Table of Contents

From The Chief Editor's Desk

Casual Python, Part 8

PCLinuxOS Recipe Corner: Mexican Pasta Shells

ms_meme's Nook: PCLOS Choo Choo

Short Topix: Dropbox Reinstates Support For ZFS, XFS, Btrfs, eCryptFS

GIMP Tutorial: Joined Photos

De-Googling Yourself, Part 5

Two "Life-Changing" Firefox Add-ons

Yad Script To Automate Web Logins

PCLinuxOS Family Member Spotlight: drhadidy

Mind Your Step: A New Rant Series

PCLinuxOS Bonus Recipe Corner: Easy Meatless Lasagna

ms_meme's Nook: Excited About PCLOS

PCLinuxOS Puzzled Partitions

Screenshot Showcase

From The Chief Editor's Desk

I don't keep it a secret. Baseball is my favorite sport. I especially enjoy watching games involving my favorite (and hometown) team, the Kansas City Royals. During baseball season, the Royals games are on my TV almost every night, win or lose.

My son, Ryan, is a member of Slugger's Blue Crew. It's a program by the Royals for children, and Slugger is the Royals team mascot. The kids get a special Slugger's Blue Crew t-shirt, baseball hat, lanyard and ID card, a watch, and all sorts of other assorted goodies. One of the "other" goodies is a voucher for two tickets to a Royals game. The above photo is of Ryan and dad, at a Royals game, cashing in that ticket voucher.

In the game of baseball, one of the loftiest and most regarded "stats" is who hits the most home runs. It's definitely a crowd pleaser to see your favorite power hitter hit the baseball over the outfield fences. But it dawned on me some time ago that this particular stat is relatively meaningless. Let me explain.

Every football field, soccer field (mostly), tennis court, rugby field, handball court, racquetball court, and (to a lesser extent) basketball court (the court size enlarges as the players get older) is the same size. However, baseball is played on a field that does not have uniform dimensions.

Sure, the bases are 90 feet apart. The pitcher's mound is 60 feet, 6 inches from home plate, elevated 10 inches higher than the plane that home plate sits on. But that is where the consistency ends. From ballpark to ballpark, the rest of the field dimensions vary, sometimes wildly. Kauffman Stadium, where the Royals play their home games, has nine feet high outfield walls, one of the most spacious outfield spaces in the major leagues, and is known as a "pitcher's ballpark" for how difficult it is to hit home runs there. Baltimore's Camden Yards is known as a "hitter's ballpark," so termed because of how easy it is to hit home runs there due to the shorter distances to the fences. Boston's Fenway Park has a short right field fence ... not just in distance, but also in height. All around the league, the dimensions of the ballpark vary.

So, every team plays half of the season's 162 games in front of their home crowd. Teams that play in a "pitcher's ballpark" aren't going to hit as many home runs as teams that play their home games in a "hitter's ballpark." The Royals may play -- at most -- six or seven games in Camden Yards during a season. Thus, the members of the Royals are almost never among the league leaders in home runs. Invariably, the league leaders in home runs are mostly from teams that play their home games in "hitter's ballparks."

Yet, still so many baseball fans put such importance on "who's the home run leader" in baseball. They never stop to consider the aspect that I just pointed out about home runs. Now, if every baseball park were built to the same dimensions, with the same distance to the outfield walls, with the same height of outfield fences, then the home run stat would actually have some merit and meaning. But until that happens, it's a stat that has little meaning. Simply put, the playing field is not even or level ... literally.

Yes, it's great to idolize the Babe Ruths and Hank Aarons of the world. They were true power hitters. No, I don't recognize the Barry Bonds, Mark McGwires, and Sammy Sosas of the sport, especially since they either admitted to or were caught using PEDs (performance enhancing drugs) to achieve their "records." Yes, I love to watch the power hitters on the Royals (Jorge Soler, Hunter Dozier, Alex Gordon, Bubba Starling, etc.) hit home runs. Little else in a baseball game matches the excitement of watching a hitter blast the baseball over the outfield fence.

I know that baseball is mostly an "American" sport, being played predominantly in North America, Central America, South America, and the Carribean. It's also very popular in Japan and Korea. But outside of those areas, baseball can at best be considered a "fringe" sport.

Still, baseball is my favorite sport.

**********

Are you triskaidekaphobic? In case you didn't know, it's the fear of the number 13. For whatever reason, lots of people have attached a lot of irrational fear and eerie superstition on anything to do with the number 13. Some buildings don't have a 13th floor. Instead, the numbers go from 12 to 14. Some hotels and apartment buildings don't have a room labeled 13. Apollo 13 was the manned mission to the moon that is affectionately known as a "successful failure." If you suffer from triskaidekaphobia, September has a nice surprise for you: Friday the 13th. Heck, a whole series of horror films were centered around Friday the 13th. Yessiree! If this is you, you might want to stay home from work, school, or avoid any activities that might have even the slightest risk of injury or harm.

This month's cover celebrates the superstition and fear that comprises triskaidekaphobia, thanks to the appearance of Friday the 13th. Buahahaha!

**********

Until next month, I bid you peace, happiness, serenity and prosperity. Plus, all the home runs you can hit!

Casual Python, Part 8

PCLinuxOS Recipe Corner: Mexican Pasta Shells

Mexican Pasta Shells

Ingredients:

12 uncooked jumbo pasta shells
2 teaspoons vegetable oil
1 medium onion, chopped (1/2 cup)
1 can (15 oz) pinto beans, drained, rinsed
1 1/2 teaspoons chili powder
1 package (3 oz) cream cheese, softened
3/4 cup taco sauce
1 cup shredded Colby-Monterey Jack cheese blend (4 oz)
1/2 cup crushed corn chips
1/2 cup sour cream
4 medium green onions, sliced (1/4 cup)

Directions:

1. Heat oven to 350F. Spray an 8-inch square pan with cooking spray. Cook and drain pasta shells as directed on package.

2. Meanwhile, in 2-quart nonstick saucepan, heat oil over medium heat. Add onion; cook about 5 minutes, stirring frequently, until crisp-tender. Stir in beans, chili powder, cream cheese and 1/4 cup of the taco sauce. Reduce heat to medium-low; cook 2 to 3 minutes, stirring occasionally, until cheese is melted.

3. Fill cooked shells with bean mixture. Place shells, filled sides up, in pan. Pour remaining 1/2 cup taco sauce over shells.

4. Cover and bake 20 minutes. Sprinkle with shredded cheese and corn chips. Bake uncovered about 10 minutes longer or until cheese is melted. Garnish with sour cream and onions.

Tips:

Cover and refrigerate pan of unbaked stuffed pasta shells up to 24 hours. Increase first bake time to 25 minutes.

Shells come in small, medium and jumbo size. Be sure to purchase jumbo-size pasta shells, so they'll hold all the filling. Use about 2 tablespoons filling for each shell.

ms_meme's Nook: PCLOS Choo Cho

OGG                                                                       MP3

by Paul Arnote (parnote)

Google Effort To Prevent Chrome Incognito Mode Detection Flops

On July 18, 2019, Google announced in a blog post that it was closing a loophole that allowed sites to know if a user was connecting to a site using "incognito" mode on Google Chrome. Some sites would not allow users to connect to their sites using incognito mode. Granted, some users used incognito mode, where browsing history and cookies are not saved, to circumvent article limits and paywalls. In 2017, The Boston Globe started blocking users of incognito mode from accessing its content. The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Dallas Morning News and others have also employed the method that prevents users of incognito mode from accessing the content on their sites.

The "method" is detecting if Chrome's FileSystem API is disabled or not. In incognito mode, the FileSystem API is disabled, resulting in the return of an error code whenever trying to write cookies or browsing history to the user's device. Google stated in its blog entry that this particular method would be eliminated with the release of Google Chrome 76 on July 30.

And close it they did. However, sites blocking incognito users have resorted to other methods to block the use of incognito mode. It seems the "fix" has opened up two more ways to detect if a user is using incognito mode, according to the BleepingComputer website. The fix opened up the FileSystem API in both regular and incognito mode, with the incognito mode using a memory-based transient file system that is cleared at the end of the session.

In the first method, if the user is using incognito mode, a memory quota of a maximum of 120 MB is reserved, according to Vikas Mishra on his blog. If the space for FileSystem API is 120 MB or less, the user is using incognito mode. The non-incognito mode uses 10 percent (or 2GiB maximum) of available disk space. Websites can query their quota without any special permissions. Armed with this information, Mishra executed a quick and easy script that showed if a user was using incognito mode or not.

The second method was discovered by researcher Jesse Li, and uses access timings. In normal browsing mode, it takes about 2281 ms to write data to the disk based file system. If a user is using incognito mode, it takes an average of 792 ms to write data to the memory based file system. In other words, data is written three to four times faster to the memory based file system, used when the user is using incognito mode, as in regular browsing mode when data is written to the disk based file system.

Fortunately, Google has stated in their blog (first link), "any approach based on private browsing detection undermines the principles of Incognito Mode. We remain open to exploring solutions that are consistent with user trust and private browsing principles."

Users can only hope that Google is serious about preserving user privacy in incognito mode. We at least hope they are more serious about this than preserving their "do no evil" credo, which has gone by the wayside a long time ago.

End Of Floppy Disk In Linux?

On July 18, Linus Torvalds marked the floppy drive "orphaned." This means that there are no developers able or willing to maintain the code in the Linux kernel. Able is probably more like it. When was the last time you saw a computer with a floppy drive, outside of a museum, or at the bottom of a miscellaneous junk pile of computer parts? I don't think floppy drive controllers are even available on today's motherboards.

Orphaned modules will probably get deprecated and removed eventually if no one else comes forward to continue maintaining and developing it. Here's Torvalds entire statement posted on GitHub:

This also marks the floppy driver as orphaned - it turns out that Jiri no longer has working hardware.

Actual working physical floppy hardware is getting hard to find, and while Willy was able to test this, I think the driver can be considered pretty much dead from an actual hardware standpoint. The hardware that is still sold seems to be mainly USB-based, which doesn't use this legacy driver at all.

The old floppy disk controller is still emulated in various VM environments, so the driver isn't going away, but let's see if anybody is interested to step up to maintain it.

The lack of hardware also likely means that the ioctl range verification fixes are probably mostly relevant to anybody using floppies in a virtual environment. Which is probably also going away in favor of USB storage emulation, but who knows.

Will Decon reviewed the patches but I'm not rebasing them just for that, so I'll add a

    Reviewed-by: Will Deacon

here instead.

* floppy:
MAINTAINERS: mark floppy.c orphaned
  floppy: fix out-of-bounds read in copy_buffer
  floppy: fix invalid pointer dereference in drive_name
  floppy: fix out-of-bounds read in next_valid_format
  floppy: fix div-by-zero in setup_format_params

Most of us probably haven't seen, much less used, a floppy drive in at least 15 years. Actually ... I did ... once ... about 10 years ago (I have a USB 3.5 inch floppy drive, still in working order, but I'd have to do some serious searching to find where I stashed it). With floppy drives having been supplanted by larger and more efficient USB thumb drives, it was only a matter of time before the death bell tolled for floppy drives.

The floppy drive, however, will always be with us in spirit. The floppy drive gave its life so we may forever have the universal icon for "Save."

Dropbox Reinstates Support For ZFS, XFS, Btrfs, eCryptFS

Last November, Dropbox dropped support for any Linux file systems that weren't ext4. At the time, Dropbox announced "a supported file system is required as Dropbox relies on extended attributes (X-attrs) to identify files in the Dropbox folder and keep them in sync." But, the odd thing is that most of the file systems they "disallowed" actually do support extended attributes. That includes ext2, ext3, Btrfs, XFS, JFS, and others. Then, and even now, it sounded like a lazy programmer or lazy team lead didn't want to have to mess with supporting any file systems other than ext4.

In the backlash that ensued, Maestral was born. It's an open source Dropbox replacement on Linux and Mac systems that supports all file systems with extended attributes that Dropbox stopped supporting. It is a PyQt5 program that matches the Dropbox client's most commonly used capabilities, allows running from either the command line or a GUI, and comes in at a much lighter weight than the native Dropbox client.

Maestral wasn't the only solution born out of the sudden loss of support. Another project by a user named "dark" sprouted up on GitHub that fixed the file system detection in the Dropbox Linux client, restoring the ability to sync files with the Dropbox server while using "unsupported" Linux file systems. Other solutions were for users of "unsupported" file systems to run their own private version of NextCloud or ownCloud.

