LINUX Unplugged - Episode 243: The Stallman Directive

Episode Date: April 4, 2018

Richard Stallman has some practical steps society could take to roll back the rampant and expanding invasion of our privacy. But his suggestions leave us asking some larger questions. Plus the latest on the march to Juno, some fun app picks, a quick look at Qubes OS 4.0, community news, and more.

You see, any simple model of human nature is going to be wrong. Human nature is complex. Many emotions are possible. Many motivations are possible in the human mind. So a simplistic motivation, a simplistic model of human nature, humans are motivated by profit, is absurd. I'm not denying that that motivation exists, but they're denying all the others. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 243. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's got so much stuff in its dock today, you might just say it's having a bit of a

breakdown. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Actually, Wes, the votes are out. Will Gnome make it this episode? Will it not? The chat room is currently running the odds. But before we get there, we have some news from Valve. And Apple is currently poaching Linux developers. It's actually even more mysterious than you might think.

Say what? And then there's some new NVIDIA features coming to Snap Packages. Wimpy's here. He'll tell us all about that. Say what? lines of code are being cut from the Linux kernel. Daniel Foray will jump in here and tell us about the march towards Juno, and then Wes has got oregano. What is it, and why has Wes loaded it? Well, it fits with an overall theme. Later on in the show today, we're going to talk about an opinion piece that ran in The Guardian that was authored by one Richard Stallman, and it's his radical proposal to keep your data safe. He says the surveillance imposed on modern society far exceeds that of the Soviet Union. For freedom and democracy's sake, we need to eliminate most of it. And for Richard, he's got some pretty sanient, centered opinions

on how we could do that. It involves some tweaks to existing surveillance systems and payment systems, but it's worth discussing. So we'll get to that later on in the show. But before we go any further, we must bring in that virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings. Mumble Roop. Hey. Hello, hello.

Hey, Gazar. Hello. I don't know what any of that was, but I loved all of it. Hello, guys. How are you doing today? We have a good showing. Wimpy, it's good to see you back. Hello, hello. Hello, hello, sir. Good to have you, as always.

Guys, what do you say we start the show out today with a little Valve news? We haven't talked about Valve in a little while. Cue the Valve! Oh, there it is. Yep. Ooh, I send shivers down my spine every time. I don't think this move surprises anyone. But it appears that Steam machines are just silently disappearing from the Valve website. Yeah.

Liam over at GamingOnLinux.com has this. He says, in fact, the entire hardware page on Steam is now gone. And anyone that goes to the direct link, the store.steampower.com slash hardware is just redirected to a basic search page. And it looks like when he did some digging, it must have rolled through earlier this month. You know, when I was down at Dell, I kind of got a cold read on the future.

They weren't sure. They thought maybe VR and 4K would push it over, but I don't think there's been a huge demand on Steam machines for VR, and that's sort of what they were banking on to bring them to the next level and be competitive with consoles. That was going to be their secret sauce, and it didn't materialize. You know, and even now, like Liam makes the point,

there's now over 4,000 Linux games on Steam, with more releasing every single day. Of course, a lot of them are junk, but that's just how it always goes. Some of them are great, too. I gotta be honest. I think I bought into the hype pretty big back in the day when these things were first announced, because if you remember, it was a hype sandwich.

It had Windows Store momentum that was freaking out Valve and Epic and other game developers, and then you had the whole, like, layer, the tasty, tasty layer of the Steam client getting developed and created for Linux. And then the finish at the bottom there was the nice, savory fact that they were going to ship purpose-built hardware to run Steam. And they were going to create their own Linux distribution. And, I mean, how could I not get excited about that? That's just some exciting shit.

The reality is, though, that consoles have really not changed much since they launched the market. Microsoft and Sony and Nintendo have continued to lock that market up. Console gamers seem to be a different type of gamer than PC gamers to a large extent. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. I mean, I'm not a big gamer, but it seems to be that the markets aren't. Maybe there's not a big crossover there.

Right. And there hasn't been a huge amount of radical change either. That would naturally lead to a new contender coming in. Yeah. I know maybe this is just them redoing stuff, but I don't know. Anybody in the Mumba room have any takes on Valve pulling down the Steam machines off of the website? Is this a sign that things are over? Yeah, a little bit.

Yeah, I think a lot of it has to do with the very successful Steam Link, because you can then just use your regular PC across the network, plug it into your TV, and boom, there's your console. I can 100% see that. Yep. Yeah, the Steam Link and the Steam Controller have been the successful byproducts of that experiment. Very much so, yeah. And, uh... Exactly, as a proud

owner, I'm like, yeah, that's it. That's gotta be it. And it makes sense, then you invest once in a really nice graphics card and a really nice desktop PC, and then you can stream it to multiple televisions. And it actually works. You know, I've got one. I've only used it a little bit, but it, I was impressed. It actually works. And NVIDIA's got something similar that's built into the NVIDIA Shield. You can do the same thing to the NVIDIA Shield TV if you have a Windows box.

Right. So there you go. I don't know. All right, how about a mystery? You guys want a little mystery? Oh, yeah, and Bacon points out in the chatroom, she's Bacon points out that the Moonlight Project, which lets you just use a Raspberry Pi, because remember, it's an H.264 stream here. All right, how about this one? What do you guys make of this? What is going on? Apple, for unknown reasons, is looking to hire multiple Linux kernel developers in both Texas and in California. Is that right?

Yeah, they specifically are looking for people with Linux kernel development experience and someone with five plus years of embedded Linux kernel development experience in understanding of the Linux kernel internals, familiarity with ARM and Linux kernel device driver development experience. Odd. In Cupertino and in Texas, in Te tejas i'm not sure i don't know where is there it doesn't say what town in tejas but um oh austin yeah what is that about it doesn't necessarily seem like it you know it seems device oriented or something on the embedded space if not you know not their server like server stuff maybe would make more sense yeah it's just weird when it's paired at that same time those rumors going around that they're switching cpus they're going to arm uh but if you're in the austin area or the curpatino area you might

want to get a gig because they you know probably pay pretty decent and um could just be for building custom systems in their data centers you know it could be could be could be arm embedded arm embedded yeah um and so i did a little uh i did a little digging to see if this is the first time they've ever done this and it is not it is not this has been going on i i found two other job postings this year where they were looking for uh potential employees with linux development experience. And everything from Linux file systems was one of the requirements, familiarity with Linux file systems. And it could just be that they are looking to make their products better.

And so they want to hire somebody that is working on a superior built system. I mean, you know what I'm saying? That's a punch to the gut there. I'm not a big fan of their kernel, eh, Chris? Well, who knows? Who am I to say? But you've got to wonder if it's not a good way to vet a better developer from a less better developer.

