LINUX Unplugged - Episode 171: Uncontained Human Error | LUP 171

Episode Date: November 16, 2016

This week we take a deep dive into the IOT & the Cloud. Noah isn’t quite dead yet as he gives us an earful on the future of MacOS. Plus our thoughts on Signal, Telegram, Wire, IRC & more!

All right. So here's what, here's essentially what my, the last like week and a half has been like. So starting last week I was out at a client's and I was working and my kids, every time they get sick, it kind of like passes around. It's like ring around the Rosie and then we all die. Right. And around Sunday I started to get sick. The Sunday that I arrived there. Now that's the Sunday that feeling. the rest of the week like that. Get home Friday, late, late Friday. And I thought, well, I'm going to take the weekend and just hyper, hyper rest. Lots and lots of rest, lots and lots of water, lots and lots of good food. Try to fix yourself. Yeah, I'm going to kick myself back into gear so that I can be here

ready to roll on Monday. So that's what I do Friday. What little time I have on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Monday, get a super important call and I decide I have to go into a client to take care of something before I leave town. So I look at the seats available and I find out that there aren't a lot of flights to Seattle anyway. So I go take care of the client and I get to the airport, fly over to Minneapolis, which is the only place you can fly out of Grand Forks. And I spend nine and a half hours in the airport trying to get flights to Seattle. We get to 1045 at night and it turns out we're not going to get to Seattle. There's just no way

flights are not going to happen. So I call Rekhi and I'm like, dude, I am exhausted. I have had four or five hours of sleep. I have been here for nine and a half hours. I don't know how to get to Seattle. And I just, I don't know what I'm going to be able to do. And Rekhi says, well, we got to find something. So him and I spend like an hour looking at every possible flight between Minneapolis, St. Paul airport and Seattle airport. Where did those two intersect? Well, it turns out Boise, Idaho is a city that nobody wants to go to or from, from either Minneapolis or Seattle. And so they have 68 seats available. And so I'm all right, I'm going to go, I'm going to go get on that flight. So I go hop on,

on the flight to Boise. The problem is the flight to Boise doesn't leave until 1045 at night. So now I'm at the airport going on 12 hours and I fly to Boise and I land in Boise at midnight flight back out of Boise into Seattle is until six 45 the next morning. So I go like lay down to try and get some sleep and airport security guy comes and he's like, uh, excuse me, sir, sir, you can't sleep here. You have to be outside of security. Well, inside of security, they have nice, soft little benches outside of security. They have the anti-bum metal benches that have big bumps on them. So you can't actually sleep.

Right. So I'm I try. Can't sleep. Can't sleep. Can't sleep. About an hour in, I get some sort of sinus plug infection something, and it just makes my entire jaw and my face just like this crippling pain that I can't even talk, I can't breathe, I can't do anything.

All I can do is concentrate about how much my face hurts. So I look to see if there's like a little shop or something I can go get some decongestant. Well, there is on the other freaking side of security, right? So I'm telegramming Rekai and I'm like, I need to get something. You know, I don't know how I'm going to continue living like this because I really cannot take this. So finally, after four and a half hours or five and a half hours, the security checkpoint opens back up. I'm able to get through. Before I actually get through the security line. The crippling pain goes away.

Well, I mean, yeah, this is this is looking up. So but I still go spend seventeen dollars on some decongestant stuff just to have on hand. I considered him anti-suicide pills because it was going to be and I didn't take my own life from pain. Right. Seemed like a good investment. So I get those. I get on the plane and I'm like, and thank God they had first class available. So I was I was like, well, I'm actually going to get to sleep. Well, apparently everyone in first class on a 645 a.m. flight wants to like have a social hour with the flight attendant. That's crazy.

So every 30 seconds, the flight attendants is coming up and she's like, hey there, how do I, you know, do you want anything to drink? Would you like a banana? Would you like toast? Would you like banana bread? Like, really, what I'd like is for anything to drink? Would you like a banana? Would you like toast? Would you like banana bread? I'm like, really? What I'd like is for you to GTFO and just let me sleep. Right. You know?

So, uh, so I, you know, it's a, it's a hour or something. Actually, I entered the space time continuum. I took off at six 45 and landed at six o'clock, which is kind of cool. That's great. Yeah. So you've had the whole day. I know. Which is kind of cool.

That's great. Yeah. So. Now you've had the whole day. I know. So I land and, or maybe it was, I took off at six and we landed. I don't remember anymore. But I land and all I want to do is get in my, just get a rental car and get to the studio and sleep.

And I pull onto I-5 and it is standstill traffic. And I'm like, what is going on? And so I'm flipping through the radio stations. Turns out there's this huge car accident. It takes me three and a half hours to drive from the airport to the studio. And I finally get to the studio at like, I don't know, 10, 1030. And I just crash right onto the couch. No sooner does my face hit the cushion do I hear the deep

rumbling voice of a beard going, hey Noah, it's you might want to get up because you got to be on air in 20 minutes. I'm like, ah. Oh, that's painful. So I drag myself back up, go into the shower, and I have been trying not to use my voice for

the past couple days for two reasons. One is because it hurts, and two is because I need to save what little of my voice I have left to do these two shows. So all that to say that big, long rant to say, uh, I, it's going to be a fun show. Yeah, it's going to be a fun show. And you get, you know, late night jazz announcer. No, that's, that's what it's going to be. And the thing is, like I was, I was talking to my mother and we're going back and forth and I'm like, this is, this is why my clients hire me though.

And because when Noah says, no, it was going to get something done, I will either get something done or I will die in the process of trying to get something done. But one way or another, you know, it's happening. It's very stressful for your family, but it works out great. Yeah. Yeah. Well, she, you know, we knew about the JB trip. What we didn't know, family perspective, was we weren't aware that I was going to be gone the week prior in Wisconsin.

I didn't find that out until late in the week. Yeah, that's rough. So Beard was kind enough to share his orange juice with me. So I have orange juice and vitamin C that I'm going to be sucking down on the whole show. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 171 for November 15th, 2016. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show where the current hosts have taken off and been replaced by the walking dead. My name is Noah, and joining me for the first time, both of us here in the studio, is Wes. Hey, Wes, how are you?

Hey, Noah. How's it going, man? I think I'm doing better than you are. I think so. You know, it's great to finally be here in the studio. I don't think we've ever done a show just you and I in the studio. I don't think so. We've done it remotely. Yeah, we've done it remotely, you and I.

Well, those are a lot of fun, so this must be even more fun. I agree. I agree. And hopefully, if all goes well and according to plan, I won't kill you by the end of the episode. That's right, and Chris won't kill us when he gets back. Exactly, yeah. If I didn't wipe out JB, that'll work out. Well, we have a super fun and exciting

show, but no show is complete. No show can even begin without first saying hello to our Mumble Room. Hello, Mumble Room. How are you guys? Hey, guys. How are you? Holy cow. That was great. We have a full house.

Well, thank you, Mumble Room. If you didn't catch, if this doesn't, if my rant didn't make it into the pre-show, this week, Noah is doing jazz voice Noah, because Noah is practically dead, but I'm still here. So, the first thing we're going to talk about today is something near and dear to my heart. Anyone that has known me for more than 10 minutes, if you meet me on the street or we're having a conversation in a restaurant, the first thing I'm going to do is switch you to Linux. And after that happens, after you've been converted and after you are a Linux user, that's going to happen. Oh, it's going to happen. Yeah, I just did. It happens. After that happens, though, the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to give you direct communication line to me so that I can continue to troubleshoot your problems and so that you can communicate not like an animal.

And so I put people on Telegram. I have so many Telegram conversations that it would take me a year to just get through. I mean, I'm scrolling right now, right? This is ridiculous. I'm scrolling. I'm continuing to scroll. I'm continuing to scroll. Just keep going to scroll. I'm continuing to scroll. I was just, I have telegram conversations with everyone. So if he doesn't respond, that's why. Yeah, that's why. And here's a great way to get me to not respond. If you send me like seven messages in a row, it's not, I'm not trying to be

rude. I just, I literally like my brain does this weird thing where I'm like, I'll just, I'll have to get back to him. Like I can't, I can't process that much information when the text start goes off the screen. I just, I can't keep up with you. And then, and then a lot of times I just forget. So it's not me being rude. I just, I literally don't have, yeah, I have, I have a, I have the memory fish of a, I have the memory of a goldfish anyway. So you don't need to do that. That's what the great feature of editing your messages are for. Right. Exactly. Or maybe just, you know, composing a message one time and then sending it, you know, there's that.

So when Signal Messenger first came out, I was super excited because I saw this as possibly the only replacement for Telegram I would have ever considered. I am, I've been very happy with Telegram and I've had no reason to want to leave Telegram. But at the end of the day, all of the security audits of Telegram have come back and said, we haven't found any problems with it per se. But the way that they tell us that they want us to audit their security leads us to think that there may be some security holes that we're unable to discover. So introducing Signal. Signal Messenger is a encrypted chat program that not only does chat, but also does voice communication, SMS, that whole nine yards. And it went through a crypto analysis and the results are in.

