● 06.15.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 16/06/2022: Cambalache 0.10.0 and Fwupd 1.7.8

Posted in News Roundup at 6:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• The team quickly decided to provide the Ubuntu Linux environments within the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Each Linux system provided 16 CPUs, 104 GB RAM, and 500 GB of attached disk space to meet the computational need. Hemant Kelkar developed a custom Linux image with the tools needed for the class including R, conda, and jupyter. Final configuration and testing was completed just days prior to the start of the workshop with 30 identical custom Ubuntu Linux systems ready for student use.

• Oregan says that the latest release of the Linux-based Zenterio OS enables UX performance gains, as well as enabling access to premium content applications such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video on the installed base of set-tops.

Desktop/Laptop

• While Windows and Linux have long since been rivals, Windows 11 is more like a desktop Linux distribution than you might think, no matter which side of the aisle you’re on. Here are some of the reasons why.

• [...]

• Linux desktops and macOS have had a similar feature. Microsoft had its own “gadgets” for a while before discontinuing the idea, but it seems to have come back. It’s the latest iteration of an “active desktop” incorporating content downloaded from the internet. It seems that Microsoft can’t give up on the idea as other OSes implement this feature.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Have apps been randombly crashing on Ubuntu 22.04, you leave your system for a bit and all your work is gone, and sometimes even the Gnome shell, well cause is a new tool brought into Ubuntu 22.04 called Systemd OOMD

• Welcome to the 471st installment of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode, we take a look into the amateur radio operator related PBX system called Hamshack Hotline. HH is a network of hams around the world connected with VoIP phones which can be used for ragchew, tactical communication, troubleshooting and more. This Part 1 episode looks at the hardware and software requirements, documentation, initial setup procedure, common features and use cases and more. Thanks for listening and have a great week. Also, try out HH. It’s a lot of fun.

• Sam Curren unpacks for Doc Searls and Dan Lynch why DIDs and DIDcomm are the best approach to identity—and to making people first-class citizens on the Internet. Curren also discusses the origin story of picos and the advantages of nomadic living and hacking.

• 00:33 Linux Innards 33:47 Vibrations From the Ether 42:33 Announcements

• In our Innards section we discuss how we would build our own distro

Kernel Space

• Fwupd version 1.7.8, a tool for updating firmware from Linux, has been released. The new version adds more supported devices and improves existing hardware support.

• What’s New in Fwupd 1.7.8?

• Fwupd 1.7.8 mainly concentrates on enhancing hardware support. The new version adds support for PixArt and FlatFrog devices. There are also a number of bug fixes to improve reliability when installing firmware with certain devices.

• The program can be downloaded directly from the project’s GitHub page or installed using a standard Linux package manager.

Graphics Stack

• For those who don’t know yet, Panfrost is the open source OpenGL driver for the ARM Mali Midgard, Bifrost (and soon Valhall) GPU series. This driver is in a pretty good state already (see the conformance status here). On the other hand, we have PanVk, the open source Vulkan driver), and as can be guessed from the PAN_I_WANT_A_BROKEN_VULKAN_DRIVER=1 environment variable that is needed to have it loaded properly, it is still in its early days.

• My internship, which started in December 2021 and wrapped up recently, was about getting PanVk closer to conformancy by implementing one of the core Vulkan features: support for secondary command buffers.

• But before we dive into implementation details, let’s take a step back to explain what command buffers are, why Vulkan introduced this concept, and what makes secondary command buffers different from the primary counterpart.

Applications

• Linux has a powerful command line, and it is an essential utility for major operations in the Linux operating system. It is particularly useful for system-level administrative tasks such as installing or uninstalling software, folder or file operations, user management, and much more.

• Linux command line also provides a unique and not-so-well-known music player feature. You can listen to your favorite music using music players based on the command line.

• These music players are fast and consume less memory compared to GUI apps. So, let’s look at some of your best options for command-line music players.

Instructionals/Technical

• SFTPGo is an open-source SFTP server that is highly configurable and offers plenty of features to make it a viable option for just about any type of business or even home usage. SFTPGo supports a number of storage backends, such as local filesystem, encrypted file systems, S3 Object Storage, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage, and even other SFTP Servers.

