LINUX Unplugged - 568: All Your Silos are Broken

Episode Date: June 24, 2024

Online identity is a ticking time bomb. Are trustworthy, open-source solutions ready to disarm it? Or will we be stuck with lackluster, proprietary systems?Sponsored By:Core Contributor Membership: Take $1 a month of your membership for a lifetime!Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!1Password Extended Access Management: 1Password Extended Access Management is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps.Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FMJupiter Broadcasting MeetupsXZ Utils Backdoor Vulnerability (CVE-2024-3094): Comprehensive GuideThe Mystery of ‘Jia Tan,’ the XZ Backdoor MastermindWho is ‘Jia Tan,’ the coder behind the XZ Utils Linux backdoor?Reflections on Distrusting xzThe Linux kernel does not accept anonymous contributions due to legal reasons. — The Linux kernel does not accept anonymous contributions due to legal reasons.Kernel.org Docs on contributions — It is imperative that all code contributed to the kernel be legitimately free software.Elon Musk wants to ‘authenticate all real humans’ on Twitter.Elon Musk claims alien identity, links human brain function to AI purposeElon Musk Finally Realizes That Verification Requires More Than A Credit Card, Planning To Make Users Upload Gov’t IDElon Musk can show the world how to really do IDWorld IDNostr: All Your Silos Are BrokenNostr Iceberg MemeNIP-01Mapping Nostr keys to DNS-based internet identifiersNavigating the social graph — In this paper, you will find a definition of the social graph, principles for thinking about it, and practical ideas for using it for DoS prevention, social discovery, anti-impersonation, accurate ratings, and more.Highlighter — Highlighter is like Substack & Patreon but on Nostr.Satlantis — Satlantis is like Trip Advisor, meets Instagram and Google Places.HiveTalk — Free Video Calls, Messaging and Screen Sharingzap.stream — Twitch alt powered by value for value and NostrostrGit — A truly censorship-resistant alternative to GitHub that has a chance of working.Blogstack — Write decentralized blogs over relay using nostr w/ ⚡ lightning tips.Ditto — Ditto is a Nostr community server. It has a built-in Nostr relay, a web UI, and it implements Mastodon's REST API.UseNostrawesome-nostrDecentralized publishing for the webNostr AppsNosta — New to Nostr? You're in the right place. Here you can easily set up your profile, discover apps, and browse other profiles.Amethystamethyst: Nostr client for AndroidyanaPrimal AppDan's Nostr RelayMembership Summer Discount — Take $1 a month of your membership for a lifetime!SpeechNote — Speech Note let you take, read and translate notes in multiple languages. It uses Speech to Text, Text to Speech and Machine Translation to do so.rhasspy/piper: — A fast, local neural text to speech system.Starship — The minimal, blazing-fast, and infinitely customizable prompt for any shell!starship on GitHubZSH Docs: ZDOTDIRdistrobox-assemble — distrobox-assemble takes care of creating or destroying containers in batches, based on a manifest file.Pick: Gathio — Gathio is a simple, federated, privacy-first event hosting platform.

Did the studio stink when you arrived this morning? Did you get any weird whiffs? No. Okay. Although it did seem like you might be trying to ventilate in here. I was. I'm trying to cover smells. You know, it's, gosh, things that you don't ever expect that go into making a podcast.

Here's a little insight on how today started. So I wake up and my dog's lazy. And he usually comes in with me, but he doesn't want to come in this morning because he doesn't want to get out of bed. And I figure, why make him, right? So I leave the dog at home. And I'm pulling up, and it's just crappy weather. It's been really nice here for the last few days. And when it gets hot, what I've had to do recently is I crack the door on the garage.

And then I crack the inside door as well to get a complete airflow. Despite cottonwood fears. Yes, this has caused a cottonwood incident in the garage. And then I cracked the inside door as well to get a complete airflow. Despite Cottonwood fears. Yes, this has caused a Cottonwood incident in the past, but we're past Cottonwood season, so I figured, safe. Plus, it gets above 80 degrees in that garage, and we got server gear out there, and I just don't want to cook it.

So I left, and then the kids got out of school midweek, and so I've been working from home and haven't come back to the studio. So when I'm rolling up, I'm like, huh, I probably didn't leave that garage door cracked for that long. But, you know, it's not cracked that big. It's not like, you know, what could really get through there? Maybe a rat.

That's not great, but it's not a big deal. So I parked the car. I open up the front door, and I come in. And this super surprised, I mean, more more surprised than i was cat looks up on the couch who's just been this big fluffy cat has just been chilling on the couch they got in under the garage door came through the inner door well nobody's been here for like the last three days four days amazing made themselves comfortable on the living room couch saw me thought what a human's here took off bolting and i think that cat bolted into this studio somewhere oh no so if you hear if you hear a bunch of noise or disruption the

cat didn't leave the building no but the second cat did there were two there were two there were apparently two cats and one of them i think peed um because i'm coming down the stairs and a less fluffy cat like a more of like us this cat's a it'm coming down the stairs and a less fluffy cat, like a more of like a, this cat's a fighter. I've seen this cat. This cat's like a bruiser. And this big old cat sees me, I see it, and it takes off and runs out through the garage.

And as it's going under the garage door, it looks back at me like, see ya sucker! So now I, you know, now I got a stinky studio with a cat somewhere in here. I don't know where. Are you saying I shouldn't have made friends with the neighborhood cats when I was there last? Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show.

My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen. Well, coming up on the show today, we're tackling the topic of online identity and how it is impacting open source and a lot more online, and how free software has solved it before commercial vendors have really gotten off the start line. Then we're going to try something new in the pick, so stick around for that, and we'll round it out with some great boosts and more. So before we go any further, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our mumble room. Hello, virtual lug!

Hello! Happy Linux Sunday! Hello, thank you. Look at that. Look at that. That's a great showing up there in that quiet listening. We've got a handful here that are brave enough to be on air, too. We love having you on board. And our mumble room details on our website. You can join us every single Sunday. We love it when you do. And a big good morning to Tailscale. Tailscale.com slash unplug. That's the easiest way to connect devices and services to each other. And when you go to Tailscale.com slash unplug, you'll get 100 devices for free. Build a simple network across complex infrastructure. Connect your LAN to your VPS to your mobile devices. Replace legacy VPN infrastructure in just minutes.

Go get started. It's changed the way I network. We no longer have any inbound ports on our firewalls. Tailscale.com slash unplugged. Now, before we get into the meat of the show today, and it's a meaty one, I wanted to remind everybody that if you're in the Pacific Northwest and you can make it out to Spokane Saturday, July 13th at 4 p.m.,

we're going to have a meetup somewhere. We're just debating locations. As per usual. Yeah, yeah. You know, the breweries have worked well, but we want it to be all ages. We like it low-key, somewhere where we can just kind of like call them the night of and be like, hey, do you mind if 15 of us stop by?

It's usually pretty low key. So if you got any suggestions, please do let us know. And then Brent's going back to Berlin in September. I sure am. Yeah, there's the NextCloud conference that we're throwing again this year, which had tons of fun there last year with our JB community as well. So Saturday,

September 14th, we're doing a little meetup at the conference. So if you want to join us in Berlin, please do. There's people traveling a little from all over the world to come join. So we'd love to have you too, if you're interested. And then we have a question for you. So please do boost in with your advice. What should we replace the Knicks drinking game with? We're willing to take our punishment.

So we'll do something. But I think it turns out we're lightweights. We're officially almost through the one bottle of vodka. And I think that's about all we can take. Is it because last episode went off the rails? Is that how you're feeling? And the episode before. And yeah, it's just, it's too much.

I'm an old man. I'm an old man. Maybe we can bring it back. You know, we could switch to the traditional one every once in a while or something. Maybe there's a way to bring it back into rotation. We need some advice because we're willing to take our punishment,

but we don't know really what to replace it with. We do have the bottle here still, though, so should it come up in the show, we'll finish off the bottle of vodka. Made in California, apparently. There you have it.

Boosted, let us know what you think we should replace the next drinking game with. And when we talk about identity, it seems like such a broad meta topic. And there's so many slices of this that you could take a look at. And I thought maybe we should start with just how online identity, something that's truly trustable and verifiable, is something that's impacted free software development in the last few years. The XE vulnerability has kicked off this conversation around how to know who is truly submitting to a project and trust that person. And how do we vet these people? And how do we vet these people?

And how do we trust these people? Wired has a great post called The Mystery of Giatan, the XE backdoor mastermind, which we'll link in the show notes. As well as The Verge has a piece called Who is Giatan? The coder behind the XE utils Linux backdoor.

