs. A popular browser that took us away from the destructive, decline that was Internet Explorer 6. The extension king. Many use Firefox for day to day browsing from all walks of life. It’s served a valuable purpose. One could say it’s not finished serving a purpose either. It shows us what the future will be. One small problem with where Firefox is going though is it’s becoming less private. Recently adding Google Analytics to the Add-ons page, adding ads to the new tab page, and there are already a few questionable additions in the road ahead as well.Another issue, depending upon your needs and hardware, is the bloat of the new U.I. and the increasing crashing. Firefox is going through a metamorphosis right now. Many new technologies are emerging from Mozilla. Rust is a new technology that is being developed and sponsored by Mozilla to aid in making their flagship browsing engine smoother on memory footprint and it is tout...