You can trust it. Signal is secure. So the article from the register.co.uk says encrypted SMS and voice app signal has passed a security audit with flying colors. As explained in a paper titled A Formal Security Analysis of the Signal Message Protocol, published by the International Association of Cryptologic Research, call published by the international association of cryptologic research signal has no descript no discernible flaws and offers a well-designed and compromise resistant architecture signal uses a double ratchet algorithm that employs in uh epigramal key exchanges continually during each session minimizing the amount of text that can be decrypted at any point should the key be compromised signal was examined by a team of five researchers at the UK, Australia, and Canada,

namely Oxford University Information Security Professor Cass Kramer and his PhDs Katril Cone-Gordon and Luke Garrett, Queensland University of Technology PhD Benjamin Dowling, and McMaster University Assistant Professor Douglas Stabila. Dowling and McMaster University assistant professor Douglas Stabila. So basically they went through and they looked at the this particular messenger and they said, yeah, it it's it's actually pretty secure. Providing a security analysis for the signal protocol is a challenging for several reasons. First, signal employs a novel and unstudied design of involving over 10 different types

of keys and a complex update process, which leads to various chains of related keys. It therefore does not directly fit into existing analysis models. Second, some of its claim properties have only recently been formalized. Finally, as a more mundane obstacle, the protocol is substantially documented beyond its, or is not substantially documented beyond its source code. Now, that's an important point. Signal Messenger, the protocol, the server, the entire thing from top to bottom,

open source, open code. Yep. You can look at it. Look at it, modify it, run it. Right. So that makes me, it makes it a very compelling product. Now, I tried it a couple weeks ago, and my experience was not great. I had to crash a lot.

That was back when I was on Ubuntu. But the experience was definitely not as polished as Telegram. Did you try it on the phone? No. Because I think that's kind of where they started. They had TechSecure on Android for a long time and then they had a different iOS app

and then they kind of made Signal and merged them together and finally it's merged. And then eventually got the desktop app, which I think is a Chrome app, right, isn't it? Really?

These days. So like I've got... Oh, Electron, yeah. Yeah, it's an Electron app. So they've come a long way so that I can definitely see the desktop not being their primary focus,

at least hasn't been. Yeah. Yeah, and to be fair, most of the time I'm on telegram, I'm using it on my phone, but you know, on the other side of the coin, telegram has made the Linux desktop client a huge priority for them.

It really is. It's a very good client. That's what I can mean. Honestly, I use it more because I like it as a chat program than I, than it has a security chat program. Exactly. How about you?

The desktop version of telegram doesn't even have security at all. Yeah. Well, it's still encrypted. It's just not. Oh, yeah, it's encrypted from the server. It's not encrypted. It's from server to server. Like, everything on the server is not encrypted.

Say what now? On their server, when you use the secure chat feature in Telegram, that's encrypted. When you're not using that, it's not encrypted. I was under the impression that the you use the secure chat feature in Telegram, that's encrypted. When you're not using that, it's not encrypted. I was under the impression that the difference between the secure chat and the regular chats were the secure chat, the private key is on your device only, whereas the regular chat, it's still encrypted, but they hold the key on their server so that it can do synchronization.

But the fact that you can edit it on on both parties means that it's not really secured okay because it's on their server editable so it's not yeah secure and so that's just like it comes back like telegram is the thing that i try to get my family on because you know at the end of the day if we're spied on that's all right but for people you know that have more real concerns are more concerned about that lead different lives sure it it's cool that now we can have even more trust in Open Whisper systems and Signal in particular. Yeah, they have a choice. Anyone in the member room actually used Whisper? What do you think of it?

Yeah, I used it. I used it when it was tech secure. Then it became Signal, and then it combined Red Phone into Signal. Thank you. And it's uh it's always really good and it also could do on text messages for sms on signal on the the phone version so it's uh it's really cool because it also gives you like a notification whether this this particular conversation is encrypted or not um so like if someone else is using signal but you're using the SMS feature and they're also using Signal as their SMS, it will just automatically convert it into a Signal thing.

So that's really cool. That is not like an upgrade. Yeah, what confuses me is more like how do they have the keys shared between devices for conversations that are encrypted from phone to phone and then move to the desktop? Right. It's an Electron app. I don't even the desktop. Right. It's an electron app. It's like I don't even see how that works. That's a good question. But just to be one more thing, it is really interesting to know

that that signal protocol is also used by Facebook. Really? Yeah, WhatsApp. Yeah, their messenger. Oh, yeah, and Facebook Messenger. Yeah, and WhatsApp, yeah. It's too bad they won't let that Messenger be... The thing is, when Facebook started forcing

you to install Messenger, that's when I stopped using Messenger. I don't play that game. Anyone else in the mobile room use Signal? What do you think of it? Nobody? When I installed it, I installed it, but I have no friends using it,

so it's very difficult to to really convert them the canonical chat platform problem and see that's the problem if you don't have anybody to get on there it's a little point in having it right i have i have telegram but that that got started pretty slowly and i just met new people there right yeah and you know if you think about it any social networking platform any chat platform any platform, really what it amounts to is you're going to be where your friends are. Right. Yeah. And I think that's why things like G plus and Facebook have reason to such prominence and in Twitter, because so many people are already there. It just becomes natural. I mean, I remember back when I was in high school. I remember back when I was in high school, MSN Messenger was the way that everyone communicated, right?

And nobody used it. When MSN Messenger started to die was when Facebook took off because they had integrated Messenger. And so why would you have friends on MSN when you could just chat through Facebook? It just doesn't make a lot of sense. Wow. What's up? I remember the same thing. I used to on yahoo messenger and msn messenger isn't it funny how we just kind of go rotate through chat platforms yep i used to have everyone on aim yeah and then that died icq like jcore says and irc oh yeah

irc is still around and we're still using it. I never got on IRC until like three years ago. You know, I think that's actually kind of, it seems like IRC has kind of had a resurgence, at least in the tech crowd. Oh, for sure. I was on the original ICQ. You know why IRC has got a resurgence?

Because Slack has an IRC bridge. Oh yeah, there you go. That's a big thing and if you think about it really slack is just irc for 2016 yeah i mean right people who need web apps now what do you guys think about riot what is right i'm a huge fan of riot and matrix tell me about it um so matrix is a way to do federated chat. So you can, it's sort of similar to diaspora, but for just a chat protocol. And so you have all these disparate home servers and you have usernames at the home servers hosted on a domain. And so it's kind of federated in the same way

email is. So if I'm at one server with my name, I can send to another server with that name and they connect to each other and start sending messages back and forth. And the servers store the seat and then you log into the servers using some client like Riot. That's really the biggest one, actually. You may have heard of it. I don't know of many others. It used to be called Vector. But one of the neat things about it is

they kind of build themselves as the missing signaling layer for WebRTC. So they support WebRTC kind of as a first-party platform. And at the same time, it's really, the signaling part really shines through. So it support WebRTC kind of, you know, as a first party platform. And at the same time, it's really the signaling part really shines through. So it really is good at like, they have a lot of different bridges, IRC bridges, Slack bridges, RocketJet bridges. And so like, it's a, it seems. And the nice thing is you can host your own without having to deal with someone else's server directly. You always just talk to your own local instance, and then it goes

out and federates with other people. And on top of it also has bridges for slack and irc so you have all of your conversations in there like a you know like a modern web http json focused bridge that can just take glue that you can take between i actually like it more than using colossal for irc i have all my irc pumped through a matrix home server really that's which is super nice yeah and then i just use riot on like my phone or in my browser i will have to try that. That sounds fascinating. It's pretty cool. There's a lot of infrastructure you can set up, but it's pretty nice once you get it running. Now, how do you have a setup on your phone?

Oh, the phone, there's an app. So iOS and Android have a Riot app. Riot.io. And then you can talk to your own home server. So Ham Radio, you were saying that they are going to be discontinuing a lot of the Google apps? video, you were saying that they're going to be discontinuing a lot of the Google apps? Yeah, I heard that Google next year is going to be disabling the Google apps on Chrome, and so that means that the desktop client for Signal is going to be going away.

Huh. Okay, and that does not, no, doesn't mean that. Okay, what does it mean then? Anything running on Electron can run on Electron electron because that's a completely different framework it's google is room is eliminating the apps that are inside of the chrome store so like they're like you won't be able to be able to install apps from there why why are they removing it i thought that was a big thing part of the whole chrome os thing chromebook they're saying that the whole point of those apps was to be able to use offline and they're saying that the whole point of those apps was to be able to use offline and they're saying that the majority of people who use those apps do not use them offline so it doesn't really benefit them to even have that infrastructure available i see that makes

sense right but if i go to open whisper systems website there's no download our electron app it's you have to download it through the google chrome store so yeah but they could convert it more than likely like it's mainly that the the what they're just they're removing is the offline features and because signal is a online only thing um well as far as like sending the conversations back and forth right right um it makes sense they could just switch it but they're not that's gonna it's to be for at least another year. I guess we'll have to wait and see. They're actually doing it.