Fortunately, and probably quite a bit too late for many Dropbox users who have moved on, Dropbox has reversed course. Included in the changelog files for Dropbox 77.3.127 beta is that Dropbox has added back in support for ZFS and XFS on 64-bit systems, and Btrfs and eCryptFS.

Although the company that runs Dropbox probably won't miss many of the Linux refugees since last November financially, the move to remove support for popular file systems was a bit of a black eye in the public relations sense.

Knoppix 8.6 Abandons systemd

If you want to start a fiery debate among Linux users, just bring up one word: systemd. A handful of Linux distros have eschewed systemd, including our PCLinuxOS. Knoppix, with its 8.6 release, joins an exceptionally short list -- only two Linux distros -- to have adopted, and then abandoned, systemd, according to a TechRepublic article. The other one is Void Linux.

Hated by many, many Linux administrators and users, Linus Poettering's creation to replace the init system used by Linux is most likely here to stay for the vast majority of Linux users. The problems with systemd are vast and worrisome. First, it replaces human-readable log files with binary log files that can only be read with an appropriate software-based reader. Second, systemd has been besieged with "feature creep." Instead of doing one thing really well (as most *nix programs do), systemd has dipped its toe into just about every part of the Linux operating system. It's no longer just an init system. It tries to control every aspect of a user's computer and userspace. Third, and most likely because of systemd's overreach, it has been besieged with security vulnerabilities, with the latest (that I'm aware of) coming in January, 2019.

Here is what Knoppix creator Klaus Knopper had to say regarding the abandonment of systemd (translation via Google Translate, from the German Linux Magazine):

The startup script knoppix-autoconfig, which detects the hardware and controls the parallel startup of important system components, remains the backbone of Knoppix 'boot system.

The still controversial startup system Systemd, which has been a scandal for some vulnerabilities just recently, has been deinstalled since Knockix 8.5 (and) is finally uninstalled. I bypass hard dependencies on the boat system with my own packages.

To still get a systemd-like session management and thus retain the ability to shut down and restart the system as a normal user, I run the session manager "elogind" instead. This bypasses Systemd's interference with many system components and reduces the complexity of the overall system. If you want to start your own services at startup, you do not need to create any systemd units, but simply enter them in the text file >>/etc/rc.local<< which contains explanatory examples.

Knoppix is based on Debian, and had been using systemd since 2014. Work started on systemd in 2010, with Red Hat adopting it in 2011. Since then, it has grown like an unwanted zit on prom night.

Just in case there was any doubt, I am not a fan of systemd. Had it remained just a replacement for the Linux init system, I might be able to see some value. But it then proceeded to consume Linux like nothing ever has. It goes against the tradition of *nix programs: do one thing, and do it well. I dislike systemd almost as much as I dislike the egotis... (well, let's try to keep it moderately cordial here) Linus Poettering. It was Poettering, after all, who also brought us PulseAudio hell.

Any reasonable person should be asking about now: is this just the start of a mass exodus from systemd? Linux users everywhere can only hope so.

The Hackers Get Hacked

In what many may term either karma or the ultimate payback, Russia's security agency, the Federal Security Service (FSB), was hacked, according to a Business Insider article. The result was, according to BBC Russia (in Russian), possibly "the largest data leak in the history of the work of Russian special services on the Internet."

The robber barons, going by the name 0v1ru$, made off with over 7.5 TERABYTES of data from Sitek, a major information technology contractor of the FSB. They also left a "calling card" of a Yoba Face, a meme that trolls those who have been hacked. For reference, a terabyte of data holds 200,000 five minute songs, or 500 hours of movies. The data stolen merely uncovered projects with goals that were already known or suspected.

The smaller 0v1ru$ group turned the pilfered data over to the more well known hacking group Digital Revolution. The latter has targeted the FSB in the past. In turn, Digital Revolution passed notable (and unedited and unaltered) information to media outlets, and posted on Twitter about their discoveries. According to BBC Russia, none of the stolen data contained Russian government secrets.

As you might expect, the FSB has not commented on the embarrassing matter.

GIMP Tutorial: Joined Photos

by Meemaw

I saw this tutorial on YouTube and it looked really fun, so I'm going to share it. This is similar to the "Out Of Frame Effect" tutorial I shared in the November, 2014 issue. This one will make an image look like it is spread across two photographs.

I am again using an image from a parade that my town has every year.

After loading your image into GIMP, right click on the layer that shows the image (in the Layers toolbox) and choose Add Alpha Channel. (We'll have to explore Alpha Channels soon.)

To start working on the photo frames, add a new, transparent layer. In the Layers toolbox, make sure that your transparent layer is selected, then choose the Rectangle Select tool and draw a square.

Using the Bucket Fill tool, fill your square with white. Now, with the square selected, go to Filters > Light & Shadow > Drop Shadow and add a drop shadow to the white square. I had to use the Drop Shadow (legacy) to see it, but you may not have any problem.

With the drop shadow complete, you may see that it and your white square are in two different layers. If they are, right-click the drop shadow layer and choose Merge Down.

Now we're going to create the border of our photo. Go to Select > Shrink, and make it 25 pixels. Now the smaller square is selected, so press the Delete key to delete the white.

It's starting to look like a photo. With that layer still chosen, go to Select > None to de-select everything. Now choose the Rotate tool, and click on your photo frame. When the rotate window comes up, press the mouse key in the angle setting until your frame is rotated the way you want, then click on Rotate.

If you haven't saved your file, you should save it now.

We want two photos, so duplicate the frame layer (it should still be selected, so all you should have to do is click on the Duplicate Layer button). You'll see another layer in the layers list but not another frame in your picture yet. Change to the new layer, and choose the Rotate tool again. We don't usually set every photo down in exactly the same position, so rotate this one a bit differently than the first - maybe even in the other direction - then click on Rotate.

Now, choose the Move tool, to move this frame to a different position. Drag it to wherever you want it, but still overlapping the first frame. You also need to decide which of your "photos" will be on top, and make sure that layer is above the other. When I got mine moved, I wanted the left frame on top, so I raised that layer above the other with the arrow buttons in the Layers toolbox.

Selecting your "frame" layers one at a time, choose your Eraser tool, and carefully erase those parts of the frames that are over the object you have in your photos. You also want to erase that part of the bottom frame that should be under the top photo.

Let's really make them look like two photos on the table. With your Eraser tool still active, choose the layer that the photo is in, and erase the part of the photo around the frames. There is a trick to erasing that you might use: click the mouse at one corner of a frame, but don't hold it down. Go to the next corner, hold down the Shift key, and click your mouse there. You should see a straight line erased between the places where you clicked your mouse. I was able to do all the boundaries of the frames very quickly using this method. After that, I made my eraser tool much bigger, and was able to erase the rest of the picture quickly and easily. I've used this trick many times since I learned it! Remember though, it works that way only for straight lines.

At this point we want to add another transparent layer (for a tabletop). Move it to the bottom, and Bucket Fill it with the color of your choice (I'm partial to blue). You can also crop it down to a nice size.

Save and export your image, and you're finished!

De-Googling Yourself, Part 5

by Agent Smith (Alessandro Ebersol)

As I am following the chronology of the emergence of Google services, in this article I will discuss alternatives to Google's second product: Gmail.

In fact, the year Gmail came out (2004), Google pioneered a social networking site called Orkut. And while I have no evidence that these forays into social networking and messaging (email) represented any malice, I firmly believe they were the first steps in profiling Google's users more accurately, and thus better spying on the lives of (and serving up targeted ads to) its users.

Gmail History

The public history of Gmail dates back to 2004. Gmail, a free webmail service with support for POP3 Email clients, is a Google product. Throughout its history, the Gmail interface has become integrated with many other company products and services, with basic integration as part of the Google Account and specific integration points with services like Google+, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Hangouts, YouTube, and Google Buzz. It was also made available as part of the G Suite. The Official Gmail Blog follows the public history of Gmail from July 2007 onwards.

Gmail was a project started by Google developer Paul Buchheit, who had already explored the idea of Web-based email software in the 90's, before Hotmail was launched, while working on a personal email software project as a college student. Buchheit started his work in Gmail in August 2001. At Google, Buchheit had first worked in Google groups, and when he asked "to build some kind of Email or personalization product," he created the first version of Gmail in one day by reusing the Google Groups code. The project was known by the code name Caribou, which refers to a Dilbert comic strip about the Caribou project.

However, if the Gmail product is free, the price of "free" is the data and personal information of its users. The amount of information collected is huge, frightening and it will never be possible to undo since the user has no power over it.

Fortunately, there are many alternatives to Gmail, and I'll start to list the best ones in terms of privacy and security.

GMailAlternatives

ProtonMail

Secure, no-compromise email brought to you by MIT and CERN scientists.

Headquartered In Switzerland

ProtonMail was incorporated in Switzerland and its servers are located in Switzerland. It is located outside US and EU jurisdiction, and all user data is protected by strict Swiss Privacy laws.

Zero Access

Due to end-to-end encryption, user data is already encrypted when it arrives at Proton Mail servers. There is no access to use Drs' messages, and as it cannot be decoded, it cannot be shared with any third parties.

Backwards Compatible

ProtonMail works from any modern web browser, and there is nothing to install. It is also compatible with other Email providers, so you can continue sending and receiving email from friends who are not using ProtonMail.

Forever Free

The ProtonMail team believes that privacy is a fundamental human right and should be available to everyone. That's why multi-level pricing is offered, including a free version that anyone can use. ProtonMail will bring privacy back to the people!

Fully Anonymous

ProtonMail does not log IP addresses or require any personal information to register. It accepts bitcoin and cash payments for paid accounts to ensure that even paid account users have complete privacy.

Platform

ProtonMail works on all devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones. There are no plugins or applications to install; just use your favorite web browser.

One downside, however, is that it does not have POP3/IMAP access, due to the nature of data encryption. As such, it is not compatible with email clients such as Thunderbird.

Tutanota

Tutanota is derived from Latin and contains the words "tuta" and "nota" which means "safe message". Tutao GmbH was founded in 2011 in Hannover, Germany.

Tutanota is a free and open source web client that focuses on privacy and security. It has open source apps iOS and Android. The Android app is published to F-Droid (meaning the app doesn't use Google's push notification system), making it a great choice if you want to De-Google your life. All data is stored encrypted and cannot be searched, i.e. used commercially. It offers easy to use encryption.

It offers 1 GB free storage for everyone.

Easy one password for everything

Tutanota wants to provide the easiest to use and most secure Email client. You don't have to mess with multiple passwords to sign and for encryption/decryption. State-of-the-art encryption technology handles all the complexities of encryption and decryption. Still, the user's password only belongs to himself. All email content is hashed and salted before it is transmitted to servers.

Since only the user with his/her password has access to his/her encrypted data, profiling is impossible. Tutanota combines security with ease of use so everyone can use end-to-end encryption.

Tutanota offers end-to-end encryption for Emails sent from one Tutanota user to another. Tutanota also encrypts all emails and contacts. Tutanota uses a standardized hybrid method consisting of a symmetric and asymmetric algorithm - AES with a length of 128 bit and RSA with a 2048 bit. External recipients not using Tutanota will be notified with a link to a temporary Tutanota account. After entering a password that has been previously set, the recipient can read the message and reply in encrypted form.

It's one of the few (if not the only) email services that doesn't require a mobile number to create an account.

GMX Mail

GMX Mail is a free advertising-supported Email service provided by GMX (Global Mail eXchange, Germany: Global Message eXchange). Founded in 1997, GMX is a subsidiary of United Internet AG, a listed company in Germany and a sister company of Internet 1 & 1 and Fasthosts Internet. In addition to an email address, each GMX account includes an Email collector, Address Book, organizer, and file store. Each user can register up to 10 individual GMX email addresses. Premium or not, users are greeted by pop up advertisements at login. GMX is currently the only major Email provider that supports popup ads. GMX Mail currently has over 11 million active users.

The application comes with 5 GB of Email storage, 2 GB of file storage, file sharing features, and virus and spam protection. Drag and Drop capability for files and emails is also used. Other features include a push mail service to feed other third party addresses (eg Gmail) into the GMX inbox, an address book, and whitelist and blacklist functions. The service supports POP3, SMTP and IMAP protocols as well as mobile device integration. The service also offers calendar functionality and the ability to log in directly to Facebook using GMX's login and registered password. Email accounts can be registered with a choice of .com, .co.uk and .us, among many others.

