● 10.09.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 08/10/2022: 25th Anniversary Ultima Online

Posted in News Roundup at 6:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• Welcome to the DebugPoint Weekly roundup #22.08, where you can find all the happenings from this week, mainly from the Linux and open-source space. It’s been an eventful week where many distro updates arrived, whereas some significant releases from major apps.

• Here’s what happened this week.

Desktop/Laptop

• If you’re looking for the best Ubuntu laptop to buy in 2022, then you have many great options to choose from. The laptops we recommend in this article either ship with Ubuntu pre-installed, or they work with the popular Linux distribution without any issues.

Server

• I moved from VMWare Workstation to using Linux’s libvirt and its native virtualization facilities earlier this year, and I’ve been happy with that move although I still would like to be able to take good snapshots of UEFI based virtual machines. Over time I’ve wound up with a setup that I’m happy with for the work that I do, one that’s similar but not quite the same as my VMWare setup.

• I have two groups of VMs. One group is Fedora VMs (and one Windows VM) that I use for testing Fedora upgrades, Windows things, and so on. All of these machines are NAT’d through a somewhat customized NAT setup, and I basically just run them. I make little to no usage of VM snapshots; about my only use is to snapshot them before I do something I consider unusually risky (or that I may want to re-try), and then generally to delete the snapshot later after it worked.

• The second group of VMs is VMs used to test various things in our Ubuntu server environment. Our environment expects machines to have real IPs, so all of these vms use ‘macvtap’ bridged networked (on a second, completely unused port) and have their own IPs. Our standard Ubuntu install setup has a two stage install process, where we first install from ISO image (which sets the machine’s IP address, among other things) and then run through a large postinstall step to customize machines. With most of the testing I do, I want to start from scratch in a fresh install (which most closely mimics real servers) rather than try to shuffle around software and setups on an already installed machine.

Audiocasts/Shows

• You’ve been preparing for the death of chrome adblockers and manifest V2, Firefox will support both manifest V2 and manifest V3 for as long as possible so its the best choice. In this video I show you how to setup Firefox to be the same as chrome including profiles, browser sync, and casting.

Graphics Stack

• There is of course, a way to make queue ownership transfers the responsibility of the driver, by declaring every resource to be VK_SHARING_MODE_CONCURRENT instead of VK_SHARING_MODE_EXCLUSIVE. But how much fun would that be? And, it is said that this is rather bad for performance (I would assume that queue ownership is then internally transferred lazily at the last possible moment, and that this could cause bubbles). And, heck, we’re using a rendergraph, which means the renderer should get out intentions telegraphed far enough ahead in advance to make the right decisions…

Applications

• In general, a digital whiteboard is a tool that contains a large interactive display in the form of a whiteboard. Some examples of whiteboard devices are – Tab, large-screen mobile phones, touch-screen laptops, and surface displays.

• If an instructor uses a whiteboard, you can draw, write or manipulate elements on those device screens using a touch-sensitive pen, stylus, finger or mouse. That means you can drag, click, erase, draw – do everything on the whiteboard that can be done on a piece of paper using a pen.

• But to do all those, you need software that supports all those functionalities. That means bridging the gap between your touch and the display.

• Now, there are many commercial applications available for this work. But we will talk about some of the free and open-source whiteboard applications in this article that are available for Linux Systems.

Instructionals/Technical

• Process signals are a famously tricky part of Unix in practice (although they can sometimes seem simple in theory). Recently I found myself wondering how old various Unix signals are. The answer turns out to be older than I expected for most signals, although it’s difficult for me to tell exactly how far back they really go because of our limited sources for very early versions of Research Unix.

• Carlos Fenollosa recently published an article titled “After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.”.

• It gained quite a bit of attention in my online social circles, and while I do agree with some of the points they made (specifically that e-mail isn’t as simple as it used to be a decade ago), I disagree with fair bits of their opinion. I know that I’m late to the party, but I want to use this post to elaborate why nonetheless.

• Snapshots are not backups! It is important to understand this. If your storage is damaged or the file system get corrupted, or the device stolen, you will lose your data. Backups are archives of your data that are on another device, and which can be used when the original device is lost/destroyed/corrupted. However, snapshots are superfast and cheap, and can be used to recover accidentally deleted files.

• VirtualBox (VB) is a cross-platform hypervisor or virtualization software developed by Oracle Corporation. Basically, VB allows user to run guest operating system on another host operating system virtually without need for partitioning of hard drive or running another OS on dual boot which involves risk of crashing host system.

• VirtualBox creates virtual hard drive and installs guest OS on it. Virtual hard drive is nothing but the big size file stored on the computer hard drive. This file works as a real hard drive for the guest OS.

• Running any application software or video game on virtual machines is sometimes not as smooth as running them on OS installed on full hardware. Everything depends on amount of hardware resource allocated to virtual machine.

• Anyone who has ever had to deal with video files knows they can be a pain. Different devices use different formats, and you’ll often have to convert a video from one format to another to watch it on your chosen device. This can be a time-consuming process, especially if you’re dealing with large files. Fortunately, there’s a solution: HandBrake.

• HandBrake is an open-source video transcoder that supports Mac, Windows, or Linux. It can convert videos in many different formats into more commonly used ones like MP4 with minimal file size reduction – making it efficient at reducing the amount of data consumed on your hard drive while also helping save time! Whether you need to take a video from your phone and watch it on your laptop, or you want to download a movie from the internet and watch it on your TV, Handbrake is the tool for you.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Handbrake on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the command line terminal with various methods to install the transcoding software and update and remove the software if the need arises.

• The GNOME desktop environment is the default GUI for Ubuntu systems. However, if you’re running Ubuntu Server or one of the other flavors of Ubuntu such as Kubuntu or Lubuntu, then you won’t have GNOME installed by default. Follow along with us below to get GNOME installed on Ubuntu.

• In this guide, we will cover how to install VMware workstation Pro on Debian 11 / 10 step-by-step. At the time of writing this guide, VMware Workstation 16 Pro is available.

• On Linux-based systems such as Ubuntu, the PATH environment variable is used by the system to search for commands.

• For example, when you type in a command like “nano”, Ubuntu will search any directory listed in the PATH variable for that program.

• If the PATH environment variable didn’t exist, you would have to type in the full path to every file you want to run.