They're just gradually doing it. Mosin-Raf, you had a comment about why IRC is making a research? Actually, it wasn't really that it was making a research. It's just that I can remember using it before the Internet became big. And as things went on a lot of people that were on like you know the old school BBS's and all that kind of stuff if they wanted to keep in touch with each other

they ended up just sliding over to IRC because it gave them the same kind of setup as well IRC unlike let me see if I can get the theme here MSN Messenger Yahoo Messenger A AIM. If you're not getting the theme, the theme is that they're all branded. IRC is not branded.

It's just kind of there. It's sort of like, hey, it's a library. It's called a library. It's not Rogers Library or Verizon's Library. It's a library. You go to the library, right? Sure. So it's the same thing with IRC. Just anyone had it.

Anyone can access it. The servers were all over the place. You just kind of went there. So it wasn't attached to any one particular company. So it wasn't a matter of, hey, I don't like this company, or, hey, this company now has these flashy little ball things that wink at you and stuff like that. It was just kind of there. All right.

Anyone else, any thoughts on Signal Messenger? So they conclude that it's impossible to say if Signal meets its goals, as there are none stated, but what their analysis did say is it proves that it satisfies security standards, and they add that we have found no major flaws in their design. It's not definitive, but it's kind of the first ratchet along the way towards it being trusted. All right. Now, this next story, as you can imagine, has me super excited, and that is that the new MacBook doesn't run Linux. So there was a gentleman that did a very comprehensive write up in the Ubuntu subreddit.

And basically, he took his brand new 2015 MacBook and went through and said, here's what I tried to do. Here's I tried to get Linux to work. And here's why it doesn't work. Basically, the first problem is that you can't even get past the grub screen. So you can't even actually get Linux to boot. Secondly, if you can actually get into Linux, the built-in keyboard and mouse don't work. Only the power key works to force the reboot, and he tried this on the non-touch bar version. He says that there's a patch for the 2015 MacBook that may work for it, but he's not obviously entirely sure. And

he links to the driver, and we'll have that in the show notes. And the biggest problem is that the NVMe drive has the wrong PCI class ID. So Linux doesn't actually see it as a bootable device. So you can't boot off the built-in hard drive. Which, by the way, if you look at Lewis Rosman's breakdown of it, they used some fancy special connector that is only you know, only available to them and that particular computer. So you can't just replace the drive. The thing is a walking disaster. Yep.

Another thing is like the input devices. He was saying they don't work. That's because they're over the SPI bus instead of USB bus. Right. It really is quite a different machine than we've seen before. This thing is a disaster. Yeah. I was glad to see that at least some of the people in the Reddit thread were, you know, like being like, well, at least thank you for sharing. Right.

I know some people turned to the like, you know, like you should have checked and like, yeah, probably if you weren't willing to spend that money, check to see if it's Linux compatible. Right. Given like the history of Macs. But it is a nice donation to the field of maybe we can eventually get something working. Sure. But it is a nice donation to the field of maybe we can eventually get something working. Sure. You know, and the thing is there's a lot of chat in the subreddit about – well, actually, there's a lot of chat in general in the community of we need to be ready to accept Mac users when they come over to us.

I think a certain amount of time should be spent on that. And then I think we should start focusing on the manufacturers that aren't actively working on these like one-off models that are just freaking crazy you know it's one thing to you know take a lenovo machine and swap a wireless card in it it's one thing to open a you know the adele and and you know put a different wireless card in it or put a different sound card or something like that. It's something entirely different when the manufacturer makes a totally separate hard drive that is barely related to what we know as computers. Everything soldered to one board. Exactly. Or it's basically a system on a chip.

Exactly. The amount of time that I would like to see the Linux community doing that for a couple of reasons. One is I don't know that I even necessarily agree that there are droves of people that are buying a 2015 MacBook and then wanting to put Linux on it. Think if you're on the market and you're willing to make a compromise for a laptop that's limited to 16 gigs of RAM and doesn't have an escape key, you're probably buying that computer because you want a Mac OS to begin with. So I don't know that that's a really valuable use of our time. But secondly, if we really want to take people over and we really want to be there for Mac users, then they can sell their MacBooks

and buy something like a system 76. It's going to work right out of the box with Linux, you know? I'd be interested in what you guys in the mumble room think. I think it's crazy that you have that 16 gig limitation on something so expensive. I mean, I have 16 gigs on a T420 from 2011. Yeah, but a T420 has so much more space on the motherboard and the chassis. You have to kind of understand what Apple's constraints are for their motherboard and layout of devices and such things.

They're only getting one DIMM in there effectively, even though I think it's actually soldered on. But it's the capacity of one DIMM and one controller. So, until they make 32 gig DIMMs, they're not going to have 32 gigs available. But, you know, the answer that I've seen for that is that they wanted to keep it smaller because they wanted more room for the battery. But hold on.

That stands up to reason until they say, well, until we reach 100 watt hours and then we don't want to go over that because the airlines wouldn't let you take a laptop on a plane. And I looked into this. That's total BS. The airline restricts external batteries over a certain. And I don't remember off the top of my head what it is. External batteries are restricted. So you can't pack on your big pack of 1000 batteries. Separate batteries you can't take on.

And only that you can take that on carry on. It just can't be checked in luggage. Internal batteries, things that are inside of a device, there is no limit. So you could have, if you can find a way to get a 5,000 you know, watt-hour battery attached to a laptop as long as it's encased in the laptop.

A generator in there, whatever it takes. Exactly. You can take that puppy, put it in a laptop bag, check it in the baggage compartment. No problem from the FAA. So that's BS. Now, they might be limited to a single DIMM, and I guess I can understand that. The problem is it seems like they had two lines.

The MacBook Air seemed to target the daily desktop user. And the people who wanted light and thin. Exactly. That's where their focus was. Exactly. I want a thin daily driver laptop exactly exactly that seems like the appropriate place to put in you know 16 gigs of ram and integrated graphics and stuff like that the pro line has always been set aside for people that are doing more demanding tasks media tasks uh you know well what else do they have i guess just media tasks but people

development you know yeah okay sure machines are uh how much big ide yeah yeah i guess yes you're running vms so i i don't understand apple's decision to handy well i guess i shouldn't say that i understand their decision from this standpoint even with as many macbooks as you see at a conference, they still don't really hold any significant share of the PC marketplace, right? I mean, still under 10%, maybe 15, right? They're the outliers in the enterprise. Right.

By and large, majorly dominated by Windows, right? With Windows 10 no longer having a, I mean, as far as they say, no longer having a newer and newer version of Windows, they've lost the advantage of, well, buy this machine. It'll last you 10 years or whatever. And we'll just keep giving you updates. Now, Microsoft can make that claim, at least for the time being. Right. At the same time, you look at tablets and smartphones and they are surging.

Right. A lot of people, even diehard Linux users, make compromises and go buy an iPhone or an iPad. Yeah, definitely. So if you're a executive at Apple and you're sitting in your office and your primary task is to make a lot of money, and you look over here and you say, we're selling iPhones out the wazoo and making bank on them. And over here in this department, we're still struggling to get a real grasp on the marketplace. Where are you going to spend your R&D? Where are you going to spend your time? Where are you going to spend your R&D? Where are you going to spend your time? Where are you going to spend pushing all of this stuff together?

And if you look at the latest version of macOS, it resembles now more than ever iOS, right? So I think that there is a real chance that what they're looking to do is migrate iOS into macOS, make them all one platform, let the people that are doing media production and all that stuff port all their tools over to iOS and use all that stuff. And then all they have to do is sell what they would call like an iPad Pro with – oh, wait. We already have that. You know what I mean? So it's just like at every turn, it seems like they're continually doing that.

I'd be interested if anyone has any feedback. I think it plays into their history as well of just like – before they went Intel, they had their own – I mean not their own architecture. But they used power chips and they used Motorola chips. power chips and they used Motorola chips. And I think we just see what was almost more of a convenience or coincidence for them when it was like a large overlap with our x86 based PC marketplace. And I think we see iOS as sort of its own ecosystem, its own architecture. They're making their own processors or at least, you know, having them fabbed for them. Right.

So I think that they've always viewed their desktops or Mac OS X in the same way. It just hasn't looked like it from the outside. But now, like, with their Touch Bar and with their, you know, the ARM chip sitting on their system on a chip as well, it really is, like, they see it as a whole platform as one thing. And probably, yeah, it will form more into with iOS into their Mac ecosystem. Mamoru, what are your thoughts? Honestly, saying iOS is going to be better than mac os for professionals is

i didn't say that oh well i don't think ios would ever be for professionals if anything any professional that i know from outside of chris or reiki or professionals i know personally they don't use mac anymore because of their hardware choices and their software choices. They're like, they're done. They've had it. If Mac doesn't, you know, cater to them and go, look, we have these awesome machines for editing.

We've got this rock solid OS. You know, we're still working on Final Cut. If you don't grab those people, you're going to lose them. And I don't see them doing that with their offerings. Yeah, I agree. We actually have a small production house in Grand Forks. They're an offshoot of a local news agency.