And then there's a Hacker News thread that's really good on reflections on that whole event that get into identity. And then not that long ago, LWN.net published an article titled Verifying the Identity of Developers. And they wrote in there, it's probably a dystopian future that none of us want. But what if GitHub required all contributors to use their real name and strongly verified their identity? You know, in other words, what if we outsource this problem to GitHub? The Linux kernel has an issue with accepting anonymous contributions due to legal reasons. And of course, we do also remember, what do we call that University of Michigan attack

where they got false code? Did they have a name for that? But we remember that kind of quote unquote experiment where they got bogus code injected into Linux kernel. Again, that was based on identities and false trust. So it's a challenging problem, I think, in free software. And we don't really have any way of solving it right now, seemingly, because it's such a distributed system. It's not like a commercial platform.

You could solve some of this with having people that are at least on GitHub KYC for everything and then tie like their accounts to like some sort of government identity or something. And then you'd have essentially Microsoft acting as who is authoritative and trustable or not. And it's obviously a problem we keep sort of coming back to iterating both in the whatever the Facebook era, but also in like the early days of the net right I mean these days we've seen stuff like Keybase trying things out

obviously there's you know people do you know key sign in and swap back in the day key sign in parties yeah right encrypted email and you know sign messages have been a thing for a long time but we don't actually seem to be using much of it do we not at scale no and I think in part of it it's just too complicated maybe people don't realize it and

it's left this vacuum like elon musk has talked a lot about wanting to authenticate all real humans and um well i got some links to that you know one of them is elon musk finally realizes that verification requires more than a credit card, planning to make users upload government ID. Sam Altman launched WorldCoin, which utilizes WorldID to scan your iris and then tie your identity to a token on the blockchain, which sounds horrific and dystopian. I mean this thing has been blocked in several countries and there's like some human rights violations going on with this thing. It's not good. No, it is not good.

And it's because there is this opening in the market that they can even propose these ludicrous situations and or solutions. And they're not the only ones. The commercial world is gearing up like crazy to solve this. There have been products now for years. And we've already even seen just on a like like not on a, maybe even global layer, but just the proliferation of ways to sign in without actually making an account with whatever,

you know, third party you're interacting with. It's, I know the Amazon or Apple or Google or Facebook. How many things do you think you sign into using your Google ID? Definitely a handful for me because there's like this, there's this layer of apps where I'm like, I don't want, I don't know if I trust them to actually run the username and password database. So then I end up outsourcing that to Google. But that's not a great solution.

It comes with its own set of trade-offs and risks. Yeah. One Google account problem and you can't get into any of these things. And Google's recognized that this existing password login system sucks. It sucks for the user. It sucks for the user. It sucks for the service too. I was having a conversation with the developer of Albi on Office Hours a year ago. And they have an issue where people create their accounts and then they lose their passwords

and they can't log back in. And so they end up with people creating a bunch of accounts. They use them and then can't get in again. And they just have like these stale things sitting around. And Google recognized this as a problem. And instead of like, you know, coming up with an open standard, they've got a commercial solution to solve it. We know how complex user authentication can be.

Users often think they have to choose between security and convenience, sometimes opting for weak passwords that can easily be phished or hacked. Users also often forget whether they already have an existing account, which drives up duplicate accounts in your system. It may also be the case that users are simply dropping off in the traditional signup process because the flow is too cumbersome to complete. Both scenarios negatively impact your conversion rates,

drive up maintenance costs, and generate more risk, which then creates a need for an even more complex account management system to securely store sensitive information like passwords. At Google, we are addressing these challenges by offering a suite of identity products that take these burdens off of your shoulder. You just have to trust them. Yeah. They're going to take that burden off your shoulder, Wes. I appreciate that. No problem with that. And then they can take it right in the trash. Yeah. And then they can use it for monetization. So the problem with that. And then they can take it right in the trash. Yeah. And then they can use it for monetization. So the problem with that is

that's the commercial sector. And you're going to get some users and you're going to get some developers to implement that. And we see that. We do see that. But if you want real scale, you want to implement things at the government level. So commercial companies like Folio are building solutions that they sell directly to governments.

Identity is broken. Physical identity documents are outdated, yet citizens worldwide rely on them to prove who they are. We want to change that. And so we built Folio, a digital identity issuance and verification service for governments that allows any eligible citizen to receive an identity document and use it to quickly and securely verify who they are. Use Folio 2.

Register citizens quickly and simply using a mobile registration process. Issue secure biometric digital identity documents with a single click to citizens via the Folio platform. Verify the identity of citizens quickly and securely via the Folio platform. Verify the identity of citizens quickly and securely via the Folio platform and mobile consumer app. These verification services can then be opened up to the private sector, turning a traditional cost into a revenue generator. Talk to us today about how Folio can deliver your digital identity project

and eliminate deployment risk, reduce CapEx expenditure, provide seamless and instantaneous citizen verification, and deliver identity to everyone. Folio, delivering integrity and trust through digital identity. Yeah, the whole thing's great. I cut it down just a little bit so that way we wouldn't go on for like five minutes, but you can find the Folio app. It's out there.

It's being used. So that's a new sponsor on the network? Yeah, right? Woo! Onboard your citizens and turn something that used to be a cost into a profit center. I noticed that there wasn't any mention of, you know, open source standards, any sort of ways that, you know, citizens might have problems with it. Right. So that's if you want to implement something at the government layer. But what if it's like the Western world where there's so many services, so many people have been online for a long time.

They have dozens and dozens of online identities, you know, your online banking, your Twitter account, your email accounts. Well, there are internet stalking as a service companies. It's already a big business that's trying to solve your identity and it's trying to tie it all into one person across multiple platforms and then make that available to lawyers, investigators through an API. It's called People, P-I-P-L. In fact, the average social media user has more than eight social network profiles alone. Now add their online banking, shopping, blog, and membership accounts.

It's easy to see how hundreds of online identity fragments are scattered across the internet. In a world of rampant fraud and compromised data, traditional identity information isn't sufficient by itself to meet today's investigation and verification needs. But when all of the fragments of online data are collected, connected, and corroborated, the result is a more trustworthy identity. People is the online identity information company. People's unique identity resolution platform is based on advanced data analysis and a recursive algorithm. It scours the globe, collecting and updating email, mobile, and social media identity fragments from the internet and from exclusive sources of public information. The People platform then uses these

identity fragments to build actionable online identities. The result? People is the largest global index of online identities. I don't People is the largest global index of online identities. I don't think any of us want these solutions. No. No. They want us to want them. Yeah, and they go on to talk about in the video how, you know, they're the first software as a service platform to offer this

with an API that you can use and integrate into your solutions and blah, blah, blah. Like, I can understand some of the base needs for some of these things, but just the way these solutions end up being is it feels like like credit scores. I was just going to say that. All these other systems of stuff that tracks me that like other people can buy, but I have no access to. I was saying they're drifting like this company is drifting towards a credit score style identity

system. That's and it's horrible model. That's a horrible model. Let's take things that we know don't work and we'll just keep pushing there. I don't want to live with any of this. And I think any of these solutions, and there's so many, guys, this is just like scratching the surface. Every big tech company has a solution and a hundred startups you've never even heard of.

And there's so many solutions, too, that focus just on enterprise as well. And they're all their own silos. They're all creepy in their own way and they all make the internet net worse. And the thing is, free software has a solution today. It's already being used by tens of thousands of users. It has a robust set of applications and libraries that are already developed with support ready to go.

And it has some of the world's best developers already working on it. And today, we're going to do a deep dive. 1password.com slash unplugged. In a perfect world, I think end users would only work on managed devices with IT-approved applications and hardware. That was the dream for a moment, but reality set in, and every day we see employees using personal devices that, of course, have unapproved apps. That's just the nature of the beast, and they're not necessarily even managed or protected by MDM

or some other security tool. The reality is there's a giant gap between the security tools we have and the way we actually work. And 1Password's come up for a name. They call it the Access Trust Gap, and so they've created the first tool to fill that gap. 1Password Extended Access Management. It secures every device signed in for every app on every device. And the device trust solution that you've probably heard about us talk about before on the show, Collide, it brings it all together into one password extended access management. And they care about the user experience and privacy, which means it can go places other tools can't, like personal or even contractor devices. It ensures that every device is known, healthy, and every login is protected.