Pros:

Attach files up to 50MB

Large file storage system

Wide choice of email addresses

Secure.

Cons:

Low inbox capacity

Fewer features than other email services

On the GMX website there is a mention of encryption and user data protection, but unlike the services listed above, testing would have to be performed to confirm these statements.

Autistici/Inventati

Autistici/Inventati (A/I) is an Italian activist technology collective that provides email accounts, email lists, web-hosting and other tech tools for a fairly high proportion of Italian-speaking activists in the anti-capitalist movement.

From its manifesto:

"Our goal is to regain spaces on the Internet where we can discuss and work on two levels: on the one hand, the right and the need for free communication, privacy, anonymity and access to digital resources; On the other hand, social projects linked to reality and efforts.

Setting up a standalone server seems to us to be a good starting point to achieve our goals.

We believe that communication should be free - and gratis - and therefore universally accessible.

We try to accomplish all of this by offering internet services (through website hosting, email accounts, mailing lists, chat, instant messengers, anonymous email redirection, blogs and many other things) for individual or collective projects in agreement. with the same goals and sharing our ideals, using our best skills and knowledge to defend the privacy of users.

Staying out of the commercial attitude of paid services and web spaces, we are happy to welcome people uneasy about cultural and media censorship, with globalized imagery being prepared, packaged and sold every day."

The service opened in 2002, has servers in Norway, the Netherlands, and Iceland.

The email service has the following features:

SSL encryption by default.

You are not prompted for your tax code, document number, or first name and last name to activate your mailbox.

A/I mailboxes have no space limit, but the user is always encouraged to download their attachments so to do not overload the servers.

A/I mailbox service offers you a wide range of domains to choose from.

Mailbox can create up to five more addresses (such as nicknames for your same mailbox account).

Supports POP3 and email clients like Thunderbird and others.

The account is disabled if it has been inactive for more than 12 months.

The service is maintained by donations, which can be made from this page, and in order to create an A/I account you must comply with the policy collective.

Zoho Mail

Zoho Mail is a webmail service built with the needs of a modern business in mind. It provides features for users to communicate effectively while meeting the IT administrators' mailbox management and customization needs. In addition, Zoho Mail is integrated with more than 20 Zoho applications.

Zoho Mail's free plan supports up to 5 users in an organization, with 5GB of storage and 25MB allowed per attachment.

Zoho Mail is also available as an Email and Calendar app for Android and iOS.

Key Features:

Mail:

Customize push notifications according to sender and / or folder, so that you are only notified about emails that matter.

Archive, delete and move messages using easy-to-go actions.

Accessing Other External POP Email Acco Dunts, such as Gmail and Yahoo.

Save important emails to your phone and access them even when you are "off the network".

Calendar

You no longer need separate apps for your email and calendar. It is within the Email application.

Easily schedule appointments, view / edit your upcoming events and get attention.

Supports multiple calendars.

Contacts

Easily search and find emails from spec Dific contacts, even if they are buried under hundreds of other emails.

Filter emails and files according to contacts.

Make calls to your contacts from the app.

Archive

Search easily and find All attachments stored in a convenient list, that can be accessed even with the user offline.

The servers are located at the company's headquarters in Chennai, Tamil Nadul, India.

Vivaldi Mail

Vivaldi Mail is a free, ad-free, no strings attached email service developed by Vivaldi Technologies. It also offers contacts and calendar features, search capabilities, Folder management, WEB/POP/IMAP Access, 5GB storage capacity, 20 MB maximum attachment size, self-learning spam filter, DAV sync, etc.

This Email service is a part of the services for the Vivaldi Browser community. The email server is located in Iceland.

Its most important features are:

Support for generating and using PGP keys to encrypt emails.

Really usable calendar.

eclipso Mail & Cloud

Germany's complete and secure email system with many useful and practical functions: Antispam, unlimited Email folders, webmail, mobile app, Postoffice, fax and cloud storage.

Choose your email address from the following domain names: eclipso.de, eclipso.at, eclipso.ch, eclipso.eu, eclipso.es, eclipso.it, eclipso.be, eclipso.nl, eclipso.me, eclipso .mail. Depending on the rate you select, you can choose from 10 (free account eclipse Free mail) to 50 GB (Connect, Premium or Business).

Email aliases, attachments, address book, virtual hard disk drive, photo albums, WebDAV access, calendar, ActiveSync IMAP sync, S / MIME, email signatures, antivirus, antispam, email filter mail, smartphone interface, notes, bookmarks, other added features, for paid and free accounts.

The free service is with ads, the paid service is without ads. Paid accounts also have IMAP access and email forwarding.

Free Account Features:

10GB Storage for E-Mail & Drive

1 Eclipse E-Mail

2 Alternate Addresses

Possible POP3 Access (enables clients like Thunderbird)

Eclipso Office / Organizer

Photo Album Eclipso

Fax, SMS, Letter Send

Professional spam filter and virus filters

Eclipso application for Android & iOS

Customer Support within 48h

Mailfence

Mailfence is an encrypted email service that offers OpenPGP-based encryption and digital signatures. It was launched in November 2013 by ContactOffice Group, which has been operating an online collaboration suite for universities and other organizations since 1999.

Mailfence offers secure email capabilities with other functions such as Calendar, Contacts, Documents, and Collaboration.

Its features are:

End-to-End Encryption

The service uses an open source implementation of OpenPGP (RFC 4880). Private keys are generated in the client browser, encrypted (via AES256) with the user's password, and then stored on the server. The server never sees the user's password. The service also supports end-to-end encryption using passwords with the possibility of message expiration.

Digital signatures

The service gives you a choice between "sign" or "sign and encrypt" an email message with or without attachments.

Integrated keyboard

The service provides an integrated keyboard to manage PGP keys and does not require any third party additions / plugins. OpenPGP keypairs can be generated, imported or exported. Other users' Public Keys can be imported via a file or text or can be downloaded directly from public key servers.

OpenPGP Full Interoperability

Users can communicate with any OpenPGP-compliant service provider.

The Free account offers the following features:

500 MB emails

500 MB documents

1,000 scheduled events

1 group

Encryption - Two-factor Authentication

Support: email

Since its servers are located in Belgium, they are legally outside the US jurisdiction. Mailfence is therefore not subject to US gag orders and NSLs. Under Belgian law, all requests for national and international surveillance must be submitted to a Belgian court.

And here, we end another part in this series. Next month, I'll write about YouTube and alternatives to it.

Two "Life-Changing" Firefox Add-ons

by Paul Arnote (parnote)

I'm a diehard Firefox fan. Having used it since it came out, it just works the way I want and need it to work. And, just as for any Firefox user, I have a collection of must-have add-ons that I use with it. Yes, the switch to Firefox Quantum was a little painful for me, since I had to give up a few of my absolute favorite must-have add-ons. The developers of those add-ons had chosen to not conform to the new add-on architecture that Firefox Quantum brought with it. But, I found replacements for most of them, and life went on.

Oh, I've tried other browsers. For a while, I was a fan of Chromium in its early days. I've always been rather suspicious of Google Chrome, with its "phone home to Google with a report on everything you do" tendencies. Plus, Google Chrome memory management just plain sucks. Google Chrome tends to just devour CPU cycles and RAM like free samples of cotton candy at the state fair. Opera just felt "odd" to me. It represents a different way of thinking about the web. Midori, for its speed and small size, is just too light for many of the things I expect my web browser to do. That's just the tip of the iceberg. I've tried most of the browsers that are in the PCLinuxOS repository, at one time or another.

Does that mean that I think Firefox is perfect? Nope. There are some changes that I would like to see. While I feel that Firefox has the best memory management of all of the full-featured browsers available, it could be better (of course, it would be helpful if I didn't have so many open tabs at one time, too). And, I wish it took a background snapshot of all of my open tabs, so that I can easily restore them when I close out the wrong Firefox window (when I have multiple Firefox windows open … like when I'm streaming media in a separate Firefox window).

However, you didn't start reading this article to hear me wax on enthusiastically about my love of Firefox. I have discovered two Firefox add-ons that, for me, have been a panacea. One fixes an evolving and ongoing problem, while the other helps make Firefox faster and more efficient.

AutoplayStopper

I know I've written at least twice in this magazine about how annoying autoplaying media is. You're scrolling along through a web page, and all of a sudden video and LOUD audio start playing. The MLB website is especially notorious for automatically playing media. Just because there was one video you wanted to watch, it will then play all the media on the page as you scroll through. Grrrrrrr! I want to decide what to watch, when I want to watch it, if I even want to watch it at all.

AutoplayStopper, by RandPC, fixes all of that. Curiously, it shows up in your list of add-ons as AutoplayStopper, but is listed on the add-on site as Halt VideoAutoplay. Whatever name it goes by, it has stopped automatic playing of video in its tracks on my computer.

This add-on is a life changer when autoplay media literally drives you up the proverbial wall. It returns control to ME, the user, to decide what I want to watch, and when I want to watch it. Heck, sometimes I might actually want to read the article before watching the video.

Yes, Mozilla is working on methods to stop the autoplay of media elements. But, their methods are evolving and ever-changing. So, what works in one version may not work two or three versions later. Then, you have to work to find the new settings and try to adapt. This add-on works without jumping through those hoops.

Left clicking your mouse on the AutoplayStopper icon on your Firefox toolbar (top far right in the image above) brings up a menu to allow you quick access to common functions for the add-on.

Clicking on the "Settings" option in the menu will allow you to further fine tune the performance of AutoplayStopper, allowing automatic playback of videos on selected sites, while preventing them everywhere else. The default setting is to block them everywhere.

As for the MLB site that autoplays every baseball video on the page once you play just one video, those videos no longer autoplay. Hall-e-lu-jah!

Sleep Mode

The Sleep Mode add-on, by matico, puts all of your other tabs except for the one you're currently working in, to "sleep." According to the description on the add-on's page, "Sleep Mode will temporarily put all tabs to sleep mode for saving RAM memory, saving battery and make your computer/laptop faster."

Left clicking your mouse on the Sleep Mode icon (upper top right of image above) will bring up additional controls to allow you to further tailor the add-on to your liking. I have turned on "Ignore pinned tabs," since I always have three tabs that are always pinned: Gmail, the PCLinuxOS Forum, and the magazine's website. If you have tabs that have audio playback within them, you can prevent them from going to "sleep" as well. Since I use Google Docs frequently (writing magazine articles), that option is also turned on to prevent those tabs from going to "sleep."

The sleep timer defaults to "0" (zero), which means that as soon as you leave a tab, it immediately goes to sleep. Currently, the sleep timer does not appear to function. Setting it to anything other than zero, the tabs still immediately go to sleep as soon as you switch to another tab. Once you've made all of the selections you want, select the "Start" button, and your changes will be implemented.

After more than a week of using this add-on, I've discovered that when you restart Firefox, you have to also go in and specifically turn it on by hitting the "Start" button. Until you do that, the add-on has no effect on your tabs.

When a tab is "asleep," there is a little crescent moon displayed on the tab between the page icon and the title of the page. Switching to a "sleeping" tab causes that tab to "wake up" and the previous tab you were using goes to "sleep."

You can also exempt any particular tab from going to "sleep" by right clicking your mouse on that page, and selecting "Sleep Mode" and the action you want from the Firefox context menu. I have found that pages containing forms do not perform especially well after being put to sleep, so those pages may be good candidates for "Ignore this tab (current session)." Google News is another site that wants to automagically reload every time you wake it from a slumber, so you might want to also ignore similar sites, as well. You can always revert back to allowing a particular tab to go to "sleep" by selecting "Allow sleep this tab (current session)" from the context menu.

While Firefox does an admirable job with memory management, the Sleep Mode add-on assists Firefox with the task. By putting your tabs to sleep, you can cut the amount of memory used by Firefox by almost half. Any time you save some RAM, you free it up for use by other programs and aspects of your system to use. Remember when I shouldered some of the blame for Firefox's memory footprint earlier by admitting that I often have lots of tabs open at once? For example, while writing this article in Google Docs, I've had (at times) more than 20 tabs opened up. With the Sleep Mode add-on in use, I've noticed that Firefox is much more responsive, as is the rest of my system.

