Category: Allgemein

I Love Free Software Day 2019

vanitasvitae1 Comment

Free Software is a substantial part of my life. I got introduced to it by my computer science teacher in middle school, however back then I wasn’t paying that much attention to the ethics behind it and rather focused on the fact that it was gratis and new to me.

Using GNU/Linux on a school computer wasn’t really fun for me, as the user interface was not really my taste (I’m sorry KDE). It was only when I got so annoyed from the fact that my copy of Windows XP was 32 bit only and that I was supposed to pay the full price again for a 64 bit license, that I deleted Windows completely and installed Ubuntu on my computer – only to reinstall Windows again a few weeks later though. But the first contact was made.

Back then I was still mostly focused on cool features rather than on the meaning of free software. Someday however, I watched the talk by Richard Stallman and started to read more about what software freedom really is. At this point I was learning how to use blender on Ubuntu to create animations and only rarely booted into Windows. But when I did, it suddenly felt oddly wrong. I realized that I couldn’t truly trust my computer. This time I tried harder to get rid of Windows.

Someone once said that you only feel your shackles when you try to move. I think the same goes for free software. Once you realize what free software is and what rights it grants you (what rights you really have), you start to feel uncomfortable if you’re suddenly denied those rights.

And that’s why I love free software! It gives you back the control over your machine. It’s something that you can trust, as there are no secrets kept from you (except if the program is written in Haskell and uses monads :P).

My favorite free software projects for this years I love free software day are the document digitization and management tool paperwork, the alternative Mastodon/Pleroma interface Halcyon and the WordPress ActivityPub Plugin. These are projects that I discovered in 2018/2019 and that truly amazed me.

I already wrote two blog posts about paperwork and the fediverse / the ActivityPub plugin earlier, so I’ll focus mainly on Halcyon today. Feel free to give those other posts a read though!

I’m a really big fan of the fediverse and Mastodon in particular, but I dislike Mastodon’s current interface (two complaints about user interfaces in one post? Mimimi…). In my opinion Mastodons column interface doesn’t really give enough space to the content and is not very intuitive. Halcyon is a web client which acts as an alternative interface to your Mastodon/Pleroma account. Visually it closely resembles the Twitter UI which I quite like.

Halcyon – An alternative user interface to Mastodon/Pleroma

As a plus, it is way easier to get people to move from Twitter to the fediverse by providing them with a familiar interface 😉

There are some public instances of Halcyon available, which you can use to try out Halcyon for yourselves, however in the long run I recommend you to self-host it, as you have to enter your account details in order to use it. Hosting it doesn’t take much more than a simple Raspberry Pi as it’s really light weight.

I know that a huge number of free software projects is developed by volunteers in their free time. Most of them don’t get any monetary compensation for their work and people often take this for granted. Additionally, a lot of the feedback developers get from their users is when things don’t work out or break.

(Not only) today is a chance to give some positive feedback and a huge Thank You to the developers of the software that makes your life easier!

Happy Hacking!

Brussels Day 1 and 2

vanitasvitae1 Comment
Atmosphere at a train station in Brussels

Day one and two of my stay in Brussels are over. I really enjoyed the discussions I had at the XMPP Standards Foundation Summit which was held in the impressive Cisco office building in Diegem. It’s always nice to meet all the faces behind those ominous nicknames that you only interact with through text chats for the rest of the year. Getting to know them personally is always exciting.

A lot of work has been done to improve the XMPP ecosystem and the protocols that make up its skeleton. For me it was the first time ever to hold a presentation in English, which – in the end – did not turn out as bad as I expected – I guess 😀

I love how highly internationally the XSF Summit and FOSDEM events are. As people from over the world we get together and even though we are working on different projects and systems, we all have very similar goals. It’s refreshing to see a different mind set and hear some different positions and arguments.

I’ve got the feeling that this post is turning into some sort of humanitarian advertisement and sleep is a scarce commodity, so I’m going to bed now to get a snatch.

WordPress Anti Spam Measures using Fail2ban

vanitasvitae1 Comment

I recently got really excited when I noticed, that the number of page views on my blog suddenly sky-rocketed from around 70 to over 300! What brought me back down to earth was the fact, that I also received around 120 spam comments on that single day. Luckily all of those were reliably caught by Antispam Bee.

Sudden peaks in page view and spam comment statistics.

Still, it would be nice to have accurate statistics about page views and those stupid spam requests distort the number of views. Also I’d like to fight spam with tooth and nail, so simply filtering out the comments is not enough for me.

That’s why I did some research and found out about the plugin WP Fail2Ban Redux, which allows logging of spammed comments for integration with the famous fail2ban tool. The plugin does not come with a settings page, so any settings and options have to be defined in the wp-config.php. In my case it was sufficient to just add the following setting:

/path/to/wordpress/wp-config.php

define('ANTISPAM_BEE_LOG_FILE', '/var/log/spam.log');

Now, whenever Antispam Bee classifies a comment as spam, the IP of the author is logged in the given log file.

Now all I need it to configure fail2ban to read host names from that file and to swing that ban hammer!

/etc/fail2ban/filter.d/antispambee.conf

[INCLUDES] 
# Read common prefixes. If any customizations available -- read them from
# common.local 
before = common.conf 

[Definition] 
_daemon = wp 
failregex = ^%(__prefix_line)s comment for post.* from host= marked as spam$
/etc/fail2ban/jail.local 

[antispambee] 
enabled = true 
filter = antispambee 
logpath = /var/log/spam.log 
bantime = 21600 
maxretry = 1 
port = http,https

Now whenever a spammer leaves a “comment” on my blog, its IP is written in the spam.log file where it is picked up by fail2ban, which results in a 6 hour ban for that IP.

