LINUX Unplugged - Episode 162: Linux Flying High | LUP 162

Episode Date: September 14, 2016

Ubuntu powered drones that double as a desktop PC, tweaking your Linux desktop vs polish & coreboot’s efforts to bypass Intel ME.Plus our we update you on some of our favorite open source projects, the MySQL 0-day, a batch of emails, why we're excited about the crazy USB/IP Project & more!

Wes, you probably catch XKCD from time to time, but I thought this was hilarious. They have posted the perfect phone, the XKCD Phone 4. And there's a couple of things that I think are just, I don't know why, they're just obvious. First of all, it has a built-in dog whistle. Yeah. It has exposed duck work on the sign that is software-defined. It has a new bright glow display that incorporates genetically spliced together jellyfish protein. It integrates Siri, Cortana, Google Now, and Alexa all at once.

They all respond simultaneously. Oh, that's great. And of course, it also has a parallel port on the bottom and 12, count them, 12 headphone jacks. That's your phone. How often have you been with your 11 best friends and you want to listen to exactly the same thing? Exactly.

Or maybe Linux Unplugged, right? Yep. Boom. There's your upgrade, Wes. Just bring it to your local lug. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 162 for September 13th, 2016. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's going back to school. My name is Chris.

My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. How's the install going over there? Oh, it's wonderful. I'm up and doing the show. Nice. Hey, well, we got a big show for you today. So buckle up, Wes. Buckle up. Coming up on this week's episode of the Unplugged show, we're going to go through some breaking news, just as a sort of a community heads up. We're going to talk about a drone that also doubles as an Ubuntu desktop

PC. Apparently also, speaking of Ubuntu, they're getting attacked for being copyright pirates or something like that. I'll tell you about it coming up on the show next. NextCloud's got a surprise in store. We've got some really interesting open source projects we want to highlight, some updates to cover,

some digging around on getting rid of that Intel spyware, aka the management firmware. Strong words from Chris over here. Plus, I had to fix a keyring bork this week. I'll tell you about my keyring bork. We also have jets flying overhead right now as we record the show. To do great

honor to Linux Unplugged. Sending your USB devices over the network. A follow up on making Linux look a little better. We're going to talk about it in the context of the Loki review. You hear that? You hear that thing? Wow. That's for the show. That's for the show. We're going to also talk about the state of Linux desktop customization.

And then we have a very important email to get to. We have a couple of good feedback items. We're going to do something we haven't done for a while. We're going to reach into my mail sack, and we're going to read some really great emails. Yes. Yeah, some stuff that people have probably been wondering.

So we've got all of that coming up in today's show. But you know what else we've got, Wes? We've got a totally locked and loaded mumble room. Time-appropriate greetings, mumble room. Time-appropriate greetings. Listen to that. Time appropriate greetings. Time appropriate greetings. Listen to that. Hello, guys. Boy, it's great to hear all of you in there, and welcome back to Popey's. It's been a long time

since I've heard Popey's charming voice. It's good to have you here. You smell good, Chris. It's handsome even over Mumble. I know you do, Popey. I don't even have to smell you to know. You know what? He truly is. Smell-o-vision? Just sort of a public service announcement, because there's a lot of things we could start today's episode off with, but we should probably start with some legitimately breaking news. This is CNN Breaking News.

So there is a zero-day vulnerability right now that could lead to total system compromise for MySQL. It came out yesterday, so it's still pretty new, and I just wanted to put the word out there. For any of you out there, it affects, this is directly from the CVE, the vulnerability affects all MySQL servers in the default configuration in all version branches, being 5.7, 5.6, and 5.5, including the latest versions,

and could be exploited both by local and remote attackers. That was an advisory that was published yesterday afternoon. Both the unauthenticated and authenticated access to MySQL databases are an issue. And it's a SQL injection apparently. But I don't know the details. It's CVE if you want to look it up. It's CVE-2016-6662. Well said.

If that's not a sign, I don't know what is. Anyway, so just a heads up to those of you out there that may have MySQL installed. But I actually thought this would be a really fun story to start with. I love this so much. This makes it feel like we're in Marty McFly's future right now. I might not be able to have the video wall that he had that was super cool or the dehydrated pizza refresher thing, which was amazing. We could be eating pizza right now. But I bet Marty didn't have a drone that also doubles as an Ubuntu PC.

I bet Marty didn't have that. No, he did not. Because we've got that. We have that. Or we could. Well, that's true. It's a development kit from Parrot, I think. Or is that how you say it?

I think so. Okay. I just want to make sure I'm not making fun of him. It's designed to create drones that can avoid obstacles, like the new DJI Phantom 4 that's super fancy, which is, I got to tell you, somebody who has tried doing, well, we've crashed our drone before. Let's just put it that way. It was awful. The development kit itself doesn't have wings, and it needs to be attached to a drone and a flight controller. Otherwise, the kit can be used to create robots. Otherwise?

Yeah. It's called Slam Dunk, and it has a fisheye camera that can capture 1,500 by 1,500 pixel resolution images at 60 frames per second. The camera allows the drone to process the images, which it will then be able to identify obstacles, which is very nice because then it can use that identification to avoid those obstacles. It also has an ultrasound sensor, a magnetrometer, and, just for Wes, a barometer. which is very nice because then it can use that identification to avoid those obstacles.

It also has an ultrasound sensor, a magnetrometer, and, just for Wes, a barometer. Yes. They say it doesn't need GPS to operate. The development kit has an HDMI port as well as ports for keyboard and mice, which means you can build a PC out of it. There's no price yet. We're going to probably get something in the fourth quarter. But just, you know, what do we always hear about what makes Ubuntu work so great on the cloud?

What makes Ubuntu work so great on the cloud? Wes? I think it's the built-in drone support. No. I mean, I don't, maybe not yet. I think what you often hear is I can build in my local environment and have it run just like

it builds and Dev matches production. Yes. So this is the ultimate version of that because you can make this little kit. You could hook it up a keyboard and a monitor and a mouse and develop directly on it and strap it onto a drone or a robot. Away you go. And this is the true 100% dev matches production kind of scenario here. Or when your friends come over and you need an extra computer, you just sit them down by your drone.

It has to charge anyway, right? I mean, when you have a full Ubuntu machine up in the sky, what are the possibilities? With a camera on it that has a 1500 by 1500 resolution at 60 frames per second. Is that what it said, 60? It runs Ubuntu 14.04. So it's going to feel a little old. A little old. It's a drone.

I want to see, like, the diagram in the blog post shows a keyboard, a mouse, and a screen. I want to see someone running after the drone with a keyboard, a mouse, and a screen. Oh, my God, yes. Or like a really long USB cable. I think that's a super neat example too of how Ubuntu can be used on

a range of devices that are actually approachable by consumers so somebody who really had an inspiration could go out and get this stuff. Eventually at least. In the fourth quarter it looks like. It's the first time where it's uh the in the clouds is legitimate oh no that's good too oh i haven't thought of that you guys are on top of it today okay so let's while we're talking about ubuntu let's talk about this the ubuntu torrent was removed you know from google using the infringing uh – DMCA. Yes. Take down.

This horrible process where big companies outsource to these third-party contracting firms who go out and do these massive sweeps of the net and then they submit these huge DMCA take down requests. And maybe – of course – or perhaps Hollywood is – hold on a second. Full stop. Perhaps Hollywood is telling us something. Maybe the robots are on Ubuntu. Oh.

Yeah. So Ubuntu 12.04's LTS torrent was taken down because apparently, according to Hollywood, it infringed on Transformers Age of Extinction. That was the Ubuntu release that came with Transformers Age of Extinction, right? Just pre-installed. Yes. Starts right on startup. It's an example contentinstalled. Yes. Starts right on startup. It's all that example content. Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. And I just, this, boy, if this isn't just such a great example, taking down open source software like this, like what a broken system is this? This could be worse. There's an even better example of why this is broken. Last week, Warner Brothers ordered Google to remove several sites from its own websites because they infringed their own copyright.

Right. They had the Batman Dark Knight and Matrix stuff yanked out of Google search results for their own sites. Boy, I don't mean to take this down a notch. Take down your own stuff. What happens when they start taking down other legitimate stuff accidentally? Where does this stop at? Well, Google aren't going to put any real effort into checking this because they get millions of these things a day. So nobody can be giving this any sort of –

It would be nice if they could charge a fee. If you want to take something down you have to pay x amount so they can't just generate a bunch of bogus requests mose and wrath you have an idea of where it stops yeah when you sit there and you think about it what happens when they take down someone else's stuff then lawyers show up remember how you were discussing lawyers um i don't know which show that it was but it was in the past couple of weeks the lawyers will have a field day if warner brothers accidentally manages to take down something by say fox or something by just some other company any other company let's just say it was something that involved say microsoft for example microsoft

would say oh you decided to impinge upon our ability to make money through legitimate means well we have a few people that would like to talk to you snap snap the shark lawyers show up sure yeah so basically once they start picking on somebody their own size yeah well well it's not a matter of picking on because remember as you're saying this is pretty much a blanket sweep right so it's not a matter of picking on. It's more like because I have size 13 feet, so I got to be careful where I step sometimes because if there's little kids around, I could end up stepping on their feet. Now, what happens to someone with size 13 feet? It's on someone else's feet who also has size 13 feet, but they're hostile. That's an interesting analogy.

And you just came up with that on the fly. That was damn good, sir. What size are your feet? He's probably got big feet. He's thinking about that. Yeah, that is a good way to put it. That is a really good way to put it. And it just is shameful right now.

And I think I'm extra sensitive to it because i've i have i almost almost on a daily basis i fight this problem on the youtube side of things which is also a google platform right yep and it i am i am assumed guilty exactly that it puts the onus on the the content creator who's just trying to you know like do their thing or people who are just trying to distribute legitimate isos and now it's gotten even worse from a monetization. The only nice thing about YouTube from a content creator standpoint is it's got a great user base and sometimes you can make some ad revenue. Now, for the kind of stuff that kind of views we get on YouTube, nobody goes to YouTube to watch long-form content except for the awesome people that watch our long-form content. watch long form content except for the awesome people that watch our long form content.

That's, you know, because there is definitely an audience for it but it's not as huge as everybody that's on YouTube to watch 15 minute, 5 minute, and 10 minute videos.