After all of this time, I'm pretty sure my bad habits aren't going to change. It's just how I work. The Sleep Mode add-on saves me from my own shortcomings and bad habits.

Summary

I'm fully aware that each user will have their own unique needs, so what I may think is "life changing" may be a big "so what" to someone else. However, I don't think I'm all that different from most users. I think I have a lot of company, actually. So, give these Firefox add-ons a try. It just may help make for happier surfing.

Yad Script To Automate Web Logins

by Daniel MeiB-Wilhelm (leiche)

This is a YAD script I wrote to log in automatically to an account or website/homepage.

My homepage was not available, because I forgot to login into my account. As I get older, time goes by faster, and I forget to do some things. So I wrote a little bash script that will remind me to login or open my homepage. Instructions on writing a bash script can be found in our magazine. For example, check out this article.

What is needed?

YAD for the dialog, Firefox and nothing more.

My bash script is as follows:

What does it do?

First, we need a directory to store the timepoint to enter our homepage. That is why I created a folder named /.homepagelogin. You can name it whatever you like. I set it as a hidden folder under my home directory.

Now we need a if then else fi function, and a function to compare the time to login to my homepage. A window starts with the information that the time isn't right now to login.

If the time is right, Firefox will open my website and log me in (hopefully). After we close Firefox, we can set a new time for a future login.

The first start opens Firefox with your desired site, that you set in line 12 after the command "firefox".

And last, I created a desktop file and stored it under ~/.config/autostart.

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Type=Application
Name=homepagelogin
Exec=/home/user/.config/autostart/timer.sh
Terminal=false
StartupNotify=false

I saved the desktop file as timer.desktop, and the bash file as timer.sh. You can name it however you like. But don't forget to make timer.sh executable.

If you like it, or have a better idea to login to a website after a certain time, please let me know it.

PCLinuxOS Family Member Spotlight: drhadidy

As Told by YouCanToo

What is your name/username?
My Name is Mohammed El Hadidy, Username is DrHadidy

How old are you?
47.

Are you married, single?
Happily married, with 2 wonderful kids.

How about Kids, Grandkids (names and ages)?
Two kids. My oldest is 15, and her name is Amira. The young boy's name is Timur, and he is four.

Do you have pets, what is your favorite?
A girl boxer "Malina", and a boy cat "Vasili".

Are you retired, still working and if working, what do you do?
Originally I'm a Cosmetic Dentist. I also own an Advertising agency and a medical services company.

Where do you call home? What is it like? IE: weather, scenery
I live in Cairo, Egypt. It's a megalopolis full of people and cars and buildings and huge monuments, and of course "River Nile".

But the place I really call home is Alexandria where I was born. It's a wonderful city on the Mediterranean sea. It's a nice small but full of life city, with a wonderful sea and a lot of history.

Pyramids of Giza

Where did you go to school and what is your education level?
I graduated High School in Kuwait, and went to "Cairo University" to get my bachelor's degree in Oral and Dental Medicine. I then got loads of courses and certificates in Cosmetic dentistry, Oral Surgery and Dental Implants.

What kind of things you like doing? Hobbies, travel, fishing, camping?
Travelling, Scuba diving, Camping, Swimming, Outdoor Activities. I also like reading, watching movies, listening to music and opera.

Why and when did you start using Linux?
I got introduced to Linux in the year 2001. I downloaded my first copy of Suse on my IBM Thinkpad. It wasn't easy to install. The CDs and drivers at that time had a lot of issues. So, it was a dual boot install, and mostly I was just updating the install every now and then and was trying to understand more about the system. But I was fascinated by the idea of open source.

Then I had a very big virus problem at the end of 2006 which destroyed my Windows driven home PC and laptop, my clinic's PC and my Windows mobile phone.

I decided to shift to Linux and just get rid of Windows forever, especially when I was reading of all the improvements in the development of Linux and how easy it became by then.

I installed Suse as the only system on my machines. Then I had a problem with the sound card of my LG laptop.

I started looking around and trying many other distros, until I read about PCLinuxOS. I was amazed by the reviews, and especially how the installation comes out of the box, and how so many people spoke about how their driver problems disappeared when they used PCLinuxOS. I was shocked how Linux people are impressed by its stability.

I installed PCLinuxOS on my laptop, and my LG laptop started singing. I was really so impressed and happy with the new system, and really didn't need to go back to Windows since that day.

What specific equipment do currently use with PCLinuxOS?
My personal laptop, Home PC, personal office PC

Do you feel that your use of Linux influences the reactions you receive from your computer peers or family? If so, how?
They are always impressed by my description and stories. And many of my friends have converted to PCLinuxOS already.

What would you like to see happen within PCLinuxOS that would make it a better place. What are your feelings?
I can't think of anything really now. I'm completely satisfied with the system as is. The forum is so informative and the support is incredible. I just wish to have a PCLinuxOS version for mobiles and tablets so I could use it in all my devices.

PCLinuxOS Family Member Spotlight is an exclusive, monthly column by YouCanToo, featuring PCLinuxOS forum member. This column will allow "the rest of us" to get to know our forum family members better, and will give those featured an opportunity to share their PCLinuxOS story with the rest of the world.

If you would like to be featured in PCLinuxOS Family Member Spotlight, please send a private message to youcantoo, parnote or Meemaw in the PCLinuxOS forum expressing your interest.

Mind Your Step: A New Rant Series

by phorneker

In my last article on Ruby, I mentioned the phrase mind your step a couple of times. Where did this come from?

Mind your step is another way of saying "watch your step", or of saying "be careful".

If you have ever taken a flight to or from Amsterdam, this phrase should be familiar. It is the prerecorded message played continuously through speakers located at the end points of the moving walkways between terminals. In fact, this is one of the things that makes Amsterdam's Schiphol airport famous.

BTW, The name Schiphol is pronounced as skip-hole.

Also, Mind Your Step happens to be the name of their integrity program for those employed at the airport, and for those doing business with the airport. This means that complete integrity is expected in everything that happens at that airport, hence the name "mind your step" for the program.

Source:
https://www.schiphol.nl/en/schiphol-group/page/code-of-conduct-integrity-guidelines-compliance-and-supplier-code/

...and on that note, I would like to begin this series with a statement on integrity.

Capital One Data Breach

It seems there has been a data breach every week. What happened at Capital One was no exception.

There is one difference, however. Unlike most recent data breaches, the perpetrator of this data breach is a former software engineer at Amazon.

This could well be the first time anyone was caught committing a cybercrime. This news supports my speculation as to who is really behind these cybercrimes.

It is enough that Amazon has Alexa-powered devices have been known to listen in on personal conversations. But what the h*** was a former software engineer at Amazon doing in a Capital One customer database?

While the latter has nothing to do with Amazon, what evidence we do have does not necessarily prove that Amazon was somehow involved in this data breach? There is no proof that Amazon was not involved either, but the connection here is enough to warrant suspicion about Amazon.

It is that very suspicion that caused the European Union to prosecute the major tech companies for various misdeeds (especially those that breach our trust) over the past two decades.

Why De-Googling is not effective

Amazon is not the only company that can be placed under suspicion. It is no secret that Google and Facebook have had their share of integrity issues.

So how come they are still popular? While we may know how to exit Google and Facebook services, there is still a majority of the world's population that is not aware of how to get around these problems, not to mention that most (if not all) of the Fortune 500 companies are still somehow in bed with these tech titans.

Fortunately, DuckDuckGo has recently aired some new television advertisements that bring up the privacy issues associated with Google. So there is some hope here. (I saw these on the Tennis Channel while watching the Western and Southern Open tournament.)

Meanwhile in eastern Asia

According to China Global Television Network (available in Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco), the Chinese semiconductor manufacturer Huawei has released the HarmonyOS, an open source product that is an alternative to the Linux-based Android.

The icons that are part of the user interface are simplified outlines of icons found in KDE's Breeze package. But that is only the basic look.

HarmonyOS was designed as an Internet of things operating system rather than something that can be installed on a PC or Intel-based Mac (such as PCLinuxOS).

As it is an open source product, and whether it can be made available as a developers kit for PCLinuxOS depends on political factors, such as countries banning Huawei from doing business as the United Kingdom has done, or tariffs that Donald Trump has placed on Chinese goods so far.

This is not the first time a technology developed outside the US never made it into the marketplace in the US.

MSX comes to mind here. MSX was a set of standards developed for home computers sold in Japan in the 1980s, and was developed in part by Microsoft. Unfortunately, there was no market for these machines in the US.

The OpenMSX emulator package installable from Synaptic contains most everything you need to replicate one of these machines. This is still a work in progress. The ROM images are available for download from the Internet Archive as well as from MSX related sites. However, the legal use of these ROM images depends on the legality of the ROM images in the country where you are using OpenMSX.

The same could be said for Amstrad CPC-464, which was a popular home computer in many of the countries that made up the European Union back in the 1980s.

The JavaCPC package contains a fully functional emulator implemented as a desktop environment running in a Window on your favorite window manager.

The name Amstrad stands for AMS Trading Company, which operated as a London based distributor of merchandise sold to retailers.

If you bought televisions and stereos in the 1960's and the 1970's from a major retailer such as Sears, Montgomery Ward, or JCPenney, manufacturers of these products produced lots of their merchandise with the retailer's private brand embedded.

For example, the Atari 2600 gaming console was sold by Sears as the Sears Video Arcade. We all knew this was a rebranded Atari 2600.

In the case of the Amstrad CPC-464, this machine was developed specifically for AMS Trading Company to compete with Clive Sinclair's ZX80 and ZX81 machines (sold in the US as the Timex Sinclair 1000 and Timex Sinclair 1500 machines).

What killed off these machines was the demand for IBM compatible computers and the MS/PC-DOS operating system (now available as FreeDOS).

Note: Amstrad's machines that sold in the US were the last machines produced for AMS Trading Company, and were IBM Compatible. What killed this line of machines was that the power supply for the machines was housed in the monitors that came with the PCs, and that only those monitors could be used with these PCs. The same monitors could not be used with any other brand of PC from that era.

LibreOffice ends 32-bit support at Version 6.2

Sadly, another blow to the existence of 32-bit computing came with the Document Foundation making the decision to no longer produce a 32-bit version of LibreOffice.

As of Version 6.3 (the current version as of this writing), LibreOffice will be available as a 64-bit only product. The 32-bit version of LibreOffice 6.3 is available only for Windows. There is no 32-bit Linux or Mac OS-X binary available for download.

Source: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/, then open the operating system menu and see for yourself.

Thankfully for us, this is not an issue. This does suggest, however, that there will be other applications, such as the GIMP, Firefox, Audacity, and VLC which one day will no longer have a 32-bit version available.

But then, this should only affect machines with a Pentium 4 or older processor (which had been discontinued more than ten years ago). Even then, it is still possible to compile the needed 32-bit version from source code. The real issue happens with commercial software which never comes distributed with the source code.

Wine still supports 32-bit Windows Applications in PCLinuxOS

Thankfully, Synaptic still has the ia32-libs package for support of 32-bit binaries. This package works with 32-bit AppImages as well as 32-bit Windows applications running in WINE.

The reason I mentioned this is that I heard that Canonical made a decision to stop supporting 32-bit Windows applications in their WINE package. This means that as of Version 19.10 of their operating system (which I shall not mention its name), the wine package will be built without 32-bit binary support.

This could prove to be a really stupid decision as many Windows applications today are still built as 32-bit applications. Also, there are still many CD-ROM and DVD-ROM discs of classic Windows applications and games available at places such as Goodwill and GameStop, which were designed to run on 32-bit versions of Windows.

Thankfully, we still maintain the WINE package with 32-bit support.

Is this email address real or fake?

Finding messages with fake e-mail addresses has become a daily occurrence. Distinguishing a real e-mail address from a fabricated one is easy if you know what to look for. Most e-mails we get have a sender name attached to an e-mail address.

Zip Recruiter, the job search site, offers a service that allows you to get alerts on jobs that match your resumé. As you get these alerts, the emails have a sender label called "ZipRecruiter", which is associated with the e-mail address of alerts@ziprecruiter.com, which is legitimate for the notification service.

However, a header of "Smart Blood Sugar", with an email address of usephorneker@xhcfq-yieldingly.cu is not only not legitimate, the e-mail address does not make any sense whatsoever.