And they have switched to Adobe Premiere on Windows boxes. Oh, really? Yeah, and the university, first, they dumped – they originally dumped Final Cut Pro for for Premiere. And the new machines, the new desktop machines are Windows boxes because they support all of their PCI capture stuff. And they have repurposed the they had like a learning lab and those had a lot of IMAX. And those have been repurposed with Adobe Premiere on on those IMAX. repurposed with Adobe Premiere on those iMacs so that when those students get up into the later years, because in your third and fourth year, when you're doing journalism school,

then you actually go do assignments, right? And so they're teaching them to do it on these iMacs on Premiere because they already had these iMacs, and then they're moving off onto these Windows machines where they're using Adobe. So I've seen the exact same trend. And they're moving off onto these Windows machines where they're using Adobe. So I've seen the exact same trend. However, I, of course, being the Linux guy that I am, I contacted a couple of guys that were teaching that particular video course at UND, switched them to Linux, got them editing all of their stuff under Linux. And now this year is the first year that they are teaching in tandem with Premiere Lightworks.

So it's going to be done. Yeah it's, it's going to be done. Yeah. Unfortunately, it's going to be done on IMAX because that's where the, that's where the lab is. But the advantage to those students is they can take those, they can take that software, those things that they have learned inside of that class and take it home and then they can edit there. So I actually haven't checked in with those guys to see how that's going.

But, um, you know, at the end of last year, that was my, that was my understanding that, that, you know, they, they saw that as being a really competitive advantage. So I have seen that I have I have seen that trend as well with people moving off of OSX. But I think what you have to consider is that there are a lot of people that change the definition of what a professional is. Right. Fifteen years ago, 20 years ago, a video professional was somebody that showed up with a sixty five thousand dollar camera and had either you had a studio camera, you're recording inside of a studio or you had an electronic news gathering crew. So you had an ENG camera and you filmed and then you brought that back into an actual edit bay. And, you know, and you had you had you had an actual hardware mixer where you took your audio, where, you know, everything was recorded. You could tweak all that stuff in, you know, live right there and you do all of your editing and then you produce

it you take it to your editor and then that would go out and then that would get produced onto some sort of published media like a dvd or vhs or whatever the master sent and get stamped out exactly and we can send out right today the definition of a professional has changed. Apple sees a professional as somebody who films on their iPhone, edits on iMovie, and publishes on iTunes. The New York Times fired the majority of their photographers and gave all of their reporters iPhones and said, here, they all have 64 gigs of RAM. Start clicking away. I'm sure you'll get something that's usable. Does that quote? Huh?

Well, no. Yes. you'll get something that's usable. Does that quote? Huh? Well, no, yes, but I mean, you know, there was a, there was actually, I was looking, I was watching a thing on still photography and they bought a bunch of

Canon rebels, put them all on auto mode, handed them to 50 people and said, go take pictures of the sport events. They had, you know, 150,000 photos, 148,000 of which were useless. And then they found like six that they

actually wanted to use, but the cost to buy those cameras, give them to people, have them shoot was still cheaper than hiring like 10 real professional photographers. So I think the definition of a professional is, is rapidly changing. I think people on YouTube broadcasting themselves are professionals. Right. And Apple does a good job of hitting that. Like we have a pipeline and it's good enough for what you want to do. I completely agree. They put all of those tools in place. So my, my question back to you,

sir, is, is, is it possible that Apple says they take all of the stuff in iOS and they just say, all right, here you go. Let's make,

let's make these tools available on iOS and push those out to people. Just redefining what a professional is. Or you're still not seeing it. Maybe I'm totally off. I can say that they're more switching to the prosumer grade. I don't think professional is really changing. I think more areas and industries are developing to become professional. But I think the vast majority of people who are professional YouTubers are using professional gear.

Yeah, I think that statement is true. You can use low-end prosumer stuff or consumer stuff. But eventually, you will be going to Canons and other rigs and, you know, professional XLR mics. It's just the road to get there pretty much. So eventually I think any kind of prosumer that's not hardcore, a studio or news journalist or anything like that from the past will eventually want to demand tools from Apple.

And I think they're just going to have to give it to them. Eventually. Indy acres. You're saying that, that you still define a professional photographer as somebody who can operate a camera in manual mode. And it's essentially second nature to them. Indy acres.

Good ones. going twice. Thanks for the call. So basically, to bring this all home, I believe, I truly believe that Apple is sucking it up. I think they're sucking on the desktop and on the laptop. And I think that's a good thing for their business model because I don't think that was where they're going to see huge profits anyway. Right. And I think that the cost to continue to develop Mac OS to make it a competitive platform was going to be high. And I don't know that they would see the returns that they're going to see on mobile development.

Right. So I think it's the right decision for them. As a Linux desktop user, I have never been more excited because Windows, despite the changes that they have made, still suck and they will forever hold a bad taste in everyone's mouth for being Windows. What do you think, though, about that new subsystem of theirs for Linux and the potential there for at least like the developer side or the content creator, right? Because they have the Adobe apps. Yeah.

And there you can have both. It does scare me a little bit. I think maybe what we're counting on in some ways is that distaste of Windows and the want for a real POSIX style system, which you get with OSX at least a little and obviously with Linux. Huh. at least a little and obviously with Linux. Huh. I guess I can see that being a threat. At the same time, I think that eventually the people that like to dig down and get dirty with the system are eventually going to want more.

So I think they'll come over to us eventually. And I think they're also going to just, being honest with you, I think they're just going to get tired of their computer crashing all the time. I like it. So this brings a lot of hope to me because I think that you're going to have people. I don't think Windows is a great place to be on the desktop. I think Mac OS is becoming a less great place to be on the desktop. And so Microsoft continues to focus on and transition to cloud-based services.

Man, they're cloud-first. Exactly. And Apple is transitioning and focusing on mobile. So who's left to really concentrate on the traditional desktop? Linux. Now, if the answer to that is, well, the majority of people are just going to have an iPhone. They won't have a computer. I can totally live with that.

If my job revolves around supporting Linux desktops for people that work in CEO positions or tech level positions or something like that, and the traditional desktop, keyboard, mouse, laptop, if that paradigm is relegated to Linux, even if the amount of people in that paradigm shrinks and the majority of the society has moved over to mobile devices, I can live with that compromise. I can happily live with that compromise. I think there's some nuance there, at least in terms of where we're expected to do things. But as long as things are currently shifted towards the – obviously you can do content creation in some domains on your mobile device. But I think as long as it's like there's professionals in the back rooms creating things and then we have all these other devices we use for consuming and interacting with them.

Sure. Yeah, that's where I could live with it that way too. So a couple of weeks ago, we talked about the Super Nintendo on – or the new Nintendo Entertainment System that is going to be running on Linux. Linux. And apparently there is an exploit compromising Linux desktop. Wes, can you tell me about this? Yeah, so it doesn't actually relate to that fun device.

It's just kind of similar. There's a lot going on with the NES these days. So this is a zero-day exploit. Right now, at least the one that was released, it really only affects like a specific version of Ubuntu 12.04. So it's not something you necessarily need to have. But basically there's a GStreamer plugin

that plays these NSF files, which are music files from the NES. And when you're using something like Nautilus, it tries to... When you open it, these files get parsed by GStreamer, and there is a vulnerability

in one of these... It's in the bad set of plugins for GStreamer, and it only is in the 0.10 distribution, not the newer 1.0 GStreamer package. But basically when that happens, then you get pwned. But it's kind of interesting because these files, they're not like a regular music file broken down into samples. It actually emulates a processor.

It takes less space, and the way they're encoded, it emulates a processor, and then it tells the processor, do these instructions to produce these tones, and then it captures those tones and plays them, which I thought was kind of interesting. It is interesting. So first, I guess I'll open it up to the mobile room. What do you guys think of this? You guys are so quiet today. I mean, the technology of the emulating the processing of it to create the sound is kind of amazing.

One of the biggest problems with most emulators is they're trying to reverse engineer it instead of trying to create a hardware emulation. emulation. One of the biggest things is a lot of games that are impossible to play as an emulator because the hardware emulation that they're trying to compensate is more like slowing down the current

hardware we have. Whereas this is more super interesting, but the problem with the zero day doesn't really sound like it's a big problem, but it's going to get a ton of attention, especially like Ars Technica and stuff. Right. And to me, it was more interesting really to highlight these files and the way they work. And of course, just to realize, obviously, this doesn't affect newer distributions,

but it's always good to be aware of parts of your systems that are taking vulnerable inputs, which are file system files and auto-loading them or that kind of thing just just something to think about anyone else i think we're using 1204 should yeah great from what i saw it was recommended to use a raspberry pi and put retro pi i mean how does that compare i mean this is not really right it's this this is a difference between being an official product versus um you know creating yourself it's like you you technically aren't legally allowed to download roms unless you own the game itself so um they're not losing any money from it so they're not gonna like technically attack anyone for those doing those things but this is more like if you want to have

like a set-top box kind of thing that's built for you and you don't have to build it yourself but there's also certain games that can't run without proper emulation so like if you're getting retropie that retropie is just like a distro that pulls all these different emulators in so you're not really going to get the exact kind of experience so maybe some games like for example this is not what nes classic does because it's just the nes but if they ever come out with like n64 classic or something like that that would be amazing because games like banjo kazooie were taking flaws that were in the hardware of the n64 and making that a feature of the game so they're impossible to emulate so if they figure out a way to emulate the the processor of the N64 and making that a feature of the game. So they're impossible to emulate.

