James'Techblog

Due to a recent event occuring on Github, I had to change my password and add 2-step authentication to protect my work. The crisis occurred sometime around June 28 when the Gentoo Linux team noticed that they were unable to affect changes on their Github repository. It turns out that some amateur hackers had guessed a possibly weak password to begin with and logged everyone on the team out of their account. The hacker then went on to wreak havoc on the Github repository. As far as I know the issue is as of now resolved. The Gentoo team did so with commendable effort and emaculate timing. However, they did not have a sufficient backed up or cloned version of their repository and so they had to go through with a fine-tooth comb and fix any errors that were found. I also do not believe that Gentoo images downloaded elsewhere were as badly effected, however, users who cloned the Git repository recently had been told to reclone the Git after July 4 th . This was just one ...

Brave, a browser started in May of 2015, is a Chromium-based browser with elements that resemble something else. The browser offers tracking and ad protection by default, however this is customizable, complete with on/off toggle for user convenience. What is more, Brave uses tokens to pay for surfing as well. Brave uses a very nice looking dashboard, however, as it becomes more Chromium related, the browser is expected to take a different turn in the later part of 2018 or so. Brave also offers HTTPS conversion which converts any Http site to Https automatically if there is such an equivalent. Brave recently started using Tor with their private browsing windows, this adds more privacy and anonymity online. It is a for-profit browser, but the company makes its money by sending users its own ads in place of ads by google or other companies. Brave protects user identity and allows users to continue to help support content creators and web developers alike. Unlike Chrome,...

Open Wifi is the rage these days. From quaint cafe’s to regular, run-of-the-mill family restaurants, Wifi is left free and open to the public. This can be both a good and bad thing. Convenience is that you can update that app on your phone that you might have otherwise missed out on in your busy schedule. You can also share that favorite youtube video with your family, but you wouldn’t leave an open account on your home router would you? Open Wifi uses no encryption, so your data is basically free range. Even using secure HTTPS can be intercepted by someone with a descent understanding of the networking. Then why do we use these unsafe networks so much? How can we prevent or protect our devices and or traffic from being compromised? Stay away from clear text or HTTP only. While it may not be a big deal for just going to a random site to read an article or look at pictures, HTTP is unsecured and now is being deprecated by most websites in favor of more modern standards ...

The list of browsers following Chrome’s lead is rather slim when compared with Firefox, at least in Linux. Firefox Quantum was the latest attempt by Mozilla to increase speed and productivity of the browser, but recent updates tended to break that experience for some users. Pale Moon 27 is a great browser for people that like simple, but what about users who want more extensions and themes, who want a browser with more relevant web features? Enter Basilisk. Basilisk is a browser based off of more recent firefox code, but on a completely different rendering engine called Goanna. Goanna is the same engine behind Pale Moon, but Pale Moon and Basilisk run on different version schemes and a separate version of code. Basilisk supports a similar look and style to pre-photon Firefox with a look similar to v29 to v56 while Pale Moon is running an older v38 ESR code base with pre-australis look and feel. Basilisk has a more comprehensive list of usable extensions as opposed to Pale Moon ri...

On June 25 th in a forum post, Pale Moon lead developer “Moonchild” as he is called, issued a statement about possible version 28 release times. The current estimated release date is not known, but is thought that it will be some time in Autumn. Pale Moon 28 is supposed to bring more web standards support amongst websites today that version 27 just doesn’t have. The new version will be a milestone release and is taking part of its code from the new project Pale Moon developers had in mind with their other browser in development(Basilisk).  Basilisk is a continuation of the XUL platform for their addons. Right now it doesn’t appear extensively populated on the Pale Moon add ons page, however, this will most likely change when their presence grows among forums and communities. When new and opensource developers take Pale Moon as a serious project, they will start working on useful extensions and themes for Pale Moon. Pale Moon is still based in part off of old Mozilla code, ...

Manjaro has a new stable update on the way. Some things I liked about the beta build of this release, it’s smooth and fast. Everything seems to work out of the box. The biggest gripe I can say, the themes. Now I haven’t done a lot of extensive testing with 18.0 as of late, lots of sidetracking going on. I did find a few quirks getting my scripts up and running in the live version if I recall. I have been noticing a lot of troublesome updates in my testing branch from updates on the way to 18.0. The current version is still 17.1.0 and most of the changes I believe are more under the hood than aesthetics. There appears to be a lot of library and driver support updates on the way. Pam and Pinentry recently updated in testing which has been giving me a fit. Each time I play video on VLC something throws me back to the login screen at random. One system had VLC totally stop working. My solution was to revert to a more modest player on both systems at this time. Parole Media playe...

Hi everyone! Been a busy week. At first, I was coming up with plenty of ideas of things to write about, plenty of ideas for new features to add in to my scripts, but things just didn’t go quite as planned. While I did get some work done, I was interrupted by all the machines in the house that were updated becoming paper weights literally before my eyes. The culprit turned out to be an upstream Mesa update from Arch Linux. Mesa deals with video graphics and uses Wayland as a dependancy. Wayland is the new and future successor to x-server. X-server is the X11 system that gives you a graphical experience within Linux. X-server has a process that can actually run in the background without you even being in the desktop and so this is why it is recommended, when installing or unstalling drivers via command line or tty, that you issue the command stopx. X can even have a negative impact on Lightdm performance as well. After issuing all of the updates I rebooted my machine to only b...