Take a risk on somebody that has some kernel experience. Probably a good chance they know what they're doing. Yeah, and probably have some easy easily easy to vet open source contributions exactly exactly so anyways isn't that weird it's been going around it's been going around in two different locations too so i mentioned some new features this week well check this out. Hot little, I have my hot little hands here. I have some notes about a new release of Snappy, which supports NVIDIA drivers, and it will be shipping in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Apparently, this is all part of Snap 2.32.2, which is available for download now and runs on all Snappy-enabled GNU slash Linux distributions. Now, I could sit here and tell you about it, but I probably would be doing a disservice when we could just ask Mr. Wimpy kind of the details about this. But, Wimpy, if I'm grokking this story, it looks like Snapped applications can now take advantage of the binary NVIDIA driver for full acceleration and maybe even CUDA?

I don't know how deep it goes but what's the details well this isn't something new this is just a change to accommodate the nvidia 390 drivers oh i see this has already been possible oh yeah this has been this has been there for some time news to me but the yeah okay so uh yes but it's been around for a while. So, you know, when you install games like, what's the Mario Kart thing? Super Tux Kart. There's a snap of that. That's obviously using all of that stuff already. But the 390 drivers have a different layout and structure and different shared object names and the confinement model needed to be updated to support those new drivers. model needed to be updated to support that those those new drivers oh anything in particular that i'd find interesting so what did nvidia do with the 390 release that because i assume the trick is is talking outside the sandbox is that is that what has to be sort of shored up is that capability it's passing through to the drivers on the host operating system yeah and the location of the shared objects have changed in some cases so they didn't they didn't hook up properly but they do now and that'll be in 1804 when it ships it's already in 1804 and

it's making its way to the other flavors you know the other uh releases in due course looks like there are some improvements to temporary files with app armor as well with uh snap d so that looks good um i uh i, uh, I gotta say, and this is me saying this and I'm not saying it cause one piece here seeing, uh, now Popey too. Hi, Popey.

I, uh, seen, I've seen a lot of good pickups of snaps. It feels like momentum. Mm. Hmm. Fly packs got some pickups this week too,

but I really feel like snaps have maintained a pretty strong trajectory. Hey, Chris, while you're on that, while you're on that trip, I've got a great snap for you. Oh, yeah? Tell me about it. Cointop. Snap install Cointop. You will totally love this.

This is completely up your alley. You will love this. We'll do it live. Snap install Cointop and then just run Cointop. All right. I'm snap installing right now. It's an Htop-style interface to cryptocurrency rates. I knew you were going to say that. I love it.

I already love it so much. That's great. And, of course, you would be the person to know about this, Snap. I know this is an area that you – oh, this is – Well, yes. Look at that. I have my finger on the pulse of this, of course. Yeah.

You know, Popey is your go-to guy for cryptocurrency. He has always. And all of your VR inquiries should come to me. Guys, this is so cool all right everybody uh go and go snap install coin top because i the part that really that really sells it for me is the ticker graph along the top when you can generate a graph like that on a on a command line application that deserves an install in some some some love there so uh gives you it gives you the uh the top 13 at least in how many i can fit i suppose if i were to make my oh just page down page down left and right there you go i'm down there you go oh yeah there

we go the the letters at the top of the columns will sort the columns and all that it's brilliant nano coin huh hmm interesting wow there's more coins these days than I would know what to do with. That is a great app. That is, thanks. A little bonus app pick there from Mr. Popey. I appreciate that. Well, I guess what I thought was a great development for Snaps is just business as usual and keeping things moving along. Which is also good.

It's good not to have those kinds of things break. Well, while we're talking about really cool apps, Wes found LSOF to GraphVis. Now, LSOF, as you know, lists all of the open files on your Linux rig. And that's cool. But what if you could graph it all? And it looks so neat. I did it here on my Plasma Neon box. And it's really cool.

I actually forgot that I had Postgres running, so you can see, if you ran it on yours, you'd see all the different processes and which ones are communicating to which over a loopback adapter. You can see that SystemD literally has its hooks into like a bajillion things. It's really kind of intense. It's really kind of intense. And I also realize how many applications on my machine have a back-end, front-end arrangement, like Spotify and a bunch of others that have a back-end listening process. And it visualizes those links between those processes. Yeah, it's a fascinating look that, I mean, you can obviously piece together through various other options,

but especially maybe if you're interrogating a system you're not too familiar with or you're trying to do an audit, this is a helpful overview. Yeah, it was. Well, I guess, oh yeah, Postgres. I forgot I did that before a show one time. And you have to have Lua installed and you have to have GraphVis installed. And if you're on 16.04 and you install Lua 5.3, the package maintainer didn't set up a symbolic link. So you have to symbolically link user bin Lua five,

three to user bin Lua. But once you do those things, it generates a nice, pretty graph for you. It sure does. I will have a link in the show notes. If you want to see that new show notes to got to mention this, I really got to be, I got to be better about this because I'm still getting tweets. They don't know. They don't know that we have Linux unplugged.com now. Yeah. That's so shiny. Yep. If you go to Linux unplugged.com now oh yeah that's so shiny yep if you go to linux unplugged.com slash 243 you get links to anything any apps we talked about anything like that just linux unplugged i'm doing it right now you can do it with me linux unplugged.com slash 243 boom uh of course as we do this show it's not posted yet but after it's posted it'll be live

that's the new website a new rss feed there too linplugged.com slash RSS if you want to plug that in your podcast catcher of choice. And if you've got one of those podcast catchers that supports chapter markers, check those out, too. And, you know, while I'm talking about chapter markers, I'll give a plug to a user error this week. It's back. Episode 47 with Noah, myself, and Joe is on there. Joe Ressington joins us for, I thought, a particularly good episode of the User Air program. Also with chapter markers. Boom.

Boom. Got the chapter markers everywhere. So if you've got a podcast catcher that supports them, go take advantage of that. Let's take a moment and let's thank Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Linux.ting.com. You know, I could tell you about Ting, but it's been a while since we've heard from Kyra. So let's have Kyra do it. What do you say?

You want to do it? All right, Kyra, tell me about Ting. Ting keeps rates simple. We don't make you pick a plan. Instead, you just use your phone as you normally would. How much you use determines how much you pay each month. You can have as many devices as you want on one account. That's good, because when you use more, you pay less per minute, message, or megabyte of data.

That's good, because when you use more, you pay less per minute, message, or megabyte of data. Your usage, plus $6 per active device on your account, plus taxes, is your monthly bill. Simple. That's what we mean when we say... Mobile. That makes sense. Yeah, it's better than unlimited, because you have to pay a lot of money for unlimited, but with Ting, you just pay for what you use. $6 a month, your minutes, minutes your messages and your megabytes nationwide coverage cdma and gsm no contracts no agreements nor the termination fees none of that plus great customer service those are all the extra things i like to mention that i she couldn't fit into that jazzy tune but check it out linux.ting.com

it'll take 25 off a device or if you just want to bring one that's compatible because they do have the two networks so check their byod page then they'll give you $25 in service credit. Linux.ting.com, and a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Linux.ting.com. So there's just one story that's gotten a lot of attention this week, and it's a total non-story. So we're going to razz it here a little bit. We're going to take a piss, I believe, as our friends from across the pond would say.

