Android 12, Linux on Apple M1, RHEL, Twitch Leak, Sony, Fairphone 4 | This Week in Linux 171

[Music] welcome to episode 171 of this week in linux recorded live on october 9th 2021 from the destination linux network i'm michael tinnell and if you're new to the show this is the podcast that will keep you up to date with what's going on in the linux world and i'll give you my take as a 20 year plus linux user now we have so much to get to so much news whether it's mobile enterprise so much let's just jump right into your weekly source for linux good news [Music] this episode of this week in linux is sponsored by digitalocean and bitwarden first in the show let's talk about android we don't talk about android that much on this show but the latest version android 12 is now officially available from the opens the oasp or the android open source project so there's a lot of interesting features in android 12. uh it's not like the typical boring release that we have been seeing so android 12 has a new user interface with redesigned widgets and other graphical elements more efficient system performance more responsive notification a faster machine learning performance support for the avif image codec a variety of new developer apis and various privacy enhancements that have been wanted by a lot of people for a long time although talking about privacy enhancements when google's involved is sort of laughable so but i will say that overall the new android 12 is the is the first release in a long time that is actually interesting for many releases it's been the same old boring thing but with 12 they have made big changes to the overall look and feel and they made a lot of big performance changes including with support for impr the enhancements of background processes not taking up so much resources one big improvement that is kind of sad it took this long is the new notification history log i can't tell you how many times i've accidentally swiped away something that i didn't mean to just because some random thing popped up in the notification so when i swiped it i swiped the wrong thing and it just because it changes orders when that happens and that's happened so many times that it's very annoying but this is a much needed improvement so now when you go to your notifications if you accidentally swipe something away you can actually check out the notification history and then see when stuff happened in what order and all that and it's very surprising it took over a decade for anyone to figure out that it was necessary there's actually third-party applications to kind of compensate for that and now finally android has that it's took a while but it's great that it's finally here so now if you want to learn more about android 12 there's a lot of new stuff there's some video demos and stuff like that i'll have linked in the show notes so if you want to check out the latest information about what happens with android 12 you can find links in the show notes um next in the show we've got an exciting update for asahi linux i first talked about this effort in january of this year and in that time the project went from a hopeful gold to now seeing the fruits of that labor becoming a nice ripe apple get it apple okay for those who are unaware how awesome that dad joke was asahi linux is the project being made to get linux working on apple's m1 mac line of computers plus the goal of the asahi linux project is to upstream everything into the linux kernel so that is a fantastic thing and they've got a lot of stuff already in the kernel being reviewed we have been following this progress since it started and today i have something great to tell you about it and that is that with the progress made over the past month asahi linux is usable as a basic linux desktop on m1 mac hardware albeit without gpu acceleration which will be coming later but this is fantastic and now also there are many new apple m1 driver submissions under review for mainline such as including the pin control i2c driver asc asc mailbox io mmu 4k handling and also device power management all of these things are currently being reviewed and there's a lot more that are pending to get reviewed very soon which is just awesome so what about the other things about you know in the future proofing of it what about apple m2 chips that are bound to be coming at some point well the acai linux developers have mentioned that they are optimistic for the moment that much of their driver work will carry forward to the future of apple silicon iterations and i quote apple is unique in putting emphasis in keeping hardware interfaces compatible across soc generations the uart hardware in the m1 dates back to the original iphone this means we are in a unique position to be able to try writing drivers that will not only work for the m1 but may work unchanged on future chips as well this is a very exciting opportunity in the arm64 world we won't know until apple releases the m1x or the m2 but if we succeed in making enough drivers forward compatible to boot linux on newer chips that will make things like booting older distro's installers possible on newer hardware this is something that people take for granted on x86 but it's usually impossible in the embedded world and we hope we can change that on these machines now this is fantastic news and i'm really excited about it because it means that linux is going to be supported on this hardware much quicker than people anticipated and it