Podcast Season 3 Episode 20
Podcast RSS feeds: Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and Opus.
Title: Practicable Surveillance
In this episode: More epic discussions about privacy, encryption and the Investigatory Powers Bill. Steam Machines are finally on sale and Debian Live is Dead. Linus is quite happy with Linux security, thanks, and there’s an imminent bug hunting session for LibreOffice 5.1. We’ve got an awesome Finds section, a brilliant OggBox and the /r/famous Voice of the Masses.
What’s in the show:
- News:
- The Investigatory Powers Bill has been unveiled, and it’s wide open to interpretation, and therefore, misuse. The first Linux-based Steam boxes have started to go on sale. Debian Live isn’t.Linus Torvalds has come under fire for his kernel’s security policy. And there’s an imminent bug hunting session for LibreOffice 5.1.
- Finds of the Fortnight:
- From our #linuxvoice IRC channel on Freenode:
- <einonm> Last podcast there was a discussion about random data on a USB stick – and someone mentioned that there’s no way of tellign if it’s random data or not… well, there is, and it’s called entropy analysis – you can use it to extract encryption keys that’s placed in a load of pseudo-random data, for example.
- <Devilment> Could be a Find that most people are aware of, but looping your earbud wires over the top of your ears stops the rubbing sound from being transmitted.
- <einonm> and the other thing is that on Gnome, if you hold down shift (I think..) and printscreen, then you can select an area to copy, not just the whole thing
- <TwistedLucidity> MakeMKV *rawks*! That’s my find. The GNU/Linux version may still be proprietary, but it works. Take *THAT* evil DRM that stops me watching what I just bought.
- <TwistedLucidity> Oh, another find. The rear USB (and ethernet) port on a Thinkpad are on a separate daughter board. So when you drop you lappy and destroy said port (along with the USB cable that was plugged in), it easier to repair.
- <Burghmuir> A find that might be useful is using Ctrl + R at the start of a command line and then typing the command with a Ctrl + R will auto complete based on the history. This is cumbersome so I use bind ‘”\e[A”:history-search-backward’ to keybind to the up arrow (.bashrc etc). So start typing and then up arrow to get the last command. This has saved me hours over the years.
- Mike:
- Manage Docker containers from within Minecraft with Dockercraft.
- There’s a version of Doom where enemies have PID above their heads and when you kill them they kill off that process.
- Graham:
- Andrew:
- Code Club is awesome.
- IntelliSense
- Ben:
- The word for the ‘@’ symbol in Finnish is snail.
- Standing desks are better for productivity.
- From our #linuxvoice IRC channel on Freenode:
- OggBox
-
Huge thanks to Mr MJB for sending in his thoughts. If you’ve got something to say and would like to record yourself saying it, send the Ogg Vorbis file to mike@linuxvoice.com.
- Voice of the Masses: Are rolling releases the future of distros?
Outro music is called Charon’s Wheel from gear(s) by Ben Regier. He combines his mandolin playing with Ardour, Hydrogen and Audacity. He told us, “I grew up playing bluegrass music, and this album is an attempt to combine that background with some more experimental and electronic music I’ve been listening to lately.”
Presenters: Ben Everard, Andrew Gregory, Graham Morrison and Mike Saunders.
Download as high-quality Ogg Vorbis (69MB)
Download as low-quality MP3 (99MB)
Download the smaller yet even more awesome Opus file (27MB)
Duration: 1:18:25
Theme Music by Brad Sucks.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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About The Author
Graham Morrison
A free software advocate and writer since the late 1990s, Graham is a lapsed KDE contributor and author of the Meeq MIDI step sequencer. @degville on Twitter.
You almost did it. You got to the last five minutes and then somebody had to go and say the ‘A’ word that infects the Linux podcast world like a virus…AWESOME!
Hey, that’s at least progress, right? 🙂
It was an AWESOME track to end on though. Really nice.
Kudos to Ben too for reading and trying to understand the snoopers charter bill in the raw. Made for a really interesting section.
I am finnish and actually I have never heard the @ sign being called “etana” (snail). Here it is called “ät”, which sounds same as the english word “at” sounds (when said in finnish). There is one older nickname (that nobody uses anymore) here for it and its “miukumauku” (something similar to “meowmaow” in english). It is because some people say (I actually don’t understand it, but what ever) the @-sign looks like a cat with it’s tail.
How ever you might mean the swedish word for @, that is “Snabel-a”. It sounds a little bit similar to snail, but actually means “trunk” in english.
Thanks for the information Etana. Fascinating – and it’s great to hear from a native Finnish speaker. I like the @ symbol as a cat – I can see it if I imagine looking at the cat head-on with its head turned to its right and the tail up and around its body.
Ben… Similar issues as you regarding multiprocessing in Firefox and like you have toyed with Chromium instead. But it miss Firefox too much especially group tabbing feature. I have just started using Firefox Aurora dev build which has multiprocess enabled now… It has temporarily killed my plugins but hopefully will resolve the issues is was having with one tab making the browser crawl… I’m on Debian Unstable and have installed from here… http://mozilla.debian.net/ however more detail about project are here… https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis. I’ll going to be playing with this over the next few days and hopefully it will mean I can stick with Firefox!
In Polish we call “@” as “monkey” 🙂 And to be honest…. it still sounds silly. But it’s very clear.
Simon, there is slimmed-down ver. of firefox called Light (http://lightfirefox.sourceforge.net/) It’s not so outdated as Pale Moon and works quite well. As always you can find it in AUR 🙂
Sorry, I mean Ben not Simon 🙁 Too much Linux/oss podcasts 😉
Just listened to your podcast – love it as always, but don’t always get to it as soon as it comes out. I think your talk about the investigative powers is really interesting – do you know if there is actual *evidence* of mass surveillance being useful for catching terrorists? I’m currently doing research, and I’ve been through a painful 4 month process (still not finished yet) of getting ethical approval for my study. They take privacy of patients really seriously – maybe the investigatory powers bill should be made to go through a ‘regional ethics committee’ – I’d like to see how shredded it gets.
Enjoyed the chat about the psion. I was using a psion 5mx up until recently – there is nothing that has that combination of keyboard, battery life and portability. Unfortunately, we forget how reliable our filesystems have become since then. I lost a whole load of data due to ‘corruption’. It suddenly took me back to the early days of my computing experience, where almost all files became corrupted at some point or another.
I also like the Thinkpad chat – just got a T450s – it is a terrific machine, and works so nicely with ubuntu-mate 14.04 without any modifications.
Keep up the good work and looking forward to your next podcast!
Thanks Duncan! Regarding mass surveillance, apparently the recent Paris attackers were communicating in plain text and they still weren’t caught. Yet the UK government is saying that encrypted communications are the big problem…
And yep, I remember the Psion 5mx’s keyboard (I only had a Series 3, but I remember trying that model in a shop). Very impressive given the size of the handheld. Now we’re all used to tapping on glass screens on phones and tablets, and pretty much every laptop manufacturer is going for ultra thin, shallow, chiclety things. Ugh! Give me old style ThinkPad keyboards any day 🙂
*blush* Yes, I totally admin that Ben’s Internet woes and his use of rsync with the parameters –partial –progress inspired me to write a small snippet in LinuxWelt magazine about how rsync can be used to transfer large files through choppy networks. And yes, he’s totally entitled to a bit more than a _cum omni honorificentia nominandus exlibris_. Next round is on me.