Hello, Dan. I'm glad you made it, because guess what? A Juno progress update is our next story, so I'm glad you could make it into the show today. Yay! Yeah, so let's talk about this hype story, though. Linux kernel is cutting its code size

by 500,000 lines of code by dropping support for old cpu architectures and i know a lot of you did your ears perk up and go does that mean 32-bit does that mean 32-bit does that mean does that mean power pc what does that mean no it's nothing like that it's like it's like these crazy ones like met tagETTAG, MN1030, Backflin. There's one called, there's a CRIS CPU architecture. Oh, don't cut that one. They're going to. And the Unicord 32, it's gone. Also, Hexagon architectures are out, but their maintainers are trying to step up their contributions, so they may keep it.

But they say Kelenov support for these different architectures that aren't really used anymore is beneficial for lots of reasons. Number one, it'll reduce the attack surface of the kernel, and it also just reduces the damn size of the kernel, which is particularly nice. And although many of us have fond memories of working on these old systems, it is time to move on, and

out with the old and with the new. Gotta get all those new ARM processor and phone supports in there after all. Yeah, it looks like that'll be about a little under 2.5% reduction. No kidding. It's not too bad. Did you just do a little quick math over there? Quick math. I heard you quick math in it over there.

You're on a roll today. Wes also spun up a server app we're going to be talking about later in the show. During the intro of the show, I think he spun that up. You maniac. about later in the show um during the intro of the show i think you spun that up maniac all right so daniel foray from elementary os is here and his timing is great because i want to talk about the slow and steady march towards juno now juno is the next release of elementary os which will be based on 1804 lts of ubuntu. And lots of new things are coming. We've been kind of covering this as it gets here.

And a new post went up. And you guys have a feature that I'll say is inspired by Unity that was one of the best new user Unity features. So why don't we start there, Dan? Yeah. Yeah, so a couple of the things we've been looking at with this release especially is kind of user feedback and figuring out what do people feel like is missing or what are people saying that maybe elementary OS can't do right now and kind of showing them how they can do it. And so this is, I think, one of the great ways that Unity showed them how you can use keyboard shortcuts there. And so we said, hey, this is a great idea. Let's implement it. So you mash down the super key, essentially, and if you hold it long enough, a pop up comes up with an overview of the keyboard shortcuts that the end user might want to cycle

through a window or switch workspaces or take a screenshot or even zoom an application in. And but then you guys went further than that. You can also remap what that super key goes to. Yeah. Like you can change the mash behavior. Yeah. So we set that up because we know that people have different expectations of what they want the super key to be. So we figured,

you know, the first try, we're going to have it pop up as the keyboard shortcuts to show them, you know, this is what we set it up as default, but then you have a quick shortcut that'll put you right into shortcut settings, and you can have it show instead the applications menu,

or you can just have it do nothing if it's getting in your way. Looks like, while we're talking about system settings, the Bluetooth menu got reworked quite a bit. New device discovery seems a little different. And is this essentially moving away from the GNOME tools and rolling your own Bluetooth stuff here with the management aspect?

Right. So one of the things that we have to kind of work with in a new release is changes that Upstreams have made. And the GNOME Bluetooth wizard has actually been deprecated Upstream for a really long time. And so we've kind of finally moved away from that and have more of our own tools.

Wow. It looks nice and clean, as it always does. It almost goes without saying these days that it always looks nice and clean. Thanks. So the one thing that I wasn't clear on is you guys have GeoClue, a GeoClue API that developers that are creating applications

for elementary OS can use to ascertain the user's location, and that's controllable by the end user. So what's new with Juno? Because that's already existed, correct? Right. So we had the GeoClue API in before, but there were some big problems. One was that we didn't have any documentation available for it on Volodoc. documentation available for it on Volodoc. Another was that you had to ship a custom vAPI file with your app to actually use it. So that was kind of inconvenient,

and you have to know how to do that. And then another big issue we had is there was no real incentive for developers or users to care about this API because they had no kind of control or interaction with it. Well, and now it's like even more like... The part I didn't quite grok was like, now it's like down to the nearest town, like you can get more fine grained of how close it gets for the user. What we do is that now when an app wants to get your location through geoclue we throw up a little alert dialogue and we ask you permission and then we let you know what kind of accuracy that the app

is requesting so you can know oh i see like right so if you have an app that um should only be requesting country level but it's requesting street level you can say hey no like i don't want to do that ah that's like hmm well so that's those are the things that jumped out at me. Is there any other things that made anything I missed or anything you want to mention? Yeah, I mean, we've been trying to look at some things that our users have been asking for. And one of the big ones is some more changes to code. So there was recently a poll in the Vala Google Plus community that said that more people are using elementary code to write Vala apps than gedit and GNOME Builder combined.

Wow. Yeah, so we're really going hard on trying to make this a great code editor. We've added a new fast style scheme switcher, so you can easily go into dark mode uh with solarized dark or light mode with solarized light and that's just a one button click back and forth i like that yeah i see that uh uh this uh this is one of these uh i don't have i have i ever it wasn't this renamed like this is i knew this by another name before didn't i before it became code yeah so in in elementary us loki we shipped it as scratch this is this is a total rebranding okay well dang dang it looks great um and so now it's called code

and that was formerly formerly the artist formerly known as scratch right dang and those are just the things you're talking about at this point just yeah there's some app center updates as well some changing over like uh going from updates to installed and a few other like tightening up of the UI there. It's good stuff, Dan. It's good, good stuff. So when do I get it? When do I get it? When do I get it, Dan? Dan, when do I get it? Dan, Dan, can I have it now, Dan? Dan, when do I get it? Can I try it, beta Dan? Dan, when do I get it? Dan, I want it now. we're trying really hard to get to the point where we're going to release a public beta. What we're doing right now is we're trying to track any regressions from the old version and make sure that we fix those up and things are ready for our developers

to get their applications ready to ship in App Center and for translators to go in. So we have to hit a string freeze so the translators can go in and do all their stuff before release time. Very good. Well, I'll wait patiently then, I suppose, because it just takes its time is what you're saying.

Yeah. So Ubuntu, though, is going final beta, though, right? So, you know, as far as upstreams are, you know, that's tracking nicely. So that'll save us and let us focus in on just kind of cleaning up and then getting ready to roll that beta out like real soon all right all right i'm excited well thanks for coming by and giving us an update i like you i like that you guys are keeping us posted helps build the hype and that's always appreciated it's always fun to get excited about a new release yeah trying to definitely tune into

our blog because we we're posting stuff all the time about what we're working on boom we'll have a link to that in the show notes as well. How about just a quick shout out to the GNU Cache Project? Because I don't think we've ever mentioned them on the show. And they just reached a major milestone. Version 3.0 has been released. And it finally has been moved over to GTK3. Nice.