So if they figure out a way to emulate the processor for the N64, that would be amazing. I mean, I've been waiting on that a long time as well. Super Nintendo, I think, would be more exciting to me, or N64. I'm really hoping for the N64. In fact, when I was joking with Rekai a couple of weeks ago, I said, when we talked about that little portable NES system, I said, I wish Nintendo would make a portable N64 system. I know, right? I would take that everywhere.

I would. If I had a portable Game Boy-like device that I could play GoldenEye on, that would be ideal, right? And what Rekai's answer was, he said, you have one. It's called your S6. And I said, they have it? And he goes, yeah. So sure enough, went to the Google Play Store, and I was able to download an emulator on my phone. And, you know, the great thing about my phone is it's on Ting, right?

And so I have, I don't pay to download any of the, use any of my data because I'm on Wi-Fi. In fact, we have a special Wi-Fi network that is at every location that we work at, and we call it the tech network. Oh, that's clever. I like it. Yes. There's no speed restriction, anything like that. So basically any client I go to, I have internet. I have network coverage, unrestricted network coverage.

And so I can walk into any of these places and just my phone automatically connects. So basically what I need my mobile carrier to do is to provide me with basically gap coverage. Right. So when you're on your way between sites. Exactly. So I had a nine and a half hard drive between Wisconsin and Grand Forks. And then today, well, over the past two days, I actually I had to I was in an airport for well, what ended up being like 17 hours, 18 hours. Right. And the great thing was, I don't usually tether on my on my laptop.

Usually I just have a dedicated little card that that that connects their card wasn't connecting. And so I was like, well, I'll just tether, right? Now, this is something I haven't used in a long time on my phone. My phone had a great signal. Laptop didn't. So I take my phone, climb up the airport, and set it on the edge of the window. Nice, yeah.

Enable hotspot. Ting doesn't charge me any extra for the hotspot. It's just pay for what you use. So you use 100 minutes. You fall into that bucket. They charge you for 100 minutes. You use one gig of data. You use one gig of data.

And they don't care if you're using that gig of data on your phone or if you're using that gig of data through tethering on your laptop. It's cell phone plans for adults. Exactly. Yeah, cell phone plans for adults. Now, there was a gentleman in the chat room that asked me if I would send him a Ting Sim. So if you send an email to NoahJupiterBroadcasting.com with your address, I will throw a Ting Sim in there and get that out to you. No problem. Ting Sims as a service.

I am. Yeah, I am. This is not an offer for everyone. There's one person that reached out to me and specifically asked. I'm going to accommodate him. I am not going to send Ting Sims to everyone. But that particular guy, I'm feeling generous. So you send me your address and I will ship you out a Ting Sim free of cost at my expense.

You send me your address, and I will ship you out a Ting Sim free of cost at my expense. And if you want to get a Ting Sim, you can go to linux.ting.com. It'll get you $25 off your first device for your first month of service, or you can get 25 SIM cards. You didn't think about that, did you? No, I didn't. No, you didn't. But if you wait for the dollar to— That's your whole business right there. Exactly.

Exactly. If you wait for the dollar SIM sale, you could get 25 SIMs for free with your first month of service. I don't know if that's really a necessary or good thing to do, but you could totally do it. The other thing you could do is you could get $25 off your first phone, which for me paid for the majority of the phone because I buy cheap phones. Exactly. Or you could get $25 off your first month of service. Now, between my wife, my son, my mother, and I, I think our average Ting bill is like, oh, and I have a couple office phones, and I think our average Ting bill is $45.

Let me look. I'll tell you what. Not only does Ting have an amazing dashboard, they have an amazing app. We don't talk about the app nearly enough, but I can pull this app up in about 30 seconds. $27. Wes, will you verify, please?

Yep. $27. All the no's. Now look at how many minutes I've used. Zero. Zero minutes. You know why? Because all of my calls are funneled over SIP.

So I use a program. It's just data. And then you have the one bucket system to worry about, right? Exactly. Not only do I have the one bucket system to worry about, that particular bucket doesn't apply to me. Basically, anytime I'm not in transit. Right?

When I got here, as soon as I got here, I'm not using minutes anymore. So, linux.ting.com. Get yourself something nice. And thank you to Ting for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged program. All right, guys. So, let's take a look. I want to dive back into this LinuxFest Northwest founder honored with the Community Builder. Wes, can you tell me a little bit about this? Community Builder Award, and it's meant to recognize people in the Cascadia region, the Pacific Northwest, who

have done good work building community, building things that people can feel a part of, building organizations that last over time, that bring people together, diverse groups together. And so this is kind of, it's just a nice article over on opensource.com talking about Bill, who has been the main founder and person running LinuxFest

Northwest, obviously the home show here of the JB network. Yeah. So it kind of tells the story back in 1968, the Great Northern Railroad hired Bill, then a student at Western Washington University, my alma mater. Because of his computer experience, Bill became interested in Linux and open source community in the late 1990s

as things were ramping up with a few other computer nerds. He helped start the Bellingham Linux Users Group and then from then started its Linux Fest. And since then, he's been doing it. He's seen a lot at other festivals around the area. He's known in the community. He's recognized by people all around. So this is just a great little

thank you, Bill. Thank you for all you've done, and some nice community recognition. That's super cool. Momoroom, how many of you guys are coming out to Linux Fest Northwest? I'm hoping to be there awesome anyone else no idea I'll make it alright well it's in April so start

thinking about it now early May money issues yeah that's a real thing right if we could come up with some way to have some sort of like sponsorship to get people to different Linux Fest that'd be the real way to go you know of like sponsorship to get people to a different Linux fest.

That'd be a, that'd be the real way to go. Uh, you know, the other thing is too, is I wish they would split these, uh, Linux fest,

Linux cons up a little bit because they all hit like in the first couple of months, March to June scale, then Linux fest Northwest itself. Yeah. It's just immediately all in a row. Exactly. Yeah.

It just, it just, it just, it drains the pocketbooks of those of us that have to, uh, that have to be at all those. It's unbelievable just immediately all in a row. Exactly. Yeah. It just drains the pocketbooks of those of us that have to be at all those. It's unbelievable. I'll be at scale.

I don't know about LFNW. All right. So KDE Neon users are requested to perform a full reinstall. Wes, what can you tell me about this? Well, so it looks like

it was just that some of their package distribution servers, it was possible for people to push things to them, right? So here it says, a package archive used by KDE Neon was incorrectly configured so that anyone could upload packages to it. They have no reason to think that anyone actually did so or that there was any, you know, intentional compromise

or that any of these packages are bad. But they do ask that for your own protection. They've updated packages. Everything has a newer version in the repo now. So if you do a reinstall, you'll get all the new packages and they've fixed that configuration and restored the server.

So it's just something to be aware of if you're on Neon. That's crazy. What else do we have? Mumble Room, how are you guys doing? I haven't heard much from you. This will be a great episode for you guys to chat because my voice is just, it's not great.

Take it easy on Pornhub. Well, I mean, I don't mind chatting at all. I just don't want to be rude when people are talking. Oh, no, no. you guys to to chat because my voice is just uh it's not great take it easy on porn well i mean i don't know you're chatting at all i just don't want to be rude when people are talking i don't know we're we're following your lead though all right for so for the about the uh the kitty neon thing um there it's not necessary to to have do a reinstall. They're suggesting that if you're worried about it, like for extra security to be absolutely sure,

you could do a reinstall. Gotcha. But they're saying that if you just do an upgrade once the packages are rebuilt, that it should be fine. Do they not sign their packages? They do sign their packages,

but it's more like if someone had access, like the configuration issue is that someone could just sign the packages but it's more like if someone had access the configuration issue is that someone could just push the packages and they would be on the server kind of with like already allowed to be in

so they would be signed by this process yeah kind of yeah so unfortunately that doesn't solve the problem but they wouldn't be able to replace the other packages. They would be able to add their own extra package. So it wouldn't be like having to rehash anything or anything like that. It's just more they could put something on the server, and then they could kind of trick a meta package to pull something down.

It's a really scary sounding issue that is not as bad as it is, but could potentially be terrible. So it's more like just... Be aware of it. It's more like, let's get in front of it so it doesn't actually make any problems. I'll tell you what else is terrible

is the Internet of Things. This article comes to us from hackerboardsBoards.com. Despite growing security threats, the Internet of Things hype shows no signs of abating. Feeling the FOMO companies are busily rearranging their robots for IoT. The transition to IoT runs deeper and broader than the mobile revolution. Everything gets swallowed into the IoT maw, including smartphones, which are often our windows on the IoT world, and sometimes our hubs and endpoints. Now, I have said once or twice on this show and on LAS

that I don't like the Internet of Things. I don't like the concept. I don't like the name. I don't like the branding. I don't like anything about it. And yet, the answer now is, from what I understand, looking at containers to solve a lot of the problems that we face in the IoT world. So, Canonical's IoT-oriented snappy Ubuntu core version of Ubuntu is built around a container-like snap package management mechanism and offers App Store support. This snap technology was recently released on its own for Linux distributions. On November 3rd, Canonical released Ubuntu Core 16, which improves the white-label App Store and updates control services.