They see that it's like, oh, an hour and 20 minutes. Yeah, yeah. So it's never been like a huge platform for us. We don't make very much money on there at all. And you, you know,

it's almost, it barely even makes enough for whoever they'll actually even pay us. But they've started now demonetizing videos simply for covering current events. And this happens to one of our shows on the JV Network on a routine basis all the time. But it's also even been retroactively happening to like shows called Stoked. I used to do a Star Trek online podcast years ago.

OK. It's recently beginning to demonetize for covering current events. They are, in some senses, they can do everything from revoke JB videos from certain audiences in the world, completely revoke it, or just not

allow it to be funded. There's so much control, and never do they start with, well, let's get the creator's perspective. Let's get the content creator's perspective. Right. Just like this Google takedown. I mean, when you get removed from Google, you're essentially gone. You just disappear from the internet.

But so far, it's just made for a few good examples. So now let's talk about something that's outside of Ubuntu. I'm going to use the word Unity, but I don't want you to get confused. It's not the Unity desktop. It's the Unity gaming engine. And it looks like the Unity gaming engine is getting some proper Vulkan work done right now. Yeah, this was posted by a software developer over at Unity Technologies, and she shows here an example of a demo, a Unity demo, running under Vulkan on Ubuntu. Pretty cool.

Pretty nice. And not that I'm some huge fan of Unity games, but it eventually will mean – what this will mean is more games for Linux. This is going to – this is going to be a lot more games for Linux. And that is a big deal. So it's not really news anywhere yet. I just happened to catch this on Twitter today. I was just trolling. It's a cool-looking screen cap there too.

Yeah, that's one of the demos that – yeah. I also like that hashtag Linux. It kind of looks like a corridor of a modern retrofit Millennium Falcon. It looks like a corridor of a modern retrofit Millennium Falcon. Like if the Millennium Falcon got a facelift and they went in and cleaned it up a bit, it would look like that with big balls rolling around. I don't know what that's about. But I thought that was pretty cool. Actually, speaking of trolling around on Twitter, I found this on there too from Nixcraft, ButterFS status in Linux kernel 4.7.

And this is kind of an interesting breakdown. And by the way, the Nixcraft ads, the world is already moving on to ZFS. So a couple of things that are still not working properly in butterfs as of kernel 4.7. I thought I would just mention them here. Not to ding it, but just so you know. They list defrag as mostly working okay, but extents currently get unshared. Compression is mostly okay. Auto repair and compression itself may crash from time to time. Scrub and RAID 5.6 are considered unstable.

RAID 5.6, right holes still exist also, and parity is not being checksummed. And the free space tree is considered unstable. So if you're on a little Indian machine, you're okay. But if you're on anything but an x86 machine, apparently ButterFS can't calculate free space for shit. I think that's the version 2 free space tree that you have to

enable by an option. So these are things that are considered totally unstable. Then they have things like device replace, balance, quotas and queue groups, out of band dedupe, and file range cloning that are considered totally unstable. Then they have things like device replace, balance, quotas and queue groups, out of band dedupe, and file range cloning that are all TBD. William, what do you think of that stuff? Anything else that jumped out at you about the current state of ButterFS?

I mean, RAID 5 and 6 is broken. What a surprise. We've kind of known that for a long time, that it wasn't in a great state, and it never really has been fixed stability wise and i think that right there your sentiment is my point i feel like as a community enough of us have come to a like uh this is never gonna this is just not gonna work like i i feel a little bit

like she's been dumping countless hours into it like they've definitely been submitting patches but it's not really getting anywhere i I do feel like the window of acceptance, or I guess I should say the court of public opinion, may have come to its verdict. And that could change, but it doesn't have the same kind of momentum or excitement or general trust or anything that we'd like to see.

I also don't see Raid 5 and 6 being as relevant today as they were 10 years ago either. Most people are running Raid 1 and Raid 10 now. I still use it, right? Most people are running RAID 1 and RAID 10 now. Well, I still use it myself. I still use it myself. It's still relevant for me. But why do you say that? Hold on, I don't hear you.

What else do you think people are using instead? Sorry, my mixer is flaky with the mute button sometimes. So what I was thinking is disks take so long to recover now, your large, like, 4 to 8 terabyte disks, because the read speeds and write speeds haven't gone up enough to counteract

how much space you're adding, how much capacity you're adding. So overall, your re-silvering or your rebuilding times are taking much, much longer than they used to. True. And so it's not as useful to use RAID 5 and 6 when you could rebuild much faster in a mirrored configuration yep yep and with less potential for data loss yeah that's interesting and also storage is kind of cheap so yeah and then stripe it's not that

big a deal to go 2x you know 2x is not a big deal yeah you're losing some but it's worth it for the speed of everything all right i think you're probably i think you. I think you're probably, I think, you know, I think you're dead on on that. So, and I think, I think I will admit part of the reason I would, I would, the configurations in which I would still use RAID 5 or 6, I guess,

would be not a lot of disks. And I specifically want something that's kind of a straightforward setup. And I, and I, and I, I'm thinking of like a, like a, maybe an editing, I mean, I don't even know anymore. But maybe an editing system with a few terabyte drives in it that are super fast.

But even there I tend to do actually just like a RAID 0 type setup. Yeah, I mean it depends, right? There's so many different – like how much do you care about? What are your priorities? So I have a feeling there may be a surprise in the air. There may be something we could be talking about next week or whenever. I actually don't know. I don't know when.

But if I was going to make a Redbook prediction, I'm going to say the NextCloud project has something up their sleeve, which is going to take the project to the next level. What? Now, they're kicking off a NextCloud conference, and they've just put up a blog post about it. They have a couple of headline speakers there. One of them is the CEO of Canonical, Jane – is it Silber? Is that how you say it? It is Silber. Yep.

And then also Karen Sandler, the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy will be giving some keynotes. They're going to have lightning talks and they're going to have hacking sessions where they encourage people to bring hardware. And there's going to be a bit of a surprise. A bit of a surprise. A bit of a surprise that I can't tell you right now. But I will be able to tell you soon. Come on, Chris. Tell us.

So if anybody gets a chance to go, let us know. Look at them having a conference. Yeah, I think that's cool. It kind of like gives them, you know, it defines them a little bit more as their own thing. I definitely want to give room to continue to listen to the own cloud version of events and just sort of break all this stuff down. But in terms of just tactical execution here, the next cloud project is lapping OwnCloud. Like the OwnCloud project or whatever, the OwnCloud company, has stumbled to properly and fully respond to the entire series of events. When they finally did, it was through sort of indirect means and blog posts through quote-unquote bloggers.

And then all of this sort of has been rather, they've been rather quiet. They haven't really been executing. They haven't been executing on promotions as well. And now this, there's a conference happening for NextCloud. There seems to be a lot of momentum there. It feels like it's, it feels more like a community. It feels more like there's like, there is life there.

There's people excited about it. If it's just some quiet company that – if no one is talking about it, then why would we talk about it? And whereas with HomeCloud, I feel that there is sort of – it has the life support feeling right now. And the only thing – and part of me is just like, well, I know I need to keep in mind there's two versions of events. There's always two sides to a story. And we haven't fully heard their side. We've begun to hear but we haven't fully heard. And I keep keeping that in mind.

And at the same time, these guys are generating buzz right now. Exactly. But we don't want to rule it out. Like, HomeCloud might continue to be very good. They might do some exciting things that we want – that we're excited about. But you just don't know. Maybe Oracle should buy them and then kill them. Oh, oh yeah and then we would know what to do we've established this whole path for software to die oracle buys it right they can buy them we can have the second

open office and libre office and eventually they shut to apache or next cloud in this case exactly oh man i think that's the worst idea in the show yet. Donate it. Or just donate it straight to Apache, and then you know it's dead. Well, you know, I've been using own cloud for a long, long time. In fact, I still have a droplet with it running on there. I don't actively use it, but I can still connect to it and check it out and all that stuff. So I'm keeping one toe in the water. So that's, I think, you know, but I'm also feeling the Nextcloud pull. Anybody in the mobile room running the Nextcloud installation at the moment with some regular use?

Yep, I have it as a snap on a Raspberry Pi. And what are your thoughts so far? I like it. It just kind of sits there and runs. I don't really do an awful lot with it. It's not, like, active because I don't have a huge amount of storage attached to my Pi. But I've just been playing with it. I should do something like that.

A Pi actually would be a good machine just to kind of – and I could – I'd like to use it for calendaring. I did have a period of time. My own cloud peak, my peak own cloud was – I got all really anti-Google for a while. And I seriously was getting creeped out by the tracking. And I went and got an iOS device. And I prototyped this. I remember I started this. I got like an iPhone 5 or something like for free from Ting.

And they just sent it to me so I could try this. from Ting and he just sent it to me so I could try this. And I set up everything to use my calendar, my contacts. Everything was pointed to my own cloud server. And I didn't use Google search. I had a 100% Google free iOS device. This was a little while ago now. And own cloud, it reached that point where I was totally, totally unaware I was even using own cloud. I didn't, there was- It was just a back end, a plugable back end.

Yeah. I just had, and I had it syncing with my desktop, my GNOME desktop. So I had calendar events on my phone. That is nice. Yeah. And never at once, never once was I ever having to manage the own cloud server. I just got everything set up once and it worked. And it was a pretty cool experience because I didn't use Apple services and I didn't use Google services. So if I ever get around to getting that Ubuntu phone going,

I might set something up just like that up. Oh yeah, that's a great idea. But it would be nice. It does seem to work really well for that kind of stuff. It's just when you when you're using it for that and then the urge to use it also for your syncing sinking maybe if it had better support for like you know just being strapped on top kind of as a layer yeah i would use it more yeah wimby are you still uh playing around with uh a libre vault i am and and how is it going so far uh well i haven't uh

done anything uh significantly different from when we last spoke, but it's still working. That's good. Although Mark from Ubuntu Podcast contacted me over the weekend because he was doing some testing. And he ran into some issues actually getting the thing to run. And there was a couple of bugs introduced in a recent update. But, you know, file issues on GitHub and the developers very responsive. So, um, that was about to ask that's, that's kind of a good test right there. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, I'm going to pick up with that. I've, I've had a pause on that

cause I've been busy with other stuff. I'm going to pick up on that next week and put it through its paces a bit more and hopefully look to move something important over to it. My challenge is I've got about four terabytes of data in total that I'll be syncing using whatever I end up using. Wow. And one of the things I definitely noticed with it was a major issue with BitTorrent Sync is because that data set is so large,

it was essentially constantly just working to recalculate the hash on the files, re-index, and by the time it got- Just maintaining state. Yes. Just churning. So I had to have a dedicated machine. Still do, actually. I still do, actually, have a dedicated machine.