• It is possible to add directories temporarily or permanently to Ubuntu’s PATH variable. By adding a new directory, Ubuntu will check it for any new binary files the next time you run a command.

• Paperless-NG is a powerful software designed to act as a digital archive/index for all your paper documents.

• When you feed Paperless-NG a document. it will perform OCR (Optical Character Recognition) over it, turning images into searchable and selectable text.

• This is just scraping the surface of what Paperless is capable of. You should definitely check out this software if you need a central place to aggregate your documents.

• The Raspberry Pi is an excellent device for Paperless-NG as it uses a low amount of power, making it cheap to run continually.

• Knowing how to reboot Ubuntu is one of those simple but crucial to know tasks for managing your system.

• There are numerous reasons why you need to reboot Ubuntu. An example of a reason you would want to restart is if you changed the size of the system’s swap. Unfortunately, applications aren’t aware of changes to the swap till they are restarted.

• Another reason you may want to update the terminal is if you updated your Ubuntu kernel, it won’t be utilized until the system is rebooted.

• Over the following few sections, we will cover three commands you can use to restart your system.

• If you have ever had a process on Ubuntu that wouldn’t close, no matter what you did, it is possible to force kill the process.

• By killing a process, it will be forced to close immediately, meaning if it were just saving, Ubuntu would terminate the process without waiting. This sudden termination could potentially lead to data loss or system instability.

• You should typically only kill a process on Ubuntu if it no longer responds to normal stop commands.

• This tutorial explains how to play media from the Linux terminal in Linux, including Youtube.

• In many scenarios, we may need to play media from the terminal. After reading this tutorial, you will know how to play local media and how to play and download Youtube media from the Linux console.

• Except for installation method examples, made on Debian, this content is valid for all Linux distributions.

• Python is a commonly used programming language that has received many updates over its lifetime, so you will likely need to check the version a system is running.

• It is important to know the Python version running on your machine as each version has changes that may impact whether the code will behave how you expect it. The most significant changes usually occur between major updates. For example, going from Python 2 to Python 3.

• The version number in Python is split into three numbers, 3.10.1. 3 represents a major update, 10 is a minor update, and 1 is a micro update. Each update will also have a “release level” such as alpha, beta, candidate, and final. Final is the version you are most likely to use.

• SSH provides a secure channel to access Linux servers. Sometimes we come across the error “Connection refused” while connecting to SSH servers. There could be several reasons behind the error like the SSH service is inactive, the port is blocked by ufw firewall, the server is using a different port, or because of some IP conflict.Today, we will explore different ways we can resolve the ‘Connection Refused’ issue on an Ubuntu/Debian system.

• SSH Keys are a critical way to significantly enhance the security of your Ubuntu device’s SSH connection.

• These keys are the recommended way for securely connecting to a device, over as someone would have to steal the entire SSH key to gain access to your system.

• Every SSH key is a pair, where one key is used to verify the content signed by another key. The key used to encrypt the connection is called the private key. The key used to verify the contents of this connection is called the public key.

• Over the following few sections, we will show you how to generate an SSH key on Ubuntu and then use it to make a connection.

• Almost six months ago I published a quick guide teaching how to generate a GPG key and use it to sign your git commits. During the creation of the key, I recommended you set an expiration date. Today, my key has expired and I’m taking the opportunity to write this small guide on how to proceed if this happens to you.

Games

• Steam Next Fest is in full swing, and earlier this week we put out some recommendations. Here are a few more games that run great via Proton on Linux to take a look at this month: Cosmoteer, Dredge, and Potionomics.

• Find the new official Steam Deck Docking Station too expensive? Perhaps you might like to take another look at JSAUX, as they’ve announced another upgraded Docking Station.

• Ultima Online is celebrating its 25th anniversary! You know what that means, right? Story time!

• Nothing says “1980s gaming” like a black joystick with a single red fire button. But if you prefer better ergonomics, you can connect modern gamepads to your retrocomputers thanks to a variety of modern-to-classic interface adapters. These typically support just the directional pad and one or two action buttons, leaving out modern features like motion control and haptic feedback.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• It’s not exactly a secret that I’m a die hard Amiga zealot. I’ve previously sung the praise of AmigaOS itself, powerful applications like Amos Pro and Deluxe Paint and the programming tools supplied in a standard AmigaOS installation. This is just scratching the surface: the Amiga is blessed with a large library of excellent software. High quality programs like Lightwave 3D, PageStream, TV Paint, SAS/C and SCALA InfoChannel are some of its big name applications with a proven track record of professional use.

BSD

• In a long series of commits, Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) has added support for the immutable memory mappings on which we reported earlier. We see: [...]

Devices/Embedded

• EV40E67A Curiosity Board The board offers flexible IOs interfaces including one mikroBUS socket, a 40-pin header compatible with Raspberry Pi, three USB ports and two CAN interfaces via header pins. The RJ45 port seen below supports Fast Ethernet (up to 100Mbps).

• The product page mentions that the board also offers secure capabilities such as a Hardware Encryption Engine (TDES, AES, and SHA), True Random Generator) TRNG, Secure Boot with on-chip Secure Key Storage, eight tamper detection pins, six tamper pins and On The Fly scrambling/unscrambling for memories.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Pseudonymous YouTuber and electronics enthusiast “Artillect” has put together a typewriter with a difference, upgrading a vintage Brother AX-25 electronic typewriter into a fully-functional Linux machine.

• “After lots of work, I’ve finally finished turning my typewriter from the 80s into a computer,” Artillect explains of the project. “It’s a fully functional computer running Linux; you can use it to do basically anything that you’d do in a terminal.”

• In my previous post I managed to get the Archimedes A3010 to a point where it could boot up. But there are still things to test and repair. The work continues…

• Now that it boots into the OS from ROM probably the most important thing is the ability to load more software into it. I hooked up the floppy drive, picked a magazine coverdisk out of the box of disks that came with the machine and…

• The Acorn Archimedes is famous as the machine that introduced the world to the ARM processor. There were several different models but the A3010 was a wedge shaped design that was geared towards the home computer market. I had never owned an Archimedes before this and only briefly used the one in the corner of the BBC Micro room in high school. But I thought this was a piece of history worth preserving and I really wanted to try it out properly.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• Diabetes is a life-altering disease and its management is not easy. It required a life-changing routines and personal discipline.