So basically, their idea is is let's take this really crappy world that we live in and try to use containers to leverage updates and security patches. And I think on one side, that sounds ridiculous because obviously from the world of our, you know, in the, you go from the IoT world to the server world and containers

are the new thing that's kind of viewed skeptically from the security angle where VMs are trusted or, you know, bare metal even. But I but I think here the, the idea really is, you know, you're using, you know, using a bunch of like the, the snap stuff, or you're using resin.io, which is like a platform trying to use Docker containers on embedded devices. And I think really what you're getting is better, you know, a better understanding of what you, of the build structure and a lot of these embedded devices, right, like they're using build root,

they're forking from existing open source packages, but they're maybe not upgrading things. They may not have great build pipelines or anything approaching that. So I think this is just trying to take some modern development practice, modern understanding what your dependencies are, understanding what you're built from in ways where you can then improve on that rapidly

to hopefully at least compartmentalize and then establish, right? Because with a container system, you need to then, if you have a Telnet system, you know you have Telnet running because you had to export the port for the Telnet and you had to configure the daemon, more so than if you're just taking a fork of OpenWRT and sticking it on your light bulb. Bouncy, wow, wow, you nailed it.

Yeah, no, Mummerum, what do you guys think I don't know how that fixes the problem I mean most of the problem is people aren't doing their jobs in setting the systems up securely right so I think not that this is the answer but more like it's one place they're exploring I think their idea then is to

make that easier to do have better systems to produce those artifacts to produce those artifacts, to produce end things without having to do things from scratch where you might not have the incentive to actually update things or configure them securely. But personally,

I still like the separate offline network of things. That's my favorite. Yeah, no, that's fair. But you're just complicating the design of the solution to make it simpler and more secure kind of oxymoron there, you know? Well, I mean, I think basically what they're doing is they're trying to say, if you're going to have something insecure, first of all, let's try to make it so that

the people that develop the IoT stuff don't have to think about the security per se. That can be handled for them on a different level and be pushed out, right? And the second- They're not thinking about it now i agree but that but so i mean if my choice is between an insecure internet of things any more secure internet of things i don't like internet of things either way but i'll take more secure internet of things every time right and it may be that you have less of a service area that you you know if you're if you're responsible for the entire os stack and securing it versus if you're grabbing a base, almost container hypervisor type thing, and then you're responsible just for your app and what it exposes, it may be a different incentive structure. snaps are are secured in a more of a mount a mount point that is its own separate thing that it's but it's also connected to other pieces so that you have benefits of basically both worlds hurricane

herndas hey how's it going on correct me if i'm wrong wrong, but most of the IoT devices that have been insecure has been because people haven't followed best practices. And we're talking at the base level of the operating system. So I don't see how Docker is going to stop people deploying these devices with operating systems that have the same password on all the systems or the same security certificate. the systems or, you know, I mean, the same security certificate. I mean, these guys are not following best practices.

And I think that's the biggest issue here. Yeah, absolutely. It's because it's not Docker and it's more, it's the same thing of you want to upgrade your system. You do snap upgrade, you're done. Well, I think what he's saying is that if you, if you take a company that doesn't, it's, we have a human problem, not a security problem, right? We have companies that aren't taking security seriously. And if you think that technology can solve security concerns and you don't understand the technology and you don't understand the security concerns, that's the famous quote, right? It's the issue of them being lazy and not updating it, sure. But that's the same thing with all software of any kind.

Okay, fair enough. Minimac? Yeah, I more and more see that Internet of Things has become a marketing argument for products. I don't see the reason that a coffee machine has to be on the Internet, so the real need and use it is secondary. And these are, in fact, the machines that They are, in fact, used for spamming other machines afterwards. Right, right.

And that happens a lot, actually. You find that you run into a lot of these machines that, like, I saw a meme a couple days ago and it was talking about, you know, things like the internet-connected broom and stuff like that. When you get to, I mean,

there becomes a point where it becomes ridiculous, right? There are certain things that make sense to be connected to the internet connected broom and stuff like that. When you get to, I mean, there becomes a point where it becomes ridiculous, right? There are certain things that make sense to be connected to the internet, you know, from my perspective, but even people like my grand, my grandparents would have not understood internet connected light switches. To them, that would have been ridiculous that you'd want to put your light switch on the internet. So I have a hard time deciding where exactly to draw that line, because what seems ridiculous to me may not seem ridiculous to the next generation. And what seems perfectly logical to me probably seems ridiculous to the previous generation. But this idea that this idea

that everything is going to just happen in the cloud for us and talk out to the internet is kind of ridiculous. You know, I think it was William that brought up there is a you don't have to be on the internet to have a connected lifestyle. I have IP based cameras. They are connected through their own dedicated switch. They have their own dedicated DHCP server and they are on an entirely separate wiring system than the rest of the house. They are technically networked. Yes.

But there is absolutely no tie in to my normal household network and certainly no tie into the Internet. So the chances of those cameras getting hacked, some even if they could be the most unsecure thing in the world, the chances of those getting hacked slim to none slim to none unless you're physically inside of my house and you manage to plug into that switch there's no wi-fi access there's no outside internet access in a weird way i kind of wonder if we haven't jumped a little too far with containers too fast i kind of wonder if we haven't rushed it a little bit i remember when containers first came out, I barely had a chance to start trying them before I started to hear people rolling them out into production. And in fact, I myself have rolled a couple of them out in production.

And the only reason I was comfortable doing that is because we have services like DigitalOcean that I can go ahead and try those things on before I actually have to go to a client's network, you know, or someplace that where it really matters. And you can set up a production ready emulation suite. You know, there was a time when I was going through networking where I had to rent a Cisco stack. So I rented, you know, you know, a Cisco switch and a Cisco router and a Cisco this. And, you know, it's very expensive. It's a couple hundred dollars for the week to access that what they call the Cisco lab. Right.

And I did when I was first setting up containers, I did the same thing by going over to Digital Ocean and using the the promo code Dio unplugged. And basically, I was able to get a ten dollar credit and I was able to spin up my first two droplets, my first two five5 droplets for free using their private networking. I was then able to build a virtual data center that I could test all of this stuff on. And I mean, it was it was a total game changer. So come five, six months down the road, being able to walk into a client's facility and say, yeah, I can do this with confidence. Yeah, we can go ahead and set this up. It was no problem for me because I had already tried it. I had already had a chance to play with this stuff. And if it didn't work out, I just blew it away and I started all over again.

Exactly. And I'll tell you, the real key, no pun intended, pun intended, the real key is when you pair this stuff with a YubiKey because now you're not getting passwords emailed to you and they're always like some obtusely long thing that you have to like copy and paste and then you forget that you have to use shift when you paste into the terminal so it doesn't really paste and then it closes. Oh my gosh it's ridiculous and

then the other thing is too is I have this weird paranoid sense about me I'm like oh the NSA is spying on me that they've captured yeah they've captured my email now none of that with the YubiKey I literally add my SSH key and then when I spin up all my digital ocean droplets I just check that little box that says, you know, Noah's YubiKey around his neck or whatever. And boom, digital ocean spins up.

And D.O. makes it so easy to do that. They do. And if you use our code D.O. Unplugged again, you're going to get $10, which will give you the you can get a $5 rig for free for the first two months. Or you can get two rigs or you could get a $10 rig if you wanted to try something, you know, with a little bit more oeuf to it. We actually spun up, when we were testing SATCOM 1 and SATCOM 2, we actually, we spun up like super, super powerful ones just to kind of get the hang of it, just to kind of see what it would be like to work on a super powerful Linux rig. I think we did it more out of novelty than any real production requirement.

Linux rig. I think we did it more out of novelty than any real production requirement. So Linux DigitalOcean.com and use the promo code DO unplugged. Is Crystal with us or did he drop out? He's still there. Yeah.

Is your connection any better, sir? It's not his connection. More like he's trying to set up push to talk and he's currently on voice activation so yeah okay all right well we'll let him sort that out i yeah kind of nice to have him here because uh you guys are super quiet today uh so wes tell me about the the end of the general purpose operating system yeah so this was just an article i saw that I thought was kind of interesting over at the blog, morethan7.net. And it was just talking about, and it probably is focusing maybe on the opposite end spectrum of the IoT.

I threw that article in there just to kind of get this topic started. But what we're seeing at the, I don't know, when I started doing things on the Internet, you know, kind of in the early days of Linux, not super early, but the early days of like web scale Linux, you know, you were getting your VPS or maybe a shared host and you were configuring things on the, you had an FTP account or you had a, you know, you had a whole open VZ server that you were then configuring and you installed Apache with mod

PHP and you got your MySQL going. Oh boy, now you got your web app running. But these days, there's a lot of things that's not necessarily the level of abstraction that people are going oh boy, now you've got your web app running. But these days, there's a lot of things. That's not necessarily the level of abstraction that people are going for. These days, we're seeing a lot more. You have infrastructure as a service. You have all kinds of different intermediate service, platform service layers.