The xhcfq- portion of the domain name is a series of random characters, and that tells me that a template was used to generate the fake sender e-mail address, and that template was formatted as

use%1@%2-yieldingly.cu

where %1 is a parameter read in from a database generated from a data breach, and %2 is a parameter read-in from the random character generator.

Note: The .cu is the domain suffix for the country of Cuba.

When you consider the millions of e-mail addresses, account usernames, passwords that are harvested from data breaches, it only makes sense to outsource the dirty work to a cluster of machines. After all, we can prosecute a cyber criminal, but we cannot prosecute an algorithm.

So far, we have fake news, fake package tracking numbers, fake social media profiles, fake websites, fake phone numbers, fake identification cards, fake job offers (usually found on Craigslist), and even fake packages (remember the NASA engineer that solved his package theft problem by creating a fake package that exploded with multicolored glitter and rancid scents).

In fact, we could call the wine package "Fake Windows", but then, the same could be said for Windows 10.

With so many things being fake, it is difficult to distinguish fact from fiction, or from opinion for that matter. But, it is not impossible.

It is simply a matter of knowing what to look for.

As part of my education at Valparaiso University, I took a required course called Freshman Seminar where one semester is dedicated to studying topics of interest. For the Spring 1986 semester, the topic for the course I took was on totalitarianism.

The books 1984 and Brave New World were required reading not only for this course, but also required reading for English classes I took in high school.

As part of the philosophy requirement for my bachelor's degree, I took a course in philosophical logic, which turned out to be a fun course.

It was there where I learned about logical fallacies, such as what constitutes a contradiction or a tautology (statements that are always true no matter what the facts), and how to separate facts from weasel words, i.e. words that appear to be something valuable, but in fact have no value other than to convince the gullible to believe what is being said, as well as empty words, i.e. anything that actually says nothing, and has no other purpose than to fill up time and speech.

One more thing...

Another clue as to my speculation about these fake emails coming into my Gmail account (I should really shut that account down) is the fact that these come almost every day and in varying amounts.

Fortunately, these messages end up in the Spam folder, so all I have to do is to select all such messages and delete them in one fell swoop.

If this were a person sending out these messages, it would occur to that person that maybe this practice is not working and that maybe that practice should stop, but that is not the case. Hence, I am convinced that these messages were sent out by a cluster of machines given the task mentioned in the previous topic on fake emails.

Enough of the rants for this month. Remember, mind your step.

PCLinuxOS Bonus Recipe Corner: Easy Meatless Lasagna

Easy Meatless Lasagna

Ingredients:

2 cups ricotta cheese or small curd creamed cottage cheese
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
1 tablespoon chopped fresh oregano leaves or 1 1/2 teaspoons dried oregano leaves
2 jars (28 ounces each) tomato pasta sauce (any variety)
12 uncooked lasagna noodles
2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese (8 ounces)
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
Additional shredded mozzarella cheese, if desired

Directions:

1. Heat oven to 350F. Mix ricotta cheese, 1/2 cup Parmesan cheese, the parsley and oregano.

2. Spread 2 cups of the pasta sauce in ungreased rectangular pan, 13x9x2 inches; top with 4 uncooked noodles. Spread ricotta cheese mixture over noodles. Spread with 2 cups pasta sauce and top with 4 noodles; repeat with 2 cups pasta sauce and 4 noodles. Sprinkle with 2 cups mozzarella cheese. Spread with remaining pasta sauce. Sprinkle with 1/4 cup Parmesan cheese.

3. Cover and bake 30 minutes. Uncover and bake about 30 minutes longer or until hot and bubbly. Sprinkle with additional mozzarella cheese. Let stand 15 minutes before cutting.

Tips:

Complete this meal with your favorite tossed salad and crusty Italian bread.

To prepare ahead of time, cover unbaked lasagna tightly with foil and refrigerate no longer than 24 hours. About 1 1/2 hours before serving, heat oven to 350F. Bake covered 45 minutes. Uncover and bake 15 to 20 minutes longer or until hot and bubbly. Sprinkle with additional mozzarella cheese. Let stand 15 minutes before cutting.

ms_meme's Nook: Excited About PCLOS

OGG                                                             MP3

PCLinuxOS Puzzled Partitions

Scrappler

Download Puzzle Solutions Here!

Sudoku

Download Puzzle Solutions Here!

Crossword

Download Puzzle Solutions Here!

WordFind

Download Puzzle Solutions Here!

Mixed Up meme Scrambler

Download Puzzle Solutions Here!

Screenshot Showcase

Posted by ahrfox, August 5, 2019, running KDE

Posted by francesco_bat, August 4, 2019, running icewm

Posted by klaatu, August 21, 2019, running KDE

Posted by Mr. Cranky Pants - YouCanToo, August 5, 2019, running KDE

Posted by mutse, August 7, 2019, running Trinity

Posted by mutse, August 7, 2019, running KDE

Posted by parnote, August 10, 2019, running Xfce

Posted by Texstar, August 17, 2019, running Xfce

Posted by tuxlink, August 11, 2019, running KDE

Posted by Yankee, August 23, 2019, running openbox r="0" src="./images/page04/floppy_disk_T.png" width="250">

On July 18, Linus Torvalds marked the floppy drive "orphaned." This means that there are no developers able or willing to maintain the code in the Linux kernel. Able is probably more like it. When was the last time you saw a computer with a floppy drive, outside of a museum, or at the bottom of a miscellaneous junk pile of computer parts? I don't think floppy drive controllers are even available on today's motherboards.

Orphaned modules will probably get deprecated and removed eventually if no one else comes forward to continue maintaining and developing it. Here's Torvalds entire statement posted on GitHub:

This also marks the floppy driver as orphaned - it turns out that Jiri no longer has working hardware.

Actual working physical floppy hardware is getting hard to find, and while Willy was able to test this, I think the driver can be considered pretty much dead from an actual hardware standpoint. The hardware that is still sold seems to be mainly USB-based, which doesn't use this legacy driver at all.

The old floppy disk controller is still emulated in various VM environments, so the driver isn't going away, but let's see if anybody is interested to step up to maintain it.

The lack of hardware also likely means that the ioctl range verification fixes are probably mostly relevant to anybody using floppies in a virtual environment. Which is probably also going away in favor of USB storage emulation, but who knows.

Will Decon reviewed the patches but I'm not rebasing them just for that, so I'll add a

    Reviewed-by: Will Deacon

here instead.

* floppy:
MAINTAINERS: mark floppy.c orphaned
  floppy: fix out-of-bounds read in copy_buffer
  floppy: fix invalid pointer dereference in drive_name
  floppy: fix out-of-bounds read in next_valid_format
  floppy: fix div-by-zero in setup_format_params

Most of us probably haven't seen, much less used, a floppy drive in at least 15 years. Actually ... I did ... once ... about 10 years ago (I have a USB 3.5 inch floppy drive, still in working order, but I'd have to do some serious searching to find where I stashed it). With floppy drives having been supplanted by larger and more efficient USB thumb drives, it was only a matter of time before the death bell tolled for floppy drives.

The floppy drive, however, will always be with us in spirit. The floppy drive gave its life so we may forever have the universal icon for "Save."

Dropbox Reinstates Support For ZFS, XFS, Btrfs, eCryptFS

Last November, Dropbox dropped support for any Linux file systems that weren't ext4. At the time, Dropbox announced "a supported file system is required as Dropbox relies on extended attributes (X-attrs) to identify files in the Dropbox folder and keep them in sync." But, the odd thing is that most of the file systems they "disallowed" actually do support extended attributes. That includes ext2, ext3, Btrfs, XFS, JFS, and others. Then, and even now, it sounded like a lazy programmer or lazy team lead didn't want to have to mess with supporting any file systems other than ext4.

In the backlash that ensued, Maestral was born. It's an open source Dropbox replacement on Linux and Mac systems that supports all file systems with extended attributes that Dropbox stopped supporting. It is a PyQt5 program that matches the Dropbox client's most commonly used capabilities, allows running from either the command line or a GUI, and comes in at a much lighter weight than the native Dropbox client.

Maestral wasn't the only solution born out of the sudden loss of support. Another project by a user named "dark" sprouted up on GitHub that fixed the file system detection in the Dropbox Linux client, restoring the ability to sync files with the Dropbox server while using "unsupported" Linux file systems. Other solutions were for users of "unsupported" file systems to run their own private version of NextCloud or ownCloud.

Fortunately, and probably quite a bit too late for many Dropbox users who have moved on, Dropbox has reversed course. Included in the changelog files for Dropbox 77.3.127 beta is that Dropbox has added back in support for ZFS and XFS on 64-bit systems, and Btrfs and eCryptFS.

Although the company that runs Dropbox probably won't miss many of the Linux refugees since last November financially, the move to remove support for popular file systems was a bit of a black eye in the public relations sense.

Knoppix 8.6 Abandons systemd

If you want to start a fiery debate among Linux users, just bring up one word: systemd. A handful of Linux distros have eschewed systemd, including our PCLinuxOS. Knoppix, with its 8.6 release, joins an exceptionally short list -- only two Linux distros -- to have adopted, and then abandoned, systemd, according to a TechRepublic article. The other one is Void Linux.

Hated by many, many Linux administrators and users, Linus Poettering's creation to replace the init system used by Linux is most likely here to stay for the vast majority of Linux users. The problems with systemd are vast and worrisome. First, it replaces human-readable log files with binary log files that can only be read with an appropriate software-based reader. Second, systemd has been besieged with "feature creep." Instead of doing one thing really well (as most *nix programs do), systemd has dipped its toe into just about every part of the Linux operating system. It's no longer just an init system. It tries to control every aspect of a user's computer and userspace. Third, and most likely because of systemd's overreach, it has been besieged with security vulnerabilities, with the latest (that I'm aware of) coming in January, 2019.

Here is what Knoppix creator Klaus Knopper had to say regarding the abandonment of systemd (translation via Google Translate, from the German Linux Magazine):

The startup script knoppix-autoconfig, which detects the hardware and controls the parallel startup of important system components, remains the backbone of Knoppix 'boot system.

The still controversial startup system Systemd, which has been a scandal for some vulnerabilities just recently, has been deinstalled since Knockix 8.5 (and) is finally uninstalled. I bypass hard dependencies on the boat system with my own packages.

To still get a systemd-like session management and thus retain the ability to shut down and restart the system as a normal user, I run the session manager "elogind" instead. This bypasses Systemd's interference with many system components and reduces the complexity of the overall system. If you want to start your own services at startup, you do not need to create any systemd units, but simply enter them in the text file >>/etc/rc.local<< which contains explanatory examples.

Knoppix is based on Debian, and had been using systemd since 2014. Work started on systemd in 2010, with Red Hat adopting it in 2011. Since then, it has grown like an unwanted zit on prom night.

Just in case there was any doubt, I am not a fan of systemd. Had it remained just a replacement for the Linux init system, I might be able to see some value. But it then proceeded to consume Linux like nothing ever has. It goes against the tradition of *nix programs: do one thing, and do it well. I dislike systemd almost as much as I dislike the egotis... (well, let's try to keep it moderately cordial here) Linus Poettering. It was Poettering, after all, who also brought us PulseAudio hell.

Any reasonable person should be asking about now: is this just the start of a mass exodus from systemd? Linux users everywhere can only hope so.

The Hackers Get Hacked

In what many may term either karma or the ultimate payback, Russia's security agency, the Federal Security Service (FSB), was hacked, according to a Business Insider article. The result was, according to BBC Russia (in Russian), possibly "the largest data leak in the history of the work of Russian special services on the Internet."

The robber barons, going by the name 0v1ru$, made off with over 7.5 TERABYTES of data from Sitek, a major information technology contractor of the FSB. They also left a "calling card" of a Yoba Face, a meme that trolls those who have been hacked. For reference, a terabyte of data holds 200,000 five minute songs, or 500 hours of movies. The data stolen merely uncovered projects with goals that were already known or suspected.

The smaller 0v1ru$ group turned the pilfered data over to the more well known hacking group Digital Revolution. The latter has targeted the FSB in the past. In turn, Digital Revolution passed notable (and unedited and unaltered) information to media outlets, and posted on Twitter about their discoveries. According to BBC Russia, none of the stolen data contained Russian government secrets.

As you might expect, the FSB has not commented on the embarrassing matter.