• While there are countless diabetes management application, almost all of them comes with a cost, either they are paid, they do not respect users privacy, or they come populated with ads.

• That is not the case with our choice of the day: Diaguard, it is a free of cost, completely ad-free, tracker-free diabetes management application for Android phones and tablets.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Wireshark 4.0 was released today, and as you might have guessed from the version number, quite a few things have changed since 3.6. If you are a regular Wireshark user we recommend that you pay close attention to the release notes this time around, since it includes quite a few changes. I’ll cover some highlights here, but the release notes go into much greater detail.

• Nextcloud is a free self-hosted open source collaborative cloud platform, that helps you back up, and sync your files, notes, calendars and more. By default, it supports multiple user and user groups which makes it an ideal solution for families, gaming groups, companies to collaborate and share their files among members.

• Moreover, it has a vast rich ecosystem of extensions that extends its functionalities, which can transform it to anything. It is also supported by a strong community of users and developers, who keep it fresh and secure.

• But that is not all, Nextcloud can save your large bookmarking collection that you have in your web browser with its amazing bookmark extension. Nextcloud can be installed easily on a minimal droplet in DigitalOcean in less than a min, and it will cost you few bucks a month. It will keep your data secure, private, and aids you in keeping a remote backup.

Education

• Learning my first programming language was really hard. Learning the second was also hard but probably easier. What about the third or fourth? The Nth? Does each one get easier? Does knowing other languages create new difficulties?

• I just read a paper, Here We Go Again: Why Is It Difficult for Developers to Learn Another Programming Language?, that tries to understand the barriers that developers face when picking up another language.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Access/Content

• Gold OA refers to titles that make all articles free to read on the publisher’s Web site upon publication, thanks to the payment of an APC. Diamond OA, discussed previously on Walled Culture, can be thought of as gold OA with a zero APC. Hybrid journals are another clever publisher trick: they include some articles paid for with APCs, but a subscription is required to access the other material. In effect, publishers get to double dip. That’s really not how open access was supposed to work out…

• Last year, Walled Culture noted that the academic publisher Elsevier enjoys an astonishing profit margin of 30-40%. Those profits, built on the free labour of academics writing about research that has been largely paid for with public money, has allowed Elsevier to go on a spending spree, buying up companies that complement and extend its core business. SPARC – “a non-profit advocacy organization that supports systems for research and education that are open by default and equitable by design” – has a news item about Elsevier’s acquisition of Interfolio, a leading player in the field of Faculty Information Systems (FIS), which tracks a wide range of faculty data. Here’s why that is troubling: [...]

Programming/Development

• Both the Prometheus and the Grafana Loki ecosystems are mostly configured with a large amount of YAML. Since we use both, this has resulted in me writing a fair amount of YAML. I’ve never tried to systematically learn YAML; like a lot of other things to do with configuration files, it’s something that I tended to pick up as I needed to know specific things. I sort of learned general ideas, copied examples, diagnosed and fixed complaints, and so on.

• A while back I decided to install yamllint (well, the Ubuntu version of it) and use it on our YAML files. I expected to find some minor things and small surprises. Instead, I received a litany of warnings, primarily about having too much indentation. This was especially surprising to me because I’d absorbed the story that YAML was extremely picky about whitespace; you had to use two spaces, no more and no less, and carefully line everything up where it was required. Except, apparently, not always, at least as Prometheus and other Go programs accepted YAML.

• Here are the slides I presented for FRnOG #36 in September 2022. They are about Akvorado, a tool to collect network flows and visualize them. It was developped by Free. I didn’t get time to publish a blog post yet, but it should happen soon!

• Recently, I’ve been working with an environmental scientist to refactor a large R package. Let’s call her Jane.

• Jane inherited a mess of code, and had to get it working as quickly as possible. She tidied up it as best as she could in the time, but now that the company depended on it, it needed some attention. We referred to it as her “Russian Doll code” because it had many nested functions, each passing the same giant nested lists back and forth. I could see that it frustrated her every time she had to touch it as she knew there was a better way to structure the code.

• When you prepare for a job interview one of the questions they always tell you to prepare is “What are you most proud of?”. Personally I’ve never been asked that question in a job interview but it kept me thinking. Some years ago I developed the R code for the creation of maps of infrastructure for a Political Sciences project, and I can say that this is one of the projects I’m most proud of. However, it is also true what they say to developers, that nobody cares about how you did it. The final user only cared about what was done, while the research team about what are the possibilities. Due to the confidentiality agreement of the client, I also cannot share a git repository.

• The project taught me so much in terms of technical skills that I have decided to share the how in case it can help somebody else. It is also my way to contribute to the R community since I myself learned R and programming thanks to the kind people who post their experience on the web (and to the ones who have the patience to answer questions in StackOverflow too).

Perl / Raku

• Hey! I know, I know: long time, no blog. I would love to blame the pandemic, but the truth is, I just haven’t been inspired with any sufficiently Perl-y topics lately. Until recently, when I ran into this.

• Now, once upon a time, I wrote a post about a small buglet I had encountered. The post presented the problem, then asked you if you saw the problem, then explained what was going on. So let’s do that again.

• [...]

• But, as it turns out, unlink is fine with getting an empty list (I tested it). So that wasn’t the problem. Still, the last two sentences of the previous paragraph, when combined, contain the answer to the mystery. If you haven’t spotted it by now, you may want to take a moment to reread them carefully and see if I you see it before proceeding further.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• From time to time I find myself trying to move a batch of files that have a similar pattern in their names but doesn’t quite match an easy to write glob pattern. In the past, I used to write quick and dirty scripts — usually in shell script, nothing fancy — to make it easier to move these files around. A few months ago I discovered zmv, a zsh function that is much better than plain old mv to move files around. Since an example is worth a thousand blog posts, let’s jump right into it.

• I mean, almost. Before we start, make sure you have zmv loaded in your shell — it’s not loaded by default: [...]

Leftovers

• We wrote up an astounding old use of technology – François Willème’s 3D scanning and modeling apparatus from 1861, over 150 years ago. What’s amazing about this technique is that it used absolutely cutting-edge technology for the time, photography, and the essence of a technique still used today in laser-line 3D scanners, or maybe even more closely related to the “bullet time” effect.