You have things like AWS Lambda, where you're not concerned at all. Or the whole no-ops thing, where you're not concerned about what operating system is. Is it RHEL? Is it Ubuntu? It all runs on Linux, sure. But for you, you write your Java application. It gets executed in your container or wherever, and then it runs. I want the candy. I don't care how I get the candy. Right.

And I understand that. I mean, I even may support that worldview when you're trying to build large-scale distributed systems. Sure. I just wonder, is that a success for Linux? What does that mean? distributed systems. I just wonder what it, is that a success for Linux? What does that mean? Also, like, what does that mean in terms of new developers who, you know, maybe they start from the code side, but they want to start deploying things. I think in the past, some of those people would then be pulled into the Linux ecosystem, where you're suddenly running Linux at home,

and you're converting your media center. And you know, you get in the Linux culture. And if you're just using these cloud scale platforms, where yes, Linux is there, but that's not really never, you know, you make a Docker container where you, you know, you might your import Python and then you build your Python thing. Never is it even say the word Ubuntu or Linux on it. What does that mean for the Linux ecosystem and new developers, new people in that ecosystem who are coming to Linux? Well, let's tie that back to our original discussion about FreeNAS and BSD, right? Right. I think if you start to look at things from the perspective of, I just want to push the button, take the banana. If we look at things in that sense, I like FreeNAS because I can drop an enterprise-ready solution. If Linux becomes so

effective at doing its job that I don't have to know it exists for me to get the banana, I'm okay with that. That actually doesn't bother me. And if Amazon can make a buck by customizing that operating system and delivering an end of banana to a user without them having to understand how the banana got there to begin with, I guess I'm okay with that too. And so then to go on from there, how do you feel about the – how do you want to call it? Patriotism or to the kernel level, do you care mostly about the experience? Is it POSIX-like?

Or is it a license issue? Could Amazon then replace their EC2 service with FreeBSD hosts or even a Lumos host? And would that change things for you? Would you – is there a community loss there? Does it matter? you would you is there a community loss there does it matter well i think first of all i don't i i'm usually not aware if they're going to change something like that out right i wouldn't know as again i'm it's it's a black box i don't know how it's working i like i don't see that happening for a couple of reasons first of all i think that a lot of these systems have gotten built up on

the backbone of linux and they have ridden that train up and you get a lot of people that are very, very comfortable administrating in what they already know. And I'll give you a great example of that. It's been 15 years since I first sat down and was required to use a given server, a server operating system, right? When I first started out, they said, you will use rel because that's what we use here. And that's, you know, whatever. system, right? When I first started out, they said, you will use rel because that's what we use here. And that's, you know, whatever. And, uh, you know, I was formerly trained on rel and whatnot. And, and I got, and I, and I got my start in rel partly because I sought out jobs in that, in, you know, in that area. But I, ever since then I have formal training on rel. I have worked with

rel. I've worked with red hat, the company extensively. So when I go to set up a server, it is second nature to me. I just naturally want to use RHEL. And you see in the military, a lot of the guys that go in and they become very proficient with a given firearm, they own a very similar firearm when they get home because it's what they like to shoot because they're very comfortable with it. And I think that we have gotten as an industry so entrenched in the Linux ecosystem, in the Linux system, I think it's going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to ever back our way back out. And so if you're going to go to something like BSD, BSD would not just have to equal Linux in a competitive advantage. It would have to far exceed it because you would have to have something so compelling that it's worth people to fundamentally relearn the system that they know. What do you guys think in the mumbo room?

In general, I don't think the general use OS is going to go away for a long time. Because, I mean, these cloud solutions are great and all, but even the average user is going to have to be on the technological level and understanding to be able to use these and have them work. And people who really want a general use OS to do whatever they want with as a playground. I think most of us in here and most people who work in it and devs who like to tinker, we'll probably always use one rotten corpse. What do you think?

Go in once. We'll always use, once. I'll always use a general operating system. I'll add stuff like a Kodi box or something. There's definitely places where it

makes sense, but it's not fundamentally going to change how I use the majority of what i do like i guess i wonder and i think that applies to most people because they're they're even if you have uh like even if people switch like earlier we were talking about how maybe the mass majority of people will switch to something like a phone or a tablet as their main system that's a general operating system sure so i don't really think that this really has much, you know, ground to stand on. Sure.

So I guess I just wonder from the new user perspective and, and, and maybe, maybe it's like the, the difference, like you were talking about like learning rel and like even learning rel, like even though it's an enterprise distribution, it's kind of locked away in its own little tower.

You know, you're on the command line, you're using these new tools. It's, it feels more part of the community versus like these days, maybe you could have come up and like what you got, you got certified in AWS.

Right. You know how to administer the ACLs for network access, as you know, all about EC2. Sure. And that doesn't, I guess that doesn't feel the same in terms of,

you're maybe even accomplishing the same things, but it doesn't have the same heart to me. You know, it doesn't. And you know, the thing is, we're in a drastically different landscape today than we were 15 years ago. You know, these days, when I started out, I spent, and I spent it on my own money, too.

No, actually, no, I didn't. That's not true. That's not true. I got a company to pay for it. But I contacted a company and had them pay, I think it was like three grand, to send me to official training to get trained on rel, because I was doing this stuff for them. And I said, you know, I just, I really need some, some actual training. And it wasn't so much that I needed to learn how to do things. I think I knew how to do the tasks I needed to do. Really what it gave me was the confidence to know I was doing things correctly.

These days, you don't have to spend $2,500, $3,000 to get that sort of training. You don't. You can go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged, and we will give you a great deal to be able to use Linux Academy. And the thing about Linux Academy is they take everything in bite-sized pieces. So they work with your schedule. They take everything that you'd need to know, and you can do it on anything. You can do it on RHEL. You can do it on Ub know and you can do it on anything. You can do it on rel, you can do it on Ubuntu, you can do it on AWS. You pick the area of expertise that you need to know and then you go through those snippets.

Now, for me personally, I went through when I, when rel seven came out, I didn't need to go through, you know, the basics of the Red Hat operating system. I'd been using it for 10 years, but I needed to know what was different between six and seven. Well, Linux Academy had a course for me. They had a course from transitioning from six to seven. And I was able to, in just a week or so, get myself up to what I would have had to spend five days plus hotel, plus food, plus taking time off work. A lot of people don't constant, you know, if you're self-employed, the cost to come here to do a show, the cost to fly out here, the cost to stay here, that's not where the money is. The money is in the fact that I'm not working when I'm back in Grand Forks.

How much money could you have made? Exactly. The cost in going to a training session is not the $2,500, $3,000. Really, that's peanuts. It's not the couple thousand dollars I'm going to spend on a hotel for a week or the food I'm going to spend. It's the time away from my business. It's the time away from my business. It's the time away from my business. And I see that dropping. Well, with Linux Academy,

I'm able to keep doing my work, keep serving my clients, and at the same time, stay up to date on the leading edge of technology. You can get a professional grade education right there in your office. You can. And these people are dedicated Linux professionals. They're not just people that show up

just to collect a paycheck. These people are dedicated Linux professionals. They're not just people that show up, you know, just to collect a paycheck. These people are dedicated Linux professionals that, you know, really have a passion for teaching Linux. So head over to LinuxAcademy.com slash Unplugged. And a huge thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged program. So one of my passions, in fact, one of the focus of the show that we are working on, the call in show called Asanoa that we're working on is going to be small business. Small business is near and dear to my heart. And one of the things that fits in tandem with small business is, of course, Linux, because in small business, it's all about that ROI. How can I get the most return on my investment for the least amount of money invested?

So this article comes to us from ZDNet. Many small businesses with tight budgets are facing a tough choice. Stick with an obsolete operating system and remain vulnerable to hackers or spend a lot to install new gear. David Gerwitz shows how Linux can help preserve your investment while staying safe and secure. Earlier this week, my phone rang. I looked at the caller ID, and it was from a neighbor in the community. Since I was writing, I ignored it.

Next came a text from the same guy. Please call me. Like I said, I was working, so I ignored it. God, we've all been there, right? Then came a succession of text alerts on my phone. I turned my phone off and finished my article. When I finally looked at my phone, there were a scroll of alerts all from Fred.

I don't know Fred all that well, but we often bump into each other around town and events. He normally seems like a cheerful, calm sort, but not today. I listened to his voicemail message where he sounded like he'd been crying. We're done, Dave. Don't know what to do. Expletive computers.

It was a busy week, and it sounded like it had been generally desperate. I reluctantly decided to get involved. I called him back and said, hey, Fred, what's going on? You sound upset. Dave, can you come over? I think I might be done for. If there's a chance, fixing computers is not my favorite thing, but I'd been inside all day, and so it would be nice to get out. So I headed over to his office. What I walked into seemed like a war zone more than an office. A cluster of workers were staring at a clunky old LCD monitor that looked like they'd seen a ghost. Here's what I discovered.