Do, do, do, do, do, do, do. Yeah. And, you know, I think that's probably taken them quite a bit of work to get there, so I thought it was worth celebrating. Even though we've never really mentioned the show, it's one of those boring, just get work done tools, but it is kind of great. Yeah, I mean, for double entry, you know, simple double

entry accounting stuff, works pretty nicely. Mm-hmm. Looks like they've added support for some online service APIs, too. Oh, that's handy. So, it could be, yeah. And some improvements to the SQL database backend stuff. So GNU Cache 3.0 with GTK3 now baked in. Check it out. Yeah, I guess so.

I don't know. I don't think I've probably launched GNU Cache in years. All right, we do have a new Cubes OS. Anybody in the mobile room a Cubes OS user? You know, anybody? Anybody? I thought we had somebody at one point. Come back to us.

Everybody switched over to elementary OS, I guess. It's so flashy. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. All right, well, we'll talk about Cubes OS then. So Cubes OS is, you know what? You know what, actually? Before we go to Cubes OS, let's take a moment and let's mention, we plugged User Air. I'll also mention, check out this week's Late Night Linux that just came out. It's Ike's last episode, and they have Graham on from Linux Voice and talk about some of their future plans, so go check out that. It was a pretty great episode. And then also, I think we mentioned it once before, but one more plug, Skis.

The Ubuntu podcast is back from their season break. They recently had a great interview. Yeah, we are. Fantastic. Congratulations, guys. It's good to have you back. And so Ubuntu podcast is definitely worth checking out. And you know what?

Might as well, if we're doing this, I'll throw a plug in there for TechSnap. TechSnap.Systems. Wes is going to do a breakdown of a super cool open source tool called Terraform. And we'll be covering that in this week's episode that will be coming out on Thursday. Lots of fun. Yeah. So there you go. I just wanted to mention a few of those things because there's a lot of really cool stuff going on out there right now.

Speaking of cool stuff, how about DigitalOcean? Oh, yeah. You know them all about it. Go to do.co slash unplugged and get $100 credit. If you have a new account and you have a legitimate credit card on file, you can get a $100 credit at DigitalOcean. This is secure, reliable, predictable pricing, super easy, infrastructure at scale, and they now have flexible droplets.

You can mix and match the resources that are most appropriate for your application. do.co.action. You know, I've told you so much about DigitalOcean. Wouldn't it be good? Wouldn't it be good to hear from somebody else, Wes, for once? Please! DigitalOcean's cloud computing platform was designed with simplicity in mind, giving development teams the ability to easily manage infrastructure.

That's why thousands of businesses around the world are building, deploying, and scaling their applications faster and more efficiently on DigitalOcean. Using our simple control panel or API, you and your team can seamlessly go from deploying to scaling highly available web, mobile, PaaS, DBaaS, or machine learning applications. In just a matter of seconds, quickly set up one to thousands of virtual machines, easily secure servers and enable performance monitoring, and effortlessly attach more storage. Plus, you'll always know exactly what you'll be paying every month with a predictable flat

pricing structure across all global data center regions. By using DigitalOcean, you'll get the infrastructure experience that development teams love with the features your business needs. Sign up for DigitalOcean today and experience simplicity at scale. Oh, do.co slash unplugged. Do.co slash unplugged. I don't know, Wes. All of a sudden I decided to make it a theme. I'd have other people do the ad read this week. It's way easier.

And there's less of a chance that you will mispronounce something. Why didn't I? So it's the best of both worlds, really. Why didn't I think of it before? Fair enough. All right, so back to Cubes OS. That was a fun diversion. You know, sometimes you Why didn't I think of it before? Fair enough. All right, so back to Cubes OS. That was a fun diversion. You know, sometimes you got to pet the dog, you know?

Sure thing. Keep them happy. Yeah. Cubes OS 4.0 is out after nearly two years in development, countless hours of testing. You and I did mention it recently. It's got a new admin API, a brand new core stack, fully virtualized VMs for enhanced security, multiple flexible disposable VM templates that can be spun up immediately, a brand new RPC policy system, a powerful new VM volume manager that makes it easy to keep different VMs on external

drives. That's super cool. It says, hey, get this drive, plug it in, let's go. New template system and a rewritten command line interface. That's like a lot of stuff. And I think the virtualization changes stuff has been huge in this version of Cubes OS. So big congratulations to Cubes OS for the brand new release. I don't really, you know, like I know that the Purism laptops are going to be shipping based on with Cubes OS.

I don't personally have a use for it yet, but it is very cool. The idea is that you run everything in its own isolated VM. So you have a web browser VM, you have a chat VM, you have an IRC VM. You have all these VMs on your system, and there is some resource sharing they do, so it's not like it's massively. Right. But the idea is that everything has its own independent stack. And then as long as your virtualizer is secure, then your applications are isolated and secure.

It's like containers. Who needs that, right? Yeah, we already have virtual machines. And it's interesting to watch cubes sort of respond in a now a container world because cubes has been around for a long time since before Docker was really, you know really a common idea. And so they've sort of had to watch the market move around them a little bit, and they've had to adapt to that. And I think this release reflects that. Yeah, it's impressive that despite... I certainly don't use it very much either,

though this is making me want to give it a spin one of these upcoming weeks. They have a lot of momentum going for themselves and making constant improvements. Yep, exactly. And we're going to talk a little bit about richard stallman's uh poster in a bit and uh i think maybe we could revisit that then oh yeah you know that security kind of stuff um but yeah maybe one of these days west maybe one of these days we're avoiding the whole challenges thing for a while one of these days we could do like a cubes os week or so that could be fun especially if we could run on our laptops you know but we both put it on the laptop and we work out of that for a week see what it's like really get an appreciation for that workflow would it be doable i wonder if people might be listening to do this all the time and might just think it's not that

big of a deal i don't know okay well let's do a little app pick here it's kind of a server side app pick and uh something that west got set up like i said during the intro i've been thinking a lot recently about um discord versus irc as some of you guys know we did a poll in the show and it was pretty much universally irc that won and uh i was trying to break down like well what is this about and a lot of people said well you know uh irc isn't a cloud service irc is uh you know it's it's the open source way. Like there's all these different reasons that people had. And none of it totally clicked with me because, you know, the IRC system that most people use, like Freenode or like GeekShed in our case, is hosted by someone else on their computer.

It's kind of technically a cloud service. It's just the cloud service that we didn't call cloud services back in the day. It was just a server you connected to. But if IRC were to launch today, that would be considered a cloud service. It's just the cloud service that we didn't call cloud services back in the day. It was just a server you connected to. But if IRC were to launch today, that would be considered a cloud service. And so I didn't really buy the argument that moving away from Discord got us off the cloud or something like that. But you can't argue that one thing you can do with IRC that you can't do with Discord is you can truly brew your own IRC server, roll it yourself if you want. Definitely. And that kind of got me down this path of like, what other things do we commonly now use as hosted services

that we could quickly and easily re-implement for ourselves if we didn't need something huge and large scale? Maybe you don't need a free node scale IRC system. Maybe you don't even need something as large as what Jupyter Broadcast needs. 20, 30, 40 people in an IRC room, nothing massive. How many hoops do you have to go through to just do this yourself? Maybe you just need a private server behind closed doors to orchestrate a couple things. So how easy is it?

