Hello and welcome to episode 243 of Late Night Linux. I'm Joe and we've been in our
failing.
Howdy.
Graham.
Good evening.
And Will.
Hello.
Let's get straight on with our discoveries then.
Will, you hate freedom and so I've got the Amazon spying devices, but you've got something
about rooting them.
Yeah.
Very early Echo dots, the ones that look like a hockey puck have been rooted now.
This is interesting for a couple of reasons. One is interesting if you read the link in
the docs about how they went about rooting this device. The company who developed this original
device Lab126, which is an Amazon internal hardware development company, have actually
done a pretty good job. And there's an interesting bit of information about the security on
the device, the fact that the mute button and the LED are controlled by the kernel that
you can't just write an app that is capable of changing the status of these devices so
that you can't pretend that the microphone is muted when it's actually not. And this
review of the security of the device is generally pretty positive and said that they did do
a good job. What they left in there was some debug options, which allows you to use fastboot
to boot a different kernel. And once you've booted this different kernel, then you're
in and you've got root and you can do what you want. So it's an interesting security overview
of the device. And if you are concerned that it is just stealing your thoughts, this might
make you feel a little bit better about that, that they have put some thought into it.
The things that they claim, like the mute button being a hardware mute button is true.
That's good. But the other side of this is a bit more interesting to us as an open source
podcast, as a Linux podcast. When we talked about Home Assistant launching their year of voice
and how they wanted to create their own voice assistant that would remove the dependency on
people like Amazon, the concern I had was the availability of hardware. Who would want to buy
some 3D printed, janky home made device that is a far-filled microphone and kind of looks
like a massive blob of plastic. Nobody wants that. That hurts. Yeah, you know, I'm looking at you
here. What they want is something that looks like it's been built properly and is decent. And you
can't buy off the shelf, something which is open and also decent. And so this maybe fills that gap.
Maybe you could go and buy some of these first or second gen Echo dots, put your own kernel on
them, run your own open source software on them, and then hook them up to our Home Assistant in your
own home and have a completely closed system that does not rely on the internet to do your voice
recognition. So I'm interested in this for a couple of reasons. One, I think it's a call hack.
And two, I think it's potentially the answer to the biggest problem for Home Assistant in my mind,
which is decent quality, nice looking devices that people would want to use. Yeah, I remember
you saying about the different types of microphones and stuff. Was it near-field, far-field, all
sorts of stuff like that? Yeah, I don't remember. Yeah, now that'd be cool. I mean, I'm not opposed to
the actual idea, but yeah, just don't fancy somebody else from that. That's me thinking you
were going to order several of these. No, they're nice and secure. Not unless I put my own software
on them, and I'd never get around to doing that. So they'd be a right waste of money.
All right, I found in Kaiba, you snuck a KDE thing in here.
I did. So one of the lightning talks during Academy was by Jean Baptiste, the, I don't know,
I was a little bit of his name, from the video land project. And this is based on the fact that
through COVID, obviously, lots of companies had to do remote work. Everybody discovered that.
It worked fine for a lot of stuff, but it was abysmal for things like gaming, being the top one.
Anything where latency is a big issue. So based on using the live VLC or live video
clan library, he has produced a rust-based sort of remote control of computers. And what he does is
he sets up a box beside him that's ruined this thing called Kaiba, which is a AGPL or commercially
licensed available to, which is quite smart. They can sell it to companies that want to offer
it as a service, which is no problem by me. And they are able to get down to about 40 milliseconds,
which is about three frames per second delay, but it'll be roughly down to 20 milliseconds,
which is about one and a half frames. So I mean, near on the same with very little latency.
And as what they're doing is they're using games as the sort of default test case for it,
because if you can get games to work, you can get anything to work. And it seems to be going really
well. I can't see a way to get it right now, but it's definitely something to really watch.
And it's got the ability to forward on input using the quick protocol. So it's like TCP light,
essentially where you can drop a couple of frames where you're looking at the screen,
but you want to make sure that you definitely get all the command inputs that you're sending.
And I don't know when they're going to release. It was just a quick lightning talk on Academy,
but if you've got around 10 minutes of spare and you're interested, definitely a thing to watch.
And I'm really looking forward to this coming out because I've a few projects and clients that have
needed something like this back in COVID days. But you know, if we have a proper replacement,
Rust desk was one that I was using, but there's a bit of a sort of iffyness maybe that some people
have highlighted about that, maybe unfairly as well. But you know, if this thing you can run
your own system, it's a client server protocol brilliant. Graham, let's indulge you with an article
from Technologizer, the end of computer magazines in America. This is by Harry McCracken,
and he talks about how maximum PC and Mac life are ceasing production of the print version
and going digital only. And they are the last two computer magazines, except that then you go
on to say I will apart from Linux magazine and this magazine and this magazine loads of other
ones. But yeah, the main ones are dead. So that's it, the end of computer magazines in America.