It's a VM, but it's a dedicated machine with allocated resources just dedicated to that task. And so I don't know how LibreVault is going to handle that, but that will be one of the things. And the unfiltered show notes are just huge. It's just a huge, huge set of data, and I haven't even released all of it. You should be like the testing bed for syncing solutions. I will be.

It's unfortunate you can't use SyncThing because they have an iNotify solution which would reduce the polling of the files. Well, I don't know how LibreVault does it, so then maybe they're using iNotify too.hing because they have an iNotify solution, which would reduce the pulling of the files. Well, I don't know how LibreVault does it. So then maybe they're using iNotify too. Yeah, they could use iNotify. I would hope if they're Linux-focused. Yeah. There's the wrapper.

What's the lib something? Oh, really? Well, that does KQ and other stuff too. Yeah. Yeah. If I have a dedicated machine, it's manageable, and I just have it off on a set of disks. But that may be changing in the future. So I will be revisiting that.

Either way, you know what? I will have it all running through a DigitalOcean droplet. That's how I do my cloud component to this. This is when I ran own cloud, and if I try out next cloud, this is what I'll be doing. And when I do a LibreVault deployment. I've had the same thing on DigitalOcean for like, I don't know, two years now. It's just always there. I just assume it just sits there. It's always on. It's great. You know where the light

went off for me? So DigitalOcean, you can get a droplet for $5 a month to do this. This is a $5 droplet. Especially if you're not transferring tons of stuff all the time. You just need it to kind of sit there and when you need it, it's there. And if you use our promo code DOUNPLUGED, you get a $10 credit. So

the light went off for me when I decided it was time to do a couple of regional servers to help people that are downloading our own filter files just get it a little bit faster. So I sort of kick it off by seeding in their location. And then other folks, other audience member in those areas pick it up. And of course, using BitTorrent Sync and now currently, it sort of becomes its own CDN. And so my transfer isn't that crazy because everybody that's part of the swarm is also transferring the files, but yet I'm able to serve them up at local speeds at $5 a month. That is awesome. It is great.

It is so great. And as I switch over to LibreVault, which I suspect I will, I'll just essentially implement the same exact setup. And they have templates, which makes it super nice. They also have snapshots, which is great before you make a big transition like I'll be making. And they have an API that allows me to automate the rebooting and the managing of these systems really easily. And I can just use apps that have already been created by the open source community.

So check them out at digitalocean.com and use our promo code DOUnplug. They're all SSD-based storage. They have block storage you can attach as you need it. So as the unfilter storage grows now, I can add that, which makes being able to seed it with all of the content, the entire back catalog now, much more possible, which is going to be super nice. And something else that they are sort of drawing everyone's attention to

is high memory droplet pricing. High memory droplet pricing. It's easy for me to say. It's high memory droplet plans that offer large amounts of RAM, which is super, super cool. I mean, I'm talking like when I say large amounts of RAM, I'm talking like 128 gigabytes of RAM. Wow. Or, holy crap, 224 gigabytes of RAM. Holy crap. 224 gigabytes of RAM.

Damn. That is nuts. DigitalOcean, and then combine that with the SSD-backed block storage. They're using Linux for all of these systems. KVM for the virtualizer. I couldn't say more. DigitalOcean.com. Just use our promo code DLUnplugged. You apply that to your account, you get a $10 credit, and you just supported the Unplugged program. Keep us going. DigitalOcean.com. Just use our promo code DEOUNPLUGGED. You apply that to your account, you get a $10 credit, and

you just supported the Unplugged program. Keep us going. DigitalOcean.com. DEO Unplugged. And I wouldn't mind to try out one of those 256 gig droplets. I know. Yeah. Just for a little while. You know, just an hour or two, play with it. Jeez Louise.

You know, I wonder, so what were you talking to me about before the pre-show? What you were talking about with the persistent RAM state, would that work on a virtual machine? That's a good question. It might, yeah. Do you want to recap what it was? Oh, I was just talking about the

kernel's persistent memory support for having like a block device in persistent memory. So apparently I had no idea. This is a module that's been available for a while that allows you to convert part of a space of memory of RAM to persistent storage. And so it's meant for like for dealing with persistent like. Is this sort of the back end technology that RAM disks use to create a RAM disk or is this beyond that?

Is this something else? Similar but this is developed in theory to support like non-volatile RAM. Oh. So if you have like that, I don't have that. But for development purposes as well as other purposes, you can mark any segment of RAM. Basically, you say leave this unassigned, and then the kernel can make a block device out of it.

Okay. And that actually, but the content you store there persists after a reboot? Not like a full reboot. Not if you actually turn the system off. But if you keep the system running and, for instance, k-exec, then yes. Because as long as you don't wipe that memory and then you boot the new kernel, also treating those memory regions as a block device, then bam. That's cool.

Yeah. So you can just have a whole system running in RAM, reboot right back into it. Yeah, you could. Oh, that'd be fun. So what were you using that for? Not really anything specific. We're just playing with it. But there's a lot of just like speed up use cases, or maybe you just want to have a system who, you know, you use your disk just for data, and then you bootstrap into that kind of environment off like a PixieBoot server or

something for your root file system. This is officially our geeky segment, because I'm going to play off that. And I was just talking about KVM, which I think is the world's best virtualizer. And is that even the right term? Should I hypervisor? Is that what I should be saying? Yeah.

But this is called Kimchi. It's an HTML management interface for the SOB. So you, of course, probably are familiar with boxes. Very nice GUI to manage KVM or whatever. But Kimchi is an HTML-based management tool for KVM. It's designed to make it easy and possible to get started. And look at these screenshots. Here's the login here.

And here's where they've got several virtual machines running. Oh, I like those icons there. Yeah. They recognize distros automatically, and the virtual machines get the distro icon next to it, which is very nice. Honestly, this is so nice. I probably should have kept it as a secret and then done it as like a big segment on

Linux Action Show. It has a web interface. It'll show you a list of running guests, including live screenshots of the guest session. You can use action buttons to shut down the guests or, you know, you can connect to the display of the guest in the browser. I was about to ask. Mm-hmm. I think this is probably the way I'm going to – oh, boy.

Oh, boy. Chris has got an idea, everyone. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. See, I was thinking – oh, boy. I was thinking I was going to use Proxmox in Lady Jupes. So you know, Wes, I'm working on setting up a Linux-based network in the RV. Yes.

And I was thinking I only want one computer. So you're going to have like a virtualized all-in-one. I was thinking Proxmox. It's worked super solid here. It has been a total work champ. And we've got machines that have been running literally since day one. When we moved in, it was one of the first things we stood up were these machines. That's awesome.

And they're still running today. It's been bulletproof. So I was thinking, well, I should just set up Proxmox. But honestly, with Kimchi – It's probably a lot – it's a lot easier to just bolt on. I think I would rather do this with like a base server install and then load Kimchi to manage it. Because the thing is going to – the other thing about it, it's going to be under a couch. It's going to be under a bench sealed up. There won't be a monitor i can get to or anything like that

so this is this could be this this could be the virtualization solution this might be my proxmox replacement i was recommending proxmox to a friend but he was kind of running into things that he was already kind of you know the server he was had in mind he kind of already set it up he was already using ubuntu on it and he didn't really feel like he didn't want to wipe and reinstall. So he might just be able to bolt this right on and bam, all right, there you go. You're KPI-managed. And it could be perfect for me because I would much rather just have like a base 16.04 server install or something like that and then install this on top of it. Proxmox is fantastic, but it still is a little too free-nazzy for me in the sense that it's too much of a pre-built setup.

Especially if you're only going for one device, right? So if it's your office and you just stick it in the corner, that's fine. Yes. When you have the device that like in six months you might need it to do a whole new function that Proxmox doesn't support. Yeah. Here we have a dedicated Proxmox machine and it runs in the garage 24-7 and that is the only thing it does. And I just cannot do that in an RV. So this is going to be, I cannot wait to play with it. It's called Kimchi, and we will have a link in the show notes to the GitHub page.

So while we're in the geeky category, I wanted to talk about the management firmware that comes with pretty much most Intel machines for years now, right? I mean, I think it's been in there since the Core series, perhaps. I don't know when it was added, but it's certainly been here, yeah, for the... But like all things that are inbounded with the Intel stuff, they iterate it on every single release, constantly adding features. And it is, some people call it like the sort of the spyware, Intel spyware that is, it's proprietary.

We have no idea what it does. It's called the management firmware. Is that what it's called? Management engine. Management engine. Thank you. Thank you. And it does all kinds of crazy things.

Like apparently it uses your network connection to go out and synchronize with NTP servers. If you run Windows, it supports functions like syncing your Wi-Fi network passwords to the firmware chip itself. And, of course, no source code is available for this. Well, no. And the Corbo project has been keen on replacing this or getting rid of it. And there's been some experiments by, I'm going to say Tramiel. Tramiel? Tramiel.

Yeah, maybe Tramiel. I apologize. I'm so horrible with names. Yeah, come join us and then correct us. That would be, jeez, that would be great. If we could just have a name person on here, I'd be horrible with names. Yeah, come join us and then correct us. That would be great. If we could just have a name person on here, I'd be all about that. But you are familiar with his work if you're not familiar with his name. He is the one that created the Magic Lantern firmware.

He reverse engineered the firmware on the Canon 5D Mark II. Oh, wow. That is really cool. Yeah, he's also the guy behind Thunderstrike, which is a proof-of-concept EFI firmware rootkit for Apple's MacBooks that uses Thunderbolt. And we've covered it extensively on TechSnap. He is – so you're probably familiar with some of his work, even if you're not familiar with the name like I wasn't. And he's been poking around at trying to get around or disable this management engine. And he says, I'm experimenting with what happens if I remove the management engine firmware from the lower SPI flash chip on a ThinkPad X230.

I just erase the first four kilobytes of its region. Take that. And then Corbett boots up fine and reports that this has a bad firmware. The management engine has a bad firmware. But it continues on, and Linux actually initializes without any complaints. And then he went to try to remove the entire region of memory, and of course it immediately wouldn't boot at all. So he's beginning to experiment with what he can poke at and what he can damage in the

management engine. I like that. To make it unusable, but still to make Linux bootable. Which is kind of a great idea. What an interesting approach. We're cracking the management engine. Destroy the damn thing.