GIMP Tutorial: Joined Photos

by Meemaw

I saw this tutorial on YouTube and it looked really fun, so I'm going to share it. This is similar to the "Out Of Frame Effect" tutorial I shared in the November, 2014 issue. This one will make an image look like it is spread across two photographs.

I am again using an image from a parade that my town has every year.

After loading your image into GIMP, right click on the layer that shows the image (in the Layers toolbox) and choose Add Alpha Channel. (We'll have to explore Alpha Channels soon.)

To start working on the photo frames, add a new, transparent layer. In the Layers toolbox, make sure that your transparent layer is selected, then choose the Rectangle Select tool and draw a square.

Using the Bucket Fill tool, fill your square with white. Now, with the square selected, go to Filters > Light & Shadow > Drop Shadow and add a drop shadow to the white square. I had to use the Drop Shadow (legacy) to see it, but you may not have any problem.

With the drop shadow complete, you may see that it and your white square are in two different layers. If they are, right-click the drop shadow layer and choose Merge Down.

Now we're going to create the border of our photo. Go to Select > Shrink, and make it 25 pixels. Now the smaller square is selected, so press the Delete key to delete the white.

It's starting to look like a photo. With that layer still chosen, go to Select > None to de-select everything. Now choose the Rotate tool, and click on your photo frame. When the rotate window comes up, press the mouse key in the angle setting until your frame is rotated the way you want, then click on Rotate.

If you haven't saved your file, you should save it now.

We want two photos, so duplicate the frame layer (it should still be selected, so all you should have to do is click on the Duplicate Layer button). You'll see another layer in the layers list but not another frame in your picture yet. Change to the new layer, and choose the Rotate tool again. We don't usually set every photo down in exactly the same position, so rotate this one a bit differently than the first - maybe even in the other direction - then click on Rotate.

Now, choose the Move tool, to move this frame to a different position. Drag it to wherever you want it, but still overlapping the first frame. You also need to decide which of your "photos" will be on top, and make sure that layer is above the other. When I got mine moved, I wanted the left frame on top, so I raised that layer above the other with the arrow buttons in the Layers toolbox.

Selecting your "frame" layers one at a time, choose your Eraser tool, and carefully erase those parts of the frames that are over the object you have in your photos. You also want to erase that part of the bottom frame that should be under the top photo.

Let's really make them look like two photos on the table. With your Eraser tool still active, choose the layer that the photo is in, and erase the part of the photo around the frames. There is a trick to erasing that you might use: click the mouse at one corner of a frame, but don't hold it down. Go to the next corner, hold down the Shift key, and click your mouse there. You should see a straight line erased between the places where you clicked your mouse. I was able to do all the boundaries of the frames very quickly using this method. After that, I made my eraser tool much bigger, and was able to erase the rest of the picture quickly and easily. I've used this trick many times since I learned it! Remember though, it works that way only for straight lines.

At this point we want to add another transparent layer (for a tabletop). Move it to the bottom, and Bucket Fill it with the color of your choice (I'm partial to blue). You can also crop it down to a nice size.

Save and export your image, and you're finished!

De-Googling Yourself, Part 5

by Agent Smith (Alessandro Ebersol)

As I am following the chronology of the emergence of Google services, in this article I will discuss alternatives to Google's second product: Gmail.

In fact, the year Gmail came out (2004), Google pioneered a social networking site called Orkut. And while I have no evidence that these forays into social networking and messaging (email) represented any malice, I firmly believe they were the first steps in profiling Google's users more accurately, and thus better spying on the lives of (and serving up targeted ads to) its users.

Gmail History

The public history of Gmail dates back to 2004. Gmail, a free webmail service with support for POP3 Email clients, is a Google product. Throughout its history, the Gmail interface has become integrated with many other company products and services, with basic integration as part of the Google Account and specific integration points with services like Google+, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Hangouts, YouTube, and Google Buzz. It was also made available as part of the G Suite. The Official Gmail Blog follows the public history of Gmail from July 2007 onwards.

Gmail was a project started by Google developer Paul Buchheit, who had already explored the idea of Web-based email software in the 90's, before Hotmail was launched, while working on a personal email software project as a college student. Buchheit started his work in Gmail in August 2001. At Google, Buchheit had first worked in Google groups, and when he asked "to build some kind of Email or personalization product," he created the first version of Gmail in one day by reusing the Google Groups code. The project was known by the code name Caribou, which refers to a Dilbert comic strip about the Caribou project.

However, if the Gmail product is free, the price of "free" is the data and personal information of its users. The amount of information collected is huge, frightening and it will never be possible to undo since the user has no power over it.

Fortunately, there are many alternatives to Gmail, and I'll start to list the best ones in terms of privacy and security.

GMailAlternatives

ProtonMail

Secure, no-compromise email brought to you by MIT and CERN scientists.

Headquartered In Switzerland

ProtonMail was incorporated in Switzerland and its servers are located in Switzerland. It is located outside US and EU jurisdiction, and all user data is protected by strict Swiss Privacy laws.

Zero Access

Due to end-to-end encryption, user data is already encrypted when it arrives at Proton Mail servers. There is no access to use Drs' messages, and as it cannot be decoded, it cannot be shared with any third parties.

Backwards Compatible

ProtonMail works from any modern web browser, and there is nothing to install. It is also compatible with other Email providers, so you can continue sending and receiving email from friends who are not using ProtonMail.

Forever Free

The ProtonMail team believes that privacy is a fundamental human right and should be available to everyone. That's why multi-level pricing is offered, including a free version that anyone can use. ProtonMail will bring privacy back to the people!

Fully Anonymous

ProtonMail does not log IP addresses or require any personal information to register. It accepts bitcoin and cash payments for paid accounts to ensure that even paid account users have complete privacy.

Platform

ProtonMail works on all devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones. There are no plugins or applications to install; just use your favorite web browser.

One downside, however, is that it does not have POP3/IMAP access, due to the nature of data encryption. As such, it is not compatible with email clients such as Thunderbird.

Tutanota

Tutanota is derived from Latin and contains the words "tuta" and "nota" which means "safe message". Tutao GmbH was founded in 2011 in Hannover, Germany.

Tutanota is a free and open source web client that focuses on privacy and security. It has open source apps iOS and Android. The Android app is published to F-Droid (meaning the app doesn't use Google's push notification system), making it a great choice if you want to De-Google your life. All data is stored encrypted and cannot be searched, i.e. used commercially. It offers easy to use encryption.

It offers 1 GB free storage for everyone.

Easy one password for everything

Tutanota wants to provide the easiest to use and most secure Email client. You don't have to mess with multiple passwords to sign and for encryption/decryption. State-of-the-art encryption technology handles all the complexities of encryption and decryption. Still, the user's password only belongs to himself. All email content is hashed and salted before it is transmitted to servers.

Since only the user with his/her password has access to his/her encrypted data, profiling is impossible. Tutanota combines security with ease of use so everyone can use end-to-end encryption.

Tutanota offers end-to-end encryption for Emails sent from one Tutanota user to another. Tutanota also encrypts all emails and contacts. Tutanota uses a standardized hybrid method consisting of a symmetric and asymmetric algorithm - AES with a length of 128 bit and RSA with a 2048 bit. External recipients not using Tutanota will be notified with a link to a temporary Tutanota account. After entering a password that has been previously set, the recipient can read the message and reply in encrypted form.

It's one of the few (if not the only) email services that doesn't require a mobile number to create an account.

GMX Mail

GMX Mail is a free advertising-supported Email service provided by GMX (Global Mail eXchange, Germany: Global Message eXchange). Founded in 1997, GMX is a subsidiary of United Internet AG, a listed company in Germany and a sister company of Internet 1 & 1 and Fasthosts Internet. In addition to an email address, each GMX account includes an Email collector, Address Book, organizer, and file store. Each user can register up to 10 individual GMX email addresses. Premium or not, users are greeted by pop up advertisements at login. GMX is currently the only major Email provider that supports popup ads. GMX Mail currently has over 11 million active users.

The application comes with 5 GB of Email storage, 2 GB of file storage, file sharing features, and virus and spam protection. Drag and Drop capability for files and emails is also used. Other features include a push mail service to feed other third party addresses (eg Gmail) into the GMX inbox, an address book, and whitelist and blacklist functions. The service supports POP3, SMTP and IMAP protocols as well as mobile device integration. The service also offers calendar functionality and the ability to log in directly to Facebook using GMX's login and registered password. Email accounts can be registered with a choice of .com, .co.uk and .us, among many others.

Pros:

Attach files up to 50MB

Large file storage system

Wide choice of email addresses

Secure.

Cons:

Low inbox capacity

Fewer features than other email services

On the GMX website there is a mention of encryption and user data protection, but unlike the services listed above, testing would have to be performed to confirm these statements.

Autistici/Inventati

Autistici/Inventati (A/I) is an Italian activist technology collective that provides email accounts, email lists, web-hosting and other tech tools for a fairly high proportion of Italian-speaking activists in the anti-capitalist movement.

From its manifesto:

"Our goal is to regain spaces on the Internet where we can discuss and work on two levels: on the one hand, the right and the need for free communication, privacy, anonymity and access to digital resources; On the other hand, social projects linked to reality and efforts.

Setting up a standalone server seems to us to be a good starting point to achieve our goals.

We believe that communication should be free - and gratis - and therefore universally accessible.

We try to accomplish all of this by offering internet services (through website hosting, email accounts, mailing lists, chat, instant messengers, anonymous email redirection, blogs and many other things) for individual or collective projects in agreement. with the same goals and sharing our ideals, using our best skills and knowledge to defend the privacy of users.

Staying out of the commercial attitude of paid services and web spaces, we are happy to welcome people uneasy about cultural and media censorship, with globalized imagery being prepared, packaged and sold every day."

The service opened in 2002, has servers in Norway, the Netherlands, and Iceland.

The email service has the following features:

SSL encryption by default.

You are not prompted for your tax code, document number, or first name and last name to activate your mailbox.

A/I mailboxes have no space limit, but the user is always encouraged to download their attachments so to do not overload the servers.

A/I mailbox service offers you a wide range of domains to choose from.

Mailbox can create up to five more addresses (such as nicknames for your same mailbox account).

Supports POP3 and email clients like Thunderbird and others.

The account is disabled if it has been inactive for more than 12 months.

The service is maintained by donations, which can be made from this page, and in order to create an A/I account you must comply with the policy collective.

Zoho Mail

Zoho Mail is a webmail service built with the needs of a modern business in mind. It provides features for users to communicate effectively while meeting the IT administrators' mailbox management and customization needs. In addition, Zoho Mail is integrated with more than 20 Zoho applications.

Zoho Mail's free plan supports up to 5 users in an organization, with 5GB of storage and 25MB allowed per attachment.

Zoho Mail is also available as an Email and Calendar app for Android and iOS.

Key Features:

Mail:

Customize push notifications according to sender and / or folder, so that you are only notified about emails that matter.

Archive, delete and move messages using easy-to-go actions.

Accessing Other External POP Email Acco Dunts, such as Gmail and Yahoo.

Save important emails to your phone and access them even when you are "off the network".

Calendar

You no longer need separate apps for your email and calendar. It is within the Email application.

Easily schedule appointments, view / edit your upcoming events and get attention.

Supports multiple calendars.

Contacts

Easily search and find emails from spec Dific contacts, even if they are buried under hundreds of other emails.

Filter emails and files according to contacts.

Make calls to your contacts from the app.

Archive

Search easily and find All attachments stored in a convenient list, that can be accessed even with the user offline.

The servers are located at the company's headquarters in Chennai, Tamil Nadul, India.

Vivaldi Mail

Vivaldi Mail is a free, ad-free, no strings attached email service developed by Vivaldi Technologies. It also offers contacts and calendar features, search capabilities, Folder management, WEB/POP/IMAP Access, 5GB storage capacity, 20 MB maximum attachment size, self-learning spam filter, DAV sync, etc.

This Email service is a part of the services for the Vivaldi Browser community. The email server is located in Iceland.

Its most important features are:

Support for generating and using PGP keys to encrypt emails.

Really usable calendar.

eclipso Mail & Cloud

Germany's complete and secure email system with many useful and practical functions: Antispam, unlimited Email folders, webmail, mobile app, Postoffice, fax and cloud storage.