And it also laments that the only magazines that are doing well in America are British imports.
So well done, your legacy, I suppose, Graham. Yeah, I mean, I love magazines. I miss working on
magazines a lot. I still do some a bit of freelance work for Linux magazine. And I mean,
the writing was on the wall for us 15, 18 years ago. I think the culture that everybody liked about
magazines was the idea of us a bit like, you know, us talking here in the podcast that we were
some kind of friendship group as a family that were putting this in passion into the pages.
And that was how it was in that time. But magazines since then and now run these magazines in
particular have franchised out from the UK where the content is written as a kind of hate even
calling it content as a content farm aggregated onto different websites and into different
print titles or brands. So that idea of magazines that I think most of us love has been dead
for a long time. And it was part of the reason why we left future and tried to create Linux voice.
But I'm still sad to see titles like this closing. I still think there's a place for
very small scale magazines with a print run of 10,000, 15,000 for a niche where they've got
passionate engagement for the content. And so I don't think they're going to die, but the culture that
maybe those of us of a certain generation remember has been dead for some time.
There's a really interesting photograph towards the end of that article of a new stand,
I don't know where it is maybe. Oh, it says it in a Barnes and Noble. And there's dozens of
different magazines in this picture. And quite a lot of them are guides, not really magazines,
like there's guys to using your camera, there's guys to fortnight. And that seems to be certainly
whenever I've gone through an airport, that seems to be the prominent thing that you buy now.
It's like a mini book, not really a magazine that's about anything, any one topic in depth.
There is also a photo of 2600 magazine, which has been around for a very long time,
and is called out in the article specifically as having the production values of a fan scene,
which is absolutely true, but also I think that's almost what you're talking about,
Graeme, a very small, very focused magazine that is for a particular audience and is
produced in small numbers and has this sort of more, I don't know, fanatical kind of following.
Bull teak. Yeah, yeah. Bull teak, I like it. There you go. But generally speaking, the magazines
that are there are not really magazines as I knew them. You don't buy them to get the news anymore,
because all of that is sort of force-fed to your internet all day. Yeah, and it's interesting,
you mentioned that photo, because there's the hackers manual 2023 up there at the front in that
picture. And a lot of that content was written by me and the Linux format team probably 12 years
ago. And the thing that companies can do is they can make some updates, they can commission a few
articles. They call those things like evergreen content that go alongside the monthly content,
and they'll do a deal with whoever's stocking them on the shelves to have a number of these
every year. And it lets them kind of balance the cost of the content that some of that stuff will
have been originally in the magazine, and then putting these, they called them booker zines.
And so they sell really well, and they sell for a much longer period of time, and then you can
update them with just a couple of new entries. And that's what they've been doing with the hackers
manual ever since we did the Learn to Hack cover feature. What strikes me is that one of the only
magazines that has made it and has survived is Linux magazine, and that's probably because it's
niche, and that kind of ties in with how the internet and culture has gone. There was a time when
you lot were young when there was a very much a style of that time. So if you look at a photo
from the 60s, you know, it's the 60s, the 70s, you know that, the 80s, you know, you can just
instantly tell by the fashions, whereas if you look at a photo from 15, 20 years ago and a photo
from now, you wouldn't necessarily know the difference between them because there's not one cultural
force anymore. There's a million small cultural forces like this show that you're listening to now.
We are part of that. And Linux magazine is probably a similar scale as well. And you've got
probably some magazines of, I don't know, train enthusiasts and stuff. Maybe it's all online.
I don't know, but most likely you've got a podcast for everything or a YouTube channel for everything.
The idea of a magazine on a thousand newsstands across the world and selling hundreds of
thousands of copies, that just seems like it's from a bygone era. It is. I mean, I used to write
for PC Plus and it used to sell over 100,000 copies. And that was in the early 2000s. Linux
formats sold 60,000 copies. And then by the time I left future, I think PC Plus had gone bust and
Linux format was on a small percentage of the original sales. And people have said it before,
but I guess it's a bit like vinyl. You've got to kind of enjoy the experience a little bit and
spoil yourself with a cup of coffee in a magazine on something you're interested in.
Now, there is one magazine still going, which I have subscribed to on and off over the years,
which is wired magazine. Now, there's a UK edition, but there is absolutely a US edition as well.
Now, I don't know, maybe that's published by a UK or European publisher. And so it doesn't count
as far as this article is concerned. But that's a relatively niche article, but covers technology
in a way that I don't think any other magazine does and is still going and has been going for,
well, I don't know, at least 20 years. So it is possible to produce something with high production
values and a relatively broad topic and still keep going. They do tend to have a lot of
big advertisers in wired that perhaps are advertising there as a sort of specialist publication
rather than the sorts of things you'd buy at the airport. But it must be possible to continue
to run a magazine these days. Yeah, the ABC for wired last year was 41,850 copies a month.