• SFTPGo is available for Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, and Windows. I want to walk you through the process of deploying SFTPGo on Ubuntu Server 22.04, so you can enjoy a fully-featured SFTP server on your network.

• A few years ago, Google made it possible to add Linux support to Chrome OS. By doing this, anyone could install Linux apps on their Chromebook and take advantage of the powerful Linux command-line interface.

• For any Chromebook user who’d like to be able to run more standard applications, this is a great way to expand Chrome OS. And, because it’s Linux, there are tons of applications that can be installed. For instance, if you prefer a regular email client, you can install the likes of Thunderbird or Geary. Want a different browser? Install Firefox. Need an image editor? Install GIMP.

• phpMyAdmin is a free, open-source, and web-based application used for managing databases via a web browser. It provides a simple and user-friendly web interface that helps database administrators to query and manage MySQL and MariaDB databases.

• One of the common wishes in environments and languages that support concurrency is for (Unix) system calls to be cancellable in the way that other operations often are. Unfortunately this is not practical, which is part of why a lot of such environments don’t try to support it (Go is famously one of them, which makes people unhappy since it does have a ‘context’ package that can cancel other things).

• All or almost all Unix system calls can be aborted, which is to say that you can interrupt them before they complete and force control to return to the program. However, when you abort a system call this way the effects of the system call may be either incomplete or indeterminate, leaving you with either broken state or unusable state (or at least a peculiar state that you have to sort out). For example, if a close() is aborted, the state of the file descriptor involved is explicitly unknown. Only some Unix system calls can be cancelled, which is to say stopped with things in some orderly and known state. Often these system calls are the least interesting ones because all they do is inquire about the state of things, such as what file descriptors are ready or whether you have dead or stopped children.

• Some interesting system calls can be cancelled under some but not all situations using special mechanisms that may have side effects. You may be able to relatively cleanly cancel certain network IO by setting the file descriptor to non-blocking, for example, but this will probably have done some IO and might affect other threads if they immediately try to do IO on the file descriptor before you can set it back to blocking.

• Komorebi (koh-moh-rey-bee) is Japanese for the light that filters through the leaves of the trees. This can paint a beautiful picture in the imagination.

• What Komorebi is, is a program to allow for active desktop wallpaper. Which means you can have wallpaper that is visually interactive. Moving wallpaper or live websites.

• In this tutorial, we are going to show you how to install Matrix Synapse on Ubuntu 20.04 OS.

• Matrix Synapse is an open-source chat application written in Python, used for real-time communication for VOIP services and instant messaging. Synapse is developed to implement the matrix for decentralized communication which can store personal data from the chat history, user data and etc. In this tutorial, we will install Matrix Synapse with Apache as a reverse proxy.

• The installation is very easy and can take up to 30 minutes. Let’s get started!

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Hestia Control Panel on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Hestia Control Panel is a robust, open-source web hosting control panel that can be used to manage websites, mail servers, DNS, and other web hosting functions from one central dashboard without the hassle of manually deploying and configuring individual components or services.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Hestia Control Panel on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

• A hostname is a name that is given to a computer and used to identify the computer in a network. In this tutorial, we learn about hostname command in Linux with practical examples.

• Today we are looking at how to install Ultimate Sonic Mugen on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The popular Linux desktop has a new coat of paint and new touch gestures, but is it a match for Android?

• The KDE Community has announced the release of KDE Plasma 5.25, the latest version of the popular Linux desktop. The release features a number of graphical enhancements plus improved touch controls.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• After almost 6 months of work I am pleased to announce a new Cambalache release!

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

• I’ve used Linux for a while and know my way around it and like system administration, so, to propose a challenge to myself, I’m trying OpenBSD. This is the first ever BSD I use. The closest BSD-like system I’ve used is probably Void Linux, as it resembles the BSDs with the package management inspired by ports.

• I’ve went ahead and got OpenBSD 7.1 and flashed it to my USB drive. I’ve went through the installation setup, I like the question-based installer, especially the fact that you can drop to a shell anytime and resume it. After rebooting, I took care of installing doas(1), and I went with an X session to see if I can get it all working. Compiling my suckless utilities has been fine, no problems whatsoever, the required development packages have been included in the X set and everything compiled fast with no issues. X ran out of the box, I just copied my xinitrc over and that was it.