• For those not familiar, Apple AirTags are an easy way to keep track of your stuff. You just attach them to an item, and then you can track the location of it through your Apple device. While this probably wasn’t the primary initial intent, these have become super popular for checked bags when traveling.

• While some airlines provide baggage tracking, it’s awesome to always know exactly where your checked bag is. It’s especially useful when your bag gets delayed or lost, given how uncommunicative airlines often are.

• Companies were sold the rights to a domain name under contracts that were to last for up to 10 years, but the rights ran out after one year in most cases.

• A phenomenon called “quiet firing” can have the opposite effect — when employers subtly compel staff members to leave their jobs to avoid the messy business of firing them.

• I have sad news that I have decided to shut down the mastodon.technology instance. In accordance with the Mastodon Server Covenant, the server will be shut down no earlier than December 1, 2022.

• [...]

• Last week, with yet more Elon Musk and Twitter news, the fediverse generally experienced extra traffic with an influx of new users. I woke up to mastodon.technology downtime alerts. In the midst of supporting my family, I had to ssh into a server and fiddle with settings.

• I am exhausted.

• This made me realize how little joy I’ve been getting from being an admin. How I’ve come to resent the work I have volunteered to do. I’ve donated countless hours to running the instance, solving both technical and moderation problems, and I’ve always put the instance above my own needs. But I can’t put the instance above the needs of my family.

• The server has also gotten too large and too complex for me to administer. I’ve always been keen to learn the next new skill I need to be an effective admin. But I just don’t have it in me anymore. The monitoring that I have in place is insufficient to solve the current problems and I have zero bandwidth to invest in learning the skills to diagnose and fix the issue.

• There is no lack of different storytelling modes going around and it is quite easy to bundle different modes together. Game of Thrones TV series and Star Trek TNG TV series might both be categorised as TV series, but one is episodic with mostly self-contained independent stories, while the other is a single story with multiple plot lines (and diminishing returns IMO).

• The 1,200 victims of similar scams known to the Global Anti-Scam Organisation, a support group, have collectively lost $250m. Twice that amount was lost by those who contacted CipherBlade, an investigation firm, last year. Total losses for 2021 may have been in the tens of billions, since the “vast majority” of victims do not report the crime, reckons CipherBlade. Using official estimates of scale and revenue figures reported by witness testimonies, the International Justice Mission (IJM), an NGO, calculates that syndicates in Cambodia take in at least $12bn a year from online scams.

• For those who live in countries where there are plenty of abandoned railways, a popular way to explore them has been by means of home made rail carts. These are usually rudimentary rail trolleys with a small internal combustion engine, and a host of fascinating videos of them can be found online. Such a trolley has one disadvantage though — it’s not the most compact of devices. [Cato] has come up with a rail cart that’s extremely portable by replacing the engine with the guts of a pair of hoverboards.

• The V-22 Osprey is an aircraft like no other. The tiltrotor multirole military aircraft makes an impression wherever it goes; coincidentally, a flight of two of these beasts flew directly overhead yesterday and made a noise unlike anything we’ve ever heard before. It’s a complex aircraft that pushes the engineering envelope, so naturally [Tom Stanton] decided to build a flight-control accurate RC model of the Osprey for himself.

• Wendell Berry was warned. I was among the people who warned him. He recounts the collective advice in the pages of the new book that prompted it, The Need to Be Made Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice, about race relations, the Civil War, and a whole bunch of other things that Berry has been writing about for decades.

• They say that the two essential items in any toolbox are WD-40 and duct tape: one thing to make stuff move and another thing to stop stuff from moving. Many hackers would argue that the third essential tool should be hot glue — it stops stuff from moving, but still allows you to move it later if you decide that’s better after all. It also works on loads of stuff ranging from macaroni to microcontrollers. And let’s be honest: who hasn’t done the “pew pew” thing with their glue gun?

• Any project that contains something called a “flux modulator” instantly commands our attention. And while we’re pretty sure that [Retsetman] didn’t invent it after hitting his head on the toilet, this magnetic gearbox is still really cool.

Education

• Last week several teachers were fired from a Budapest high school for joining the protest. The move comes after the government restricted strike action at the beginning of the year.

Hardware

• Earlier this week, Lucid Vision Labs showcased diverse high speed cameras at Vision 2022. These Gigabit cameras offer bandwidth ranging from 2.5 to 25Gbps and some of them include Power-over-Ethernet support.

• Mechanical multi-segment displays have become quite a thing lately, and we couldn’t be more pleased about it. The degree of mechanical ingenuity needed to make these things not only work but look good while doing it never ceases to amaze us, especially as the number of segments increases. So we submit this over-the-top 16-segment mechanical display (Nitter) for your approval.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Specialty outdoor retailer REI Co-op today announced its Opt Outside movement will be permanent for all employees. For this Black Friday, and every Black Friday in the future, the co-op will forgo profits and sales at all locations, and instead pay its more than 16,000 employees to enjoy time outside.

• Since 2015, REI has closed its doors on Black Friday—inviting employees and members to spend time outside rather than shopping. Over the years, Opt Outside has evolved from a response against consumerism to a movement that has advocated for causes important to the co-op, including environmental welfare, inclusivity in the outdoor industry and responsible recreation.

• This year will mark the shift of Opt Outside to an ongoing, permanent, employee benefit.

• As we saw with Theranos, such technology could be worth a tremendous amount. My hope is that unlike Theranos, Rockley has viable tech.

Proprietary

Security

• This tutorial describes both command line and graphical free XSS (Cross-site scripting) scanning and exploitation tools.

• After reading this tutorial you will know how to install and get started with the most popular free tools to find and exploit Cross-site scripting security holes.

• Some of the tools included in this tutorial are already included in Kali Linux and other security-oriented Linux distributions. Yet this tutorial also explains the installation process for all of them.

• This tutorial explains about the Bluetooth security risks and the defensive measures to protect the data and privacy. After reading this tutorial, you’ll be aware of the dangers around your bluetooth devices and you will learn about bluetooth vulnerabilities and attack methods. Of course, the article focuses on the protective measures that you can take to secure your devices.

• This content is optimized for both regular bluetooth device users and users with knowledge on IT security, looking for deeper information on bluetooth security risks.

• The Costa Group, Australia’s leading grower, packer and marketer of fresh fruit and vegetables, has been hit by what it describes as “a malicious and sophisticated IT phishing attack” which could have resulted in passport, bank and superannuation details being leaked, as also tax file numbers.