What's that? Which version of the ThinkPad did he say? Yeah, it's the ThinkPad X230. I wonder if he can still do that with later models because I've heard they are locking down the management engine more and more and relying on it. Yeah, there's some discussion about that in the thread, I believe. So I'm kind of curious if the X230 isn't the best representative model for this.

Oh, interesting. I didn't know that. I mean, in some ways that might be true for actual production solutions. But in other ways, it allows him to poke at this and actually be able to see what kind of results and proceed. So in some ways, maybe it's good. But in other ways, it means it's not applicable to people that are getting newer ThinkPads. Yeah, that's good to know. In the good to know column, have you ever had to enter in like your keyring password on the GNOME desktop?

Sure, yeah. Yeah. Or maybe I think this is probably applied to Unity as well or Ubuntu Mate. I'm not sure. I mean, yeah. I don't know, actually. Maybe I could ask. Wimpy,

so the GNOME keyring, is that, that is a, is that on the Mate desktop? Yep, it is, yeah. Okay. So I had a, I had a very privileged thing

happen to me. It is one of the best things that's ever happened in my life is I had other people build a computer for me. What? I had to pay for the components for my own bitcoin but I had other people

assemble them for me mainly the beard and Noah and he created we covered the machines this is months and months and months ago and he even installed Anagross for me he set up Noah, he set installed Anagross for me.

He set up Noah. He set up Anagross for me. He set up Real Nice, installed a few apps for me, and set the password to something generic and said, all right, have at it. See you later. And I said thanks, sat down, started using it, and I opened up Chrome, and I got a keyring prompt for the password. I typed in my password that he had set, and nothing happened. Wrong password. I typed in my password that he had set and nothing happened. Wrong password. I typed in other variations of generic passwords

I know I've used from time to time. The various studio. Nothing happened. It was at that point I realized I don't know my key ring password.

Ah, screw it. I don't care. It won't be a problem. Right. Well, it turns out I tried to, I began setting up Nileus N1. Okay, yeah. Am I saying N to – so I began setting up Nileus N1.

OK. Yeah. Am I saying Nileus? Nileus? Nileus N1, the mail client, trying to set up my own server, get all that standing. Interesting. And N1 specifically relies on the GNOME keyring to store your credentials for Google. Yeah.

And so because I could not unlock my keyring, I couldn't set up N1. And so then I had to set off on a mission. I was on a mission now to be able to solve this problem. I didn't know what I could do because I didn't know what the password was. And the only way to change the password, obviously, is to provide the previous password. Can't do that. And I don't want to reload because the machine's freaking perfect. Except for this one thing.

Yes. Delete the keyring? So here's what I did. And there's probably a few ways to crack this nut, so please leave a comment and let me know. But what I did is I installed Seahorse, and then I went into Seahorse, and I selected the keyring that was there,

and I deleted it, which means it deleted anything it had in there. And it prompts you for a few times. And then I went to the file menu, new, created a new key ring, set in a password that I knew. And then this is the key part you have to do. After you create the new key ring, you have to right-click on the new key ring and say set as default. And then go reconfigure the applications that were trying to store their key ring credentials. So I then went and reset and reset up N1.

And then it prompted. And actually because I already had my reset and reset up N1, and then it prompted, and actually because I already had my keyring unlocked, everything just worked. Yeah, it just worked, right. So I have links in the show notes, but Seahorse was the keyring manager that I decided to use, and I have a brief description in the show notes

if you ever run into this. I've heard good things about Seahorse. Yeah. Has it worked well? Yeah. And you know why I was trying out N1 is totally, this is not really related to Seahorse. I was going to ask.

But N1 has totally kick-ass Keybase IO integration. It really does, yeah. Oh, have you played with it too? Yeah. Yeah. You should follow me and I should follow you on Keybase and all that S because I'm Chris LAS on Keybase.io. Beautiful.

And that – I have been getting some emails this week that people have been using my – and I needed a solid way to respond. Oh, they support it very nice. I was actually quite impressed with that. Yeah. So the, so did you go for the pro? Did you stay on your own server? Yeah.

No, I ended up, I decided I'm trying both. I'm still building my own server, but I also be, so I, so this week I've been getting a lot of emails for unfilter that are encrypted. I'm like, I need a way to support this. Yeah. I got a, so I went and bought pro in the meantime, but I actually already have a Droplet set up where I've already started to, but I just didn't have time to.

Sure, sure. It's all moving very fast. It's been a busy week. But damn, if that ain't a sweet integration, it totally beats a big mail or whatever you call it in Thunderbird.

Mm-hmm. And yeah. Anyways, Keybase.io slash ChrisLAS. And what are you on there? I think I'm Wes Payne. Jeez, Wes. No, I'm Noble Payne.

I'm Noble Payne on there. Okay. There you go. Yeah. So I've been enjoying Elias in that sense. And apparently it also is super vigilant about tracking when people read your emails. Have you noticed this? Yes.

So they have this. I think that's a pro-only feature. They have the built-in support for read tracking and that kind of stuff so that when they open it, they're downloading something from their servers that gives track of that they've seen it, which maybe that's important to you. Well, I'll tell you it's been interesting because I've been corresponding with an individual from the Linux Foundation recently. And it is interesting to get that bit of information from time to time. It is helpful, I will say, to get that bit of information. Just a little metadata. Uh-huh.

Uh-huh. And so that was an unsurprising perk of using N1. I thought read receipts were like this. It's more than read receipts, though, isn't it? Yeah. It's something else. What's the pricing on the Pro right now? Do you know?

I don't. Let me go look because it's not cheap but i was pretty happy with their client though and the you know it played pretty nicely with like my work i think they make it really oh pricing no here they go right here uh oh it's oh okay it's not nearly as much as i remembered it's seven dollars a month but for me here's here's here's why I like this a lot is I have a lot of – I have right now – I have over 13,000 unread email messages and I usually get that down to about 5,000. That's about as low as I ever get. And so having an email client that anything that can help me search faster, we're going to – actually today in this show, we're going to read email. We're going to cover, today, in this show, we're going to read email.

We're going to cover email, and later on in the show, it's one of the first times in probably a year that we've read email on this show, simply because I now have a slightly better workflow to collect email. You can actually look at the email. So it's been worth it. It actually has been worth it for me, because

it's been good for some encrypted communications, or GPT encrypted communications for Unfilter. It's been great for corresponding with the Linux Foundation and it's been great now for this particular function. So I do like it quite a bit. I think it's rather nice. It's bulky. It is not cheap. You can stand up your own server.

I'm going to work on that. But right now I decided to try this because I wanted to use this right away. Yeah. But it also is like, you know, you're using some other, you're using some other background anyway that's probably free. So, you know, maybe there's an angle where you're like, well, is it enough of a thing on top that. I would, I would not, I would not recommend it for most people just if you're concerned

at all about a third party being involved in your email. Unless you're using Google services, then go screw yourself. You're a hypocrite. All right. I want to talk about something else that's totally insecure. USBIP. This is brilliant. This is such a brilliant project.

This is something that actually could be really great for Linux Terminal Service Project. USBIP is a project aimed at developing a general USB device sharing system over an IP network. USB IP encapsulates USB IO messages into TCP IP payloads and transmits them between computers. Original device drivers and applications can be also used on the remote computers. So they have no modification. They have no idea. So USB storage disks work just fine. Even tools like FDISC and MakeFS and Mount all work fine.

USB keyboards and mice, webcams and speakers, USB printers even, and USB Ethernet devices. It currently is implemented as a Linux device driver and available under the GPL. Its IO performance is enough for practical. It says, I think the English is a little broken. Performance is enough practical in local area network for all types of devices, including IO synchronous devices without any modification of Linux original USB device drivers. Interesting.

of Linux original USB device drivers. Interesting. This could be big for us because this could essentially turn any webcam into an IP camera for us. Yeah. And we could bring these into our OBS machine. We could have... This could work so amazing

because we could have little machines that could be Raspberry Pis all over conferences with USB web cameras that we could pull little machines that could be raspberry pies all over conferences with usb web cameras that we could pull into our obs machine amazing yeah wow i'm super excited about this project i'm very it's selfish i'm selfish but i'm very excited because it if if the host network was good enough to support it and it doesn't have to be crazy we could really we could really uh essentially have a Linux-powered IP camera solution here. Boy.

Yeah. I wonder if that would work. I'm going to try. We have to try. Yeah, I think so. Well, maybe I can get Noah and Rick to try. Yeah. Hey, guys.

Yeah, hey, guys. Hey, guys. Let's take all the things and put them over IP. What do you think mosenrath i'm not so sure i would actually trust that you know like if you're going to do that over say like a private network a monitored network sure go right ahead but if you're not think about it for a second people are already hacking like you know webcams and all that kind of stuff already using whatever means i'm not

smart enough to remember how that's all done but now if you're putting them all really on the net via the wonderful wonderful world of ip what happens if someone says oh i know what that is i know what that is i know what that is and starts just pretty much using all those ips to literally just record all the stuff that you're doing that way. Instead of recording, you know, what's going on on your computer, using your computer to record you. So this is totally got a lot of huge, massive, unbelievable security ramifications that we probably can't even begin to touch on. I mean, this is, this is, the project even says, you know, use this for devices you trust.

But on a local area network here, like in the studio, where we like in the studio where the only thing we're doing is production. Right. Or where we could go set up a network where you could trust that network, a dedicated switch, that kind of thing, which is what we would do. Oh, man. That, if you do it in a controlled environment, I think there's a lot of potential to this. William, do you have thoughts on it? I was just going to say lock it down. Yeah, lock it down. It's a real environment. Stick it over,'re just going to say lock it down. Stick it over IPsec.

It'd be great. It'd be amazing. This could also be a great way to do network installs. You could have remote IP USB flash drives or I don't know. There's a lot of potential here. It reminds me of the network block device.

DRDB? It's similar to that. It reminds me of like NDB or the network block device. DRDB? Is that what you're – Well, they're similar to that. Oh. Network block device. What are you talking about, Wes? How you can mount a – you mount a block device over the network? Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. DRDB is more like block device replication. Yeah, exactly. Okay. I follow you. Yeah. But same thing.

But now this can be just any USB device. Mm-hmm. It's very cool. It's very cool. I'm pretty excited about it. Anyways, we'll— I wonder if you could do, like, a Synergy-type thing. Not, like, as synergistic, obviously, because it would be, you know, taken over by one machine.