Those sweet, sweet bans 🙂

Update:

Yaaaay!

Join the Fediverse!

vanitasvitae3 Comments

Federated Networks are AWESOME! When I first learned about the concept of federation when I started using Jabber/XMPP, I was blown away. I could set up my own private chat server on a Raspberry Pi and still be able to communicate with people from the internet. I did not rely on external service providers and instead could run my service on my own hardware.

About a year ago or so I learned about ActivityPub, another federated protocol, which allows users to share their thoughts, post links, videos and other content. Mastodon is probably the most prominent service that uses ActivityPub to create a Twitter-like microblogging platform.

But there are other examples like PeerTube, a YouTube-like video platform which allows users to upload, view and share videos with each other. Pleroma allows users to create longer posts than Mastodon and Plume can be used to create whole blogs. PixelFed aims to recreate the Instagram experience and Prismo is a federated Reddit alternative.

But the best thing about ActivityPub: All those services federate not only per service, but only across each other. For instance, you can follow PeerTube creators from your Mastodon account!

And now the icing on the cake: You can now also follow this particular blog! It is traveling the fediverse under the handle @vanitasvitae@blog.jabberhead.tk

Matthias Pfefferle wrote a WordPress plugin, that teaches your WordPress blog to talk to other services using the ActivityPub protocol. That makes all my blog posts available in and a part of the fediverse. You can even comment on the posts from within Mastodon for example!

In my opinion, the internet is too heavily depending on centralized services. Having decentralized services that are united in federation is an awesome way to take back control.

On Independent Journalism

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Greyscale image of newspapers on a stand.
Photo by Flipboard on Unsplash

I live in a fast-paced world. News from all over the planet reach me within minutes, even seconds. This creates a huge, violent stream of information, trying to get into my mind.

Meanwhile I have less and less time on my hands and can only hastily process all the information I consume. Too often I catch myself quickly scrolling through the news feed, only reading the headlines of articles, the excerpt at best.

I have to admit it: I depend on the news articles I read to be truthful, as I don’t have time to verify them on my own. I am at the mercy of journalists to tell me the stories the way they really happened.

At the same time journalists desperately try to get me to read their articles. They have to get clicks on their websites in order to survive, as printed newspapers are slowly dying.

As a result my news feed is flooded with sensational headlines and click-bait articles. Scandals are made to appear bigger than they really are or simply made up from thin air. Often the title of an article contradicts the content itself or is massively exaggerated.

Recent examples of this trend are the allegations around the YouTube creator PewDiePie, who is regularly accused by several news outlets to be a white supremacist, which – if you know his videos and understand his type of humor – is just absurd. Sure, there are some edgy jokes here and there, but they are exactly this: Jokes and satire. Any viewer knows and understands this.

I really hate the term fake news, as it’s often used as a lazy excuse to ignore inconvenient facts, but reading bad researched articles like those around PewDiePie make me question the credibility of some news organizations and it makes me sad to see, how shortsighted some trade away credibility for clicks.

Another example would be the case of Class Relotius, a journalist who wrote for Der Spiegel, a prominent German newspaper. Relotius deliberately made up a number of articles. This massively hurts the trustworthiness of the press, even though I think (and hope) that Der Spiegel itself is an otherwise reliable newspaper.

As I wrote earlier, I want to be able to depend and rely on the news.
I don’t want to live in a world where people screaming “Fake News” are those who speak the truth.

So what solutions are there to fix these issues?

Journalism needs financing.
Most sites greet you with popups that demand you to disable your ad-blocker to read their articles. I know that this is not an option for me.

Blocking advertisements is not – as often depicted by the advertising industry – simply a way to make my life more comfortable, it is actually a security measurement. Ads spy on the user and can even be used to execute malicious code. As a proponent of the free software movement I believe that its my right to decide which software is run on my machines. Therefore I am persuaded that it’s my right to decide to disable ads.

In Germany we have the “Rundfunkbeitrag”, a model for financing public service broadcasters in Germany. Some people say that it is unfair to be forced to pay for something that you don’t necessarily consume. While I see their point (some people don’t own a TV or radio, why should they pay?), I think that it is more important to have independent journalism. In the end that’s the whole reason behind this blog post.

I am not sure if subscribing to a news outlet in order to be able to read their articles is the right way to solve the issue. Sure, this is the way it has been in times prior to the internet (you bought the news paper), but things changed. My biggest issue with the subscription model is that I could only subscribe to a limited number of news sites at once. That however makes me dependent on those sources. If I’d want to read an article of another site I’d need to pay for that again.

One approach would be a unified subscription which would give you access to a variety of news sites. That way I wouldn’t be bound to a single source and the fee would ensure the editorial independence of the journalists. This idea is however not yet well thought out.

Maybe we need a Rundfunkbeitrag for newspapers. In the end the only difference between news on TV and newspapers is the medium that transports the content. Both are however created by journalists that are in need of financing to stay independent.

In the meantime I will consider, whether I can afford to subscribe to a news site and if so, which would be the right choice for me. Possible candidates are Der Spiegel (yes, I’d give them another chance and yes, no https :/) and Netzpolitik.org who solely rely on donations at the moment.