That's quite a lot smaller than I thought it would be in the UK. That is anyway.
Oh, okay, okay. That's quite a lot more than I thought it would be then actually.
I mean, I know we've halved about this before, but this whole thing of big companies that need to
expand every month all the time, add in finitum. And I think there's definitely a place for a magazine,
as we've said, to be a set community almost, a community getting involved in stuff. And
the problem I think is when large companies take over a whole load of magazines and then expect
them all to, you know, double their growth every fucking year or something stupid like that.
And I think that's the big problem. I think that's the death of almost all industries where
there's many things that could just take over at a nice level. Everybody gets a job, gets paid
out of it and it brings value to everybody who uses or buys it or whatever. But I think the big
problem is the fact that in a business sense of things, if you're not growing like crazy,
like a cancer essentially, then, you know, you might as well be dead. And I think that's a huge
problem. And I think if there was a way that we could, I don't know, this is really as like get
the kumbaya out here, but like if there was a community way to sponsor and print and make these
things, I think they would do better in the long run for it. And that's exactly where we come back
to like the fanzines or I think that 2600 mag is. Yeah. And I actually buy one magazine called
Electronic Sound, which actually started off as a crowdfunding campaign to create a digital
magazine. They created the digital magazine. It's kind of, it deals with electronic music.
And then the digital magazine was so successful they put it into print. And that must be very,
very small scale. I wonder if anyone's even paid to write for it. But it's super high quality,
beautiful paper, beautiful artwork. And it obviously is doing well.
OK, this episode is sponsored by Collide. If you work in security or IT and your company has
OCTA, this message is for you. Have you noticed that for the past few years, the majority of
data breaches and hacks you read about have something in common? It's employees. Hackers absolutely
love exploiting vulnerable employee devices and credentials, but it doesn't have to be this way.
Imagine a world where only secure devices can access your cloud apps. In this world,
phished credentials are useless to hackers and you can manage every OS, even Linux from a single
dashboard. Best of all, you can get employees to fix their own device security issues without
creating more work for IT. The good news is you don't have to imagine this world. You can just start
using Collide. Collide is a device trust solution for companies with OCTA. And it ensures that if
a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. So I support the show
and visit collide.com slash late night Linux to watch a demo and see how it works. That's
k-o-l-i-d-e.com slash late night Linux. On to a bit of admin then. First of all, thank you
everyone who supports us with PayPal and Patreon. We really do appreciate that. If you want to
join those people, you can go to latenightlinux.com slash support. And remember for various amounts
on Patreon, you can get an advert free RSS feed via just this show or all the shows in the late
night Linux family. And if you want to get in contact with those, you can email show at latenightlinux.com.
Let's do some feedback then. Richard says Graham should take a look at LinkedIn with a J
versus Waller bag. With its bookmark share feature, the entire show could use this. It's really good.
It's quite odd to be called LinkedIn though. That seems like Microsoft are not going to be very happy
about that. I feel like I should tell you about all my business strategies and six sigma and such
forth and how great it is. And I've been my job for excellent number of years. Yeah, cool.
Well, in our Google doc, you see it's underlined in red. Click on it and see what it suggests.
Oh, funny enough LinkedIn. Yeah, but thanks, Richard, for sending that. I took a look. And I've
I really like the article caching feature in Waller bag, which this doesn't seem to do. It's more
like a bookmark manager that you can handle yourself. But it looks like a much better option if you
don't have, if you don't have a VPS with too much capacity, or just want to run something
off a Raspberry Pi. Maybe an old VPS running sent us. My hammer says, I have a discovery for you.
Gum is a very nice tool, which helps make user input look much prettier in shell scripts.
Discovered it today and thought I should share. And yeah, it does seem to do exactly what you said.
Yeah, it's actually pretty nice. Yeah. Every time you use shell script, you then get penalized
about 20 minutes down the road. You go fucking shouldn't rent them by them. Bullocks.
I know we just take it for granted, but it's worth noting that we talk so much about
command line tools and how much we all still live in the terminal and love it. You know, whether
its wheels are assess readers or this or whatever it happens to be, it's just I'd never would have
imagined that we still get so much out of it, you know, so many years later. And I do.
Well, I think it's what sets a proper computer enthusiast apart from just a normal user,
isn't it? Because it doesn't matter what platform you run, there are command line terminals
available for macOS Windows and Linux. And that's one of the draws of Linux is that the terminal
is always the first class citizen. You don't have to use it. You could use something like Linux
Mint or Ubuntu and never open the terminal potentially, but to get the most out of any operating
system. I mean, most of the stuff we link to, the screenshots are fucking macOS.