But, like, here's my keyboard over here. Yeah, really. And it's mounted on that machine. I think you probably could. I think you—I think that would probably—I don't know why that wouldn't work. That could be—and you—hmm. Because to the Linux host host it just it just looks like a usb local device the the software level is just totally exactly the kind of thing

about linux where it's like you know maybe you have like practical applications right in your mind but there's just so much fun and playing with it and there's like so many things that you'll discover like maybe it actually is useful to you just because you can do it i legitimately on this computer over here already have a telegram thread going with Noah talking about how we could use this in production. So we will probably test this and get back to you guys on it because I think it has some serious potential. I am constantly trying to scheme different – I actually kind of blame Wimpy in some ways. But I'm constantly trying to scheme ways we can come up with cool solutions for using Linux to podcast and then

contribute back to those projects. In User Air 4, that'll come out God knows when, because I'm going on a road trip soon. But in User Air 4, we talk about some of the technology changes we've been doing on the back end and one of the new open source projects that

Rikai's been contributing to sending patches back to to produce user error. And it's pretty awesome because so far at least, and I know this will probably not always be the case, but so far every upstream project we've begun working with for the tools we're using in-house has been damn receptive. That's awesome. And in the case of the tool we're going to talk about in User Air 4 is implementing the patches right away. So some of the stuff that we needed to get fixed to improve playback on Android devices and stuff, he's already fixed it upstream.

Wow. Yeah, so we started in-house like, well, we'll patch it ourselves, and then re-contacted the developer. We've had a couple of successes like that now. So anyways, we'll talk about that in the user air for, but it is really cool to be able to take this stuff and say, this gives Linux an advantage in production, right? Of course, that's the lens of what I look at this, but that is where we're going to

build a pretty good list here of reasons that make Linux awesome to do media production pretty soon. And it's going to make the Mac look like a joke. You know what else looks like a joke? The rest of the mobile industry compared to Ting. I mean, it is. They got nothing. The duopolies, they try to be creative, but really they just want to soak you for every single thing.

See, that's not how Ting does it. Ting is just pay for what you use wireless. It's $6 for the line, and then you just pay for what you use. Ting keeps rates simple. We don't make you pick a plan. Instead, you just use your phone as you normally would. How much you use determines how much you pay each month. You can have as many devices as you want on one account. That's good, because when you use more, you pay less per minute, message, or megabyte of data. Your usage, plus $6 per active device on your account, plus taxes, is your monthly bill. Simple. That's what we mean when we say mobile. That makes sense. And then they back it up with fantastic, passionate customer service.

You get to talk to a real human being. They stay on the line. I remember when I was on my road trip out to Noah's house, and I had a MiFi issue that wasn't Ting's fault. And I legitimately, I legitimately thought at least three times, it is totally understandable for this person to bail on me right now. I mean, it's just a human. They could be like, listen, sir, it should work. I don't know. I have, I have, I have been in that support role before. So I'm like, totally understandable.

And legitimately, they stuck with me the entire time and it was, I was so damn impressed with that experience but honestly, I don't often talk to the Ting customer support

because they just have a great dashboard. The control panel really lets you manage everything. And an app for your phone too. It's really nice and the nice thing about it,

I'll just say, you can go in there and set limits on certain people's accounts. You know what I'm saying? Weak eye. You got to lock the beard down. He's data hungry.

He just loves SMS. They've also got a whole line of devices. They're unlocked. You own them outright. They're yours. It's such like an upfront and honest way to do mobile service. There's no like secret backdoor deals where you have to call up and ask about when you can get your next phone. Agreements or contracts or commitments.

Early termination fees. None of that. It's gone. You just got to go to Linux.ting.com. That will take $25 off your first device. Or if you bring a device and they get CDMA and GSM, it will take $25 off your first month, which will probably pay for the whole damn thing depending on how much you use. So just start by going to linux.ting.com. And a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged program.

All right. So, Wes, you and I were sort of kvutzing recently. Is that kvutzing? Is that about the state of desktop customization? I gave Loki a pretty good review in 4.34. I think it's got a couple of rough spots, but overall it's a pretty polished desktop, a unique product. Yes. But from a customizability standpoint, that's not its strongest standpoint.

It's not where it's really – that's not where you go. If you want to have a really custom experience, there's a lot of other options. There's the Plasma desktop. There is some great themes for the GNOME desktop. Other options is the Plasma desktop. There is some great themes for the GNOME desktop. And it's interesting because different distributions make it easier or harder to accomplish this. And if you look at distributions like Arch, there is easy access, but there's no direct tools that allow you to necessarily implement those themes. You look at distributions like Ubuntu Mate that come with the tweak tool that allow you to choose a general layout, which is an overall interface paradigm, but not actually a theme

tool itself. They're separate theme tools. Right. But they're sort of predefined, preset. You have a box in which you can play. And so there's a lot that can be done, but depending on the desktop you choose and the distro you choose or the combination in which, the variability is very high. Yeah, it really is. And so you've been recently doing – I think you just reloaded from Fedora, right?

Yeah. Well, I was just getting ready to – my laptop had been polluted by all the various things we've tried here on the show. No doubt. various things we've tried here on the show. No doubt. So I thought like, well, let's reinstall. And I kind of want to redo some of the partitioning to have better space when I do want to reinstall like six operating systems at a time to give them a shot. And I was just thinking about it.

And it's not like my main workstation. It's kind of like my on-the-go laptop when I'm out and about and don't need serious power or anything else. So it's not crucial. It's not like the one I spend all my time on. And I was just thinking about it. It's like I'm very comfortable installing Arch. I like installing Arch.

But there's kind of that last layer of, like, picking themes, choosing them, remembering, like, which directories I need to stick them in so that they'll be picked up by the right programs. You know, even things down to, like, customizing my Vim setup and that sort of stuff where it's – sometimes it takes me a little bit to get going. sometimes it takes me a little bit to get going and there are just some things about Antigros in particular in this case I was just thinking well it's I can get like a really nice desktop where I can still customize everything I need to right like there's not crazy things installed by default

but I'm up and running in a thing that looks beautiful and like I'm not ashamed to have next to my wife's MacBook that's an interesting criteria and I don't usually do that i'm not saying that's like yeah what i will do but i follow you uh but i feel like when you say it was easier was it because that it just came pre-installed with numix or was it or was it something else i think so i think it's more just what what we lack is that like that sense of design in a lot of ways like elementary has it right and that's kind of one of the things that sets them apart. Other distributions have it too.

Um, but especially in like the wild west of art or some other places, I feel like it's, you know, you see like the Unix porn subreddit and that kind of thing. And there's a lot of good examples there, but it, it really is something you,

you have to figure out if you want something that's nonstandard, but you want it to look nice, you really have to figure it out for yourself. And there's like such a, there's such a huge array of different possibilities. There's a lot of directions I think we could go. And I guess

I have one, I obviously have one take on this, but I kind of want to bounce it around the mumble room a bit. And I haven't heard from Popey for a while, so I'll start with him. I'd like to hear Popey's thoughts on desktop Linux customization. If you have just general thoughts, but also on if it's

really something that we need to be concerned with at all. I'm the worst person to ask, because I'm the kind of guy who installs a desktop and then leaves it basically default. So I think that makes you the perfect person, because it's a totally different perspective, which is, I'm kind of like, I want to live your world

for a second. So I just don't care. I just want it to get out of the way and get on with doing my applications i'll generally accept whatever the wallpaper is i might change it but i've gone for months with whatever the default wallpaper is on my distro and probably the only thing i would fiddle is the size of the launcher on the side you just make it a little bit smaller i'll install loads of apps of course, and I might change the defaults. So instead of having Firefox as my default, I may have Google Chrome. But that's about as far as it goes.

Maybe in a terminal, I might change the font and the font size, but really, that's it. I don't change things a lot. Do you consider yourself a very distractible person? Yeah. Hmm, okay. I don't change things Do you consider yourself a very distractible person? Yeah Hmm, okay So I guess I mean, yes, yes, totally

If by that you mean, you know I mean, I have loads of windows open With all my social networks in And all that kind of stuff And I also, you know, have a phone nearby Pinging me at every And yeah, I'm kind of easily distracted Okay, okay

I just think that for me, the reason why I customize is because I can't stop until it's just right. And I feel like it steals brain cycles, to use a CPU term, I feel like it steals cycles from my brain until I've got it

just right. So here's a different question. Has it gotten easier or less important because it's easier? I feel like 10 years ago, if you were using Linux, especially when Compiz was the rage and all that, you wanted to customize, right? You wanted to show off and be like,

look, I can make this look cool. Is it just that these days, we've done a good enough job that most distributions you install, they look respectable? You don't have to try to compete to make them look like windows or Mac because they're their own thing. I think there's a part of that,

but I mean, when I was working on windows or my, when my work laptop would have been a windows machine, I would have probably done the same as Chris and I would have tuned it and move the launcher and fiddled this. And what are those things for windows even called? Oh my God. Yes.

Yes. I would have done, I would have, I would have done all of that to get it absolutely perfect because I'd be sat at that computer all the time. Nowadays, I actually just accept most of the defaults and I find that's fine. I have a Windows 10 machine that I do, that's mostly gaming, but I do a bit of surfing

when it happens to be booted into Windows. And I don't change that at all other than move the launcher to the left-hand side because that makes sense. What kind of barbarian has the launcher at the bottom of the screen consuming vertical real estate? That just sounds insane. So I move the launcher to the left, and that's it.

Job done. Job done. I like it, Popey. That's a good perspective. Now, Mr. Sipes is in the mumble room, and you had a chance to look at Elementary OS. What do you think about a distribution that really focuses on, we're going to just make it look right out of the box and call it good?

You stole the words out of my mouth, Chris. I used it this past week, and it is freaking awesome. I'm the guy. I'm kind of like you. I try to tweak everything to make it just perfect. And until then it's, it's not right. And I popped into elementary and once I got my head around the keyboard shortcuts that they, that are slightly different, the unity, I was pretty much there. There are a couple of things which I got back to the team about that I think are just little bugs maybe that could be squashed and make the experience even better. But man, like their defaults are like dead on. And it kind of made me upset.