• We are happy to announce that Mehmet Mert Gunduz has joined our team. He did a great job modernizing the NomadBSD website.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Canonical is pushing the security and usability conveniences of managing internet of things (IoT) and edge devices with its June 15 release of Ubuntu Core 22, the fully containerized Ubuntu 22.04 LTS variant optimized for IoT and edge devices.

• Combined with Canonical’s technology offer, this release brings Ubuntu’s operating system and services to a complete range of embedded and IoT devices. The new release includes a fully preemptible kernel to ensure time-bound responses. Canonical partners with silicon and hardware manufacturers to enable advanced real-time features out of the box on Ubuntu Certified Hardware.

• “Our goal at Canonical is to provide secure, reliable open-source everywhere — from the development environment to the cloud, down to the edge and to devices,” said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical. “With this release and Ubuntu’s real-time kernel, we are ready to expand the benefits of Ubuntu Core across the entire embedded world.”

• One of the important things about Ubuntu Core is that it is effectively Ubuntu. It is fully containerized. All the applications, kernel, and operating system are strictly confined snaps.

• Most of you know Ubuntu as a desktop operating system; others know it as an outstanding server Linux or as a tremendously popular cloud OS. But Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, is also a serious player in the Internet of Things (IoT) arena. And with its latest IoT release, Ubuntu Core 22, Canonical brings real-time processing to the table.

• Canonical has announced the release of Ubuntu Core 22, a version of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS that is fully containerised and designed for IoT and embedded devices. If you have some use cases for Ubuntu Core 22, you can download it now.

• On Ubuntu Core, all of the software is containerised – this is a fancy way of saying everything comes as a snap package. This allows seamless over-the-air updates of the kernel, operating system, and applications. By using snaps, apps won’t run into any dependency issues as they are all packaged with the software. If anything goes wrong with an update, the system will automatically roll back to the previous working version.

• Canonical describes Ubuntu Core 22 as low touch because it comes with enhanced security measures out of the box. These measures include secure boot, full disk encryption, secure recovery, and strict confinement of the OS and apps. Canonical delivers 10 years of updates for Ubuntu Core 22 so once you have it in place you won’t need to mess with it for a while.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• At rOpenSci, many packages are maintained by volunteer community members, and similarly at The Carpentries lessons are maintained by volunteer community members. We’re very thankful for the effort our volunteers put into that role and our organisations could literally not run without their work. However, sometimes infrastructure changes are decided centrally. For example, requiring two-factor authentication for all GitHub organization members at rOpenSci or overhauling the foundation of the lesson infrastructure at The Carpentries. In this post, we shall share some insights from our experiences regarding how we, as staff members, best support our volunteers through these transformations.

• I started my work with moving CRC calculation files from ext2 driver to shared folder (so that it can be used by every other filesystem that needs it) and made it fs_shell compatible. CRC’s are used to detect minor corruption in filesystem and is one of the major features introduced for xfs version 5 as metadata checksumming.

• Being a math nerd I was quite intrigued by how crc’s are getting calculated, so I thought why not study about it in depth?

• I referred to “A Painless Guide to CRC Error Detection Algorithms” book and got basic understanding of how crc is calculated, which polynomials are used, brute force method for computing crc and finally optimised tabular approach. Don’t go by book title though, it was anything but painless :’)

• After that I quickly moved to implementing xfs V5 superblock fields, Macros, functions for checksum verification, and other essential stuff.

• Soon I hit a bug in superblock CRC verification and it took me quite some time to get it all fixed, shoutout to PulkoMandy for helping me get all things right in crc verification for superblock and answering lots of my queries.

GNU Projects

• GIMP 2.10.32 comes with support for 8 and 16-bit CMYK TIFF files, support for localized glyphs, and many other features.

• GIMP has traditionally been recognized as one of the best free alternatives to professional image editing software such as Photoshop. It is a bitmap/pixel-based image editing software that can be used to edit and retouch photos and create images and animations.

