● 06.14.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 14/06/2023: Flatpak’s Sandboxing Works and Social Web

Posted in News Roundup at 12:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• 1. A cultural difference that I notice is that it would appear Japanese people have a much better sense of their place within a larger whole than Americans do. We are so obsessed with individuality and uniqueness that we miss the value of our place in the whole. Thusly, we often lack pride in the larger things we are a part of, like our country, culture, home.

Science

• I’ve been thinking lately that I need to be more vocal about my feelings on the mad movement/mad pride and my criticisms of psych as a field.

• I’m always frustrated by how controversial it seems to be to point out that a lot of psych is still pseudo-science, systems of control and bigotry dressed up in p-hacking and wishful thinking.

• I don’t know.

• I feel like I often get treated like I’m anti-science when I say these things but I’m not. I just think there’s a lot in the past century of history that’s flawed and needs to be rebuilt off of different foundations. This doesn’t seem controversial to me. I’ve worked in sciences like physics that are full of reinventions and massive re-understandings of the field, and that’s about comparatively simple systems to—say—a living thing.

Technology and Free Software

• I have a complicated relationship with Youtube like, I imagine, a lot of people. While I really dislike everything that Google is doing with the platform and their idiotic algorithm, there are tons of exceptionnaly good content on the platform.

• Before the pandemic I did what everyone else did: I came into the office five days a week only to mostly spend most of my time at a computer, with headphones on to block out the noise; we would talk at lunch. For a while we played Switch games together once a week.

• I even worked with a team based in another country, for well over a year, from the office. I would come in every day to my desk in an open plan office full of people working on entirely unrelated projects. It simply didn’t occur to me that it would make more sense to work from home.

• [...]

• Then everything changed. We had to work from home. I got lucky, very lucky: we had just moved from a just-big-enough apartment to a house with room for an “office”. So, I got my new working space—in the basement, but with a pretty nice window.

• [...]

• I love being able to focus on my work: to put on music, if I want; or not, if I want; to dance or do push-ups or sit for a while if it gets to be too much.

• There’s a trend back towards working in offices, or at least there seems to be a push for it coming from somewhere.

• That’s fine for some, I guess. I have discovered what I like, and it’s working from home; to be alone with my thoughts then to step outside my office and be with my family. Bliss.

• Flatpak is an alternate distribution method for Linux. By default, programs are sandboxed from the rest of the system.

• An often made statement by critics of Flatpak is the insistence that this isn’t real security, because a package maintainer can change its security settings to poke holes in the sandbox. (This is allowed because some software relies on it for functionality.)

• Recently, malware was released through Minecraft mods on CurseForge, and possibly other modding platforms. It was a wide attack that ended up causing several mods and modpacks to be affected. Installing and running any of the mods causes the system to be infected.

Internet/Gemini

• I’m sat in the garden today. It’s very warm; breezy too, but the breezy just brings a slightly different kind of warmth. We have a weather warning for thunderstorms later, so we’ll see what that brings.

• I’m encouraged at the moment by the social web and the fediverse. There’s a growing understanding that the fabric of our online lives can’t be run in a VC-backed, for-profit manner.

• I’ve really been enjoying Mastodon. Compared to other social media, there is undoubtedly more of an initial effort to be made in uncovering interesting people to follow. I’ve been dropping into a few other instances to find those interesting people; FOSS and gamedev related. I guess it’ll take a while to understand and refine the process, but it’s fun to follow the chain of people and topics ever-deeper.

• [...]

• I’ve also been liberally using the block button, mainly on bot feeds which are just polluting the water with low-effort RSS spam.

• It was fairly easy a transition: except for the part where I could access my capsule for about three minutes, but *too* soon couldn’t again for over half an hour, making me wonder if I’d completely wasted my time, and possible others’ time for having announced my new capsule address. Egg is never far from one’s face online….

• New setup! When visiting the site from the web, you’re no longer being redirected to port 1966. Instead, Apache now acts as a reverse proxy.

• The following config requests new certificates from Let’s Encrypt automatically thanks to mod_md.

• HTTP requests are redirect to HTTPS. HTTPS requests for “/.well-known” URLs are left untouched for the Let’s Encrypt renewal to work. All other HTTPS requests are proxied to the old port 1966.

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