So stop trying to fight it. Stop trying to ban BYOD or shadow IT and just start protecting them with 1Password Extended Access Management. Go check it out. Support the show and see the demo. Go to 1Password.com slash unplugged. You go over there, they got an explanation and a video if you scroll down a bit. So go check it out. It's 1Password.com slash unplugged. Unplugged. just another silly decentralized Twitter clone. But the truth is, Nostr is far more than that.

It's the doorway to a universe of new applications and a truly sovereign web, and might be the most important innovation since the internet became a thing. Now, Nostr is notes and other stuff transmitted by relays. We've talked about this in the past, but this is a little bit of a different look at it. Like HTTP or TCP IP, Nostra is a protocol. It's an open standard as well upon which anyone can build anything they'd like. The protocol is based on relays. That's the important part. So relays are decentralized servers that can be operated by just about anyone. So by opening a persistent connection with the server, clients, therefore applications, can push and pull events in real time.

Now, my question to you, Chris, is why are we talking about this today? Because we've heard about this for quite a while now. I think the big click I had recently is Nostr is decentralized identity. and when i started thinking about it more as a set of basically social graph as a service protocols and capabilities and less of a twitter clone it started to make a lot more sense and there are some big things coming that different groups are working on and i had a chance to see some of that stuff we'll get to why the kind of twitter cloney aspect of noster does matter but it's definitely not the most important thing about Nostr. Very distracting because that's the experience like what 90% of folks are going to get when

they quote unquote try Nostr. But yeah, there's the protocol, the implementations, the future implementations. The applications that are being built. That's what's exciting. So if you picture the iceberg meme, decentralized Twitter clone is like the top of the iceberg. And then under the water is the open source social graph and protocol serving a foundation for more than you could possibly imagine. And we're going to try to give you some insights into that today and just ask that you keep all of this in mind as things roll out over the future. The big idea that impressed me is that every user gets a private

public key pair. You can use client apps to message and sign it with your key. So you know it's me because I signed it with my key. That gets transmitted by the relays. It's just simple. It's sign, messages, relay. And then they're building everything on top of that. Nostr works with these Nostr implementation possibilities, NIPs. New functions, features, improvements get added by NIPs. And NIP01 is actually all you need to be technically compatible. And then everything else is built on top of that. The protocol is really simple. It's flexible.

It's event objects that are basically passed around as plain JSON combined with just standard public key cryptography. So it makes it really simple for people to understand. And it means through this, you could start looking at an actual new web of trust being built. Something we used to talk about in the late 90s. Nostra brings it all together as a foundation for an ID that moves across services, applications, and websites.

Nostr is literally the foundation for the new web. This is from BTC Prague, which we'll have a link in the show notes that just wrapped up a little bit ago. It's the foundation for everything. Nostr gives us this, first of all, identity layer

of cryptographic identities where every user gets a key pair, public key, private key. And the owners of these key pairs can decide to attach some metadata to those keys like profile picture, you know, like name, lightning address and so forth. Then these cryptographic identities can have relationships with each other. They can follow each other and have other kind of metadata connecting them, giving us the global web of trust of cryptographic identities, which is an extremely powerful building block for the Internet. And it's something that cryptographers have been

dreaming about for decades. So this is happening and then Nostra gives us a public relay infrastructure that allows these cryptographic identities to communicate, to send messages to each other, so it becomes a communication or messaging layer as well and then finally becomes a communication or messaging layer as well. And then finally it becomes a publishing or persistence layer, also using the public relay infrastructure. So these are such powerful building blocks that can be used and are being used already to build a wide variety of different applications. I was shocked at the variety of applications. We'll have resources in the show notes. Shocked how much has already been built.

But just stepping back here for a moment, this web of trust concept, that was first put forth by the PGP crowd by Phil Zimmerman in 92. Yeah, not new ideas, just a new implementation in many ways. You mentioned key signing parties. Like that was another take at this. This is a way where we can do it in a trust-based way online. And you can even take it a further step essentially and kind of verify yourself with this system. So one of the early Nostra implementation proposals, NIP5, was the ability for a Nostra user to map their public key to a DNS-based internet identifier.

We were playing around with this, Wes, and it's pretty simple in its implementation. Yeah, right. There's just a JSON blob where you've got a names object with individual names, and then a public key mapping to the name. Yeah, and it just looks it up. Right, yeah. So you say you're Chris at chrislast.com, then it can go check chrislast.com

slash dot well-known slash nostre dot JSON, and then look up the username that you gave it, like Chris, in that JS object, and then from there, you've got the public key to go then filter events from the relays. And what it also means is if you go search for me now on Nostre, you'll see one of those accounts. Somebody could create a false one, but mine's the one that's verified. And that's kind of nice. But it's not just for social media. And it goes beyond just knowing

who's contributing to an open source project or taking your identity across multiple applications. And it actually goes to greatly improving the end user experience, even everyday users, as these things build out. If you think about reviews online, like Amazon product reviews and things like that, again, Amazon is the actual ultimate arbiter of truth and what exists in that review page. And they're scammed. They're so often scammed. You see bogus reviews in there. You have no idea how to weigh or trust the reviews that people leave on these different websites.

And they're all inside these silos. Yeah, well, Web of Trust can give you a new kind of user experience. We are used to all these indexing services for any platform or like centralized social media. They decide what, they list all the content and they decide what you're going to see. But with your web of trust, you can curate all the content that you see. Someone mentioned Wikipedia. Like what you see might actually depend on what sources you trust. What you see on a social feed, on a marketplace, whatever, will depend on your social graph. Yeah, I think that a marketplace like that is a great example.

You will see something that you want to buy from a Nostra marketplace, and you recognize people that have done business with this individual, and they're a trusted seller or a trusted buyer, and then you proceed to do business because somebody in your web of trust, your circle, your social graph has already completed that transaction. Or also, they didn't complete the transaction, and you know, hey, I don't want to do business with this person because Pablo and Marty both had problems with them,

so maybe I don't want to do business with them. You know, web of trust can be very powerful. I think if we really think about it, it means you put your reliability of whose information do you trust, whose information don't you trust into the hands of a distributed decentralized social graph instead of what CNN tells you or Amazon tells you or what OpenAI tells you. When you think about this long term, that has some pretty big social ramifications. And it even just adds the options, right? You can mix this in with whatever other systems you may or may not feel like using. But now you've, you know, before when it's all just behind anonymous Amazon accounts or whatever, you don't even have the option to try.

Yeah, you have to. Would you go ask all your friends? You have to either ask all your friends manually or try to figure out what their mapped accounts are on these other proprietary silos and then have that. No one does that in practice. No one does that. But now you can do that. Yeah. And that's why Noster is so much more than a Twitter clone.

It is useful and made slightly more useful by having this social layer. And it has about 16,000 daily active users, and that's growing continuously. That's not remarkable. But it does mean that anybody who builds on top of Noster has 16,000 users built in. So they go from having no users to 16,000 users. That's starting somewhere, at least.

But it also, it means you own your online identity not google or not twitter so why would you go and build an entire online reputation and give it facebook or twitter like that so this thing here it's like you want ownership of that asset and i think if we position it that way that your profile is now yours it's your asset you own it in the same way as you own your email list, but with the distribution of a social network. So it's like way richer than an email list. Nostra is really the only thing that's come along since email that you get to own that user list. And you can move it between Nostra networks and applications and take an opt to or

not take that social graph with you. You don't like this community? Move to a new one and bring the users you want, the followers you want. So that's compelling, I think. Sounds also like having multiple identities is an option here. Yeah. Yeah, that's going to be something, too, that one is probably going to have a better reputation

or something because you have it verified. I imagine one's the one you have tied to your GitHub profile, and maybe the other one's like, you know, when you want to go sail the high seas on a pirating forum or something, you don't want to log in with your well-known identity. So you want to be able to spin up NIMS, as they call them. But I think the next big thing for Nostra is going to be products built on top of them that are implementing Nostra in a way where you don't even realize it. You know, it's a technology. It's a technology. It's a protocol. You're not going to become necessarily a Nostra user,

but yet you're going to be taking advantage of the Nostra network and combine things in a way you haven't seen before, and they're just around the corner. There are some examples out right now that look really good. There's a Substack Patreon replacement built on top of Nostra called Highlighter. I mean, there's hundreds of applications stack Patreon replacement built on top of Nostra called Highlighter. Hmm. I mean, there's hundreds of applications, but I looked at some of these.

There's a TripAdvisor replacement that just launched called Satlantis. So it's, it tries to combine TripAdvisor, Instagram, and Google places

into one kind of travel planning place. That sounds interesting. It's neat, right? HiveTalk is like a Zoom replacement that's built on top of Nostra. So you use your Nostr identity to join the call.