Well, Wes found Oregano. Oregano is a modern experimental IRC server written in Go. You've guessed it was either going to be Go or Rust, didn't you? It's designed to be simple to set up and use, and it includes features such as UTF-8 NICs, channel names, client accounts with SASSL, and IRCv3 support. And you got up and running on your laptop there.

Actually, it's running up on a DigitalOcean Drop. Of course. Of course. Of course. I should have known. I should have known. What is your initial impressions on the difficulty to set it up and all that kind of stuff? Oh, it was quite easy.

They've got releases available. It also looks like it's in the AUR as well, if you want to give it a go that way. But really, you just go to the release pages on their GitHub, download it, extract it to Tarball. They've got a couple commands you can run to set up the certs and set up a DB, and then away you go. I've posted an IP there in the IRC for our live listeners. Cool.

You guys can go check in, start chatting. There's a hashtag JB channel right now. I found a couple of things about it that I liked. It's got native support for TLS SSL. It's got YAML configuration files that are easy to read. Passwords are stored in bcrypt and are also salted,

which I like all those things and it uh at least at least from from your description seems to be easy to set up so if you wanted to like if you did want to take this under your own control and you didn't need something large scale i mean i don't know what i'm not trying to say what this can or can't scale up to but i think a lot of times we get we get sort of carried away when we try to say we're going to replace Google or we're going to replace Discord and we try to replace it

with something at their scale. It's just not possible. But we don't all need that scale. And this is an example of an application that you just put on a VPS in a couple of minutes that if you wanted to,

everyone at work in your office could be using this. Yeah, I don't think that would work just fine. Yeah, and then maybe you wouldn't need Slack. And if it doesn't take hours to get set up and secured, if it can be as simple as

I mean, how many minutes did it take you? Five, ten minutes? Less than that, yeah. Three minutes? I don't know. Because one of the appeals of Slack is when you just want to create a Slack group, you just go click a button, put a name in there, and start inviting people, and you're good to go. Well, this isn't that much longer and it's something you control, and there's just that creepy story about Slack giving access

to your direct messages to management. And, you know, this doesn't have those problems and anybody using any old IRC client can use it. That's pretty cool. And then if you want cloud support, you combine it with something like IRC Cloud. Yeah, right. There you go.

You have a layered solution. Yeah, yeah. It's pretty neat, huh? Yeah, it's simple. No nonsense. I don't know that it's as configurable as some of the, you know, standard IRC servers, but you might not need that, right?

Especially maybe you're just using it to transfer data or automate some bots and processes around the office. This could be cool, too. You just need to spin it up during an event, right? You use it to coordinate during an event or something like that, and then when the event's over, you spin it. You just turn it right off. Yeah.

So anyways, that's called Oregano, and we will have a link to it in the show notes. And it looks like they also have a couple of different test servers that are always running that you can check out as well. Levi's here to check it out. Levi says he approves of it. Don't you, Levi? Yeah, Levi the studio dog. He likes Oregano.

He probably does, actually. He probably does. He probably does. Get out of there. Do you have any use for your own IRC server? I don't really. I mean, what I want, you know, because we can sometimes have hundreds hundreds of people in there i just don't think i'd want to use something like this right and i mean it kind of makes sense it's part of the business to have a little not really

our special sauce to host our own irc server so but i don't know that i need one but i could see it if you you know maybe you've already got written some irc bots or or yeah you're just like a small office of tech savvy people and you just need someone to store your chat logs and make async communication and other things easier maybe you're doing a podcast maybe you're doing a podcast you got a podcast with a you know a few dozen people watching live i mean like right now we probably there's probably not so many people in the chat room that we couldn't we couldn't host all these people on it i'm sure oh yeah we could even give it a shot yeah well some of them are maybe right now you have people logging in yeah it looks like we got a couple people checking it

out eric tech man er, you got in there? I got in there. I sure did. Good. Good. Have fun. That's nice. It's really fast. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is just running on the baseline DHO droplet. Well, there you go. Now you're off to running your own infrastructure. Boom! You didn't even have to use

Terraform. I did not. Yeah. Well, that's pretty cool. If you have any other kind of really nice self-hosted services that... You know, it's something that we haven't really talked a lot about before. And I did not. against locally running it there, writing your client to attach to. That could be easy, too. Yeah, yeah. Let us know what else you've been re-self-hosting or would like to see us attempt. Go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact and put it in there. Because I think it's not that, like, we have to be all, like, anti-hosted services,

but I think that if we can opt to use something like this from time to time, it sort of forces the rest of the industry, the software ecosystem, to still support it. So I'm always a big fan of that. And we're going to get into Richard Stallman. This is kind of a good segue, actually. He wrote a post over at The Guardian, and he calls it a radical proposal to keep your personal data safe. And he really does – I'll just kind of read it and then we can talk about it

because he does a good job of sort of illustrating a couple of points that maybe could be practical, could possibly work. Maybe we'll discuss that because I think that's sort of the question. But he writes, journalists have been asking me whether the revolution against the abuse of Facebook data could be a turning point for the campaign to recover privacy. He says that could happen if the public makes a campaign for a broader and deeper push. Broader meaning extending to all surveillance systems, not just Facebook.

Deeper meaning to advance from regulating the use of data to regulating the accumulation of data. Because surveillance is so pervasive, restoring privacy is necessarily a big change and requires powerful measures. The surveillance imposed on us today far exceeds that of the Soviet Union. For freedom and democracy's sake, we need to eliminate most of it. There are so many ways to use data to hurt people that only safe data the only safe database is the one that was never collected thus instead of the eu's approach to mainly regulating how personal data may be used with its general data protection regulation or gdpr i propose a law

to stop systems from collecting personal data he means all together and the most robust way to do that uh the way that can't be set aside at the whim of a government is to require systems to be built so as not to collect data about a person the basic principle is that a system must be designed not to collect certain data if its basic function can be carried out without that data so we have to start designing systems in a way that they just simply don't collect data because the temptation to have excuse me because the temptation to have data is so high it really is now uh is that practical though uh he talks about uh the transport the Transport for London digital card payment system that records the trips, the cameras that record your entry to the system when you go down there.