Choose your email address from the following domain names: eclipso.de, eclipso.at, eclipso.ch, eclipso.eu, eclipso.es, eclipso.it, eclipso.be, eclipso.nl, eclipso.me, eclipso .mail. Depending on the rate you select, you can choose from 10 (free account eclipse Free mail) to 50 GB (Connect, Premium or Business).

Email aliases, attachments, address book, virtual hard disk drive, photo albums, WebDAV access, calendar, ActiveSync IMAP sync, S / MIME, email signatures, antivirus, antispam, email filter mail, smartphone interface, notes, bookmarks, other added features, for paid and free accounts.

The free service is with ads, the paid service is without ads. Paid accounts also have IMAP access and email forwarding.

Free Account Features:

10GB Storage for E-Mail & Drive

1 Eclipse E-Mail

2 Alternate Addresses

Possible POP3 Access (enables clients like Thunderbird)

Eclipso Office / Organizer

Photo Album Eclipso

Fax, SMS, Letter Send

Professional spam filter and virus filters

Eclipso application for Android & iOS

Customer Support within 48h

Mailfence

Mailfence is an encrypted email service that offers OpenPGP-based encryption and digital signatures. It was launched in November 2013 by ContactOffice Group, which has been operating an online collaboration suite for universities and other organizations since 1999.

Mailfence offers secure email capabilities with other functions such as Calendar, Contacts, Documents, and Collaboration.

Its features are:

End-to-End Encryption

The service uses an open source implementation of OpenPGP (RFC 4880). Private keys are generated in the client browser, encrypted (via AES256) with the user's password, and then stored on the server. The server never sees the user's password. The service also supports end-to-end encryption using passwords with the possibility of message expiration.

Digital signatures

The service gives you a choice between "sign" or "sign and encrypt" an email message with or without attachments.

Integrated keyboard

The service provides an integrated keyboard to manage PGP keys and does not require any third party additions / plugins. OpenPGP keypairs can be generated, imported or exported. Other users' Public Keys can be imported via a file or text or can be downloaded directly from public key servers.

OpenPGP Full Interoperability

Users can communicate with any OpenPGP-compliant service provider.

The Free account offers the following features:

500 MB emails

500 MB documents

1,000 scheduled events

1 group

Encryption - Two-factor Authentication

Support: email

Since its servers are located in Belgium, they are legally outside the US jurisdiction. Mailfence is therefore not subject to US gag orders and NSLs. Under Belgian law, all requests for national and international surveillance must be submitted to a Belgian court.

And here, we end another part in this series. Next month, I'll write about YouTube and alternatives to it.

Two "Life-Changing" Firefox Add-ons

by Paul Arnote (parnote)

I'm a diehard Firefox fan. Having used it since it came out, it just works the way I want and need it to work. And, just as for any Firefox user, I have a collection of must-have add-ons that I use with it. Yes, the switch to Firefox Quantum was a little painful for me, since I had to give up a few of my absolute favorite must-have add-ons. The developers of those add-ons had chosen to not conform to the new add-on architecture that Firefox Quantum brought with it. But, I found replacements for most of them, and life went on.

Oh, I've tried other browsers. For a while, I was a fan of Chromium in its early days. I've always been rather suspicious of Google Chrome, with its "phone home to Google with a report on everything you do" tendencies. Plus, Google Chrome memory management just plain sucks. Google Chrome tends to just devour CPU cycles and RAM like free samples of cotton candy at the state fair. Opera just felt "odd" to me. It represents a different way of thinking about the web. Midori, for its speed and small size, is just too light for many of the things I expect my web browser to do. That's just the tip of the iceberg. I've tried most of the browsers that are in the PCLinuxOS repository, at one time or another.

Does that mean that I think Firefox is perfect? Nope. There are some changes that I would like to see. While I feel that Firefox has the best memory management of all of the full-featured browsers available, it could be better (of course, it would be helpful if I didn't have so many open tabs at one time, too). And, I wish it took a background snapshot of all of my open tabs, so that I can easily restore them when I close out the wrong Firefox window (when I have multiple Firefox windows open … like when I'm streaming media in a separate Firefox window).

However, you didn't start reading this article to hear me wax on enthusiastically about my love of Firefox. I have discovered two Firefox add-ons that, for me, have been a panacea. One fixes an evolving and ongoing problem, while the other helps make Firefox faster and more efficient.

AutoplayStopper

I know I've written at least twice in this magazine about how annoying autoplaying media is. You're scrolling along through a web page, and all of a sudden video and LOUD audio start playing. The MLB website is especially notorious for automatically playing media. Just because there was one video you wanted to watch, it will then play all the media on the page as you scroll through. Grrrrrrr! I want to decide what to watch, when I want to watch it, if I even want to watch it at all.

AutoplayStopper, by RandPC, fixes all of that. Curiously, it shows up in your list of add-ons as AutoplayStopper, but is listed on the add-on site as Halt VideoAutoplay. Whatever name it goes by, it has stopped automatic playing of video in its tracks on my computer.

This add-on is a life changer when autoplay media literally drives you up the proverbial wall. It returns control to ME, the user, to decide what I want to watch, and when I want to watch it. Heck, sometimes I might actually want to read the article before watching the video.

Yes, Mozilla is working on methods to stop the autoplay of media elements. But, their methods are evolving and ever-changing. So, what works in one version may not work two or three versions later. Then, you have to work to find the new settings and try to adapt. This add-on works without jumping through those hoops.

Left clicking your mouse on the AutoplayStopper icon on your Firefox toolbar (top far right in the image above) brings up a menu to allow you quick access to common functions for the add-on.

Clicking on the "Settings" option in the menu will allow you to further fine tune the performance of AutoplayStopper, allowing automatic playback of videos on selected sites, while preventing them everywhere else. The default setting is to block them everywhere.

As for the MLB site that autoplays every baseball video on the page once you play just one video, those videos no longer autoplay. Hall-e-lu-jah!

Sleep Mode

The Sleep Mode add-on, by matico, puts all of your other tabs except for the one you're currently working in, to "sleep." According to the description on the add-on's page, "Sleep Mode will temporarily put all tabs to sleep mode for saving RAM memory, saving battery and make your computer/laptop faster."

Left clicking your mouse on the Sleep Mode icon (upper top right of image above) will bring up additional controls to allow you to further tailor the add-on to your liking. I have turned on "Ignore pinned tabs," since I always have three tabs that are always pinned: Gmail, the PCLinuxOS Forum, and the magazine's website. If you have tabs that have audio playback within them, you can prevent them from going to "sleep" as well. Since I use Google Docs frequently (writing magazine articles), that option is also turned on to prevent those tabs from going to "sleep."

The sleep timer defaults to "0" (zero), which means that as soon as you leave a tab, it immediately goes to sleep. Currently, the sleep timer does not appear to function. Setting it to anything other than zero, the tabs still immediately go to sleep as soon as you switch to another tab. Once you've made all of the selections you want, select the "Start" button, and your changes will be implemented.

After more than a week of using this add-on, I've discovered that when you restart Firefox, you have to also go in and specifically turn it on by hitting the "Start" button. Until you do that, the add-on has no effect on your tabs.

When a tab is "asleep," there is a little crescent moon displayed on the tab between the page icon and the title of the page. Switching to a "sleeping" tab causes that tab to "wake up" and the previous tab you were using goes to "sleep."

You can also exempt any particular tab from going to "sleep" by right clicking your mouse on that page, and selecting "Sleep Mode" and the action you want from the Firefox context menu. I have found that pages containing forms do not perform especially well after being put to sleep, so those pages may be good candidates for "Ignore this tab (current session)." Google News is another site that wants to automagically reload every time you wake it from a slumber, so you might want to also ignore similar sites, as well. You can always revert back to allowing a particular tab to go to "sleep" by selecting "Allow sleep this tab (current session)" from the context menu.

While Firefox does an admirable job with memory management, the Sleep Mode add-on assists Firefox with the task. By putting your tabs to sleep, you can cut the amount of memory used by Firefox by almost half. Any time you save some RAM, you free it up for use by other programs and aspects of your system to use. Remember when I shouldered some of the blame for Firefox's memory footprint earlier by admitting that I often have lots of tabs open at once? For example, while writing this article in Google Docs, I've had (at times) more than 20 tabs opened up. With the Sleep Mode add-on in use, I've noticed that Firefox is much more responsive, as is the rest of my system.

After all of this time, I'm pretty sure my bad habits aren't going to change. It's just how I work. The Sleep Mode add-on saves me from my own shortcomings and bad habits.

Summary

I'm fully aware that each user will have their own unique needs, so what I may think is "life changing" may be a big "so what" to someone else. However, I don't think I'm all that different from most users. I think I have a lot of company, actually. So, give these Firefox add-ons a try. It just may help make for happier surfing.

Yad Script To Automate Web Logins

by Daniel MeiB-Wilhelm (leiche)

This is a YAD script I wrote to log in automatically to an account or website/homepage.

My homepage was not available, because I forgot to login into my account. As I get older, time goes by faster, and I forget to do some things. So I wrote a little bash script that will remind me to login or open my homepage. Instructions on writing a bash script can be found in our magazine. For example, check out this article.

What is needed?

YAD for the dialog, Firefox and nothing more.

My bash script is as follows:

What does it do?

First, we need a directory to store the timepoint to enter our homepage. That is why I created a folder named /.homepagelogin. You can name it whatever you like. I set it as a hidden folder under my home directory.

Now we need a if then else fi function, and a function to compare the time to login to my homepage. A window starts with the information that the time isn't right now to login.

If the time is right, Firefox will open my website and log me in (hopefully). After we close Firefox, we can set a new time for a future login.

The first start opens Firefox with your desired site, that you set in line 12 after the command "firefox".

And last, I created a desktop file and stored it under ~/.config/autostart.

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Type=Application
Name=homepagelogin
Exec=/home/user/.config/autostart/timer.sh
Terminal=false
StartupNotify=false

I saved the desktop file as timer.desktop, and the bash file as timer.sh. You can name it however you like. But don't forget to make timer.sh executable.

If you like it, or have a better idea to login to a website after a certain time, please let me know it.

PCLinuxOS Family Member Spotlight: drhadidy

As Told by YouCanToo

What is your name/username?
My Name is Mohammed El Hadidy, Username is DrHadidy

How old are you?
47.

Are you married, single?
Happily married, with 2 wonderful kids.

How about Kids, Grandkids (names and ages)?
Two kids. My oldest is 15, and her name is Amira. The young boy's name is Timur, and he is four.

Do you have pets, what is your favorite?
A girl boxer "Malina", and a boy cat "Vasili".

Are you retired, still working and if working, what do you do?
Originally I'm a Cosmetic Dentist. I also own an Advertising agency and a medical services company.

Where do you call home? What is it like? IE: weather, scenery
I live in Cairo, Egypt. It's a megalopolis full of people and cars and buildings and huge monuments, and of course "River Nile".

But the place I really call home is Alexandria where I was born. It's a wonderful city on the Mediterranean sea. It's a nice small but full of life city, with a wonderful sea and a lot of history.

Pyramids of Giza

Where did you go to school and what is your education level?
I graduated High School in Kuwait, and went to "Cairo University" to get my bachelor's degree in Oral and Dental Medicine. I then got loads of courses and certificates in Cosmetic dentistry, Oral Surgery and Dental Implants.

What kind of things you like doing? Hobbies, travel, fishing, camping?
Travelling, Scuba diving, Camping, Swimming, Outdoor Activities. I also like reading, watching movies, listening to music and opera.

Why and when did you start using Linux?
I got introduced to Linux in the year 2001. I downloaded my first copy of Suse on my IBM Thinkpad. It wasn't easy to install. The CDs and drivers at that time had a lot of issues. So, it was a dual boot install, and mostly I was just updating the install every now and then and was trying to understand more about the system. But I was fascinated by the idea of open source.

Then I had a very big virus problem at the end of 2006 which destroyed my Windows driven home PC and laptop, my clinic's PC and my Windows mobile phone.

I decided to shift to Linux and just get rid of Windows forever, especially when I was reading of all the improvements in the development of Linux and how easy it became by then.

I installed Suse as the only system on my machines. Then I had a problem with the sound card of my LG laptop.

I started looking around and trying many other distros, until I read about PCLinuxOS. I was amazed by the reviews, and especially how the installation comes out of the box, and how so many people spoke about how their driver problems disappeared when they used PCLinuxOS. I was shocked how Linux people are impressed by its stability.