Zap.stream is a Twitch alternative that supports boosting. OstrGit is a censorship-resistant GitHub alternative. BlogStack, decentralized blogs, Ditto is actually really fascinating. It's like an entire Nostr community, kind of looks like a Mastodon instance all in just one package. There's Reddit alternatives, Craigslist alternatives, Telegram alternatives, many, many more. And each one of them comes with a built-in user base. The Wikifredia developer kind of shows how this really matters to developers. Now, Nostra has some very simple primitives that allow for,

Fiat Chef would hate it, but it has very good composability. So you can put together different use cases and tie them together in a very seamless way. Like the way we've seen the internet grow is only in all these silos, and that's why we talk about all the silos are broken, we have all these different use cases that are siloed across the different platforms.

So you want to consume a video or publish a video, and you go to YouTube or maybe to Vimeo. You want to read an article and you go to Medium or you go to Substack. You want to do, like, fast-paced news, microblogging, you go to Twitter. But none of the activities on these different silos affect the activity on the other. So, content creators, for example, when they want to publish something, they have to have a TikTok strategy, a YouTube strategy, a Twitter strategy, an Instagram strategy. And with Nostra, it's all the same. So that allows us to create experiences

that maybe they would not have enough economical weight behind them to be their own thing, their own silo, but they can be their own thing within a larger network of users and data. That's why I keep thinking that Nostra allows us to experience the long tail of creativity, because a developer can create a very compelling experience that speaks to an audience of 10,000 users.

You would not be able to ever create a sustainable business if your total addressable market is 10,000 users. You would not be able to ever create a sustainable business if your total addressable market is 10,000 users. So the fact that we can put all these different things together, all these different puzzle pieces together and create a new type of experience is what has, to me, it has sparked my creativity so much, being able to experiment with all these different ideas. So one of the things that I created kind of recently was the idea of Wikifredia,

which is like a Wikipedia, but the fact that it is, yes, it is a nostril, that is like the least interesting aspect to it. The fact that it's a nostril by necessity, by technological necessity, demands that there is no one canonical entry for anything. So you can't go to Wikifredia and say, okay, tell me what happened, like, give me the biography of Mrs. No, no, no.

There are many people that have different approaches to what happened and what is relevant and what is interesting. So you can see much more long-tail information about each particular entry. And that is only possible because this is built on Nostra. If I were to say I'm going to create this website, it's going to be its own database, its own thing, completely isolated, and I'm going to call it Wikifredia, it would have zero users.

It would be an insurmountable effort to be able to bootstrap that. But I already have the bootstrap of the network because it's being built on Nostra. I think it's a really interesting idea that there is a built-in sort of network effect because it's on top of the Nostra protocol. Now, you boys did some deep diving. I have been kind of really kind of warming up to this for the last six months. Just as I seem, I find social media to be crap. I'm not really interested in it. And so something that was new and kind of edgy was more my style. So I set up chrislas.com, chrislas.com. And that takes you to like a public page where you can see my Nostra profile and get my key. It takes you to like a public page where you can see my Nostra profile and get my key. You guys have been jumping into it more from like the identity standpoint this week.

I'm just curious. I'll start with you, Wes. What kind of jumped out at you as you kind of learned more about Nostra and started rethinking about it? Yeah, I was really curious more about to start with just having a solid understanding of like what was going on at the technical protocol level. So I wanted to recommend that folks just check out NIP01. It's not that much to read. It's not that long. If you've done anything with web development or web technologies, it'll be pretty familiar.

Because the base is so simple, right? You have events that you publish with your little JSON blobs. And then they get signed with your private key. We know the benefits of the public-private key cryptography, that amazing math that powers so much other technologies we already use. Then you can send those to relays that you get to choose and set up. And the relays have the job of storing that event that you've sent, either temporarily or for the long term. And you can run your own relay. And you can run your own relay. You get to configure the list of relays, which, as we also know, can sometimes be a pro and a con, a complication that you have to deal with.

There are several nice community tools that are built up around kind of helping people pick relays. And then there's even kind of this sublayer of paid relays. It's like a business. And you can pay them and, you know, they guarantee you a certain level of service. Yeah, I was curious about that. Because then, so the relays store the events. They don't transmit them themselves. They just live on that relay.

Yeah. And by the way, I've never used one of these paid relays. I'm just saying it's an option. Right, right. Yeah. So the reason why this point matters is if the relay goes away and it's the only place where your notes are, then your notes go away. That's why I was kind of thinking, like, if we stick with this, we might want to set up a JB node. We sure might, yeah. That we could use, the audience

could use. That'd be fun. Yeah, so that's the important part, is like, the relays provide this mechanism of exchange between clients, but also like the memory layer for the protocol for things that are long-term, like, say, the metadata about your profile picture and, you know, what your domain,

your username is. And then clients come along, and then, besides about your profile picture and, you know, what your domain, your username is. And then clients come along. And then besides sending events to the relays, they can also ask the relays for events and supply filters. And so that's how I can kind of say I can come along to a relay that you're at and ask for all of your events or the events that are responses to a particular post or, you know, there's all kinds of filters you can do. This is when I say social graph as a service. So what that means is applications don't always have to be online to receive messages from each other. And that really matters on mobile devices.

And so you can have applications that need to do synchronous communication, but they can store it on the JSON essentially on these relays. The client comes online, talks to the relays, and then it's essentially like they were online when the message was sent. And we're seeing that's one of the ways Nostra is going to get used by apps, and users won't even realize they're using Nostra. And then, you know, there's different event types, and that's how you can have different, you know,

as more nips are added and different event types get added, you get different functionality from, you know, Twitter-like clones to things that are more like Telegram clones to all kinds of apps that you've just been talking about. And it's a neat system where like the individual relays don't necessarily have to have support for all of it if, you know, or the clients, because you can filter on the events that you want to do. So if you're a client that is a Twitter clone, you can focus on the events that are meant, you know, for that subset of the system. Right. But if you're like a Craigslist clone, you

filter on that. Or a podcast app. Like some sort of archival thing, you can grab all of them. Yeah. It's really neat. And our live stream chat is powered by this right now. When somebody posts at jblive.tv when LEP is live and they post a message in our web chat, that's a Nostr event on the back end

that's happening. And then it gets rendered in a web page. But it's not like you see it like if you go to Nostra and you look in a timeline or something, you don't just see it because they're not filtering for it. Yeah. Right. Brent, I'm curious if, if the identity stuff clicked with you when you did your deep dive this week. Yeah, it sure did. I started thinking about how this could simplify online identities. And I, so I did a little deep diving into my password manager, which I suggest you all do from time to time. And it turns out like, I don't know exactly how many like password to identity pairs I have, because that wasn't exposed to me, but I at least have something like 600 entries in my password manager, which,

you know, gives you a sense of how many things I think are important enough to keep track of. And a subset of that is online identities that require both a username and a password, and sometimes a second factor as well, which is important. But if this really takes off as the underlying technology for so many different services on top of it, I could just see how a, it simplifies these identities everywhere that we have. And, and maybe I don't want all of them to have the same ties to one identity, but that's fine. You can have a couple of these, right? And like, maybe I have, I don't know, I'm a chess master. And so for all my chess communities, I have a particular identity, but here for Linuxux unplugged i have a different identity or something like that so you have

choices there which i really think is powerful but just the idea that not every single service needs its own specific identity sounds like such a relief to me and uh and a simplification but also like i i know i've come across some people who just like, they don't really care what their identity is on all these providers. They've just given up because they can't keep track of them all. And so they just use like password reset as their main way of getting into all their accounts. And it's just like, it's even now, even though the internet's been around for such a long time, it's just a disaster out there. So if we can use something like this to solve this problem, or at least make it a little

easier, I'm all on board for that one. I bet you boys probably agree. I could much more easily live with a Nostra-based system than anything else that we've looked at that's trying to solve this problem. I would say the trick is always like usability from a user standpoint. And Chris, I think you've been using it the most out of all of us. So I'm curious from what you think, like, does it feel like a brand new, super early technology that has a bunch of rough paper cuts, or is this like fairly easy to use from a day-to-day basis? Well, the protocol is super solid. And so the applications that implemented just as like, you know, a back end technology seem to be working really good. The applications built on top of it are new.