He says that we'd have to redesign security systems in a way, in the public, where they don't constantly record everything, that the recordings would be local recordings that could be checked in the next few weeks if a crime were to occur, but should not allow remote viewing without physical collection of the recording. Biometric systems should be designed so that they only recognize people

on a court-ordered list of suspects to respect the privacy of the rest of us. An unjust state is more dangerous than terrorism, and too much security encourages an unjust state. So his argument there for the security cameras is local SD recordings, basically, and then the popo go in and recover the recordings within a few weeks if there's an emergency. But maybe like every 90 days or whatever, the cameras wipe themselves or just start overwriting themselves uh and uh same with same with like payment systems and whatnot is that is that practical let's take that one first like could we because if you think about this we have such a massive problem that we're facing now even stallman in here feels a little defeatist he comes across

a bit defeatist he does yeah right yeah he talks about how people don't care enough and about how the only way is going to change if people care, but people don't care. So that was going to be my question to you in your prompt. What do you mean by practical? Because obviously, I think in many ways, technically, yes, right. But I think he is somewhat correct in identifying a lot of the reasons, both from the law enforcement side, right? More data means faster actions, maybe arguably better public safety, perhaps not. But that's the case. And from the business side, more data is more features. And a lot of times those frills, right? A lot of times, even when we're talking about hosted versus self hosting, those frills are that extra little stuff at the end that really makes the

difference. And that users really like even if they're not central to the feature. Yeah, he argues that additional services could be offered separately to users who actually request and want them. And even better, those users could use their own personal systems to track their own journeys if they wanted or something like that. Like so the tracking stuff could be additive instead of built in. The other hard part, I think, is that a lot of times these in the small, they make sense, right? You're like, Oh, yeah, I do want to see all my past trips on the tube or whatever. And it's only in the aggregate when it's this large, once it's become this large collection, then it becomes creepy and, you know, complete surveillance. Yeah, I mean, let's be honest, we have so many different things that are monitoring our activity now we have data brokers, you have credit monitoring agencies, you have things like

movie pass that are trying to construct a night out at the movies where they track all of your location. And there's a lot of companies that are in this business now i mean facebook and google are maybe the most prevalent offenders that we talk about but there's a there's so much other stuff and so what stallman is a stallman is essentially suggesting and maybe this is the core thing i'd like to bounce around with you and the mumble room is is it possible to design these systems just in a way like like can we say they just by default don't collect information? Can we do that? Is that accomplishable?

And why wouldn't that work? And I think, think about it too from like a system administration management standpoint. Think about that for a moment. Could we do that? Could you build a system in a way where it's not collecting metrics, it's not collecting information and usage?

I don't know. So let's discuss that next. But first, linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go there to sign up for a free seven-day trial, and you support this here darn show. linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. I am so tempted to play the clip just to keep with our theme, but I'm not going to do it. I'm going to change it up from what you expect, and I'm going to tell you just go over that yourself because it is great. linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. That's where you go to sign up for a free seven-day trial and support the show. Try out their self-paced in-depth video courses on every Linux, Cloud,

and DevOps topic. They have a course scheduler to work with you if you're busy, and they have learning paths, which are a series of courses and content that's been planned by their instructors for a specific career track. That's awesome. And then you combine that when you're ready to go get your search. They have practice quizzes to help sort of get you ready. And they have courses that are created specifically to prepare you for those exams and flashcards, which are forked by the community to help you study. So it's a, I mean, it's like, it's a system to help you get through this. It's exactly the kind of support I could have used.

And then the thing that really benefits for somebody like me is these hands-on labs. They spin these servers up, but it doesn't matter what you're learning. You know, you pick the distribution with your courseware. The courseware matches it. The virtual machine will spin them up. They even have systems for AWS when you're learning that.

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Full-time human beings that can answer your questions. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged linuxacademy.com slash unplugged go there to support the show and a big thank you linux academy for sponsoring the unplugged program so i was thinking about this i i uh i couldn't really build a network without some data like if i don't even track the downloads and i don't know what shows are a huge waste of our time versus what shows people really like so they're like if you're building a server and you're not collecting metrics on where people are connecting from then you can't properly build out how your how your site loads for people you can't cache it correctly like you have to do some level of tracking and And even at that level, metadata is useful. You and I were talking about a couple of different examples of metadata that we have just from like friends and family that use different services.

And it's like you can kind of figure out what they're doing just by looking at the metadata. And I definitely wish Stallman was right here, but it just doesn't seem possible. It just doesn't seem it seems like we've gone too far down that route. You could technically do it, but there's not enough motivation to pull it off. Do you think I'm wrong? Well, I wish you were more wrong.

I mean, I think, I think in an alternate universe, it seemed, it is, it all seems possible. It seems like it could be within our reach, except it's going to be a lot of work.

And it's like, because, you know, it's one of those, lot of work. And it's like, because, you know, it's one of those like, we can, but should we questions and that takes impulse control and principles that you apply on a daily basis, especially in the face of like profit driven motives or other things. And that's where I think it breaks down. Do you think okay, so I think maybe this could change if people started to really value what their personal information was worth, like if a couple of things keep happening, that made people understand the value of it.

So mini Mac suggests that perhaps it's an opt-in feature, but would people actually pay for that mini or would they, if you don't offer it to them for free, they're not going to bother. You know what I'm saying? Like I get the idea that like you installment or positioning that, uh, something like that could be an extra feature you pay for,

like the tracking that records all of your routes. So you can graph them all for the year. But I don't think anybody would actually pay for it, do you? No, I think if you want to have trust again in these services, to collect as less data as possible and tell your users you can have other features in this product, but then you will share this and this and this data, and all this stuff should be opt-in and not opt-out.

It's like that I think you can gain the trust again. Otherwise, a lot of people are really scared now what they're doing. I wonder if either Popey or Wimpy would like to comment on the GDPR stuff, because obviously it's at the fringes of my understanding. But he does mention in here the EU's GDPR regulations are well-meaning, but don't go very far. He says they won't deliver very much privacy because the rules are too relaxed. They permit collecting any data if it's somehow useful to the system, and it's easy to come up with any way to make a particular data useful for something, he says. The GDPR makes much of requiring users to give consent for the collection of their data, but it doesn't do much good. System designers have become experts at manufacturing consent. Consent. Does either one of you have a thought on GDPR and his take that it doesn't go far enough, it doesn't do enough, it doesn't really solve this problem?

I would love to offer some erudite insight into that, but I've accidentally started playing Bomb Jack using MAME. Good for you. Yes, respect. That's fine. That's a lot more fun probably. From my own point of view, with regards to the Ubuntu Mato project and the way that we collect our crowdfunding is that that creates a problem for us. But the issue is, is that the rules are too vague and therefore pretty much everything falls under its under its rules in some fashion or other. And it's unclear if you're truly affected and whether you need to make a change or are people just making changes because it's so vague.

Yeah, that has been my take on it, too. I did a little bit of looking into it for Tech Talk today, and I was really surprised at the language when I actually got my hands on it. It just seemed like you could interpret that in a lot of different ways, and maybe that's what Stallman is trying to get out here he says uh that uh we just have to stop surveillance before it even begins to prevent this and i think that ship's already sailed unfortunately and that's why i think he's a little defeatist like i think some part of him must know it's it's too late it's you know right and like maybe there are opportunities to choose some

services if more services and things spring up that do claim at least to have those principles but there are so many like right like with cameras like things the government's use there's so many little areas that often are ignored by the public it's hard to see there being a lot of scrutiny or impetus to make changes there he does give a plug though for uh for their one-click cash payment, GnuTaler, T-A-L-E-R, Taler, Taylor? Taylor? Taylor? I don't know. Probably not Taler.

It's an electronic payment system under development that they hope to make operational this year. And they're pretty jazzed about it, so it gives it a plug in the Guardian article there. I have not actually played with it. I have heard of it before. It looks like they've got a snazzier site now. So that's the first step.