And I hate to do this while Popey's in here, but it kind of made me upset because Elementary has the polish and has the out-of-the-box experience that, at this point, I really wish that I got that same feeling when I popped up Unity 7. Oh! You're entitled to your opinion, Ryan. Alright, fair enough. Now, I want to give

Ryan, yeah, I think if I could have, if I could sum up my last review about elementary OS, it would be it is the default configuration in which my ADD mind can relax and I can just get work done. And I think if I could have just said that, I could have probably summarized the entire review. Just get rid of that last episode. But North Ranger is on the opposite side of this spectrum. He says, screw, just let it just sit there and don't tweak it. The tweaking is the beauty of the Linux desktop. Is that right, North Ranger? Yeah, you know, and my experience has kind of grown, I think, with the way the Linux desktop has grown because, you know, way back in the day, I vaguely remember messing with, you know, Favum and then Openbox on Fedora,

Red Hat at the time, was, you know, actually kind of settled into, I just want it to work during the Ubuntu GNOME 2 days. But when the Ubuntu or when the Unity split happened, I kind of checked out on desktop Linux for a while. And it was about, I want to say about GNOME 3.12 or 3.14 when I really jumped back in. But even though I liked the way that the GNOME folks were handling things, I still wanted things to work a certain way. So I went down the extension rabbit hole, man. I probably have about 30 GNOME extensions installed right now.

Oh, don't know what that's like. Nothing. And I tell you, the beauty, beauty i think of the system that is available particularly on the gnome side nowadays is how programmable it is um i had a great example of the screencast extension that allows you to record your desktop yeah and i didn't like the g streamer um settings that it was using and hey it's just a javascript file i could go in and mess with it and i thought that was awesome that it's not only the look and feel, it's actually how the desktop works. Awesome and terrifying.

I agree. I agree. Well said. I actually thought you were going to come at me with the Plasma desktop. Minimac, I want to give you a chance to jump in. Go for it, sir. Yeah, especially on small screens, I would love that all the desktop environments would have an auto height or IntelliHeight top bar because that top bar takes space and – yeah, it's space lost for me. Yeah, that precious vertical space because all our screens are now 16 by 9 or widescreen aspect ratio.

So the vertical space is at a premium. Now, there is one voice that's been absent so far, and that would be Mr. Wimpy. And like it or not, Wimpy may be sort of the face of traditional desktop on Linux. Now, traditional desktop that has moved forward in ways that make a lot of sense. But, Wimpy, we've talked around this a lot, but I'd like to hear your thoughts on this. Okay. like to hear your thoughts on this okay uh yeah i make a distro and i added a tweak tool so i could pre-bundle the default suit me which is the cupatino layout so when i installed a buntu mate so you do customize it you just build a tool to just automatically build it to do and the rest

of us get to benefit yeah that's one way to do it, I guess. Yeah. So there are tools. But then there is the practical matter of getting the themes. And I think this is – and I'm not – this is not an Arch master race thing. I just think honestly this is where Arch probably pulls ahead is the AUR has all the best themes. It really does. The AUR has all the best themes. It really does. And the simple fact of the matter is you can do packaur-sgtk-theme-arc, enter, and you now have the best theme available for the GNOME desktop.

You didn't have to Google for a PPA. You didn't have to make sure it was the right PPA. You didn't have to add it to your software repository. You didn't have to add the key if you needed to. You didn't have to refresh your source list. And then you didn't have to issue the install command separately. It's already done, and you've already configured your GNOME desktop to have that theme. It is legitimately one of the best distribution when it comes to choosing a theme because it's just in the AUR. And I think that's one area where I've really enjoyed Cinnamon and the Plasma desktop is in their theme selector. They just download the themes for you.

Because that's one of the things about themes, I guess, that I would – from before is that it feels very much like there's not a central index. There's not a lot of like – and if someone knows, like, is there a good like 2015, 2016 really good guide about how to theme Linux and all the different options and where you go and what are popular themes and where to look for those things? I feel like it's kind of like something you gradually learn. You have to know Linux people who know what good themes are. Listen to Chris Lass's very good opinions about them. Well, thank you. So it's nice if the AUR is kind of one of those places where you have blessed themes or if you have something built in.

Well, in the AUR at least, you can type in GNOME theme, search, and then search by votes or popularity and get a good idea of which themes people are installing. Yes. It provides like something like that. That's a nice for people like tweak their desktop. That is a that's an inherent advantage. But Mr. Sipes says he has the ultimate solution.

Yeah. So here's what I say. I say that the canonical hire Wimpy and hire the elementary team and they work really hard on making things custom customizable but also really nice and polished out of the box what do you think of what do you think of that chris you think we should uh pressure pressure them into into doing that uh i actually think what we should do we'll all buy a bunch of phones if they do uh ryan if we're gonna play that game what i say we should well i actually think what we should do... We'll all buy Ubuntu phones if they do. Ryan, if we're going to play that game, what I say we should...

I would say what we should do is start a campaign within System76 to ship one of their laptops as elementary OS. That's what I say we should do. What? Oh, boy. Or Mate. Or Ubuntu Mate. I would say that. No, I think honestly, I think really there is a certain design

choice that should be made for the traditional desktop. Obviously that's something that Canonical has gotten some flack for in the past and the switch over to Unity 8 is probably going to reignite that debate to some degree after it happens. But I actually – and I'm not going to put words in Wimpy's mouth. But in my opinion, the way it seems to be working is Canonical acknowledges the existence of the Ubuntu Mate project. It is an official flavor. They have extended invitation invites to Wimpy to go to things like the Snap Sprint invite. It kind of seems like the ideal arrangement for end users at this point because Wimpy is able to manage his project as an independent project and make decisions that best benefit it and its user base while

basing it on a technology stack that is not only aware of the project's existence but working amicably with that project. I mean it seems right now to be sort of an ideal arrangement and I mean I wish the best to Wimpy. If Canonical offered him a great salary, go for it, Wimpy. But I think, Wimpy, you have something kind of unique in your hands. I was just saying to Wes before we started the show, and you kind of mockingly reshared this or jokingly reshared this on Google+. But the sentence that stuck in my head was the Linux distribution of the year.

sentence that stuck in my head was the Linux distribution of the year. I mean, the year is not over yet, but there are only so many distributions I would put maybe in the top three and Ubuntu Mate is there. And I think you have a good arrangement now. And I think that's just my opinion, but I think it's one of the best distributions of the year so far. Yeah. Sadly, not the best. It sounds like Solus. Best distributions of the year so far. Yeah. Sadly, not the best. It sounds like Solus.

Right. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, Ike, he's been working hard. He's been working hard, and he did spend some time here on the West Coast. I don't think he sleeps. No, he doesn't sleep. He's actually been able to ship. So in five years, he'll explode, and you guys will be. Somehow, somehow he's even been able to ship the Mate desktop for Solus.

So now who knows what could happen. That's good to see. All right. So I want to move forward. We have some follow-up and feedback to get to. But I would like to hear your thoughts out there about the – well, actually, Ryan, do you have thoughts on polish before we move off? Yeah. The thing that gets me is whenever I was using elementary this past week, and I've used Mate before, and the thing that I come back to is I've gotten so used to popping into a distribution and having these little things that bug the crap out of me and having to go through a series of steps in order to fix them.

and having to go through, you know, a series of steps in order to fix them. And it was so weird to pop in and feel like there had been a lot of focus on that polish. And I didn't really know what you were talking about in your review until I popped up, you know, elementary on my own box and started playing with it. And I realized just the little things that have gotten neglected for what i think are visions outside of you know that that experience of i have a desktop you know i have this desktop distribution i'm going to make it as great as possible and uh anyway that was super frustrating and and i've and i'm'm glad that we have Matei and I've talked to Aiki quite a bit, Solas talking about his full focus being on his desktop distribution. And elementary, it sounds like they're doing the same thing. that there was that same focus from other projects as well and making the desktop experience just work and be consistent and nice.

So anyway, I'll get off my high horse, but that's where my head's been today. And I was just so impressed the past few days playing with elementary that I so wanted to talk about the great job that, you know, some projects are doing around that polish and that great experience. I feel like, um, elementary solace and Ubuntu Batae,

um, might be my top three for the year right now at this point. And for different reasons for each one of them, I feel like they're, they're, they're all, or at least to some extent distributions you could recommend and the the caveats that you would have with that would go

along with that are pretty minimal you know well there's a lot of other distributions that like are amazing in some ways but you have to be like well but except for this and you're gonna have to do that and uh but all those would be like i could set those up for a lot of people and just they would be that's they would do that that's dead on that's exactly that's better than i could have ever put it it's a that thing where you start apologizing yeah exactly yeah exactly oh well this is this is good you know but you're gonna run into this and i just just turn it off to wi-fi off put it back on it, it's fine. Don't suspend. Don't suspend. Yeah. That's exactly it. Yeah. Yeah, it is.

It's 2016. I think some of the surprises have been so far, now that we're more than halfway into it, have been these distributions. Same goes to Entraware. And Purism is working on it too. Some aggressive improvements, some really aggressive improvements to the desktops and laptops that run this stuff. And I think there's still people out there that have perfectly legitimate reasons to choose a ThinkPad or even a MacBook Pro or a Dell Sputnik. There's a lot of different hardware out there at this moment that Linux will run on. But the locally sourced, artisan, homegrown, 100% organic laptops that run Linux have been better. Got the penguin tattoo right on them. Better than ever.

And now we have these distributions that are better forever. And it's kind of funny because I don't think we really talked a lot about this at the beginning of the year. No, we didn't. Interesting. All right. Well, let's move on. I think we've probably spent enough time on this.

But thank you, Mumble Room. Yeah, and if you have thoughts on Linux desktop customization, feel free to let us know in the comments. I want to mention Linux Academy before we move into our feedback. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go get the advanced skills you need around Linux, the basics,

but also really all of the cool things around Linux that are more sophisticated. They have advanced training tools that increase your skills and encourage critical thinking and give you hands-on experience at Linux Academy. You start by going to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. They have labs and exercises that give you real-world servers where you get to actually work on this stuff, really feel confident with it,

and walk away like you've actually done it before. In that interview, you can be like, yep, I totally hosed that EC2 instance, I just destroyed it, and now I know what not to do. And you know what's nice about, like, specifically with the EC2 stuff, all included as part of Linux Academy subscription. It's not like you got to go set up a separate thing and all of that. You can SSH right into the servers.

They have practice exams and quizzes, learning plans that give you a timeframe and you can just work within that. In fact, if you're busy, they have availability planners that will sort of work with you on your days you have available and set up reminders. It's a super cool system full of Jupyter Broadcasting community members and created by Linux enthusiasts. I think the big thing for me is even just outside of the JB community, the amount that I've seen people jump on the

Linux Academy bandwagon is amazing. Yeah, it's getting big. Old school admins, just the whole gamut of people who use Linux I've seen. Yeah, they're getting really big. The people who use Linux, they know about Linux Academy because it's made by people who use and love Linux. It's high-quality stuff and they're getting bigger and bigger all the time. It is pretty neat to see them grow. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged.