• In a statement dated 6 October, the company said the attack had taken place on 21 August and it had commenced a review and recovery process with external security consultants from that date onwards.

• “As a result of this we have now established that access to data was confined to a single server at the Costa Corindi (NSW) site, which holds data for the berry category, and that only approximately 10% of the data on the Corindi file server was accessed,” the statement said.

• Costa was started by Francesco Costa, a wine producer from Salina, Italy, who migrated to Australia to raise funds for his vineyard, according to information on the company’s website. He worked in Melbourne, Colac and Geelong before returning to Italy in 1895. It operates in more than 30 rural and regional communities across Australia, with its business support centre located at Ravenhall in Victoria.

• “Yes, you read that right, you get security patches not just for the operating system, but for all of Ubuntu’s open-source applications for a decade.”

Privacy/Surveillance

• But since President Xi Jinping took power in 2012, he has reined in the relatively freewheeling social currents of the turn of the century, using a combination of technology, law and ideology to squeeze dissent and preempt threats to his rule.

• ByteDance is said to have detailed its performance specifics in an internal report that was provided to certain employees. The document – which execs reportedly distributed in August, around the time that they shelved IPO plans and offered to buy back shares – includes the TikTok owner’s revenue, expenses, and other pertinent operational data (excepting a breakdown by division) for the entirety of 2020 and 2021 as well as 2022’s opening quarter.

• TikTok parent ByteDance Ltd. saw its operating losses more than triple last year to above $7 billion as it spent heavily to continue its torrid growth, according to a financial report shared with employees that offers a rare look inside the private company’s closely guarded finances. TikTok parent ByteDance Ltd. saw its operating losses more than triple last year to above $7 billion as it spent heavily to continue its torrid growth, according to a financial report shared with employees that offers a rare look inside the private company’s closely guarded finances.

• According to Sensor Tower, Douyin alone is responsible for around $433.5 million of that number, or around 47%. That means TikTok brings in the lion’s share of the revenue for ByteDance. Sensor Tower estimates that both TikTok and Douyin have brought in an estimated $6.3 billion in total revenue since it was introduced.

• That number continues its rise despite subscriptions and paid downloads on both the App Store and Google Play dropping by 4.8% yearly. App downloads for both are also down 1% this quarter, compared to last.

• Facemash operated exactly how it sounds: it “mashed” faces together to compare them against each other.

• Moira Weigel, a writer/editor and junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, discussed Facemash in a piece for The New Yorker published yesterday. The article states that the site used “I.D. photos of female undergraduates scraped [read: hacked] from the university’s online directories” and that it “presented users with pairs of women and asked them to rank who was ‘hotter.’” The homepage proclaimed: “Were we let in for our looks? No. Will we be judged on them? Yes.”

• By the end of Facemash’s launch day, at least 22,000 votes were cast on the site.

• But by Sunday night, outrage from individuals and student groups led Zuckerberg, who said he never expected such widespread publicity, to shut down the site for good.

• By that time, Zuckerberg said, there had been 450 visitors to the site who had voted on their peers’ photos at least 22,000 times.

• “I don’t see how it can go back online. Issues about violating people’s privacy don’t seem to be surmountable. The primary concern is hurting people’s feelings,” Zuckerberg said. “I’m not willing to risk insulting anyone.”

• [...]

• But according to computer rules and responsibilities printed in the handbook and the FAS Computer Services website, Zuckerberg’s website likely violates campus computer use policies.

• “Everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds. You can’t do that without using it.”

• Meta’s VR social network Horizon Worlds — the company’s flagship “metaverse” app — is suffering from too many quality issues and even the team building it isn’t using it very much, according to internal memos obtained by The Verge.

• [...]

• A key issue with Horizon’s development to date, according to Shah’s internal memos, is that the people building it inside Meta appear to not be using it that much. “For many of us, we don’t spend that much time in Horizon and our dogfooding dashboards show this pretty clearly,” he wrote to employees on September 15th. “Why is that? Why don’t we love the product we’ve built so much that we use it all the time? The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?”

• In a follow-up memo dated September 30th, Shah said that employees still weren’t using Horizon enough, writing that a plan was being made to “hold managers accountable” for having their teams use Horizon at least once a week. “Everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds. You can’t do that without using it. Get in there. Organize times to do it with your colleagues or friends, in both internal builds but also the public build so you can interact with our community.”

• The answer is right in front of Shah’s face: Horizon obviously sucks. Early-development bugginess wouldn’t keep employees from wanting to use it if it were exciting and fun. If Horizon were promising, they wouldn’t have to mandate using it — they’d have to fight to keep employees from trying to get in on the beta.

• Using a turd of a product more isn’t going to make employees fall in love with it. You either love something — or someone — or you don’t. You can’t be forced to fall in love.

Confidentiality

• PGP’s only remaining purpose, then, aside from being a redundancy in case the other encryption gets wrecked, is to protect you from your own email provider. And that’s not nothing. This might sound tinfoil, but it’s a fact that Gmail has bots that read your email and uses that to target ads. And on the smaller more indie (and less traffic) operators, it’s even more likely that an op will get a chance to sneak a li’l peak.

Defence/Aggression

• High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell called the seizure of the nuclear power plant “illegal, and legally null and void,” and said a reinforced International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) “presence at the site and its unhindered access to the plant are urgently needed in the interest of the security of Europe as a whole.”

• Earlier in the day, the IAEA reported that the Zaporizhzhia plant, the biggest in Europe, had lost its only external power source as a result of renewed Russian shelling and was forced to rely on emergency diesel generators.

• “PRC authorities continue to wage a campaign of repression against the Tibetan community,” U.S. Special Coordinator for Tibetan Issues Uzra Zeya said at a gathering held on the sidelines of UN Human Rights Council meetings this week in Geneva, Switzerland.

• Central to Beijing’s campaign to fully absorb Tibet into China is its plan to install a Dalai Lama of its own choosing as a puppet leader when the current 87-year-old Tibetan spiritual leader, now living in exile in India, someday dies, Zeya said.

• “The PRC views this co-optation as critical to eroding international support for Tibet and completing its forcible ‘Sinicization’ of the six million Tibetans living in the PRC,” the U.S. diplomat added.

