not all change is progress
January 25, 2016
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0:04:06 News
0:56:44 ReactOS
1:13:07 Feedback
1:28:58 QupZilla and Pale Moon
The bane of many of our lives, advertising is not only ubiquitous but seemly indispensable to the funding of the web. So we took some time in the news to reflect on several ad-related stories. And if advertising is disliked by many, the dominance of Windows on the desktop can evoke stronger reactions in some. So, what to make of a FOSS Windows-compatible OS? And, following your feedback, we wrapped up with a look at a couple of lesser-known cross-platform browsers.
0:04:06 NewsMozilla Persona login system to shut down end November
The former CEO of Mozilla is launching a web browser that
blocks all ads by default
Google’s AMP Poised To Take The Lead From Facebook’s And
Apple’s Walled Gardens
How we fought bad ads in 2015
Bot Fraud to Cost Advertisers $7 Billion in 2016
Kickstarter publishes inside story of how Europe’s
most-funded project collapsed
snapcraft 1.0 is now available
AT&T Adopts Canonical’s Ubuntu in Push to Replace
Proprietary Systems with Open-Source Tech
Chromixium is evolving, a Cub is born!
Ansible 2.0
Has Arrived
New Research Shows OpenStack Adoption Strong, But
Complexities Remain
Docker’s Unikernel Purchase and the Changing Role of the
OS
Unikernels are unfit for production
Garrett: Linux
Foundation quietly drops community representation
Zemlin deflects with a dog-whistle
BBC
Micro Bit mini-computer faces further delay
Robot Wars rebooted for BBC Two
Greater London Linux User Group meetup
0:56:44 ReactOS
Whether for work or play, there are times when even the most ardent Linux user may need to run Windows. ReactOS holds out the promise of being able to do so, whilst staying true to FOSS ideals. But will it ever be production ready?
1:13:07 Feedback
A huge thank you to all of our Monthly Supporters — we couldn’t do the show without your help.
A perennial complaint of many is that the Linux desktop never reaches the level of polish found elsewhere, and today’s feedback kicked off with Dr. Fred Cheese making exactly this point.
Chris and Florian picked up on one of Paddy’s predictions from last time out, and Mandy Miers wondered if one of Jesse’s (or was it Joe’s?) hadn’t come to pass already?
On the mobile front, Isaac Carter flagged up that Cortana can be easily uninstalled from the latest Cyanogen OS, and Floyd Wallace offered a tip for Linux desktop users who own Windows handsets.
Floyd also returned to our interview with Félim Whiteley, to reiterate one the key reasons why you might not want to trust a company like Google with your data.
1:28:58 QupZilla and Pale Moon
Concerned about Chrome’s dominance on the desktop, or Mozilla’s seeming ongoing attempts to consign Firefox to the dustbin of history? We thought it high time to check out two possible contenders for our web-consumption needs, and turned to see what QupZilla and Pale Moon have to offer.
Paddy’s new microphone really picked up his wheezing this episode.
It’s actually my old mic, but yes, I have a /really/ annoying habit of breathing loudly whenever I finish speaking :(
It’s not a complaint, just never noticed it
before.
We have Debian Jessie, perhaps your breathing is
a subtle advert for the luddite favoured Debian
Wheezy?
Anyway, love the show, keep up the good work, and
thanks guys.
Just a thought — perhaps Joe should try out Firefox in the same manner that he tried out Pale Moon? Create a new profile and make whatever customizations you need for it to be usable, but look at it as a brand new browser and don’t try to recreate every detail of the years-old profile. I just make this suggestion because I switch back and forth between Chromium and Firefox and don’t really notice much difference between the two. Mainly I use Chromium for Netflix and for testing bloated sites in a clean browser when I don’t want to disable my various privacy add-ons.
When considering a new browser, one of the first things I want to know is what rendering and javascript engines it uses. In this case, Qupzilla uses WebKit (which is also used by Safari, Konqueror, Midori and others) and Pale Moon uses a Gecko-derived engine which they plan to rebrand as “Goanna” with the next major release (to emphasize how much it has diverged from Gecko, the engine used by Firefox). From what I can tell, Pale Moon tracked updates to Firefox for its first several years (taking each new Firefox release as its base and applying it customizations on top) but around the Fall of 2013 it made a harder break and is now growing apart from Firefox.