All right. So this is an email that came into the show from Storm77. He says, warning. They may use Pro 5 Ubuntu manual that we linked to last week. Suggest formatting the external SD card. Hi. Hello. Hello there.

Hi there. Hello. In an episode, Real Pain in the Flash, LUP 161, you added this manual to the show notes and links to the PDF. By the way, he says in the TWRP section on wiping the device, it also selects the micro SD card. This is the external SD card, not the internal one. I saw it in time. I just let you know. I almost formatted my 120 gig SD card. This is the external SD card, not the internal one. I saw it in time, but just letting you know, I almost formatted my 120 gigabyte card. Just wanted to prevent

anybody else from running into this. The backup is also incomplete, so I wrote a small tool to backup the entire flash onto an internal SD card. He links us to that too. And he says, give Wimpy his regards. Well, that's just great. Thank you for the warning and the tool improvement. That's amazing. And it's great that you're doing that nice? Thank you for the warning. Yes, likewise. And the tool improvement. That's amazing.

And it's great that you're doing that. I think you should let us know more about your experiences going forward. Oh, Wimby, can we get an update from you? Oh, fine. Going well, thank you. awaiting OTA 13 in the hope that Bluetooth is specifically Bluetooth audio

is resolved for my device. I thought literally you were going to end it with, all's going well, thank you. Done. I don't ask you about your phone, do I? In fact, I'm going to cover OTA 13 a little bit in the next week's episode of Linux Action Show.

Whoa. So check that out. Uh-oh. Yeah. No, it's all good. It's good. I think it looks like a pretty great update. So I'll just talk about that a little bit in the next episode of LAS, which I'll be honest was prerecorded.

I know. I'm going on a little road trip and so we prerecorded that. But so I do happen to know the future in that we talked about that new update so Bluetooth is what Wimpy's looking forward to it sounds like. Yeah. There's a whole bunch of stuff I'm looking forward to but that in particular I'm going to keep asking you Wimpy all the time because

I'm living vicariously through you. Okay I'll try and be better prepared in the future. This is his revenge for you asking about when the Libra was going to arrive. Is that what it is? I forgot about that. That's fair. I suppose. I was doing that for about six months.

Chris, you need to buy something so we can bring that back. You should take mental notes, Wimpy. I'll just ask you next week. Actually, I just really want to know. Yeah, that's true. Me too. Me too. Yeah, exactly.

Paul writes in about Ubuntu Touch, Wayland and the Nexus 7. He says, with all the talk recently about Ubuntu Touch and KDE, have you seen plasma-mobile.org? You talked about Wayland and how good that will be to have. But on Arch with GNOME 320, it's already available if you just check out your gdmcustom.com file. Finally, it's rumored that there will be a Nexus Pixel 7 this year. If that happens, do you think Ubuntu Touch would be released for it? Keep up the great shows, Paul.

So, Mr. Popey, can I pick your brain on what is the process when a brand new piece of hardware ships? What is sort of, what's the impetus to get Ubuntu Touch

on that device? I got to imagine it starts with somebody picking up a piece of hardware. Yeah, for the most part part they're community ports so it's you've got to have a someone skilled in doing the porting and b they've got to actually have the device yeah and then third third the real the real killer is time they've got to have time to actually sit down and do the port and when you have a never-ending supply of android devices coming and people you know saying hey i want this one next this one next

it's it's actually a never-ending supply and we need more people to to to get involved in that because it's just you know there are more devices out there than there are possible people who can port them you know i would imagine so it's it's a small team but yeah generally you pick up advices and you know get the source code for the kernel and all that kind of stuff and then start the porting effort and follow the documentation basically so far and this could change over time but it seems like the way it works is when a device reaches a certain critical mass, which can sometimes be a year or two after its original release, you start to see enough community members coming together to work on that device like the Nexus 5 for example or other devices where there's just – it's kind of nice in a sense because it gives a device of yours a

second life. But at the same time, as the community grows, I would expect that might scale a bit more right and and there's a lot of resources typical like developers scratching their own itch you know if someone has a nexus five in front of them and wants you know wants the port to happen then they'll either try and do it themselves or they'll throw some money at somebody else to do it. It's, you know, if you don't have it, if there's a device and you don't actually have one, you're probably not motivated to want to port to it.

And then you need that community of people. Because there are a lot of people. Yeah, there is like a, there is a, shoot, I'm blanking on the name, Popey, but there's kind of like a bounty source equivalent for device ports, isn't there? Yeah, UB ports. Yes, UB ports. Yes, UB ports. Yeah, UB ports.

It's got a Patreon as well. Okay, there you go. So that is a fascinating idea too. In fact, I think I've actually contributed. Well, because you kind of need that whole – you need the people developing it. They need to have the phones, and then you need the people who have the phones

and are willing to run it and then submit bugs and patches and core dumps and all that kind of stuff. It's fascinating though because it can all happen. It just takes a community. We just got to do it. It takes a village, Wes. It takes a village to raise a phone. So JavaKing writes in and wants to know my Bitcoin Linux details.

He wants me to expose all my secrets. He says, hi, Chris. You mentioned using Bitcoin. I'm a new Bitcoiner and I wonder if you might elaborate on your setup, maybe share you with your audience. Here are some questions I have. Do you use Bitcoin Core or a lightweight client with multibit or Electrum? Have you securely backed up your wallet.dat? Do you perform all transactions from a single desktop?

And what currency exchange do you use? And what app do you use to monitor the Bitcoin value? Thanks, Java King. Boom. Give us the D. It's Chris. So Java King, you're a new Bitcoiner and you wanted to know how I secure my setup. I'd say my first step is don't tell people how you use Bitcoin. That's my first hint because that is the worst thing you could do. But since I am here.

It's out. I am here at your service. I am here for you. I will expose myself. So I use Electrum as my wallet of choice. It has – mainly since I started Plan B, I've used this because I've had an on and off conversation thread over the years with the developer. And so I just happen to know the person behind it and I like it. But also I like the fact that it fires up right away.

That's one of the things I really enjoy about it. Have you tried Electrum? Yeah, I have. I also like the instant on. Yes. Really, that's a big sell. Yeah. So Electrum is the wallet of choice.

So then he said, do I backup my wallet.dat file? How do I securely backup my wallet.dat file? Well, one of the cool things about Bitcoin, Java King, is you could actually store it offline. And there are methods to actually even print it out and store it if you want. So look into that. Do you perform all transactions from a single desktop? Yes. And I back

that directory up. What currency exchange do you use? I'm lazy. I use Coinbase. What do you use? I also am lazy and use Coinbase. And I've also talked to the people behind Coinbase before. And I know them. And I like them. So what desktop app do you use to monitor the current Bitcoin value? Well, I am apparently a masochist. I use a GNOME extension.

And so I have a GNOME extension that works all the time. So right now, the Bitcoin price, as we record this episode, is $609.64, a U.S. greenback. This morning, it was at $611, and so I made a small Bitcoin transaction on behalf of the Jupyter Broadcasting – well, my Bitcoin, but I purchased something for the Jupyter Broadcasting Network because I made the guesstimate that that's the high for the day and I need this thing. And so that's – I kind of watch that, and if I know there's something that the network

needs, I watch that on my desktop and I try to make my purchase in the point where it's at the highest value of the day. And I have so many Bitcoin bookmarks that I also check. Bitcoin average? That's the one I was going to say. Bitcoin average is just the one I would go with. You just have a little pin tab with that. Check out Bitcoin average. We also have some Bitcoin functionality built into JBot. Oh, yeah, that's right. And if you want to follow news of the Bitcoin subreddits, usually pretty good.

You can go there and check that out. Bitcoin's still hanging around. It's hanging around. And Noah is actually still mining Bitcoin to this day. Oh, is he? Yeah. Wow. He does.

He has some dedicated rigs. Wimpy, do you mine any Bitcoin anymore? No. It's a fool's game. Yeah, I agree. I agree. I think Noah gets the power for free for some reason and a like it's like from like this all right like this building overall

payment that he makes i'm not even sure it's worth it for the heat that it generates anymore yeah yeah i did look into getting some of those faster usb uh a6 to plug into a pi yeah but um the difficulty now is astronomical even if you sort of used a dozen of those yeah you yeah yeah it's not worth it you're just you're just participating in the network playing your role in uh keeping the network healthy but you're not actually going to make anything you need some serious horsepower these days. I have been experiencing some interesting like, holy – what? You're using Bitcoin? And they're like, yeah, Bitcoin. What?

Bitcoin? And I'm like – I'm totally shocked. I look at them like, you know what Bitcoin is? And they look at me like, I've heard this word before, but I have no idea what you're talking about. There are more and more small independent shops in Washington that are using Bitcoin as a back-end payment, as a back-end sort of – what is the right word to use? It's the payment processing. They're using Bitcoin to fund the transactions and the payment processing. And then they're immediately converting it into cash.

And so at the point of sales device, I give them a Visa or a MasterCard. But when they swipe it, the payment processor is using Bitcoin to float the transaction or something. And then the merchant receives the payment in cash. And this is – there's a lot of little businesses doing this now. And they have it hooked up to the tablets and – Wow. Yeah. But you just use your Visa card.

Regular Visa card. But Bitcoin is used on the back end as some sort of – To facilitate. Interesting. Facilitator, yeah. Huh. I've been meaning to look into it more. We should definitely look into that.

I'm curious. Yeah. So anyways, it's – Bitcoin is still out curious. Yeah. So anyways, is Bitcoin still out there? Yeah. Electrum is my wallet. There's Multibit's another good one to check out. But I like Electrum. Wimpy, do you have a wallet that you'd like to mention?

Or do you want to talk about your setup at all? Well, these days I use CoinCorner as my exchange and my wallet. CoinCorner, yeah. Nice. I've heard of it. So they're based in the Isle of Man, which is in the shores of the British Isles, but independently governed. I like that that was your requirement. Well, it wasn't a requirement back when i was looking because i i went through the whole you know getting out of mount gox right yeah right that all yeah i mean and and even when that was

like the only reputable exchange around it was it was always a heart and mouth moment whenever you did any kind of yes gosh it was man it was just awful so i was looking for an exchange and a few couple of years ago yeah about two years ago i found coin corner and they were a startup then but they'd got all the right bits in that they could do uh sterling euros dollars they'd got all the necessary financial approvals they'd got a sensible bunch of people behind them and i switched all that over to them and i've not looked back since they've been a really good service so they're much like coinbase but that they are in this part of the world which was kind of important absolutely sure that makes sense and of course our uh our

bitcoin expert poppy any any Bitcoin update from you? Hmm. No. Hmm. Seems like he doesn't have one. I think he wandered off to bed. Nope. He just doesn't have a Bitcoin update, I think.