• While the 2.10.30 version released half a year ago was primarily a bugfix release, the new GIMP 2.10.32 focuses on improvements and new features. Let’s take a look at them.

• GIMP image editor released a new update for its stable 2.10 release series. Here’s what’s new and how to install in Ubuntu.

• GIMP 2.10.32 comes with BigTIFF file import/export support, which is an evolution of the original TIFF format allowing files bigger than 4GiB. It also supports for importing 8 and 16-bit CMYK(A) TIFF in this release.

• Anonymity loves company. Hence, to provide the best possible anonymity to GNU Taler users, the scalability of individual installations of a Taler payment service matters. While our design scales nicely on paper, NGI Fed4Fire+ enabled us to evaluate the transaction rates that could be achieved with the actual implementation. Experiments were conducted by Marco Boss for his Bachelor’s thesis at the Bern University of Applied Sciences to assess bottlenecks and suggest avenues for further improvement.

Programming/Development

• I’ve complained before about using YAML when a programming language is what’s needed. But, when you’ve got configuring to do, YAML is pretty useful. It’s so much nicer to read and write than the XML I had to write back in the early days of Java development. But one advantage XML had over YAML was that XML schemas were commonly used and so I wouldn’t get errors like this…

• Several of my recent blog posts have been focussed on using {purrr} and {glue} to programatically query a database.

• This is something I’d been wanting to achieve for some time, but my efforts got put on hold when COVID-19 came along.

• The general approach is to use a config file to denote the relevant tables and columns, along with the server and database details.

• These then get fed into flexible SQL queries, using purrr to loop over each table then merging the results.

• Over the last few weeks at work I have been refining this and building a shiny dashboard to visualise the data.

Standards/Consortia

• Find link is a tool that I wrote for adding links between articles in Wikipedia. Given an article title, find link will find other articles that include the entered article title but no link to the article. There is the option to edit the found articles and add the missing link.

• Card-style components are pretty much still a thing these days, and there are many ways to make a bunch of identical rectangles look prettier. I’m quite fond of the pop art, or maybe it’s more of a comic book style art direction that uses thick bold outlines and bright colours.

Leftovers

• I have something to confess. I don’t really know how to put this into words but I feel like a failure. It’s not because I have certain expectations of myself or because of any event that happened… It’s just that I can’t keep promises with myself.

• I have been participating in an annual work-internal project contest (we call it Pet Project contest) since I moved to London and switched jobs to my current employer

• Among Hardwick’s most notable contributions to American letters is The New York Review of Books. In “The Decline of Book Reviewing,” a mission statement for the periodical she would launch to such prominence, Hardwick argues for the necessity of rehabilitating the art of aesthetic judgment in literary matters.

Science

• When I started my first job out of college, I thought I knew a fair amount about machine learning. I had done two internships at Pinterest and Khan Academy building machine learning systems. I spent my last year at Berkeley doing research in deep learning for computer vision and working on Caffe, one of the first popular deep learning libraries. After I graduated, I joined a small startup called Cruise that was building self-driving cars. Now I’m at Aquarium, where I get to help a multitude of companies deploying deep learning models to solve important problems for society.

• When pushed to explain why quantum computers can outspeed classical computers, stories about quantum computing often invoke a mysterious property called “entanglement.” Qubits, the reader is assured, can somehow be quantum mechanically entangled such that they depend on one another. If more detail is needed, the reader is told that entanglement links qubits no matter how far apart they are—so long as the qubits are “coherent.”

• For the reader, things are far from coherent. Sure, entanglement is an important aspect of quantum computing. But what exactly is it?

• In a few words, entanglement is when multiple objects—such as a pair of electrons or photons—share a single quantum state. Like threads in a tangle of yarn, entangled objects cannot be described as independent entities.

• That explanation might be poetic, but it shouldn’t be satisfying. Things are not so simple or concrete. But with a little bit of high-school-level math (near the end of this story), our intuitions—based on a lifetime of classical physics—can be retrained and redirected just a bit.

Hardware

• Lenovo has officially opened its first manufacturing facility in Europe, to locally build servers, storage systems and high-end PC workstations for customers across Europe, Middle East, and Africa.