• In the 30-page report, entitled “Tibet, the Dalai Lama, and the Geopolitics of Reincarnation,” ITN found evidence of China’s plans to use the Dalai Lama’s passing as a “strategic” and “historic” opportunity to firm up its control of the region, based on two, previously unseen Chinese policy documents.

• Central to the plan is China’s intention to co-opt the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama and name a pro-Beijing leader in his place, said the report, which was launched Tuesday at a side event of the 51st Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland, sponsored by the U.S. and cosponsored by the U.K., Canada, Czech Republic and Lithuania.

• In what was described as a harsh rebuke of Russia, the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Ukrainian human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties, along with Belarusian human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski and the Russian human rights organization Memorial. While at first glance, the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties might sound like a group that is well deserving of this honor, Ukrainian peace leader Yurii Sheliazhenko wrote a stinging critique.

• The FSB will be responsible for ensuring protection of the Crimean Bridge, according to a decree on “strengthening security measures for transport across the Kerch Strait.”

• The Russian Ministry of Transport says train traffic is now allowed on the bridge between Russia and Crimea, where a train caught fire around 6:00am on October 8. The ministry published a video of a test train with 15 cars successfully crossing the bridge. A dozen passenger trains are scheduled to cross the bridge overnight.

• Russian news outlet Baza has shared a video from a man who says he is the owner of the truck which was blown up on the bridge between Crimea and Russia early this morning.

• “The extent of the damage was difficult to immediately assess, though any impediment to traffic on the bridge could have a profound effect on Russia’s ability to wage war in southern Ukraine,” The New York Times reported. “Videos showed the railroad burning and two of four lanes of roadway collapsed into the Black Sea, where waves lapped the asphalt.”

• The explosion on the bridge between Crimea and Russia was an operation of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), reports Ukrainian Pravda, citing a source in law enforcement. The Ukrainian Independent News Agency (UNIAN) reported the involvement of the SBU, citing its own source in law enforcement.

• The Nobel Peace Prize selection ignores a side of the war that saw even Amnesty International denounced for observing.

• “The resumption of shelling, hitting the plant’s sole source of external power, is tremendously irresponsible.”

• President Joe Biden has a lot of reasons to be furious with his national security team who, against his better judgment, systematically pressured him for 18 months to do an about-face on Saudi Arabia.

• The first trains after the explosion on Russia’s bridge to Crimea will run by 8:00pm Moscow time, reports Interfax, citing Russia’s Ministry of Transport.

• Three people were killed by the explosion on the bridge linking Russia to Crimea on Saturday, Russia’s Investigative Committee has said. According to preliminary reports, the victims were in a nearby vehicle when the explosion occurred.

Environment

Energy

• “We find no evidence that Bitcoin mining is becoming more sustainable over time,” said UNM Economics Associate Professor Benjamin A. Jones. “Rather, our results suggest the opposite: Bitcoin mining is becoming dirtier and more damaging to the climate over time. In short, Bitcoin’s environmental footprint is moving in the wrong direction.”

• So, if you are planning to follow the advice of energy experts here in Europe (and watch out, quite a few are not experts at all, just echo chambers) to reduce your electric energy consumption and save money, consider the following points (their idea is to unplug chargers you don’t use).

• The first — and only — cobalt mine in America in decades opened Friday in Idaho amid rising demand for the unique metal, a key component in electric vehicle batteries and battery storage.

• The media’s treatment of the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage is reminiscent of a time in the 60s when disaster could have been avoided with responsible reporting.

Wildlife/Nature

• I learned later that I was not alone in this feeling. It is called the “Overview Effect” and is not uncommon among astronauts, including Yuri Gagarin, Michael Collins, Sally Ride, and many others. Essentially, when someone travels to space and views Earth from orbit, a sense of the planet’s fragility takes hold in an ineffable, instinctive manner. Author Frank White first coined the term in 1987: “There are no borders or boundaries on our planet except those that we create in our minds or through human behaviors. All the ideas and concepts that divide us when we are on the surface begin to fade from orbit and the moon. The result is a shift in worldview, and in identity.”

• It can change the way we look at the planet but also other things like countries, ethnicities, religions; it can prompt an instant reevaluation of our shared harmony and a shift in focus to all the wonderful things we have in common instead of what makes us different. It reinforced tenfold my own view on the power of our beautiful, mysterious collective human entanglement, and eventually, it returned a feeling of hope to my heart. In this insignificance we share, we have one gift that other species perhaps do not: we are aware—not only of our insignificance, but the grandeur around us that makes us insignificant. That allows us perhaps a chance to rededicate ourselves to our planet, to each other, to life and love all around us. If we seize that chance.

Finance

• There are many reasons for this, but one of them has to do with the untraceable money flows, orchestrated by expensive tax lawyers, making use of fiduciary corporate management businesses, offshore vehicles or empty shelf companies.

• It is because of well-known and non-transparent tax dodging islands like Grenada, the Seychelles, St. Kitts, Nevis and the British Virgin Islands. Or Delaware – it is whispered that Biden’s home-state houses 25% of all black money in the world.

• It is astonishing and disgusting that it is still possible for so many countries, amongst which until a few years ago also Luxembourg, to offer nasty loopholes for the ultra-rich to minimize their taxes or evade them altogether by stashing money in non-transparent countries.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Our map shows that different technologies are being tested or implemented across Member states, often without most citizens even knowing about it. Our lives are being tracked without our consent, and our personal data, also those of children and youth, saved without our knowledge.

• What could this look like in real life?

• These seven cases below paint a daunting picture on the use of these technologies in cities across Europe. Let’s have a closer look.

• Facial recognition technology has been the most discussed of the RBI technologies. However, there seems to be little understanding of the ways in which this technology might be applied and the potential impact of such a broad range of applications on the fundamental rights of European citizens.

• The development of RBI systems by authoritarian regimes which may subsequently be exported to and used within Europe is of concern. Not only as it pertains to the deployments of such technologies but also the lack of adequate insight into the privacy practices of the companies supplying the systems.

• Four main positions have emerged with regard to the deployments of RBI technologies and their potential impact on fundamental rights: [...]