I installed PCLinuxOS on my laptop, and my LG laptop started singing. I was really so impressed and happy with the new system, and really didn't need to go back to Windows since that day.

What specific equipment do currently use with PCLinuxOS?
My personal laptop, Home PC, personal office PC

Do you feel that your use of Linux influences the reactions you receive from your computer peers or family? If so, how?
They are always impressed by my description and stories. And many of my friends have converted to PCLinuxOS already.

What would you like to see happen within PCLinuxOS that would make it a better place. What are your feelings?
I can't think of anything really now. I'm completely satisfied with the system as is. The forum is so informative and the support is incredible. I just wish to have a PCLinuxOS version for mobiles and tablets so I could use it in all my devices.

PCLinuxOS Family Member Spotlight is an exclusive, monthly column by YouCanToo, featuring PCLinuxOS forum member. This column will allow "the rest of us" to get to know our forum family members better, and will give those featured an opportunity to share their PCLinuxOS story with the rest of the world.

If you would like to be featured in PCLinuxOS Family Member Spotlight, please send a private message to youcantoo, parnote or Meemaw in the PCLinuxOS forum expressing your interest.

Mind Your Step: A New Rant Series

by phorneker

In my last article on Ruby, I mentioned the phrase mind your step a couple of times. Where did this come from?

Mind your step is another way of saying "watch your step", or of saying "be careful".

If you have ever taken a flight to or from Amsterdam, this phrase should be familiar. It is the prerecorded message played continuously through speakers located at the end points of the moving walkways between terminals. In fact, this is one of the things that makes Amsterdam's Schiphol airport famous.

BTW, The name Schiphol is pronounced as skip-hole.

Also, Mind Your Step happens to be the name of their integrity program for those employed at the airport, and for those doing business with the airport. This means that complete integrity is expected in everything that happens at that airport, hence the name "mind your step" for the program.

Source:
https://www.schiphol.nl/en/schiphol-group/page/code-of-conduct-integrity-guidelines-compliance-and-supplier-code/

...and on that note, I would like to begin this series with a statement on integrity.

Capital One Data Breach

It seems there has been a data breach every week. What happened at Capital One was no exception.

There is one difference, however. Unlike most recent data breaches, the perpetrator of this data breach is a former software engineer at Amazon.

This could well be the first time anyone was caught committing a cybercrime. This news supports my speculation as to who is really behind these cybercrimes.

It is enough that Amazon has Alexa-powered devices have been known to listen in on personal conversations. But what the h*** was a former software engineer at Amazon doing in a Capital One customer database?

While the latter has nothing to do with Amazon, what evidence we do have does not necessarily prove that Amazon was somehow involved in this data breach? There is no proof that Amazon was not involved either, but the connection here is enough to warrant suspicion about Amazon.

It is that very suspicion that caused the European Union to prosecute the major tech companies for various misdeeds (especially those that breach our trust) over the past two decades.

Why De-Googling is not effective

Amazon is not the only company that can be placed under suspicion. It is no secret that Google and Facebook have had their share of integrity issues.

So how come they are still popular? While we may know how to exit Google and Facebook services, there is still a majority of the world's population that is not aware of how to get around these problems, not to mention that most (if not all) of the Fortune 500 companies are still somehow in bed with these tech titans.

Fortunately, DuckDuckGo has recently aired some new television advertisements that bring up the privacy issues associated with Google. So there is some hope here. (I saw these on the Tennis Channel while watching the Western and Southern Open tournament.)

Meanwhile in eastern Asia

According to China Global Television Network (available in Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco), the Chinese semiconductor manufacturer Huawei has released the HarmonyOS, an open source product that is an alternative to the Linux-based Android.

The icons that are part of the user interface are simplified outlines of icons found in KDE's Breeze package. But that is only the basic look.

HarmonyOS was designed as an Internet of things operating system rather than something that can be installed on a PC or Intel-based Mac (such as PCLinuxOS).

As it is an open source product, and whether it can be made available as a developers kit for PCLinuxOS depends on political factors, such as countries banning Huawei from doing business as the United Kingdom has done, or tariffs that Donald Trump has placed on Chinese goods so far.

This is not the first time a technology developed outside the US never made it into the marketplace in the US.

MSX comes to mind here. MSX was a set of standards developed for home computers sold in Japan in the 1980s, and was developed in part by Microsoft. Unfortunately, there was no market for these machines in the US.

The OpenMSX emulator package installable from Synaptic contains most everything you need to replicate one of these machines. This is still a work in progress. The ROM images are available for download from the Internet Archive as well as from MSX related sites. However, the legal use of these ROM images depends on the legality of the ROM images in the country where you are using OpenMSX.

The same could be said for Amstrad CPC-464, which was a popular home computer in many of the countries that made up the European Union back in the 1980s.

The JavaCPC package contains a fully functional emulator implemented as a desktop environment running in a Window on your favorite window manager.

The name Amstrad stands for AMS Trading Company, which operated as a London based distributor of merchandise sold to retailers.

If you bought televisions and stereos in the 1960's and the 1970's from a major retailer such as Sears, Montgomery Ward, or JCPenney, manufacturers of these products produced lots of their merchandise with the retailer's private brand embedded.

For example, the Atari 2600 gaming console was sold by Sears as the Sears Video Arcade. We all knew this was a rebranded Atari 2600.

In the case of the Amstrad CPC-464, this machine was developed specifically for AMS Trading Company to compete with Clive Sinclair's ZX80 and ZX81 machines (sold in the US as the Timex Sinclair 1000 and Timex Sinclair 1500 machines).

What killed off these machines was the demand for IBM compatible computers and the MS/PC-DOS operating system (now available as FreeDOS).

Note: Amstrad's machines that sold in the US were the last machines produced for AMS Trading Company, and were IBM Compatible. What killed this line of machines was that the power supply for the machines was housed in the monitors that came with the PCs, and that only those monitors could be used with these PCs. The same monitors could not be used with any other brand of PC from that era.

LibreOffice ends 32-bit support at Version 6.2

Sadly, another blow to the existence of 32-bit computing came with the Document Foundation making the decision to no longer produce a 32-bit version of LibreOffice.

As of Version 6.3 (the current version as of this writing), LibreOffice will be available as a 64-bit only product. The 32-bit version of LibreOffice 6.3 is available only for Windows. There is no 32-bit Linux or Mac OS-X binary available for download.

Source: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/, then open the operating system menu and see for yourself.

Thankfully for us, this is not an issue. This does suggest, however, that there will be other applications, such as the GIMP, Firefox, Audacity, and VLC which one day will no longer have a 32-bit version available.

But then, this should only affect machines with a Pentium 4 or older processor (which had been discontinued more than ten years ago). Even then, it is still possible to compile the needed 32-bit version from source code. The real issue happens with commercial software which never comes distributed with the source code.

Wine still supports 32-bit Windows Applications in PCLinuxOS

Thankfully, Synaptic still has the ia32-libs package for support of 32-bit binaries. This package works with 32-bit AppImages as well as 32-bit Windows applications running in WINE.

The reason I mentioned this is that I heard that Canonical made a decision to stop supporting 32-bit Windows applications in their WINE package. This means that as of Version 19.10 of their operating system (which I shall not mention its name), the wine package will be built without 32-bit binary support.

This could prove to be a really stupid decision as many Windows applications today are still built as 32-bit applications. Also, there are still many CD-ROM and DVD-ROM discs of classic Windows applications and games available at places such as Goodwill and GameStop, which were designed to run on 32-bit versions of Windows.

Thankfully, we still maintain the WINE package with 32-bit support.

Is this email address real or fake?

Finding messages with fake e-mail addresses has become a daily occurrence. Distinguishing a real e-mail address from a fabricated one is easy if you know what to look for. Most e-mails we get have a sender name attached to an e-mail address.

Zip Recruiter, the job search site, offers a service that allows you to get alerts on jobs that match your resumé. As you get these alerts, the emails have a sender label called "ZipRecruiter", which is associated with the e-mail address of alerts@ziprecruiter.com, which is legitimate for the notification service.

However, a header of "Smart Blood Sugar", with an email address of usephorneker@xhcfq-yieldingly.cu is not only not legitimate, the e-mail address does not make any sense whatsoever.

The xhcfq- portion of the domain name is a series of random characters, and that tells me that a template was used to generate the fake sender e-mail address, and that template was formatted as

use%1@%2-yieldingly.cu

where %1 is a parameter read in from a database generated from a data breach, and %2 is a parameter read-in from the random character generator.

Note: The .cu is the domain suffix for the country of Cuba.

When you consider the millions of e-mail addresses, account usernames, passwords that are harvested from data breaches, it only makes sense to outsource the dirty work to a cluster of machines. After all, we can prosecute a cyber criminal, but we cannot prosecute an algorithm.

So far, we have fake news, fake package tracking numbers, fake social media profiles, fake websites, fake phone numbers, fake identification cards, fake job offers (usually found on Craigslist), and even fake packages (remember the NASA engineer that solved his package theft problem by creating a fake package that exploded with multicolored glitter and rancid scents).

In fact, we could call the wine package "Fake Windows", but then, the same could be said for Windows 10.

With so many things being fake, it is difficult to distinguish fact from fiction, or from opinion for that matter. But, it is not impossible.

It is simply a matter of knowing what to look for.

As part of my education at Valparaiso University, I took a required course called Freshman Seminar where one semester is dedicated to studying topics of interest. For the Spring 1986 semester, the topic for the course I took was on totalitarianism.

The books 1984 and Brave New World were required reading not only for this course, but also required reading for English classes I took in high school.

As part of the philosophy requirement for my bachelor's degree, I took a course in philosophical logic, which turned out to be a fun course.

It was there where I learned about logical fallacies, such as what constitutes a contradiction or a tautology (statements that are always true no matter what the facts), and how to separate facts from weasel words, i.e. words that appear to be something valuable, but in fact have no value other than to convince the gullible to believe what is being said, as well as empty words, i.e. anything that actually says nothing, and has no other purpose than to fill up time and speech.

One more thing...

Another clue as to my speculation about these fake emails coming into my Gmail account (I should really shut that account down) is the fact that these come almost every day and in varying amounts.

Fortunately, these messages end up in the Spam folder, so all I have to do is to select all such messages and delete them in one fell swoop.

If this were a person sending out these messages, it would occur to that person that maybe this practice is not working and that maybe that practice should stop, but that is not the case. Hence, I am convinced that these messages were sent out by a cluster of machines given the task mentioned in the previous topic on fake emails.

Enough of the rants for this month. Remember, mind your step.

PCLinuxOS Bonus Recipe Corner: Easy Meatless Lasagna

Easy Meatless Lasagna

Ingredients:

2 cups ricotta cheese or small curd creamed cottage cheese
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
1 tablespoon chopped fresh oregano leaves or 1 1/2 teaspoons dried oregano leaves
2 jars (28 ounces each) tomato pasta sauce (any variety)
12 uncooked lasagna noodles
2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese (8 ounces)
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
Additional shredded mozzarella cheese, if desired

Directions:

1. Heat oven to 350F. Mix ricotta cheese, 1/2 cup Parmesan cheese, the parsley and oregano.

2. Spread 2 cups of the pasta sauce in ungreased rectangular pan, 13x9x2 inches; top with 4 uncooked noodles. Spread ricotta cheese mixture over noodles. Spread with 2 cups pasta sauce and top with 4 noodles; repeat with 2 cups pasta sauce and 4 noodles. Sprinkle with 2 cups mozzarella cheese. Spread with remaining pasta sauce. Sprinkle with 1/4 cup Parmesan cheese.

3. Cover and bake 30 minutes. Uncover and bake about 30 minutes longer or until hot and bubbly. Sprinkle with additional mozzarella cheese. Let stand 15 minutes before cutting.

Tips:

Complete this meal with your favorite tossed salad and crusty Italian bread.

To prepare ahead of time, cover unbaked lasagna tightly with foil and refrigerate no longer than 24 hours. About 1 1/2 hours before serving, heat oven to 350F. Bake covered 45 minutes. Uncover and bake 15 to 20 minutes longer or until hot and bubbly. Sprinkle with additional mozzarella cheese. Let stand 15 minutes before cutting.

ms_meme's Nook: Excited About PCLOS

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