But the thing is, if a terminal application has done really well, it can actually be far
nicer than many terribly done with generic, shiny, gooey building blocks applications are done.
Whereas you can use color, you can use highlights, you can focus the users attention in the right
way. Whereas a gooey has to compete with all the other shape that's going on on the screen.
And there's no room for kind of distractions. You know, it really forces people to design something
that does the utility that you need from it. And also, it's available over good old SSH as well.
You're not having to worry about forwarding X and whatever. So yeah, it's always good to see
great terminal applications. Achilles wrote to us about a talk that he attended at DevConf
in Bruno. And it's by Matthew Miller and he goes through the history of various fedora releases.
And Achilles says, I don't know if this is relevant to the show itself, but I thought you'd all
enjoy it as a nice little trip down memory lane, a history lesson, and a great way to remember how
far things have come in the last 20 years. There's a lot of drama and negative feelings going
around these days, particularly in the FOS and Linux world. And it's always important to remember
the humble beginnings, I think. So that is pretty cool. But then he gives the links to it and he says,
PS, one of the answers in the Q&A at the end will be of particular interest to some of the hosts.
And then he gives a timestamped link. And it's where Matthew talks about how
immutable is definitely the future and failing is wrong. He says, failing from late night Linux
is totally wrong. And yeah, immutable is the future. It is a good talk. I've not watched
Oliver. I've got pinned in my two watch tabs. I've watched chunks of it every time I get a
bit of spare time, but it's actually it's good. I love that sort of computer historical type stuff.
It's quite great. Nice to see where we have actually come from. It's scary. Some of the
shite that we put up with. And Todd was cool at the time when it came out. Yeah, I haven't talked
to Matthew for ages, but he's a good lad. So yeah, do check it out. Link in the show notes.
So we've got a message from Michael who says, if you're interested in cool ways to learn a programming
language, I recommend exorcism.org. That's EXERCISM.org. I've used it to learn new languages,
as well as practice the ones I know or sort of know. For example, I immensely improved my
bash scripting this way. There are several reasons why I find exorcism stand out.
First, they have a large set of exercises that are tailored for learning different aspects of
programming languages, rather than algorithmic problems. But the major advantages of this platform
is the mentoring system. Once you submit your solution, you can request mentoring. Depending on
the language track, you may get a response within hours or days, and you can start a conversation
and iterate on your solution. It is absolutely amazing how much you can learn from a tiny little
exercise. Once an expert takes it apart. Anyway, I thought you may be interested since learning
Python has been mentioned a bunch recently. This sounds like an idea that I had, which was a
training site where you would get experts to come and volunteer their time to help people,
to mentor them and give something back to the industry. But it seems that exorcism
have already done this, and it's free to use and the rely on donations of money and time
crucially. Because it's one thing to just give you a bunch of resources, but this looks like
there are people volunteering their time to teach other people and give something back.
So this does sound like a really cool project to me.
Because you could see from the likes of Stakashan, the various versions of whether it
are in programming or sissa minsof, there's people out there who like to not play a point
game, but just like to help. If you can give back to people in this sort of way,
then that's kind of cool if they can make a nice sort of fair enumeration of both time and
energy for people to go through it. It's quite cool. What I like about this method of teaching
is that you learn the idiomatic ways of writing the language from a person rather than from
just like reading it. So you write a solution to the problem and somebody comes along and suggests,
yeah, but you should, I don't know, you should format it like this or like this is a better way of
doing it. Those little tweaks are the difference between reading it in a book and just
learning it parrot fashion and actually being taught a better way of doing things.
Stuart said, I thought you guys would get a kick out of this and it's an MSN article which is
basically just screenshots of a Reddit thread with someone who basically said they can't use
windows for religious reasons. And then there's this whole debate about whether or not that is an
actual thing that you can get away with and they demanded to use Linux anyway. And it's quite a funny
thread to read through, but it's all a bit silly. But I think the punch line of it, the outcome
was that they actually did end up with a Linux machine from the company. So they won. So well,
done that person who found a loophole to get a Linux machine except to get the Mandrake 7 or
something like that probably 1997. What the fuck makes a news article these days? Screenshots
apparently. Jesus Christ. At least it wasn't written by chat GPT or maybe it was.
I heard the funniest thing in French apparently chat GPT is, what's the cat I farted if you're
to say it in English? It's like, chat GPT. So it's like everywhere in TV, like straight face
news presenters saying, cat I farted over and over for things like is cat I farted going to steal your
job? Accurate. It makes you want to move to France and enjoy those. Well, give back those Brexit
freedoms. Anyway, we're about to get out of here then. We'll be back next week when
who knows. But until then, I've been Joe. I'm in Vellum. I really have been Graham. And I've been
well. See you later.
you