You know, there are some of them are less than a year old, some of them about a year old. And so you're going to you're going to results are going to vary there. In some ways, it's sort of impressive how far they've come. In other ways, it's not a fantastic experience in all cases. I have found the onboarding process has gotten pretty easy. Use Noster dotorg is a great place to start. Usenoster.org. We'll put a bunch of really good links, though, in the show notes. And then if you're on Android Amethyst, if you want to try the social stuff or Primal

on iOS or Android, really great starters. They've really kind of smoothed over the onboarding process. I mean, you think about it compared to like PGP or GPG, it's a hundred times easier. I mean, it's really a lot easier. And pretty soon it's going to be just like you sign up for your favorite app or service and you're actually creating a Nostra account. And once you're onboarded, once you create an account

that works across all these things, that's where this goes ultimately, if it becomes successful. And I think we have a real small window of time for anything like this to gain any traction at all, because the commercial companies like Microsoft and Apple and Google and X, they've been working on solutions for years. They have direct doors to government, local government, schools, like the scale and opportunity for commercial companies to try to solve the identity problem is just massive.

And wouldn't one of them love to own that? And so I feel like the window of opportunity is intensely narrow and open right now. It is nice to see like, you know, around 16,000 daily active users, a lot more than that have signed up, but not everybody sticks around, but it's good to see. And as it gets baked into more applications, I think it'll become more and more adopted because the reason why I say that so confidently is it solves a lot of problems that developers otherwise have to build solutions

into all of their apps for. And Nostra has a bunch of libraries and a bunch of code, and it's all open source and a bunch of different open source licenses. I found it kind of, it was like a little magical feeling when having these things all separated out,

you've got like the storage on the relays and then I've got my private key and then you've got all kinds of different apps. And as I was trying different ones, like I was trying one called Yana, I think, which I found was an totally open source Android client that you could get with Obtanium. All I needed to do was put in my private key and then boom,

I'm like, I'm just, I'm back to me. Yeah. Yeah. Cause you can associate certain things with that key. And so it's, you bring it with you, your profile information and your graph and all that. So it is really pretty neat. It's an impressive tech.

And it's again, things that developers want, you know, especially if you're a new app developer and you're trying to get, you're trying to get some traction and you've got to go up against massive tech companies with their built-in network effect, well, then you can at least bring a network with you. Now, you mentioned some tools to, like, figure out relays. That was one part that I, you know, the relays seem like they are one of the, like, the load-bearing part of this whole thing. And then, you know, to be able to communicate with someone, you need to have at least one relay in common. And I was testing this out with the lady we're both trying to send messages to each other and the app she was using

one of the popular apps on ios and for some reason like it hadn't configured the relays right so but signing in on it with a different client and like updating the relay list you know in the metadata that fixed it and then it was working just normally but it just seemed to highlight to me yeah getting the relays right having a sense of yeah which relays you're going to and why you know it makes it makes all the difference having a good set of relays uh so i have probably like 20 relays in my app i've just kind of i've been watching a site called noster.watch and that lists a bunch of the public relays and then does some ping tests and gets you not only a latency for the read and write, but also does a little bit of connectivity check. If you click in on them, it tells you what things it supports and lets you make a few decisions that way.

And then the other thing, if you think about it, it's like the big apps have the most popular relays. So the Primal app and the Damus app and the Amethyst app. Right. If you add all of their relays, you're good. You're pretty much good. And then, you know, the Jupiter Broadcasting one, when we get one, that'll be a good one. And Dan in the Mumble Room runs one. Dan, how long have you been running your Nostra relay?

I think maybe a year or so. Wow. And do you see it get much action? Does it do much? I mean, it's a bit spotty in there. Not many knows about it. Yeah. Well, you could always throw it in the notes. Yep. All right. We'll throw it in the notes.

So there you go. I mean, so I think that's kind of fun. The idea that you could participate in this network as well always kind of appeals to me. And I think it's got a lot of potential. I wouldn't say the Twitter clone is the best part of it, but I think it's a useful part of it when you consider the broader context. And then like if you build a following, you're building it somewhere where it feels like it's more yours. And it's also these things, they're not getting like tweaked by algorithms.

Like the Primal app gives you lists you can filter on and things like that. And I find that just as good as any kind of algorithm. But there's nobody behind the scenes tweaking what I see. I just feel a little better about that, too. We'll have lots of resources in the show notes if you get curious. We encourage you to check it out. Linux Unplugged dot com slash boost podcasting is in a weird spot right now, especially any of the podcasting business back end. Yeah, I think you probably heard us mention it's in an ad winter. I mean, that's why we have a house ad right here and not a sponsor that's actually bought this spot. But you probably haven't heard about the drama around all of this.

And I want to tell you, this is why we have been pivoting to value for value, because the old model, it broke and people keep thinking something's just going to return to normal. And all of a sudden the sponsors will be back and they'll be buying a bunch of ads across a bunch of shows that all have the same promo offer. And like, that's going to work. We've realized things have changed, but not everyone has. And the drama behind it is when the ad winter kicked in, another little change happened. iOS 17 launched, and Apple Podcast is the biggest podcasting app. Not in our audience, but in general, it is the biggest podcasting app. And in iOS 17, they made a little change where if you don't listen to a podcast for 15 days, it stops automatically downloading that podcast.

Also, when you subscribe, it only downloads the most recent episode, where in iOS 16 and before, it would download something like 10 of them. Well, this has created a massive, massive gap, and some podcasters have seen a 30% drop-off in their downloads. And some podcasters have seen a 30% drop off in their downloads. So at the same time, the ad money got really tight. It also came out that accidentally, not intentionally, but accidentally, podcasters had been overcharging some of their sponsors by 30% because their numbers were actually, people weren't listening. And some just cling to this old model. Because it's clip day here on the show, I'm going to play this clip. It's so embarrassing. You may have heard it because it's been floating around on the internet. This is the lengths that people are going to now

trying to make the old model work and why we have pivoted to value for value. And if you are on Apple Podcasts, I want to tell you there was an iOS update that is making all podcasters bend over, grab our ankles, and take it up the butt. If you are on Apple Podcasts

and you go to our page, please click the three dots in the top right-hand corner. Go to Settings, and just click Automatically Download 10 Latest Episodes. Just that will fix the iOS update that has f***ed all of the podcasters up. Again,

go to the three dots on the top left, hit settings, and about a little further down than halfway down, click automatically download 10 latest episodes. Just that will help us out so much. That's just not going to work, is it? That's why for the last two years, we've been encouraging you get a new podcast app so we're not dependent on apple and you send a boost because there's no middleman it's a peer-to-peer free software technology i'm not asking you to subscribe to any kind of ideology or anything like that but if you just got value from this episode or we made you think about something or you'd like to keep us around or even help us grow please consider sending in a boost or becoming a member you can boost from fountain fm's website without even having to switch apps if you're not ready

by just going to linuxunplugged.com slash boost. A little redirect there will send you to their website. And then you just need an app that does the Lightning Network. Cash App, Strike, so many others, so many great apps. Check them out, support the show. linuxunplugged.com slash boost. And now it is time for Le Boost. This week's been an amazing Boost week.

I've been having a lot of fun reading the Boosts as they come in. So thank you everyone for sending those in. We did get a couple live ones here. Here's one from Yukon Cornelius, 5000 sats. Simply says, live, Fountain Boost. Boost! We also got another one here from 412 Linux, 2000 sats. Thank you through Fountain Boost. Boost! We also got another one here from 412Linux2000Sats. Thank you, Through Fountain.

Holy smokes, I'm listening live while in the hot tub. Sadly, though, no food. And perhaps I'm the food being boiled? Happy show, gentlemen. Ha ha! Pew! Thank you, 412. Appreciate it. No Second Best is our baller booster, coming in with 67,777 sats.

Hey, rich lobster! System D, Microsoft's latest attempt to improve Linux? Yeah, right. More like how to make Azure less of a dumpster fire. SSH access and vSpawn sound suspiciously convenient for Azure's shaky control plane. Vspawn sounds suspiciously convenient for Azure's shaky control plane. Sure, we plebs get some scrapes, but let's not kid ourselves. Microsoft has ulterior motives, and they probably involve AI Clippy.

Love the deep dive. Great work. There's a lot there. I feel like, you know, that's a way to look at it. I think that's one way to look at it. I'm sure that's probably how you look at it, Wes. Well, I think the part that rings true for me is the scraps. That is, I mean, we've talked about it before on the show that so much development of things that we end up using as desktop Linux users especially end up being funded often by large corporations who really do have their own motivations. And it probably is true that, you know,

system D makes a great base to run whatever your latest weird AI project is. Right, because Lenart is working for Microsoft now. These days, yeah. Yeah, okay. Oh, yeah, I mean, maybe so. That does seem, I mean, look at how much has come to the Linux desktop because of things they're doing to make Linux work in cars. Hello, Pipewire. So there's, I mean, that's just a reality I think to it.

