Celso Bessa (sɛwsʊ bɛ:sa)

Prefiro construir pontes a muros

technology

What if email didn’t suck?

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What if email – which can be seen as an instant messaging tool – and its related technologies, protocols, and regulations had received much more attention from F/LOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software) and public interest technology practitioners and funders in the last 15 years?

What if, for the last 15 years or so, we had more research, updates, and improvements not only to the technology and protocols but to its regulations and the issues around it as well? For example, efficient and non-privacy intrusive anti-spam, meaningful compliance to anti-spam laws and protocols, etc.

What if we had had reliable, safer, private, and easier to use encrypted email? Would it have curbed instant messaging apps? How would disinformation campaigns be different? How would surveillance capitalism have reacted to it?

5 uniformed women seated and two on foot to the right, they are looking to the left, where a man and another womenare showingyon some flags. Between them a white board with some letters. Behind them, some trees.
Same vibe, but with ones and zeroes instead of flags.

Blockchain based botnet (cybersecurity)

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A recurring (kinda)joke in my circles is “Blockchain is solution looking for a problem to solve”. Now we can move on step forward and say “Blockchain is a non-solution with bigger and novel problems we now need to solve”.

Security researchers have recently discovered a botnet with a novel defense against takedowns. Normally, authorities can disable a botnet by taking over its command-and-control server. With nowhere to go for instructions, the botnet is rendered useless. But over the years, botnet designers have come up with ways to make this counterattack harder. Now the content-delivery network Akamai has reported on a new method: a botnet that uses the Bitcoin blockchain ledger. Since the blockchain is globally accessible and hard to take down, the botnet’s operators appear to be safe.

Bruce Schneier at https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/03/illegal-content-and-the-blockchain.html (emphasis are mine)

Read Schneier post at https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/03/illegal-content-and-the-blockchain.html

Quick tip: Managing disk space on Linux Ubuntu 1: beware of systemd journal logs and backups

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A quick-but-not-so-quick tip for Linux users: beware of systemd journal logs and backup.

Recently, I had a server running out of space often and because of that, MySQL and other services crashing. When checking the reason, I found out that both systemd journal logs and one of the servers websites backups were hogging disk space.

Cleaning up systemd journal logs space with journalctl

In the case of systemd journal logs, it’s a good “system hygiene” to clean it up often. Just don’t clean it up too much, because Logs are useful for security audits.

To do that, just use the journalctl command with the either the --vacuum-time or --vacuum-size parameters with a sensible setting. The first one will clean the journal logs and leave just the ones from the time set. For example, journalctl –vacuum-time=6months will keep only the lost from the last 6 months. The seconde one will clean logs until it achieves the specified size. That is, journalctl --vacuum-size=500M will keep only 500 megabytes of data.

For more information on how journalctl, a great tool, works check its manual page: https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/journalctl.1.html

Make sure you delete old sites backups.

Another often overlooked reason for running out of disk space is old backups not being deleted. Specially when you have some sort of automatic backup in place (e.g. using cron jobs) but they are not automatically deleted. In my case, one of the cron jobs to delete old backups of a client website were not properly set and it was not working. So, remember to check your backups often and make sure all your cron jobs are working properly.

“The social contract is broken, and that’s why the game feels rigged (What Robinhood and Facebook have in common)”

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“[…] technology is not simply a tool—neutral on all possible outcomes, good or bad—but something more dynamic, messy and complicated. It’s a complex system where the workings of both the technology and our society, and crucially, how they interact with each other matter greatly[…]

Instead, it’s always important to pay attention to a company’s incentives, and especially how it makes money. This is especially crucial with digital platforms, where the real mechanisms aren’t as easily visible. […]

“we still face this idea that the internet is a game, that the virtual world is something distinct from the real one. This condescension is even embedded in the phrase IRL—“in real life,” meaning not online.” […]

This complex interplay between business models, technology, and existing power structures in our society means that we have to move beyond simple narratives: The underdog is winning! Technology is liberating us! The underdog has lost! It must be technology’s fault! […]

The social contract is broken, and that’s why the game feels rigged. […]

When things are so unequal, and power so concentrated on one side, moralizing takes about whether r/WallStreetBets is a mob ring hollow. What makes them “a mob” for trying to profit together, while Davos is a distinguished gathering? […] But the internet isn’t a pony that empowers only the nice groups we like (Arab Spring dissidents, but not white supremacists), nor does it magically and instantaneously alter the power dynamics in society (so the underdog can suddenly be assured of a Hollywood ending).”

Zeynep Tufekci

Great article by Zeynep Tufekci published on The Atlantic. A highlighted a few parts below, but you should read it whole: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/02/gamestop-mess-shows-internet-rigged-too/618040/

We are so much more than what they are forcing us to accept.

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We think intelligence is about playing Go. But practically no one plays Go. Or chess. Real intelligence is being able to walk through an incredibly crowded street on a busy evening, nimbly, when you don’t even think about it, while at the same time recalling memories and replaying things in your brain. What I’m saying is that human beings have been reduced to a very simplified version of themselves, which they’ve accepted, in order to fit into this machine model, both of society and the internet. But we are extraordinary and we can do extraordinary things. We are so much more than what they are forcing us to accept.

Adam Curtis interview to Tom Hodgkinson at Idler

Linux/MacOs tip: use du to check folder and files sizes (disk usage)

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Whenever you are using terminal on Unix, Linux and MacOs and need to check the amount of space used by a folder or files, you can use the `du` command:

// basic use. Gives the size in bytes of all files and folders in the folder you are in
du

// gives the size in "human readable" units like kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes of all files and folders.
du -h

// gives an one line summary of the space occupied by all files and folders
du -s

// combines human readable and summary options
du -hs