Yeah, that is. I don't know. I read this and I think, boy, good idea. The problem is that it just doesn't scale. Like his idea for local storage and cameras, that doesn't scale. It simply is there's too many cameras now and there's too few people to monitor them.

And it just, they have, it's too late. now, and there's too few people to monitor them, and it's too late. The ship's already sailed. I wonder, is there time? Can this abate some potential AI machine learning problems? We're only getting started in the creep factors possible in that technology. Can we forestall some developments? Yeah, well, is there something you can individually do is what I was thinking

about. Like, what if you just became an international man of mystery or woman intentionally? Like, we talked about this before, but you start using VPNs regularly. You start using GPG all the time.

You maybe use different names for different sites uh you use different containers in firefox to create different identities or live cds only yeah like maybe you start you start behaving like somebody who is trying to cover their tracks a little bit so that way it just becomes normal and then the more of us who do it, it's just the norm. Like there's, oh, yeah, that's just what technology people do. Oh, those techies, they're always using all that security. Right. We know if we've seen things like some devices that try to VPN as a router at the edge or funnel you through Tor. Yeah. So if you did those things, then that would mitigate tracking.

And I saw this hat. I saw this hat that blocks face recognition. I wonder if we could find it. Hat that blocks face recognition. Let's find it. It's a face recognition-like prevention hat. It's the most funniest thing because, oh, well, that's actually kind of a funny thing when you search for that. You get a lot of funny different results.

But somebody is working on a hat that has a built-in led light array in the brim which blocks facial recognition cameras and you so you can wear that when you go out if you were super super paranoid see that's the thing right there i just did it i just did we have to stop talking like it's a super paranoid thing to do like it just has to become okay and normal to want to have a hat that blocks facial recognition. Right. That your personal privacy is a reasonable thing to protect without having to

explain why or need, you know, feel like you're suspicious or paranoid. Nobody listening is going to do it. Nobody. I wonder what that tells us. Maybe this is something we're just, maybe we collect a whole bunch of information.

We can find out what that tells us. Yeah, I think it tells us the scale of economies with technology and the momentum there is so strong that this is happening. That we're now capable of having machines that are capable of analyzing images. We can have them monitor multiple video feeds at the same time. And that capability is just beginning. It's just going to get more advanced. It's here. And we've all known anybody that's been in technology for years has known this is coming we've all known this yes it's just it's so obvious because the machines are getting better and better with like machine vision all of that so i guess the next conversation we need to be

having and should already be having is what do we change about society and society's understanding of technology to make sure that this is properly stewarded so that people can be good shepherds of this stuff. Is that possible? Or is that pie in the sky? I mean, it is pie in the sky. It seems possible. It seems like that can be a track that we could head down,

but because nobody in here, I don't, I don't believe anybody in the mumble room, I don't believe probably anyone listening is going to start wearing a hat to block facial recognition, is going to start using VPNs all the time, is going to use GPG. Maybe those things are maybes, but it's going to be such a minority of the audience that does it. It could literally be down to like a, you know, you could count them with one hand, how many people in our audience. Let alone popular do you how do you get that movement to start sure there's lots of people concerned about facebook it's not gonna happen we just don't have that level of skill or interest there's just so many new devices coming online all the time that track your activity that generate metadata that even just you know i i covered an article uh that

uh was was looking at the they put a packet with consent. They put a packet capture at the router and just looked at the data generated by smart appliances like smart plugs and the Alexa and that stuff. And they were able to get a pretty good idea of what was going on in the household. Sure, right? So that's all – it's happened already. It's happened. And people still want those features, right? Like, just think about how many people,

even in our audience, are still hooked on Google services because it turns out when they read all of your email with machines, it's nice, right? Or when they know all of the calendar appointments you have, they can do clever things. And you like those things.

Yeah, I'm taking the kids on spring break trip, a road trip over the weekend. And in my Google Now cards is a card for for here's the things to do in that town. And I, you know, I'm like, wow, it read my email, figured out that I booked a campsite and then generated a card of the highlights of what to do in that town without me ever prompting for a single thing. I don't know if I mean good or bad. It's just interesting that it can do that. So we're there. for a single thing i don't know if i mean good or bad it's just interesting that it can do that so we're there so that's why i think we have we have to talk about the good stewardship stuff a little bit and maybe really it's we don't we can't possibly uh come up with a solution here but maybe we can come up with a way to start the conversation i i don't know right sets of sets of principles and then maybe eventual regulation or other other steps so that these can be ingrained right like how do we set up at least guardrails so that maybe some of these can still exist if you want them,

but that we can be assured that some sort of privacy-centered policies are being followed on the back end? Hmm. Pie-in-the-sky stuff on this week's episode. I'm depressed now. It's being driven by corporations, right? So it's going to be difficult. But I guess we are their customers.

And I think, I mean, there have been cases in the past, right, where consumer sentiment changed and companies were forced to reflect on that. But it's a slow process and I think also somewhat unpredictable. Yeah. I'll give, if anybody in the mumble room wants to give a final word on the idea of kind of what we do now that we're at this point with the Googles and the Facebooks and the Cambridge Analyticas and all of the other monitors out there. What is the next step that we can practically take? Does anybody have thoughts on that? You mentioned GPG. That is definitely a way to encrypt email and make it possible. And I just recently found a way to do it with Apple Mail. Is anybody going to seek that out? No.

Unfortunately. And so that's just kind of the world we're living in, is that nobody even knows they can do it, let alone will do it. Yeah. Yeah, and the thing is, is that Stallman's not going to be around forever. And there's really almost nobody that gets media recognition that's banging that drum like that. Eben Muglen. Moglen is the name. Well, and Edward, I could name a couple others. Edward Snowden has been also making some public statements about,

Cubes OS, for example, has been promoted by Edward Snowden. So there's others, but it's a handful of people, don't you think, Dar? I think it's a handful of people, but you don't really want many people to do this. See, Stalman is an issue sometimes because of his other political views. Eben Moglen seems to be the most balanced person so far in terms of being to the positions of Stalman. the extreme to kind of make that contrast to the middle ground that most people actually live in evan moglan is kind of more towards spending that side but actually still reaches the people of the middle ground ever snowden he's always going to have that reputation of the past of what he has done yeah and then you have to think he still uses you know the proprietary product still he says apple is good and things like that so that's not really the message for a foundation like that. So Stallman's solution

for privacy is build the systems not to collect the data to begin with. But my counter to that was we're so far, far past that. So what do you do now, Dar? So what do you do now at this point? Now that it's already there. Everybody's

already monitoring. There's thousands of cameras in cities, in any modern city now. So now what? So I think that the point we got ourselves in is the one that things like Freedombox matter more. It's a project that intends to be this device that you sit in front of your router. So all of your traffic goes through it kind of does its fix before it gets to the real network and it happens you make phones that follow the same principles it's not connected to your modem at all times and you keep doing this and actually making people care and eventually when it comes to the cctv cameras and everything which

is the part we can do the least it becomes less less of a thing because usually CCTV cameras are way worse because they have so much other data on you already, right? So they can then say, oh, yes, we're spotting these also other behavior. But if it is just a footage of you going somewhere, there's no other notions of your blog post. It's kind of irrelevant most of the time. It's public information like anyone will have seen you. your blog post, it's kind of irrelevant most of the time. It's public information like anyone would have seen you. It does seem like though, as long as we're connecting out to services that track us, there's only so much we can do. Yes, right. If you're connecting to Facebook still, or Twitter, or Slack, or Google, you think not. Let's imagine the Freedombox scenario, right?