Or in games if you think Steam has done some good stuff. Right. Right. I mean you could argue the fact that we're playing games as well as we are on our Linux desktops is really just a secondary effect to Valve trying to make it work on the Steam Deck. Huh. I think I agree with you, Wes. It's like, yeah, you could look at it that way, but it's also, to me, it's kind of great.

Look what we can build as a community and assemble because of that stuff. And I guess maybe if it does make Azure a little less shaky, that probably helps some people out. I'm sure we've got some Azure users in the audience. ThreadSniffer boosts in with 45,000 stats. I hoard that which your kind covet. Andreas Kling ditched his Serenity OS baby to go all in on Ladybird, his shiny new browser project. It's not quite ready to take on the big boys just yet, but hey, it is open source,

written in C++, and has zero Google ties. Sounds kind of cool, right? Or is the world already drowning in browsers? Would you guys be willing to try it? Oh, definitely try it, yeah. I don't know if I'd commit to switching to it. I've been kind of tangentially following Lady Bird because Firefox is great, but I do kind of worry long-term about Firefox.

And obviously a unibrowser world is not good either. We're back in the Internet Explorer days if we do that. So I guess I've kind of been keeping an eye on it, but is it even ready to try? Where's it at? Yeah, I mean, you can definitely get it pretty easily. I was able to give it a go without much fuss. Loads our website just fine.

So, you know, you can at least go get the show that way if you want. The podcast player we're using from Podverse, that did work. I was able to listen, but some of it was a little wonky, especially the part where it seemed like it was not using the entire length of the visual element to control how the audio, so you scrubbed through the first quarter of it. It was like a condensed version? Yeah.

So that was a little confusing, but it did technically play. And then it's definitely not the fastest, I think, especially when you're executing JavaScript. So JavaScript-heavy sites were the worst. Lighter sites were pretty much fine. So the current version of the main interface for Reddit, kind of broken, just broken. But looking at my local, the Seattle Times, I just pick in random things, consumption

type things, or like the Washington Post, those were pretty serviceable. I didn't consider the fact that they're rolling their own JavaScript engine. I mean, that's something that Google and Mozilla have worked relentlessly on. I'm usually a bit of an optimist on these kind of alternatives, but do you think that the browser space is kind of like the phone space? Like it's already been one, and the chances of even making a small difference is just so slim that it feels a bit depressing?

I mean, there is that element to it. I think for now it's fun to watch. I mean, even if it just ends up being something of like a reference mutation or something you can use in tests to test the other big name browser implementations or any of those kind of intermediate use cases, maybe that's still good. If we hadn't made the web kind of gross, it would be a perfectly serviceable browser.

I was kind of coming to this oh my gosh it's so true yeah you know like i could i'm sure i could i didn't actually try this i should but i'm sure i could read lwn.net no issues craigslist would be fine probably debian.org yeah yeah that's a good point is it the browser's fault or is it really actually the fault of the web? Am I – you know, all this stuff is transitory. Like we are definitely living in the era of Google Chrome. But we once lived in the era of Netscape. And before that, I used a browser called Mosaic. And that was the only browser that was even really viable at the time.

And it was the world of Mosaic for a little while. And then it became the world of Netscape. Then it became the world of Internet Explorer. And these were all eras that lasted for a long time. Yeah, right. The Muso comes in with 45,000 sets. Now, this is a big one across six boosts. We have the whole boost in our show notes.

But he says he's welcoming system D. He's fine with with taking over more core system functionality most lower level system components benefit from a single implementation you know there's when i saw that boost the thing that i thought of is when i did try bsd for a minute what stuck out to me was sort of like this unified language like all of like the little little commands to do everything all kind of had a similarity to them. You know, if TACP did something in one, it would do the same thing in the other, that

kind of stuff. I really like that. Consistency. Yeah. Also, he says that he has an interest in ARM-based mainboards, the Framework Laptop 16. Of course, we saw, we talked about the member special, the RISC-V version that they also have out. And then he says, but you know, it's really going to be dependent on good x86-64 emulation on ARM systems

because you've got to have gaming support. You're going to need things like Discord. You're going to need those devices to work for integration. I think that's a great point. That's a good point. Yeah. Yeah, that's for mainstream adoption, right? And then, boys, it was just completely unavoidable.

It seems we have our first mention of you-know-what. So, Brent, are you have – are you prepared? I don't. Do you have something? I don't know if I am. I don't. All right. Well, Wes and I are.

We're going to finish this sucker off. Oh, yeah. Oh, actually, I have a drawer here, and I left last week's tool in there, so I am prepared. All right. And they say, the Musos says, I have been using NixOS full time. There it is. All right. Maybe the last time we do this for a little while.

We'll see. We'll see. So, Wes, I'm going to give you the red cup. Here you go. Thank you. Enjoy. And then I'll take the yellow cup. So he says, I did play with NixOS for a couple of weeks last year using the channel individual system approach, but now he's using the flake approach.

It wasn't until I decided again to try it that I went that way. And you know what? I think if you use flakes from the start, it is a little easier. That's always what Wes Payne says, right? Yeah. I mean, either way works. Just just start using it might as well you know whatever way uh you find not using flakes has the advantage that all the regular documentation is written for it um but either way like you're gonna have to learn a bunch about nix anyway so that part of it i think

the complexity of it once you understand nix anyway is a little overblown but don't worry you'll never go back once you learn it cheers boys cheers i tried my hand at flakes this week in totally the wrong situation and uh failed miserably which you can hear in the members feed uh that was quite an adventure but i'll try again i'll try again i have been very very pleased with the implementation of flakes that we've been using really basic but, but Wes has created a patched version of Bitfocus for me. And also we added what was like the Musonix stuff to get certain music stuff added as a flake. And it just works so well when Wes makes a little change on his end and he updates the flake. And I check it out and pull it down.

And then I do a system update. I get all the changes Wes made on his system at home, and it just works so well for deploying software that we need to be common across multiple systems. Yeah, and you can technically do all that in the more traditional Nix style. Flakes just make it easy, especially when you're trying to manage a bunch of inputs and outputs or consume outputs from other flakes. In particular, I think, when you're trying to share and reuse NixOS modules,

which is just a neat setup. Muso also says, he wraps it up saying, I have future plans to learn how to set up a local Nix store and use my server as a builder. So then I reduce the rebuild time

on multiple systems where I have software that overlaps. That seems like an excellent project. Yeah, then you throw that sucker on tail scale and then wherever you're going, you just pull that stuff down. Nice.

You give us access to it. Yeah, have some time uh that's great well hybrid sarcasm came in with 42 000 sets the answer to the ultimate question nixo has saved me from nvidia hell on debian testing image requires cuda 12.2 for machine learning, and Debian only provides the appropriate driver version in Debian testing. It worked for a time, but now that NVIDIA driver is causing libc memory errors and has stopped working. So I converted that box in XOS because of how easy it is to enable NVIDIA drivers. It was a bit of a journey getting the setup just right, but now it's set and in the config forever.

Well, congrats, Hybrid. I'm glad it worked. I mean, it sounds like a little bit of a painful journey to get there, but now that you're there, congrats. And hopefully that means you have a nice, easy, repeatable image setup going too, which maybe you'll have to boost in more and tell us how that's going with your fancy CUDA. Yeah, there's always something to be said for solving a problem once for a particular machine and then just having that recorded in a nice, easy way to deploy forever. That's, man, so nice.

Dude comes in with a row of McDucks. This old duck still got it. A long overdue boost, but I'm looking for a TTS recommendation for Linux, something simple but good. I want to feed in a text document and get something usable without fiddling with arguments. Boy, I wish I could remember the episode, but remember I had an app pick just not too long ago that let you pull down lots of different language models and then use them to... Yeah. Yeah, it's on Flathub, and I am so sorry I forgot the name. I will also double check my links because I found some good references over the weekend because i saw i saw this come in live dude

and i grabbed some things so if i can find those i will put them in the show notes at linux unplugged.com slash 568 but that app i found on flat hub i bet if you go search for whisper i bet was it speech note does it have like a two-pane ui speech note lets you take read and translate notes in multiple languages. It uses speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and machine translation to do so. This may have been it or one version of the ones I tried that also works. Yes, because it has a translator and the notepad, and then you put text in there, and it gives you a bunch of different whisper speech models to use. Yes, this looks like it.

