Bits of Linux: 2015 #13

In this edition: Doing good with Linux, speeding up Firefox, what to think of Google, learning about tcpdump and the Linux command line, and more.

📰 Articles

On the open sourcing of Swift 2.0

Recently Apple announced that the Swift programming language will be open sourced later in 2015 and be available for iOS, OS X, and surprisingly Linux. Apple is good at PR and their fans are known to blindly hail everything Apple does, but that doesn't make Apple a friend of free software.

Apple wants you to buy their products, lock you in to their ecosystem and manipulate open source as Bradley M. Kuhn puts it:

Swift is not a shining example of Apple joining us in software freedom; rather, it's a recent example of Apple's long-term strategy to manipulate open source — giving our community occasional software freedom on Apple's own terms. Apple gives us no bread but says "let them eat cake" instead.

Doing good with Linux

A heart-warming story by Phil Shapiro. He gave away a desktop computer running Linux Mint to 2 children who were adopted by a woman he met at work. He writes:

In 10 years time, these kids and their mom may well remember that first Linux computer the family received. Tux was there, as I see it, waiting to welcome these youth to their new country. Without Linux, that surplussed computer might have gotten trashed. Now that computer will get two, four, or maybe even six more years use from students who really value what it has to offer them.

Stories like that help keeping faith in humanity.

Linus on the future without him

Bloomberg published a story about Linus Torvalds where he is quoted as:

There is no concrete plan of action if I die. But that would have been a bigger deal 10 or 15 years ago. People would have panicked. Now I think they'd work everything out in a couple of months.

Linus also talked about why he stopped attending user group meetings and about his influence on the world economy.

Getting started with tcpdump

tcpdump is a powerful command-line packet analyzer, that serves as the probably most important tool security professionals use for network analysis. Daniel Miessler wrote a tcpdump Primer with examples as he believes that a solid grasp of this über-powerful application is mandatory for anyone desiring a thorough understanding of TCP/IP.

The Unofficial Bash Strict Mode

Aaron Maxwell shared tips on making bash scripts more robust, reliable and maintainable by implementing the unofficial Bash strict mode as he calls it. One thing Aaron suggests is to use the set -e option so that any failing command will stop your script. This is extremely useful, when commands in your script rely on previous commands to be executed successfully.

💬 Discussions / Q&A

Speeding up Firefox

Redditor banderlog33 wrote down some tips on how to improve scrolling and reduce memory usage in Firefox. He later amended the article based on feedback he got in the discussion with new sections. If you want to make Firefox faster and more responsive check out these tips.

What does ${*-.} mean in the find command?

aguerosantiale asked this question on Reddit. If you work with the shell and don't know what it means, check out this discussion, that explains it well.

A worrying chromium issue

This security issue was filed in the Debian project a while ago and recently sparked a discussion on Reddit.

After an upgrade to chromium 43 the reporter noticed, that Chrome started downloading the Chrome Hotword Shared Module extension, that contains a binary without source code.

Chromium is an open source project so that is intolerable no matter what this extensions does. What makes it worse is that it has the ability to record audio and was hidden from the extension list at chrome://extensions/, so most users wouldn't even notice, that it was active.

The Chromium developers "fixed the issue" by making the extension opt-out. A user commented aptly:

I almost fell out of my chair when I saw that. Great strategy to erode trust of any user who is even slightly concerned with security (which, I assume, a lot of chromium users are).

What is your opinion of Google?

Another thread on Reddit fittingly is about people's opinions on Google. On the one hand Google creates some useful services on the other hand these can be pretty invasive. h3ron describes what's scary about Google:

Google has an insane amount of data. Google knows who you call, what you say, what who write, your position in the world... even what you say when you have your browser open. Also as the science of big data analysis progresses, Google can build profiles more and more accurate.

📖 Open Source Projects / Resources

The Art of Command Line

Joshua Levy started the guide The Art of Command Line on GitHub based on information he collected on Quora. He describes the scope of this project as follows:

This guide is both for beginners and the experienced. The goals are breadth (everything important), specificity (give concrete examples of the most common case), and brevity (avoid things that aren't essential or digressions you can easily look up elsewhere). Every tip is essential in some situation or significantly saves time over alternatives.

😎 Fun Stuff

Linux user base grows

Quite significantly actually, at least in terms of t-shirt sizes according to these dated statistics from the Linux symposium.

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June 22, 2015

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