• Backblaze publishes drive reliability data at scale, but what about a random person on the Internet with his small homelab setup? For all my talk about drives over the years, I’ve never shared my own broad experience.

• These are the drive manufacturers I’ve had since 2017, with failures defined as having multiple ZFS scrubs detecting bad sectors, or the drive outright failing to turn on.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• However, there has been intense lobbying from the agriculture biotech industry to weaken the legislation, aided financially by the Gates Foundation.

• Since 2018, top agribusiness and biotech corporations have spent almost €37 million lobbying the European Union. They have had 182 meetings with European Commissioners, their cabinets and director generals. More than one meeting a week.

• I swear at some point I will stop writing about COVID-19, but in the meantime, it keeps affecting my life. I spent this past week holed up in a hotel room in Puerto Rico while taking care of my teenager, who caught COVID on a class trip. And since this is my second forced quarantine during travel, I’ve once again been forced to question why I’m stuck in another hotel as part of a quarantine.

• In the U.S., COVID is clearly continuing to spread among the population. But while on one hand we are told to quarantine, on the other hand we are also allowed to get on planes and travel domestically without having to be tested or wear masks. That said, my focus here is not on our inconsistent (and at times incomprehensible) COVID-related travel requirements, but on our exposure notification programs, because that’s where my personal drama connects with my professional interests.

Proprietary

• A 33-year-old Illinois man was sentenced to two years in prison today following his conviction last year for operating services that allowed paying customers to launch powerful distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against hundreds of thousands of Internet users and websites.

• But what will people download Chrome with now?

• Raise a glass, kiss your wife, hug your children. It’s finally gone.

• The death of Internet Explorer has been greatly exaggerated.

• Yesterday and today, there have been numerous articles about Microsoft “removing” Internet Explorer from Windows (it has never been usable in Windows “11” apparently, but has been “removed” from Windows 10).

• But like other mistakes and cruft, Internet Explorer is a part of the Win32 API and cannot be removed without bricking numerous applications and Web sites, and corporate Intranet applications, so it is still there. You just can’t use it directly.

• Microsoft has disabled about 1% of Internet Explorer, which was the part that you could visibly see, and open as an application. The other 99%, the MSHTML “Trident” engine is still there. In fact, you could write or run a Web browser that embeds it and continue to browse with it now, although that would be a serious mistake due to its infamous security history and incompatibility with standards-compliant Web sites.

• In fact, Windows now embeds MSHTML/Trident into their latest disaster, the Chromium-based Edge, which is packed with malware and spyware directly from Microsoft, including a keylogger trojan called “SmartScreen” and “Windows Defender”.

• In the sense that Windows Defender is a security program, it’s like being accused of a crime as a poor person in America and getting stuck with the public defender, which your county funds 5-10% as much as the other guys who may be trying to frame you. In the sense that it sends your keystrokes and file hashes to Microsoft, it’s malware in and of itself.

Linux Foundation

• The Open 3D Foundation (O3DF), the home of a vibrant community focused on advancing the future of open 3D development, announces its growing ecosystem with the addition of LightSpeed Studios as a Premier member alongside Adobe, AWS, Huawei, Intel, Microsoft and Niantic.

Security

• As companies continue to get breached by the hour, IT and security teams are constantly scrambling their defenses in hopes of eradicating attackers from their networks. The (sort of) good news is that security software and hardware vendors are overflowing with product and service offerings designed to help you. Many of them even promise to keep the bad guys and gals out of your systems 24 hours a day, 7 days a week!

• So all you have to do is get out your credit card, install one of these products and get a good night’s sleep, right? Unfortunately, during the penetration tests we do for clients around the country, we find time and time again that these expensive security solutions have considerable blind spots. Many fail to fully detect even the most basic attacks. And security products also need to be fine-tuned for your environment; default settings will not cover all concerns specific to your environment.

• With the continued rise of security breaches, ransomware attacks, and other cybersecurity threats, now is the time to update and improve your security policies and practices. And, in the context of developing a cybersecurity strategy, you’ll likely see the term “zero trust” mentioned frequently, but what does it mean?

• The zero trust concept has been around for a while to describe strict security and access control policies implemented as companies have outgrown the old, perimeter-based “trust but verify” approach. In fact, NIST released a special publication explaining the basics of Zero Trust Architecture back in 2020. In this article, we’ll look more closely at what zero trust does and does not mean.