Thank you. We'll put a link in the show notes. And if anybody else has any recommendations for text-to-speech on Linux, maybe also some that have really great voices, please let us know. I think that's a category I'd like to look into because then when one of these guys needs to take a weekend off, we'll just replace them with a bot. Don't we do that already?

Robo reads done. Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah. 42 boosts in with 2,121 cents. I like the run zero tinted terminal idea. Reminds me of when I first installed vanilla NixOS GNOME, the default GUI terminal would turn red at the top when sudo was in vote. I've since gone away from GNOME on my NixOS system, so I haven't seen that in a while, but it is a nice feature since there are times I realize I've since gone away from Gnome on my NixOS system, so I haven't seen that in a while, but it is a nice feature,

since there are times I realize I've used sudo within the last five minutes, still have sudo privileges, but I've moved on to another task in the same terminal, and, you know, running sudo again might not be good. Oh, no, we never do that. Never do that, no. Or, you know, never leave your...

I've never even logged in as root. No, no, no, never. Wes never walks away with his laptop unlocked. No. Nope, you know, never leave your- I've never even logged in as root. No, no, no, never. Wes never walks away with his laptop unlocked. No. Nope. Never. Tensori and BoostedIn with a row of ducks. I've been listening to The Live while mowing the lawn this week.

Love the show. I work as a sys engineer for a medium-sized insurance company. Listening over the years has helped my career immensely, so thank you. At work, they call me the open-source zealot. Nice. I know that one. Keep up the good work, guys. I will continue to try to convert our mainly Windows shop.

Recently, I've been advocating for implementing Sterling PDF over the Adobe's crazy fees. Yes. Sterling PDF is one of my go-to tools still. Feels so good when the wife's like, we need to sign this PDF and send it back to the accountant or whatever. And I'm like, here we go. Boom. Done.

Right here. Just go to HTTPS colon slash slash PDFs, honey. And it works. Yeah. Sterling PDF is a great app. And sorry. And thank you for that story. We love to hear it.

Distro Stew comes in with 11,192 sets. Coming in hot with the boost. He sure is. He says, I consider myself an advanced Linux user. I've been using it full time since the 90s. I also have been using Nix on and off for years. Only recently, though, did I actually go all in. Desktop servers and the Mac work machine, all Nix.

As a Linux junkie, I love it. But it has a lot of rough edges, which would take me a bunch of boost to enumerate. You know, you ought to just fire them off, man. Just fire them off as they come to you. You know, just send us a row of ducks each time, and then we'll read them together. He said, I would never recommend it for a new Linux user. Nix or not, the less terminal use, the better. I think Nix can get there, but it's not there yet.

Boy, so there's so many things I go back and forth on, having also myself been doing this since the 90s. I still, to this day, waffle on if you just bite the bullet and learn the terminal. In part because it's the least changing. If you go look up guides on how to okay i have a problem for example right now on my system when i upgraded to plasma 6 i lost the ability for kate to do pseudo saves so now i can't edit my configuration files that have root privilege where before pseudo would say hey man let's use policy kit here together and we'll give you those escalated privileges so you could save using sudo. That's gone.

There's a bug in like one of the cute libraries. And that's kind of, you know, it sort of sucks, right? And now that that's broken, I've had to go back to using the terminal and just using the traditional sudo. And of course, nano, like a gentleman. I think you mean run zero of them, right? Yeah, run zero. And I've stopped using Kate again.

And the point I'm trying to make is the command line stuff just always works. It stays the same. If you go get a book from the library that was written in 2004, it's going to be like 90% relevant still. But if you went and looked up even the most recent guide on how to solve my Kate editor problem, they're all going to be about Plasma 5 Kate. And none of them are applicable now to how to solve my problem in Plasma 6. And you just literally cannot find. And the internet doesn't know. It's really bad.

And this is a continuous problem in the Linux GUI because we're rapidly improving. It's a good problem to have because we're constantly making progress. But the command line remains solid and reliable. So I really, I waffle back and forth on that one. I've wondered too, I feel like in the sense that you're kind of having a conversation with your computer uh as the interface i wonder if there's like potential there i think maybe it's worth separating using the terminal and like then the peculiarities and the heritage of like the linux and the unix commands that we have right like there's one layer of the terminal is how you interface with the computer and how you tell it

what to do and there's a second layer of like oh yeah well you got to learn that ls and cat and like these kind of weird names for things are how you tell the computer to do what you do versus something like i don't know say sequel that you might be running yeah yeah you know i mean i think distrust you you got these great takes because you are a long timer you're very pragmatic i can tell so i really like i really like hearing from you because it makes me think about this stuff. And I think this is one of these boosts that I'm going to think about for the rest of the week. So thank you very much. He also kept boosting in saying, I would not recommend next to developers necessarily as a full-time one myself. It's kind of a pain in the

ass sometimes. He basically says, just requires customization beyond the base case, which gets hard. Maybe, maybe not. I think that's just a difference of opinion. I mean, you know, just requires customization beyond the base case, which gets hard. Maybe, maybe not. I think that's just a difference of opinion. I mean, you look at what we're doing with things like Bitfocus or when we are distributing some of the software we're using on the back end, and it's just made a huge difference. So I think it's just kind of a difference of opinion there. But Distro Stew, you really make me think about this stuff, so I appreciate your boost. A Devra is 17 boosts in with 5,000 sets.

I think you mean adversary 17. Adversary 17. Adversary 71. I think you mean adversaries. Adversary. Anniversary, what? Anniversary 71 boosts in with 5,000 sats to say, and so begins the pseudo flame war. Grab your popcorn, fellas.

He's right. Because you already did the run zero thing. It's already happened. Let the shame begin. I'll just keep going for one more because that was short. Noodles comes in with 5,000 cents. This is the way. Missed the Father's Day boost.

I started with an A-plus certification book from my dad back in 96. Oh, actually, that his dad had from 96, which was four years before Noodles was born. Oh, okay. He had to stop that to take care of my freshly born brother and sister, but I got to pursue it, and now I'm a software developer. That's great. My mom's father was also a software developer for the city I live in currently, but I didn't know that until my interest was already there. You know, Noodles, that's fascinating. I had a similar thing. I didn't realize until many years later that my grandpa was into building computers and techie stuff like we just hadn't ever talked

about it i developed the interest and then he found the shows he found he found i think it was linux action show no way and then we're at a family event it's christopher christopher i gotta talk to you yeah i'm like what he, yeah, I've been running Ubuntu. And I think it's like when the first Raspberry Pi came out, maybe. That's incredible. My life changed that day. Let me tell you. So I know what you mean, Noodles.

Now, we did get a note in the Matrix room, the live chat from ByteBitten. Thank you. Answering one of our previous boosts. For TTS, he recommends Piper TTS, which, quote, works interesting in the terminal. So it might give that a shot. Yeah, I've used Piper quite a bit with the Home Assistant project. It's great. That's a solid recommendation.

Thank you, Byte. Now, Opu1984 boosted in with 4,000 sats. Fun will now commence. There's a little title suggestion here for the last episode for Luff567. What seems to be the officer problem what seems to be the problem out uh yeah yeah uh this is why we got to come up with a different game because we're already sloshed if you were listening to the members version of this it has been it's a train wreck since we've taken the shots poor drew poor drew poor drew thank you

drew we really appreciate you. Okay, moving right along. We got this, boys. We got this. Purple Dragon comes in with a Jar Jar boost. Nope. Purple Dog. Perfect. Alright. Purple Dog comes in with 5,000 sats, which

is a Jar Jar boost. You're so boost. He says, follow up for Squid whitelisting. We run a SaaS solution for a finance industry, for the finance industry. Often bespoke security requirements are very high. Unfortunately, most of our servers are Windows. But I'm trying to change that. Every update seems to add some new things that trigger Squid denied alerts.

Telemetry updates, crash reporting. They always seem to just turn themselves back on. You know what? What Purple Dog is saying here is such an interesting revelation. When you run something on the edge of your network that watches all of the connections, even something like Pihole, but definitely Squid because I've done this, you learn about all these things that your systems are talking to. And you, like he said, like you realize how often these things get turned back on without your permission right i mean like

is why most of us don't have like deny by default firewalls on our desktops because yeah the number of crazy connections come in about so many networks absolutely networks. Absolutely. Jordan Bravo comes in with 9001 Satoshis. It's over 9000! I wouldn't mind switching from sudo to systemd run 0. Ah, okay, vote of confidence. Tell us if you do try it. But speaking of sudo, I have a question for the community. My zsh prompt uses starship, which is great and colorful, and it shows a bunch of useful info and has all my customizations and aliases that I like. However, sometimes I'm in a situation where I need to use sudo to run a command or switch to root temporarily. This causes my terminal to lose all that sweet, sweet customization. Hmm.