It will be interesting to see how Pale Moon evolves with the upcoming changes to Firefox (XUL, WebExtensions, Electrolysis) driving the two further apart. I imagine Pale Moon benefits from the fact that Firefox addons generally work in Pale Moon as well, though that compatibility will be lost once Firefox deprecates XUL unless developers maintain their XUL addons just for Pale Moon (though perhaps Pale Moon will maintain API stability sufficiently that no maintenance is required for them to keep working, though someone will need to host them since Mozilla will presumably stop hosting XUL addons after it deprecates XUL). Paddy, I would guess that it is hard to get a Pocket addon for Pale Moon because there is no Firefox Pocket addon maintained any more since that addon was rolled into Firefox itself (maybe the old Pocket addon would work if it is still available somewhere?).
Part of why I always look at the rendering/javascript engine first is to check if it is one of the big ones (WebKit, Blink/V8, Gecko/Spidermonkey, and I guess Chakra now?). If custom engines were used, I’d be much less trusting of the security of the browsing session. Even so, I wonder about how many resources smaller projects can devote to tracking security issues compared to bigger teams backed by Apple, Google, Mozilla, etc. In this respect it is somewhat reassuring to know that Pale Moon does have a monetization scheme and is not purely a hobby project.
Clarification: I just recently realized that Qupzilla uses QtWebEngine which is based on Chromium rather than WebKit.
I have a weakness for Midori, but there are just a couple of things holding me back from changing to it. If you get stuck with KDE, I have found Rekonq to be a good lighter Konqueror with good integration.
Not an Internet of Things risk, but here’s a risk of being harmed indirectly by a phone finder app. Very strange.
http://jezebel.com/angry-people-keep-going-to-a-confused-couples-atlanta-h-1755178641
I like qupzilla it has the good thing for old firefox and don’t like the chrome like ui.
Joe you can use flash with Chromium. I simply install it
that way :
$ sudo apt-get install chromium-browser
pepperflashplugin-nonfree
I don’t see any difference between Chrome and Chromium except you can’t use Netflix but you can use Chrome for this.
You can also install widevine into Chromium to watch NetFlix if you want to. There isn’t an Ubuntu package that I know of for this but you can look at the chromium-widevine AUR package for the steps. If you install Flash and widevine, you almost have turned Chromium into Chrome any way though. Also, a lot of Flash video sites work with youtube-dl without installing Flash, so you might not miss it.
It is kind of funny that Joe sticks with Firefox to avoid using a Google product and his main complaint is that he has trouble using it with Google products.
Hang on a minute, here’s a different Paddy with a similar Internet of Things prediction?
http://jezebel.com/in-the-future-we-will-all-be-betrayed-by-our-toasters-1755412503
Hi Luddites,
Just a little suggestion: Could you chapterize, as it
were, your podcast? E. g. Logbuch Netzpolitik or
Staatsbürgerkunde have this. If your start their audio,
hover with your mouse pointer over the timeline, timeline
will be divided, titles included. My player is VLC
Videolan. Thanks!
Love your show, kind regards
Emil
Might be a little too late to comment on this show…
Only a short browser-related one:
“brave” sure has an… interesting business model. Let’s
see where this experiment goes, it might provide some
interesting results.
On automatic (or unattended) updates:
On debian-derivates, where services are restarted
automatically, I would blame the operator when something
breaks. When running services which won’t survive a
restart it’s your own fault.
On Infrastructure-as-a-Service:
This doesn’t require OpenStack per se. Amazon’s EC2 would
sure qualify as “programmable infrastructure”. And
probably has a more stable API than OpenStack which API’s
spec is a derivate of the implementation.
On unikernels:
I don’t think that’s a reasonable approach. If you just
want a single binary you can strip down s/t like Linux
and compile everything you need into a binary you run as
/sbin/init. On not-embedded systems you could run this
binary in a container.
And to have a sensible kernel interface for the later
option use CloudABI (see https://www.bsdcan.org/2015/schedule/track/Security/524.en.html)
for which implementations exist for FreeBSD and NetBSD. A
Linux one is in the works, too.
On the infamous Grub-bug:
Seriously, what’s the matter? Who has a password on their
bootloader anyway?
It won’t protect you against someone with physical access
to the box and thus it’s storage. That’s what we have the
various flavors of full disk encryption for. And if you
don’t trust the bootloader and kernel on your disk you
have those on an external medium (CD, thumbdrive,
SD-card, w/e) anyway.
Unless of course your box is sitting in some bunker,
bolted to the wall and will blow up when someone tries to
remove the disk. But even then you would have some kind
of additional TPM module verifying bootloader and kernel
are signed by the one certain Ring^W key before executing
them limiting the influence of changed boot parameters…
I tried Qupzilla – the pc hung up with much hd-thrashing.
I had to REISUB out of it. No thanks!
(Acer M3920, LM17.3 using Chrome)
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