• Smart infrastructure vendor Nebulon today announced that its latest offerings provide newly hardened backups for configuration and snapshots, in an effort to add a new tool to the antiransomware arsenal for Linux systems.

• The idea, according to Nebulon, is to protect against the problem of misconfigured servers and dated server configurations in Linux systems. This is a particularly serious problem in IT shops where configuration and patch management aren’t handled in a centrally organized way.

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

• Panchan is going after telecom and education providers using novel and unique methods to thwart defenses and escalate privileges.

• Researchers at Akamai Technologies Inc. today said they have discovered a new peer-to-peer botnet and SSH worm that has been actively breaching Linux servers. Dubbed “Panchan,” the botnet and SSH worm was first spotted in March and is written in the Golang programming language.

Defence/Aggression

• More than a dozen students remained alive for over an hour before officers entered their classrooms. The commander feared a risk to officers’ lives, new documents show.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Image generated by MidJourney — hatsune miku, elden ring, dark souls, concept art, crowbar I have added a salary transparency page to the blog. This page lists my salary for every job I’ve had in tech. I have had this data open to the public for years, but I feel this should be more prominently displayed on my website.

• As someone who has seen pay discrimination work in action first-hand, data is one of the ways that we can end this pointless hiding of information that leads to people being uninformed and hurt by their lack of knowledge. By laying my hand out in the open like this, I hope to ensure that people are better informed about how much money they can make, so that they can be paid equally for equal work.

• Raw, machine processable data (including employer names) is available at /api/salary_transparency.json. The JSON format is not stable. Do not treat it as such. I reserve the right to change the formatting or semantics of the JSON format at any time without warning. The raw data is in /dhall/jobHistory.dhall in my site’s git repository.

Finance

• The Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday reported that food-at-home prices rose 11.9 percent over the last 12 months, the largest increase since April 1979.

• Categories experiencing the largest price hikes were typically meal staples.

• Among categories seeing notably high inflation in May were eggs, up 32.2 percent year over year; butter and margarine, 20.2 percent; chicken, 17.4 percent; citrus fruits, 16.1 percent; milk, 15.9 percent; coffee, 15.3 percent; ground beef, 13.6 percent; baby food, 12.9 percent; and rice, pasta and cornmeal, 12.8 percent. Food-away-from-home prices rose 7.4 percent.

Civil Rights/Policing

• As RightsCon 2022 — the world’s leading summit on human rights in the digital age — concludes, the work to drive global change continues.

• Access Now welcomes a timely U.N. Special Rapporteur joint statement that draws the world’s attention to digital rights in conflict and humanitarian crises, released at the conclusion of the 11th iteration of the global summit.

• The five U.N. Special Rapporteurs — who actively engaged at RightsCon on June 6-10 — emphasize that digital rights violations enable and escalate offline violence, deepening conflict and humanitarian crises worldwide. In particular, they shone the spotlight on “shrinking civic space and rising digital authoritarianism through internet shutdowns, targeted surveillance, cyber and physical attacks on critical broadcast and communications infrastructure, the use of drones by domestic law enforcement, as well as disinformation and smear campaigns,” during such crises — where they ultimately stressed “the need for accountability under international law.”

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• According to US federal law, if someone sends you something you didn’t order, you can keep it, use it, and don’t have to pay for it, so it’s unclear how this is even legal.

• They even sent one customer who ordered five items six of each item, for a total of thirty shipments resulting in a bill for more than $15,000.

• This is actually very easy to dispute. Initiate a credit card billing dispute/chargeback, which is your right under federal law.

• Explain to your credit card company that you did not order all of the products that Sonos sent you.

• Send the card company a letter to this effect and a copy of your original invoice for what you ordered.

• [...]

• You may have to go back and forth with the card company several times explaining the FTC’s rule, but you should be able to chargeback the unapproved amount and keep the stuff.

• Then file a complaint against Sonos with the FTC and your state’s Attorney General’s office.

• When you are done, the unwanted merchandise is yours to keep, give away, donate, or sell. And it’s the law.

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