James'Techblog

VLC, a popular open source media player for multiple platforms including Linux, was said to have a vulnerability that was left unpatched from about a year ago by a German researcher. The vulnerability was supposedly not even published to the VLC bug tracker itself but rather a third-party and it appears now that the vulnerability is actually a case of sensationalism. The president of VLC or VideoLan, Jean-Baptiste Kempf, stated that the vulnerability patched a year ago and thus could not be reproduced by him and his team in the latest release. The application version is at 3.0.7.1 at time of writing. Kempf also stated that the researcher was possibly using an outdated version of Ubuntu, citing a possible flaw found in a third-party library relating to VLC several months ago. This too was patched. Multiple articles and youtubers have commented on the hype , none of which seem to add anything new, however, an article on Slashdot says otherwise. The full article will be below.  ...

Pale Moon, a browser forked from older Firefox code, has released a security fix release for their recent 28 series browser version. This update fixes multiple issues with security and bypassing blocking of ftp authentications if necessary. The release also fixes a multitude of DiD(Defense In Depth) vulnerabilities or those vulnerabilities which are not currently being exploited or are not active in Pale Moon at the moment. Note that DiD does not mean that such vulnerabilities are not still active in other Mozilla forks. Pale Moon also updates NSS to the latest. Pale Moon is a fork of earlier versions of Firefox. As such, it is not to be mistaken as a Firefox clone or an insecure Firefox. Pale Moon’s engine Goanna, and the UXP-based browser are both forked from Gecko and Firefox 4 consecutively. The browser is meant to give users the customization and feel of earlier releases of Firefox without any insecurities that would result in modern use of such a version of software. Pale Mo...

In a recent tweet on the project’s twitter page, the team behind Antergos recently announced that they would be discontinuing the project. While this came as a big shock to the community, the developers described this is a bit of a long time coming as things in their lives became hectic and the project has become somewhat stagnant, not seeing much in the way of features or major improvements above standard Arch based software packages. The project was founded directly on Arch Linux and thus the Arch specific packages will be updated forever, however, many changes are soon to take place to make this a smooth transition. The Antergos repository will be the first to go, moving many packages over to AUR and making the repository itself obsolete. It is unclear as to whether the project will cease to install for new users, but that is a safe bet. Antergos started as Cinnarch and has always been mainly an arch installer with many extra bells and whistles, but it appears that this ever evo...

Solus is one of the most interesting Linux operating systems. Initially coming from a Debian-based background, Solus offers a rolling release model for updates in a simple and clean desktop-focused distribution. Solus is developed independently from other distributions and flavors of Linux and has three main desktop environments to choose from with a fourth one on the way in Plasma. As of May 3 2019, Solus has updated their Gnome desktop and the Gnome stack that Budgie uses. In this release, a major release, Solus adds the upstream Gnome-Shell and Mutter performance and security improvements as well it has removed many apps and libraries which are no longer being maintained and or updated from its repository. Another change, albeit a disappointing one, Deja-Dup which allows you to sync files to the cloud in the form of backups will stop working with this feature. It’s a real bummer, however, Solus developers decided that a certain library involved in this client to server exc...

An article popped up recently on the register, a United Kingdom based tech news site. Google’s new API has been in the news for a while now. The new API will limit or restrict third party code from accessing URLs in time to do anything about them. This kind of new behavior is especially tough for content blocking extensions in the Chrome browser. Google has yet to fully implement the newest API which is called DNR for short. WebRequest API is soon to be deprecated to make way for a new way of doing things. This shouldn’t be a big surprise as Google makes a lot of its overall revenuse from advertising. Gorhill, a developer of a very popular content blocking extension known as Ublock Origin, has stated adamantly that his extension would cease to function correctly if the new API takes precedence. Third party content blockers are closer to the browser than they are the net, this is not necessarily the case within Opera as their content blocker is built in. DNR API means that con...

Lately, I’ve been working on improving my scripts and their Help feature. This feature includes leaflets on basic functionality of some of the features held within the script. I layout basic details about what is being done in each more clearly, but still there are things missing here. I removed as many lines previously as possible to allow for some added lines of information. I realize that it doesn’t seem like a lot at the moment, however, I have also mirrored my repository on Github and moved a copy of it to Gitlab. I’ve made that repo almost completely independent of Github. There is still a bit of work to be done and so I will be doing that soon. I’ve also made my Gitlab publicly accessible now. My mind and my sleeping have been sort of a wreck lately, I’ve been trying to make minor improvements around the house with all this going on, I feel my time and energy has been largely divided, though not in equal parts. I’m hoping that by the end of this week, things will be a littl...

Solus, an operating system with a rather colorful history as Solus OS, having been based on Debian at one point, is now released as a rolling distribution, most recently in the form of Solus 4.0 Fortitude. Solus 4.0 took a while to reach release due to changes in project management and various other matters. Solus 4.0 uses the latest software packages and updates in a timely fashion. The software that comes preinstalled is very sparse, meaning that users should go into Solus expecting to install other software. The package manager is a forked version of Pisi which is called Eopkg. Eopkg is not based on deb or rpm package managers so getting deb files to work might be a bit of a hassle, nevertheless, most software that newer users might find useful should be either within the standard Solus repository or the ever growing third-party repository. Snapd is also preinstalled and readily available for those who want software that isn’t in either of these. Solus 4.0 also uses one of the ...