He just doesn't have one. He's counting all his Bitcoins. Yes. Filthy rich bastard. All right. That brings us to the end of this week's Unplugged. If you would like to send us an email, go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash contact. week's Unplugged. If you would like to send us an email, go to jupiterbroadcasting.com

slash contact. You're also encouraged to leave feedback wherever you watched this, or visit the subreddit, linuxactionshow.reddit.com and man, would we love if you showed up live. jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar, and also shout out to the Linux gamer who may be joining us

next week on the Unplugged program. That's right. And don't forget, tune in live at jblive.tv and if you'd like to join our virtual lug, go get Mumble and then bang Mumble in our chat room to find out more.

We'll see you back here next Tuesday. Thank you. GABtitles.com. Let's go pick our title, you guys. Let's go figure out what we're going to call this sucker. Hey, guys. Thanks for being here. It was a good show. out what we're going to call this sucker. Hey, guys. Thanks for being here. It was a good show. I really appreciate it.

Great mumble turnout. Yeah, absolutely. That mumble room. Virtual JBTitles.com. While we do that, let's see if I can type. Now with the live updating, too. So have you been doing desktop customization? What do you got going on over here?

No, this has not been customized at all yet. Oh, is this just stock? I installed it as we started the show. Damn, damn snickety. Thankfully, Quazzle is really easy to install. So that helps. That's true. That's why I'm running Firefox.

Well, I have Chrome now. I just haven't switched. Linux flying high. Linux is for tweakers. Yikes. Yikes. Yikes. That's rough. Tweak, tweak.

All right. Well, let's see. While we go vote at jbtitles.com, a brief distraction. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You said commercial software. I don't know what to make of this Indiegogo project. Its title gets me excited. Big Brother Needs to be Stopped.

Independence Day for Your Private Data. A new way of using cloud services and messaging apps. And they've got 20 days left to raise some funds. I'll play a little bit of their publicity video and maybe we can talk. Can I get a larger version of here? They say it's trapped in the – yeah, here we go. Let's watch this thing. Hi.

We are Zengi. We'd like to show you a new way using cloud services messaging apps a way that's simpler and more secure than ever before are you one of the 1.6 billion people on our planet using messaging apps and cloud storage every kind of a cool trick great you can share anything you want with the whole wide world. But what if you don't want to share? Is that even up to you? Think about it. What actually happens to your messages when you hit send?

And what happens to your data when you upload it to your cloud service? Some cloud services are easy to use, including for data snoops. Some are transparent about what's under the hood. And a few even manage to keep the door shut on Big Brother. But there's not a single solution out there that delivers all three of these requirements. But with Zengi, you're always protected. Not only do we encrypt your data with the best available code, we split every single file into countless fragments,

which we then distribute across all cloud storage services you use. So this is like a layer that says on top of your cloud services. I see. Interesting. So for the cloud provider and anyone else, your data is just a random collection of unreadable data chunks. Because with Zengi, only you have the key to the fully assembled files. Nobody should see your messages but the people you send them to. WhatsApp and other providers claim they encrypt your message.

But you are also just claiming that you encrypt my message. You got to give me a little more here. And don't snoop on them. But do you really believe them? Zangie is open source. So you can see yourself without a code secure and free of any backdoors. I like that. Or get alerts you can trust yourself that our code is secure and free of any backdoors. I like that. Or get alerts you can trust to check for you.

Zangie is the world's first encryption solution for the people, by the people, not some big multinational. Even when there are secure solutions out there, they're never just handed to you on a platter. The thing is, your security shouldn't be some puzzle you have to solve. He's got a Rubik's Cube. It's a serious game, and you should be free to play it by your own rules. Did he solve it there?

Rules that you configure. You know what would be great is if it was part of, you know what's a stretch goal for a project like this that I would be totally behind? Is, you know, you do your main funding for actually accomplishing this. But then in one of the stretch goals, a full third-party audit. Oh, that would be great. Yeah. That would be a great stretch goal that I could get behind.

Cool. Go ahead. Using the simplicity of Zengi. Rules that protect you and the people who you really trust. If somebody is hyper-security conscious, are they less likely to use a Fitbit because he's got a Fitbit on?

I don't know. That's a good question, know. Who those people are? What they're thinking? Where they're from? How they look like? What they're working on? And who they love? Basically, everything they want to keep private is protected by Zengi.

Zengi works. And for one very simple reason. It's an all-in-one solution that combines security, transparency, and usability to give Vueback total control of your digital identity. I feel like this is also them wanting to show off their entire team. Yeah, probably. And that guy did just solve that Rubik's Cube in the background.

That was kind of cool. All right, that is cool. Other solutions lets you choose a key. With Zangie, you have ownership of the key and the lock. Zengi will create a complete ecosystem where security, transparency and usability are yours. Anytime, anywhere. So your digital identity is always protected. And sometimes that can be pretty important.

Zengi puts you back in control of your personal data. Zengi will give you the power to protect your digital identity. These guys do look a bit like a stereotype, though. I'm going to... Good for them, though. Okay. Their music sounds like a radio spy novel. Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

I like that. That's a nice way to put it. So let's look at the... Let's see if they tell us much about the underlying technology. They have good – dress like a boss. That's cool. They have cool – they have cool – the all-in. They have good price levels. Let's see though.

We got to get some details on this. They say they created a foundation for a new standard of security and transparency and usability. Well, those are all things that we like. That sounds good. That's not the details I want. They say that your data is encrypted with AES-256. It is split into tiny chunks and distributed to all cloud services you use.

So for the cloud provider, it sounds like, yeah, it really is a layer that sits on top of your Dropbox and your Google Drive and just gives them bits and pieces. So what happens if you split it between all these places and one of them goes down? Is all your data gone? I think they're saying that it sounds like they're not

splitting it across the separate things, but they're splitting it. They have to know how to put pieces back together and they have all the bits, but because they're separated, you have to have the key to put them all back together. It looks like Linux isn't supported until $70,000 is raised. But it says it's a messaging app, right?

It's not clear. It says it does those things. How does it actually sync with other users? Does your phone do the federation? Here's the question. Can I use my existing cloud accounts? Absolutely. You can link all your existing cloud accounts or simply add new ones However, the data in your existing accounts must be re-uploaded to guarantee full security Wow, that's interesting

These guys become the gatekeeper for all of your online services That's what I was thinking You're now trusting a company you've never heard of with all of your online storage They would argue that's their advantage is that they are a uh non-multinational small group of folks that are creating something by the people for the people that's as they say that's their argument

i mean you trust in somebody for something even your grandma can use it is that thing plugged in does that say it's plugged in there west is that what it says there can you tell i don't know what those icons mean. Windows. It does look like it, yes. Okay. Fully charged, 100%. Okay. Their goal is only $35,000?

Yeah, and they don't have Linux support until 70. What? But, like, what are they going to do with $35,000? Are they planning to bang this out in, like, a month with four people? They would have to have already had a bunch of funding, I would think. Eh. Eh. Huh. So I think, unfortunately, even though it's something we'd all like, I think we're all

saying nope. I think it's kind of a nope. The goal just doesn't make sense. Yeah. Yeah, they would be such a critical point of failure. How do you sustain yourself on 35 grand? And how do you, and then, so, and they show it right here in their diagram. If you are the front end proxy to all of these different services, and the ones they have, they have Box, Pax, OwnCloud, and Drive on here.

They actually don't have Dropbox as an icon, but they have all the other ones on here. So two things. Like was just mentioned, if they go offline, you can't get access to your data potentially. But aren't you just giving the government the best gift in the entire world? They just have, instead of having to go to four different providers, they just go to one provider? And even if they just got the metadata, if they just got the time and date and where

you upload it to, that'd be something. I mean, this seems like this is one place to serve a national security letter to instead of four different places. Even if it's not getting the data, even if you're just getting the time and date the user logged in, the IP they logged in from, and the amount of data they uploaded to and the services they went to, that's valuable information. Well, is Senge actually storing anything on their end, or is it just a software solution that combines all your cloud accounts?

Well, I'm not saying they're storing the data, but they probably have logs of when you connected and logged in and transferred. They should tell us these things, perhaps. There's a lot of implementation questions. How are you doing this? I like how they're going at it. We created a foundation for a new standard of security and transparency. They keep going after this, but then

they're not very transparent about how this works at all. They say that they're going to put their code up on GitHub. Well, that doesn't make it transparent. No, not really. That's like the first thing that you do on the transparency route. Doesn't tell us what you're doing on the server side, though. Doesn't tell us how you're logging it. Oh, where the funs go. This is good.

They're making it secure for Linux, so because you'll not be able to use it. Right. Oh, excellent point. You have a thing that says where the fun – where are they going? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Scroll down on their Indiegogo page, and there's like bars and these graphs, and it's like 50% of the stuff goes to development and admin, and then there's like marketing and perks and miscellaneous.

Oh, that's what that is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's known as a chart, Chris. Oh, there it is. There it is. And that's at $100,000. $17,000 goes to development for your base goal? For what is supposed to be like a world premier secure product?

Yeah, and it has to integrate with like eight different services out of the box. Yeah, who's like, are they going to take on the burden of maintaining all those API wrappers all the time? Yeah, boy, that just right there could be a job. Yikes. Not to mention, I'm sure that Dropbox and Google is not super keen to having a third party between them and their customers. Because from Google's standpoint, Google wants to do their utmost supposedly to protect your privacy and data. So they're not going to like this. This reminds me of like when you used to be able to use – if there was a fuse layer so that you could store files in your Gmail storage but split it up into a lot of different emails.

I think somebody – I think a company should take LibreVault or something like SyncThing and productize it and just say use – and sell it as combining all of your computer's hard drives into one online secure storage. Right. No online cloud account, no service, no account required, just uses all of your devices storage and pools them together in a super secure encrypted way. Why is that not a product that people are selling on Indiegogo or Kickstarter? That seems pretty obvious. It's all about grandma. And also they wouldn't be able to do a subscription service. Oh, you got it.

Yeah, that's true.