• More than six months after an “agreement in principle” between the EU and the US, US President Joe Biden has signed the long-awaited Executive Order that is meant to respect the European Court of Justice’s (CJEU) past judgments. This is meant to overcome limitations in EU-US data transfers. The CJEU required (1) that US surveillance is proportionate within the meaning of Article 52 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights (CFR) and (2) that there is access to judicial redress, as required under Article 47 CFR. Biden’s new Executive Order seems to fail on both requirements. There is continuous “bulk surveillance” and a “court” that is not an actual court.

• Foreign actors are “likely” to use “information manipulation” to try to influence the 2022 election, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and FBI warn in a new bulletin.

• [...]

• CISA is the cyber arm of the Department of Homeland Security.

• On Thursday, a judge gave Musk and Twitter until Oct. 28 to close their deal, end a bitter months-long legal fight and avoid a high-profile trial. While there’s no certainty Musk may not have another change of heart, if he does assume control of Twitter, what would that look like? He has given hints but also left plenty of questions unanswered.

• A Meta spokesperson confirmed the decision to Variety, sharing that temporary restrictions on posting, commenting and messaging are standard practice for accounts that regularly violate the social media platform’s policies. The company did not indicate which specific posts were the cause behind the restriction.

• Amongst the allegations, the group claim that Associated hired private investigators to bug their cars and homes, hired people to listen into their telephone conversations, paid police for inside information, impersonated staff at hospitals and clinics to obtain information and accessed bank accounts and financial transactions “through illicit means and manipulation.”

• On assassination, Armageddon, the first twenty minutes of a girlfriend’s call, the International WTF Summit, and the missing American peace movement.

• With just over four weeks to Election Day, the Democratic Party still has time to realize its limitations, which have led to them losing winnable races, or barely squeaking by at the federal and state levels. Imagine the worst, most corrupt, lying, dictatorial GOP since its creation in 1854 having their most dangerous and extreme candidates win elections.

• Seven out of ten Republicans—like seven of ten Democrats—believe that American democracy is in danger of collapse.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Beijing introduced the wide-ranging law – which made it easier to prosecute protesters – in the city in 2020.

• Many who defy the Chinese government have since been jailed, removing much of the political opposition.

• Summoned to Turkey’s Foreign Ministry, Swedish Ambassador Staffan Herrstrom was told that the “impertinent and ugly expression and images” about Erdoğan and Turkey were unacceptable, according to Anadolu.

• The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has stepped up its censorship of social media ahead of its five-yearly congress, with users complaining that it was no longer possible to “speak normally” using Douyin, Weibo and WeChat.

• GFW Report, a project that tracks changes in China’s Great Firewall, said that protocols like trojan, Xray, V2Ray TLS+Websocket, VLESS, and gRPC have all stopped working on Monday.

• All are TLS-based protocols used for tunneling internet traffic via port 443 or any other custom port.

• There are also people who hold an orthodox view of cinema and label it as “un-Islamic”. A 40-something man in Shopian, who was detained under the Public Safety Act soon after the abrogation of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status and spent a couple of years in a Lucknow jail, said he was ideologically opposed to the opening of wine-shops and cinema halls in Kashmir.

• The government seems aware of these underlying dynamics: hence, in Shopian and Pulwama, where two small auditoriums are being readied, the focus is on infotainment and skill development features.

• Onur Şener, a musician working at an entertainment venue in the capital Ankara, has been killed by three people with whom he argued on the grounds that he didn’t know the song they requested.

• “Unfortunately this book is not approved to print in China as content involves anti-Communist,” a 1010 Printing representative told Zaklikowski by email. “Now the only option is printing outside of China.”

• The rejection offers a rare window into the collision of Western book production, Chinese limits on free speech, and geopolitics. All content printed or published in any medium in China has to secure the approval of the Chinese Community Party-controlled government, even if, as in this case, the book is in English and destined for distribution abroad. Russia’s war on Ukraine, with China acting as one of Russia’s only major supporters in the world, appears to have had cascading effects on a book intended for American Jewish readers.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• This regulation will intervene in the internal media market looking forward to improving the quality of media services and strengthening the integrity of the media market as a whole. EDRi finds particularly important the provisions regarding the prohibition of spyware against journalists and the rules bringing “more protection for media against unjustified online content removal”. This could increase the legal standards against surveillance of journalists and harmonise rules when it comes to online disinformation. In light of this, this new regulation should be read as a complementing legal framework that includes the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Digital Markets Act and soft law instruments such as the Recommendation on the protection, safety and empowerment of journalists (2021).

• “If they can silence Assange, they can silence anyone.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• Undersecretary of the Treasury Brian Nelson said, “The rights to freedom of expression and of peaceful assembly are vital to guaranteeing individual liberty and dignity. The United States condemns the Iranian government’s internet shutdown and continued violent suppression of peaceful protest and will not hesitate to target those who direct and support such actions.”

• The sanctions freeze any assets the seven Iranians might hold in the U.S. and blocks them from making any financial transactions, while prohibiting Americans from doing business with them.

• The concerns over witness intimidation and bullying targeting Bill C-11’s critics continues to attract attention on Parliament Hill as Senators spent more than an hour debating the issue earlier this week. The issue stems from a Globe and Mail report that Canadian Heritage Parliamentary Secretary Chris Bittle – together with his colleague, Liberal MP Lisa Hepfner – sent a letter to the Lobbying Commissioner to seek an investigation into the funding of Digital First Canada, a group representing digital first creators. DFC’s Executive Director, Scott Benzie, appeared before the Heritage committee in the spring and Bittle used his time to focus on the organization’s funding. The Lobbyist Commissioner letter was apparently filed more than two months ago and Benzie had been assured that he was compliant with the law. The story was presumably leaked to coincide with Benzie’s appearance before the Senate committee, a tactic that smacked of witness intimidation and bullying with the government seeking to undermine a critic of the legislation. Soon after, Conservative MP John Nater filed a point of privilege in the House of Commons, arguing that Bittle had attempted to intimidate a Senate witness and the matter escalated further at the Senate committee, where multiple Senators raised the issue.

• On Tuesday, the Speaker of the House of Commons dismissed Nater’s point of privilege, finding “this question of privilege stems from the deliberations of a Senate committee. My role as Speaker is limited to only protecting the rights and privileges of the House of Commons and its members.” He added that “it is not immediately apparent that the conduct in question was intended as an attempt to intimidate the witness or an act of reprisal for his appearances before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage.”