Is there a solution to this? So he must be switching to a new profile, a new environment, essentially, and losing some of that stuff. And by the way, he said it was called Starship? Yeah. Do we know about this? This sounds neat. Sounds like you want to know about it. I do.

I want to look it up. Well, you're already a fish person. I am, yeah. Maybe Starship works with fish, actually. I don't know. So should we try asking the AI, or is that too crazy? Why not? I'd say go nuts.

Should we go? the AI or is that too crazy? Why not? I'd say go nuts. Should we go? Okay. All right. So let's find out. We asked the AI what it suggests. And it says that if you run sudo with the dash capital E flag, the E flag will preserve the environment when running a command with sudo. Well, okay. That is true.

That is true. And so you could try that. You could also configure sudo to use your environment in the sudoers file. So say if you use like vi sudo, you could add a line, copy default environment underscore keep plus equals home. We'll put a link in the show notes. Can we put a link to AI? I mean, they're stealing stuff. We may as well steal it too.

Yeah, but how do we put links to something? We can probably find that in some other docs. Yeah's got to be right because that's got to be where it's sourcing it from uh-huh okay it does look like starship supports um fish okay so now all right let's do this okay let's do it let's do it caden comes in with 10 000 sats and says thanks for the cmos battery tip i'm looking to get that replaced. I think the YouTube clips of per session slash week would be good, not really for revenue, but more for exposure. I rewatched clips to share with friends. Well, that's good to know. And Cadence said he went down.

I think he gave us a live boost saying that he went and found out that it wasn't the battery. But he's still on it. Keeping us up to date. Okay. Now, Whompers boosted in 10,000 sats with no message provided. So thank you to Wompers. That's a great name, right? That's pretty good.

It's kind of a Womp situation with when there's no message, really. Womp, womp. Dexor did boost in, though, with 3,456 sats with a message. Just boosting in to say the three-hour member shows are my favorite. The longer, the better. Also note, I still can't boost on the members feed, and I'm using Fountain to do so. Say the three hour member shows are my favorite. The longer, the better. Also note, I still can't boost on the members feed and I'm using Fountain to do so. Yeah. So I've been wanting to talk about this on the show because that's it kind of is a bummer for the Fountain users because you you absolutely technically should be able to boost the members feed.

It is a full podcasting to no compliant feed with the value tags. So if you want to, you know, boost CLI, maybe that'll work. Yeah. The problem actually is that there is, I guess you could call it a bug. The reality is private RSS feeds are very much an edge case in podcasting. And so the way that some of the podcast apps like Fountainwork is when they look up the splits, because one of the nice things about boosts is we can build in splits. So Drew gets a cut. Podcast app developers get a cut, the index gets a cut,

we all get an equal share of the boosts, and the network gets a percentage too. To look up the percentage of those splits, Fountain uses an API call to the podcast index, but because the member feed is a private feed, there's nothing for the podcast index to return, so Fountain is airing out on those right now. I have been working with Fountain and they're looking at a solution for us. So it should be fixed sometime in the future. But that's the problem is they've really kind of designed that feature

for public feeds. So if we were to publish the members feed for anybody to use, then you could boost in. But hopefully we'll have it fixed not too long. Thanks for trying also. use, then you could boost it. But hopefully we'll have it fixed in not too long. Thanks for trying also. Yes, thank you. Zack Attack comes in with $5,054.

Everything's under control. Something I've been enjoying for the last couple of weeks. Distro Box Assembly Files. Easy and well-documented syntax. I'm able to basically script out Distro Box installs. Then, when I want a fresh one, I just run the assembly file.

It tears down the old one and makes a fresh box. Even brings over my dot files. And yeah, DistroBox assemble is a neat feature of DistroBox. Basically you provide an INI file and then it's got a bunch of settings in there, like what image you want to use as your base, what additional packages you want to be installed. You can set up specific init hooks. You can configure which apps get exported outside of DistroBox, how you want your entry stuff to work, like all kinds of stuff that you might want to configure about it, options to set.

And then you have that in a declarative setup, which you can use to make new boxes. Is DistroBox like one of our silent killers that people just sleep on? It's so useful when you think about it from like a creating like a standardized environment that works as you expect. Like it just, I don't know. I feel like distro boxes,

it's like something Microsoft would love to have. Like that's what WSL is, but in such a smaller, elegant, better way. It's a, I don't know. I just find it fascinating.

Distro box doesn't get more attention. It's basically like a fancy bash script. It's very impressive. Yep. That's a, that's very script. It's very impressive. Yep. That's very true. Thank you, Zach Attack, for rounding us out. I'm going to pull one forward from the below the 2,000 cutoff because the show's mascot boosted him, the Golden Dragon. 222 sats.

And we have a special boost for him now. The Golden Dragon! Yay! He says, if you aren't a member, you need to become one for the live feed on this episode alone. Thank you. Yeah, we've been working hard to make sure the members feed is totally worth it. Thank you, everybody who boosts in. We had 23 boosters this episode.

This is a value for value episode. So if you got some value from it, made you think about something or now you're going to be excited about Nostra. I don't know. Maybe consider boosting and telling us about it because we love hearing from you. We had 31 total boosts and we stacked 301, 688 sats. Thank you, everybody who supports the show and this individual production with a boost. And, of course, everybody who streams those sats. We really, really appreciate it.

Oh, look at that. One more boost comes in. Talkinette, as we wrap up. She says, I haven't yet linked my Strike account to send sats, but here you go. 4,200 sats. Ah, rounded it right out. Thank you very much, everybody.

We really appreciate it. And love to hear from you in the future. Special pick this week. I haven't tried it, but I'm putting this out there because I'm hoping someone in the community would be willing to spin it up and let us demo it. Just see how it works. Kick the tires a little bit. I've had my eye on this for weeks and I just haven't got to it. It's called Gatheo.

It's a simple, federated, privacy-first event hosting platform. It's like Meetup.com but self-hosted. And one of the things that seems to appeal to me is that the events are just automatically deleted seven days after they end. Anyone can create an event or a group. So it means we might be able to open it up to our community. So there could be some self-organizing around meetups. That would be cool. Wanted that for years.

And you can federate other instances using ActivityPub, which I didn't even realize until I got to this part, and I think that's actually really great. You could see, wouldn't it be neat if, like, the Linux community started using something like this, and you could see projects and other podcasts, and we were all just kind of in a federated ActivityPub-based galeo? You could also see something like this built around Nostr as well. In fact, there are some we were looking at that are Nostra-based. But I'm hoping somebody gives this a go.

It's like a Docker-composed way, and then maybe send us a link and report back on how it works. Maybe we could use this for self-organized calling meetups in the future. We shall see. We'll have a link to that in the show notes. Please do let us know how it goes. But I think that wraps it up for us. There you have it. If you got interested in Noster,

give some of the links a try. I'm chrislas.com. I think you guys are on there, right? You should put links to like your Primal profile or something in the show notes. All right. You know, I mean,

I don't want to use them WebinX. Come on. Come on. Also, I'd like to ask you, send in and let us know, when did you start using Linux? Just kind of curious out there. I want to survey the audience. Take the temperature.

Has it been a year? Has it been a decade? Let us know when you first started using Linux. And, of course, you're always welcome to join us live. We do the show on Sunday at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. Yeah, there's a mumble room always going.

jupiterbroadcasting.com slash mumble. You want links to what we talked about today, that's linuxunplugged.com slash 568 or on our main website. We got links there too.

It's easy. You just point your web browser of choice. Even Lady Bird, apparently. Even Lady Bird. It'll all be over there. And then you can educate your friends and families. And of course

you're always welcome to join us. We love having you in a Podcasting 2.0 app. When we stream we're live every Sunday in all of the Podcasting 2.0 apps that support live streaming. Like Fountain, like Podverse like True Fans and more. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode and we'll see you right back here next Tuesday

as in Sunday! so i i gotta ask one question. Just one question that has been distracting me the entire episode. Are you actually a chess master, Brent? Well, you'll have to, you know, find my Noster profile and find out. No, definitely not. I mean, yes.