Fred's service business has 20 PCs, all more than a decade old and still running. You got it. Windows XP. Where's the bell? This time it was ransomware. This time, he wasn't going to recover quickly or cheaply. Fred was running Windows XP for a few reasons. His hardware was running solidly, and he didn't want to pay for a Windows upgrade.

Remember that free Windows upgrade to Windows 10 didn't include XP? But he couldn't afford to buy new machines. Now, here's the thing. I see this. This is not an isolated incident. I see this on a daily basis. This right here, and if you're wondering why I dove so far deep into this article, it's because, first of all, I think the writer just did a fantastic job really drawing you

into his narrative. But the second thing is, this story is probably 95% of our customers. Really rings true. They have reached the end of their rope. They don't have a necessarily large budget. They have a budget. Again, we're not a miracle worker, right? But they have a budget, just not a large budget,

and they don't want to spend $60,000. Well, actually more than that. We just did a bid for a business that is getting all new machines, whole nine yards, and that's, I think it was $85,000. And, of course, that includes all the network infrastructure and installation and stuff like that. And they're doing, you know, we're pulling new wire and stuff for them. There's defense.

Yeah, but that doesn't even include, I mean, I'm sure it would be more expensive if we were buying those computers with Windows, right? Because these are no operating system. We're going to put Linux on them. This kind of client exists out there. So if you are a there are two people that this story should speak volumes to. The first story is if you own a small business and you're running computers with Windows XP, you need to stop today. You need to go download a bunch of Mate and you need to make it work for you.

Stop today. You need to go download Ubuntu Mate and you need to make it work for you. The first thing you're going to say is, well, Noah, there are some applications that I just have to run on Windows XP or I'm just very used to this. Not saying it's going to be a perfect experience. You might have some hiccups along the way, but I promise you 100% you are going to have hiccups if you continue down this path of using a 15-year-old operating system and expecting it to continue to work for you. Microsoft isn't doing you any favors in that regard, right? The second group of people that should really take note of this story is if you have it in you to start a local IT service, this is your client right here. You go find this person and you say for $50 an hour, $75 an hour, $90 an hour, whatever you think you can get. I will come in here and I will clean all these machines up.

I will reinstall them with the latest version of an operating system for you. And I'll work with you until we get your business operating with acceptable solutions. If you are willing to do that and you're willing to stick with it, you know, and I sat just last week. Sat in a boardroom across from a, you know, a very demanding client. And he looked right at me. And when I told him, we're going to wipe these machines, going to wipe windows off and we're going to put Linux. We're going to do this. We're going to do that.

You know, it was not I was not met with, you know, oh, that sounds great. Right. He wasn't very happy about it. But you just you stick on your guns and you say, this is why we're doing it. And I have I have a proven track record of the last 10 years of doing this. And we have successfully served clients. We can successfully serve you. You need to trust us on this.

You need to let us go forward. You need to let us do this. And this is why. And here are the competitive advantages. You will make so much money off of doing stuff like this. It's not even funny. What do you guys think about this? I definitely think that's a good service to have,

and people should be jumping up on that because they really do need to move away from XP. It seems to me like a good value add where maybe open source plays well, where a commercial solution wants to wrap it all up, they want to sell you the support, but where open source solutions open up is a good business opportunity

for people who like open source, who contribute, who support it, who can then go out in the agency and one, evangelize, and then two, maybe provide support, sell support that can then foster the community. What do you guys think? It would be a great option for – if there was like a community project that would do a service but provide – like you still have to pay for it, but you're paying for support. but provide like you still have to pay for it but you're paying for support and the people who are committing to the project are getting paid from that in certain ways so it's more like you're you're contributing to help the community help people come to the community and that would be awesome um but there's actually there's people who are are still using XP and continue to use XP regardless of having – dealing with stuff all day. Like there is one – this is just an anecdotal story.

But there was someone I was talking to, a company that was potentially becoming – was going to become a client for mine. But they decided that they didn't – they didn't think that they were a big risk, so they're going to keep using XP. And I refused to let them keep using XP everywhere because they wanted to do it where every system was XP and their server was XP and everything, absolutely everything's XP. I wanted to give them Linux everywhere, but an XP VM for the people who are going to use it,

so I could keep them off the internet. And since the XP is not online, it's not a big deal. But they refused to do that. So I have one person who works there who sends me messages at least three times a week or so uh complaining about something going wrong where their their computer completely crashes or you know the server getting infected even though supposedly that's impossible as they say but if we could actually provide them a community or a service or something that would give them you know a semblance of support and they weren't, they're not going into like, oh, we're switching completely and it's up to us to figure it out. Right. How many business owners want to spend hours on Google trying to figure that out when they really just need to get it done?

And if they have a resource that they can maybe support financially or, you know, whatever you need to do to make that work where it feels like, you know, they're doing it as part of community. Maybe it helps put, you know, businesses together who have done that so that they have people to talk to, talk about how the transitions went, problems with training, all that stuff. That's an interesting idea. I was a part of a local IT business that totally missed this vote. I had been railing on them to begin supporting Linux in any form from day one that I arrived there. And I spoke to several clients about switching their operations over to Linux and finding solutions that worked. And this was five, six years ago. And now the local IT business is dead. And those clients are looking around, I guess. They

have nothing to fall back on because this was a business that developed when doing hardware repairs was easy money. And you could actually make a fair living at just repairing the boxes. And I could not get this business to look bigger, to look smarter at what was going to happen in the next five years with the hardware becoming essentially unrepairable because Joe Consumer was buying tablet-related machines more so than laptop or desktop-related machines. And they weren't looking at the commercial market. So there's my sob story of an IT business that totally missed the boat. Mosin-Ref? Yeah, just give me a second here. I got the link for you.

It is a company called Free... Sorry. It's a company that is inside of Toronto where I'm located called Free Geek Toronto. What they do is they take old machines and they convert them over, get them back up and running,

and they always throw Linux on it. Sometimes they give them out for free, sometimes you can buy them. Here's the link here. Now, the reason why I'm bringing them up is because there's a lot of companies which are out there right now that are in the, hey, we're just going to remake this machine business. Now, if more of them actually provided setups with Linux on it,

which would mean that they wouldn't be paying as much towards the operating system. They could always donate that to the people that are making the operating system. More people would be actually willing to try it out because a lot of people who are making the decisions about the computers at the workplace, they're going to have Windows at home or they're going to have Mac at home. So if they start off with Linux at home, say Linux and Windows like what I have, all of a sudden you're no longer as afraid to sit there and try out Linux at the workplace because you already know, hey, this is what it can do, this is what it can't do, so on and so forth.

And I've actually converted businesses doing exactly that. Rotten Corpse. I like the idea of providing machines to people so that they have the transition from work to home and i also like the idea of giving them uh you know a service that provides them with the free equipment to make it easier for that transition but i don't like the idea of these free equipment there's been there's multiple plate companies that do this. I know of one that Mosin-Rabbit mentioned in Toronto. I know of one in the UK.

And they all do the same thing. They take these really terrible hardware that, well, Linux can run on this old hardware. Yes, it can, but that doesn't mean it's going to be a good experience. It's probably going to be an awful experience because it's awful hardware. Linux deserves good hardware. You'll get even more value out of it. Exactly.

Like when they use something that's good, that's fantastic. When they're given something that's terrible, they're just going to blame Linux and not the hardware because they have no idea. Exactly. Well, thank you so much for the Mumble Room for joining us today. We really appreciate it, as always.

Special thanks to Michael Dinell, our producer and show screener. Mitfrey, the man who keeps our Mumble Room up and running. Rekhi, our chief editor and all around in-house genius. And the entire team here at Jupiter Broadcasting. Linux Unplugged airs live on Tuesdays, 2 p.m. Pacific time. You can keep an eye on the schedule of this show and every other show at jupiterbroadcasting.com. We look forward to seeing you right back here next week Thank you. So, there's an article here from ModZero on modzero.github.io. And it is,

With the release of Microsoft Windows 10 operating systems, several innovations have been introduced into the market regarding privacy settings. What is a normality with Apple, since long apparently has been accepted by OS X user, now has finally become a reality for Microsoft users. The analysis of the user data and behavior of the U.S. American creator of software. Over time, more users published instructions on how to break Microsoft's habits of spying on their users, including private users whose computers are not part of a company or enterprise domain. I was annoyed that this leads to manually clicking check marks on a graphical user interface or running confusing PowerShell scripts that merge with several single rule sets. So I don't know if you guys have seen this article or not, but it basically, my understanding is that it is basically a how-to guide on how to fix Windows 10 to be more privacy-respecting. Is that right, Wes? Well, even better than that, it's like something you can install that will do it for you.

So again, it took a bunch of other guides, tips on how to do it, best practices that have emerged, and then made a tool that will just apply that for you. So if you don't really want to get into PowerShell scripts or modify the registry or who knows what, here's something that will purportedly do it for you. I haven't tested this myself. I don't have Windows 10 at home, but I know a lot of people do. Maybe you have it for gaming or something else or your spouse is using it and this might be something just to help make it more like you're used to.

Oh, that's awesome.