Let's imagine the Freedombox scenario. You post on Facebook, but Freedombox already sees that you're posting on Facebook, so it encrypts the message. You see it as if it was decrypted. Your friends see it as if it was decrypted. Yes, it is stored in Facebook, but ultimately, it's encrypted text that actually is there in the database. I didn't realize there was a capability for Freedombox. That would be great. If that was possible, so the Freedombox is essentially doing encryption of the Facebook post and decryption on the other end automatically in this scenario, in this hypothetical scenario.

This is the type of idea that Freedombox aims to achieve. It's not at that stage. It's hard work. It requires a lot of people and not that many people are working on that project, which makes it funny enough because, you know, it's important. But ultimately, it does some of the primary fundamental things like your email actually intends to do this for all email providers actually intercepting there. And that's kind of what's intended. And if we get to build tools like this, then nobody needs to worry. Like it automatically horrifies your traffic and things like that. Now, I just hope that we can build these things and get them established while enough people still care. Not to make this about the damn kids. It's probably a pretty

short little window that we have, right? That is what my concern is. That Freedombox does look like a great project. I'll have a link in the show notes, but freedombox.org if you want to check it out. It seems like part of the problem is just, too, that oftentimes, maybe with enough consumer interest, we could have some easy-to-use privacy-focused things. But even making the claim of privacy, it's not a feature that you use in a normal sense, and it takes a certain amount of understanding of the technical systems underpinning it to be able to appreciate, like, is this privacy real or is it just hype and marketing?

Yeah. So that makes it hard for consumers to self-select as well. So, Mumble Room, remind me, who just bought TunnelBear? Was it McAfee that just bought TunnelBear? You know? Yeah. Yeah. And that's an example.

Who owns McAfee? Yeah, right. Oh, actually, I thought they spun them off, but either way, it doesn't matter. tunnel bear you know yeah yeah and that that's an example owns mcafee yeah right oh actually i thought they spun them off but either way it doesn't matter my point is is that uh it shows you that even when there's this is not to make this like a like a socialism thing but it seems like to me like if there is a if there is a business directive to earn money uh at a service like a vpn service um that is a really really precarious position to be in and your company's got to be structured right to do that and the problem is is that you know another company can come in and buy them and they can have a completely different set of standards so that's why it would be nice to have be something that the open source community addresses or at

least at least uh even if it's a commercial company the the solution they're implementing is using open source using open source having having more nonprofits involved, some more things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In my perspective, this is the reason you don't pick software for its technical capabilities, but rather for the principles of the project. That's how you know that they're not going to sell out to somebody that would then allow those things to happen.

That's the whole principle. You make contracts like the GPL does to, when you actually sign up to FSF, the FSF goes and makes an effort to make a contract to you that they will never go and do other things. So you have legal ground to sue them if they do so. Ultimately, it's that kind of trust that is required more than the technical capabilities.

And we tend to very often go to the technical capabilities as a choice. We say that it's great that it's open source, but that doesn't allow the reversibility of the open source project. While having that type of criteria does allow for that. That is a well put point. In fact, I think that's a good note there to wrap that segment on because perhaps long term, that is the best way to go about making your choice. I think so. All right, Mr. Wes, the Linux Unplugged program is live every single Tuesday,

and it would love to have you join that virtual live. Oh, yeah, do it. Apparently, we talk about ourselves now in the third person. That just happens. Come join us. Tell us to stop. Tell us to keep it up. We need you here.

It only stops if you make us. Go to jblive.tv on a Tuesday. Get it converted to your time at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. And again, notes for everything at linuxunplugged.com slash 243. Oh, thanks so much for being here. And we'll see you right back here next Tuesday. I've never installed Linux. All right. We name this thing, and then we get out of here.

Amazing. Good job, everybody. I know it was kind of an awkward, somber episode with that shooting going on. Yeah, it's true. It's weird. So hopefully everybody at YouTube is okay, including some people that we know that work there. So, yeah, our thoughts are with them. All right, jbtitles.com, jbtitles.com.

Yeah, Dar, I think that was a good point. I'm glad we were able to end it on that. Yeah, definitely. And Dan, thank you very much for making it. That made the... Beautiful. That made that segment much better, as always. So I appreciate you.

Thank you, too, to everybody else for making it. Good to have all you guys here you guys are the taps the stallman directive they're not too bad no not bad at all plundered piracy privacy booty uh the code of code is code 404 stallman not found clouds of participation or precipitate is yeah you have to look at it yourself so that's that's difficult my brain isn't working too good today yeah it is it's it's busted wes i've used all my brain i have to take the rest of the week off i think you should i used all my everyone hang tight we'll be back next week yeah all done just put reruns on see if anyone notices yeah let's just we just go back and we'll

play episode 43 in place of episode 243 and see if anybody even notices you could all let's just we just go back and we'll play episode 43 in place of episode 243 and see if anybody even notices you could all let's you know what let's go see what we were talking about uh 200 episodes ago i wonder if we can find that you think we can all right you guys go boat while i go see what we decide for us we can't title this no uh let's see episode uh oh interesting 31 is when we changed over to the new logo. Okay. So I guess I can't call it new anymore. Yeah, it's the standard logo.

43, Mint 7, fresh or stagnant. Oh, interesting. Wow. Yeah. What was the verdict? Well, I have a feeling I would say stale. Hey, Chris. Yes, sir. Have you got a tremendous amount of spare time today um not particularly but i i you know i gotta edit this

no no uh that's fine well that's mysterious though yeah that's so mysterious that's super mysterious though you're leaving me you're just letting that dang well you know i'll i'll let you choose whether to do this or not but if you do snap install sdl pop sdl you know the simple direct media layer sdl pop and then run sdl pop it's not my fault if you lose the rest of your day noted yeah that's fair. That is a good disclaimer. We're going to give it a go. All right.

The Stallman Directive is winning right now, by the way. So if you have a title opinion. All right. So now I'm going to run SDL Pop. Does this need sound or anything? Sound is better with sound. Do you have the recording somewhere else? In case.

This is amazing. This is amazing. Okay. So to quick save and load press. Oh, I didn't. Oh, no. What? Oh, Prince of Persia.

Is this? It's an SDL reimplementation of the DOS disassembly that was done a little while ago. This is great. This is so great. Looks good. Oh, man. I didn't read the. Keep the kids busy over spring break.

Yeah.