Monopolies

Copyrights

• aced with that challenge, the copyright world has lobbied for and obtained ever-harsher copyright laws aimed at discouraging people from making unauthorized copies of digital material. The fact that the industry has come back many times for yet more serious deterrents proves that no matter how stringent, the laws against digital sharing simply do not work.

• The way to address this problem – and the consequence could be huge if companies ignore the risk of being sued for the illegal actions of their employees – is to make copyright fit for the digital age. At the very least, that would entail recognizing that everyone, everywhere, is sharing digital material without permission, and adjusting the law accordingly. Ideally, it would involve a complete re-imagining of copyright – perhaps even its abolition.

• Cease-and-desist notices are an occupational hazard for anyone involved in the unlicensed streaming scene. Some choose to get out while they can to avoid a full-blown lawsuit, but others only see a potentially lucrative gap in the market. Rolling the dice can pay off but it can also go terribly wrong, as a PrimeStreams reseller has just discovered.

• Canadian anti-circumvention laws (also known as digital lock rules) are among the strictest in the world, creating unnecessary barriers to innovation and consumer rights. The rules are required under the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Internet Treaties, but those treaties leave considerable flexibility in how they should be implemented. This is reflected in the countless examples around the world of countries adopting flexible anti-circumvention rules that seek to maintain the copyright balance. Canada was pressured into following the restrictive U.S. approach in 2012, establishing a framework is not only more restrictive than required under the WIPO treaties, but even more restrictive than the U.S. system.

• One of the biggest differences between Canada and the U.S. is that the U.S. conducts a review every three years to determine whether new exceptions to a general prohibition on circumventing a digital locks are needed. This has led to the adoption of several exceptions to TPMs for innovative activities such as automotive security research, repairs and maintenance, archiving and preserving video games, and for remixing from DVDs and Blu-Ray sources. Canada has no such system as the government instead provided assurances that it could address new exceptions through a regulation-making power. In the decade since the law has been in effect, successive Canadian governments have never done so. This is particularly problematic where the rules restrict basic property rights by limiting the ability to repair products or ensure full interoperability between systems.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• On Friday arvo I hopped on a bus and then another bus in order to visit an old friend’s photography exhibition.

• This one was out in the Western Lands of Deer Park, which hold a level of interest for me given that we’d pass through it on the way to Bacchus Marsh airfield on many a Saturday morning, long before the ring roads and bypasses made for a shorter, less interesting journey. Much as this friend has often done over the years, I had one of those moments on the bus where I saw a great photo opportunity out the window, and madly wrote down a reminder to come back and take it on film at a later date, when the sun’s in the right place. In this particular case, it’s another small moment of emptiness encapsulated in a wall – where the blank realm leaked out in to the everyday. I’ll get back there this week, for sure – these moments haven’t happened often lately, to the point that I wonder if either I’ve lost the “feeling”, or that I just need to give up and accept that my phone’s the only camera I’ll ever really use in future. I appreciate how different cameras help you take different kinds of photos, and I hope I can maintain some level of participation in the world of film photography.

• In the city, every day is effectively the same year-round: We do the same things, but dark and cold. Work and school start at the same time. There’s no real prep, flip the thermostat from ‘cool’ to ‘heat’. Instead of resting, we push harder to keep up the same summertime productivity.

• It’s still ~5-15C outside, but pretty soon there will be more than a meter of snow on the ground and it will be tough to do much of anything until April. The mountain noises are chainsaws and log splitters. At the hardware store, people are buying last-minute things to winterize before leaving until next spring. My neighbor up the road built a new shed. The animals are trying to pack on a few more pounds.

• I’m a gearhead. I grew up in and around cars, my grandparents and parents had a Citroën dealership. Before I studied Computational Linguistics, I did a three-year apprenticeship for automobile technician, and I still consider it one of the best times of my life.

• Once in my life, I wanted to buy a new car, and in my late thirties I made that dream come true and bought the last big Citroën with their famed hydropneumatic suspension, a C6 sedan. One of only 3,000 made. I’ve had it for eleven years now, it still looks as beautiful as when it drove out of the showroom, only these days it’s not only sleek, but downright petite in comparison with the SUV craze on our streets. As it was basically already a classic when it rolled off the factory line, I’ve treated it accordingly. I don’t like to take it out when streets are salted, and I basically only use it for long-distance travel. Getting an electric car doesn’t make sense for me at this time. My car parks for months at a time, and then I do 600 kilometers on a weekend.

Politics

• My whole life I’ve been trying to Do The Right Thing. Increasingly, I am unable to determine what The Right Thing is.

• I shop at the Unpackaged Store. Stuff that comes without packaging is weirdly twice as expensive as the packaged alternatives. Local, seasonal vegetables, they cost an arm and a leg compared to the apple from New Zealand. It’s probably the correct price if I want everyone to be paid fairly and not externalize costs, but boy, I can only afford this because I have a good job. When I haul my expensive groceries home on my cargo ebike, along a narro, bumpy bicycle lane that surely leads to broken eggs unless I packaged them really well in the material I brought along, car traffic flows by on a smooth road — when it flows, as the road is too narrow for all the parked SUVs and the ones being driven by angry people doing a quick shop at Lidl, yes I’ll have a bag, thank you.

Technical

• When I started using computers professionally, I got fed up with Windows 95 very quickly. I switched to Linux. Endless tinkering ensued, which ended up as a career starter. I became a sysadmin.

Programming

• This is a small, inflexible li’l Unix filter that reads a single sexp from stdin and prints out Graphviz’ Dot language.

• It features different fonts for strings vs symbols (which you can change with -l and -g respectively).

• When a list starts with another list, a dot-node is inserted to branch things off.

• Despite the emphasis on testing at The Enterprise, no one there was able to answer the simple question I would often ask, “what is a unit test?”

• On thinking about it since I left [1], I don’t think there’s an answer to that question. I’m thinking it really depends upon the language being used, and it’s a similar concept to Design Patterns [2], a collection of patterns seen in Smalltalk development and later forced onto other languages, applicability be damned.

• Since most of the coding I do is in C, a “unit” would most likely be a function, or maybe a collection of functions known colloquially as “a library.” The various components I worked on, like “Project: Lumbergh [3]” or “Project: Sippy-Cup [4]” aren’t libraries, and most functions in those projects are single use that exist just for organizational sake, so of course the “unit” ended up being the entire program.

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