would you know linux of course needs to be everywhere that's why we have a shirt in the dln store about that dealingstore.com linux is everywhere check it out but this is great and i'm so happy that the apple silicon is no different to that goal of getting linux everywhere and also as far regarding the current usability of it they say that with these drivers m1 max are actually usable as desktop linux machines while there is no gpu acceleration yet the m1 cpus are so powerful that software rendered desktop is actually faster on them in their opinion of than the rockchip arm64 machines with hardware acceleration i have heard some benchmarks that m1 max are pretty good hardware so i'm really happy to see that the the the support for linux on this is happening so quickly and if you'd like to learn more about the efforts being made for supporting linux on m1 max or more about asahi linux in general you can check out the links in the show notes below up next in the show we have the latest release of firefox and there is a lot of great stuff in this latest release of firefox 93. let's talk about what's new and what's been fixed as well as some a little bit of controversy that's happened related to firefox we'll get to that in a bit but for now firefox now supports the new avif image format which is based on the modern and royalty-free av-1 video codec it offers significant bandwidth savings for sites compared to existing image formats and it also supports transparency and other advanced features so that is fantastic to see and another thing that's great to see is that firefox pdf viewer now supports filling more forms so that's for xfa-based forms used by multiple governments and banks and that sort of stuff which is a very nice convenient thing for a lot of people firefox also now blocks downloads that rely on insecure connections protecting against potentially malicious and unsafe downloads so for example if you were going to download something and it tries to send you to an http download file instead of an https it would block that from happening which is very nice and they haven't really exactly explained like what constitutes a download whether it's an image that's not under https or what exactly but it's really nice to see that they're working on that kind of thing they've also improved web compatibility for privacy protections with smart block 3.0 and also introducing new referrer tracking protection in the strict tracking protection and private browsing modes of firefox also just a quick note that i'm happy about is that the compact mode is actually compact now so when they switch to the new interface with the bubble tab look they made a compact mode that was like barely compact not really at all and this latest version i tested it with a new release of 93 and the actual compact mode is compact so fantastic though there are some reports that they'll be removing the compact mode completely in firefox 94 so i don't know about that and if why they put in the effort to make it compact if they're going to remove it but if you go into the customization section and go to the density it will say compact mode not supported so it's up in the air what happens with that hopefully it stays because i do like the that i don't want to use too much of my screen real estate just for the ui of the browser i want to put more emphasis on the website that i'm going to or the web app that i'm using so hopefully the compact mode stays they've also fixed some accessibility stuff related to screen readers like orca and voiceover which is great as well as other various security fixes now there is a bit of controversy around this release related to some cert suggestions that seem to be contextual ad based now this is certainly an interesting topic to cover uh and so but and i do want to dive into it but we don't really have the time to do it on this show to this week so instead we've decided to tackle this on the next destination linux which is happening tomorrow so be sure to join us at 1pm us eastern time at dlnlive.com to see that discussion and what we think this could mean for firefox and mozilla as a whole if you'd like to learn more about firefox 93 specifically then check out the links in the show notes this episode of this week in linux is brought to you by digitalocean now is the perfect time to dive into the digitalocean there is new app platform service helps you build modern cloud-native apps for way less money with app platform you can build deploy and scale apps and static websites faster and easier than ever by using a simple intuitive interface you simply point your the app platform to your github or gitlab repository and let it do all of the heavy lifting what do i mean by that well whether you're using nodejs python go php ruby static sites docker or container images it handles all of the heavy lifting for you with any of those things by also running the app platform on their own infrastructure digital ocean keeps your cost significantly lower than with other products and they built it on top of digitalocean kubernetes by which provides a smoother migration path so you can take more control of your infrastructure setup as well and as a listener of the this week and linux podcast and a member of the dealing community you can get started right now with this to create your world-changing app with their app platform for free that's right for free actually better than free because if you go to the app platforms uh digitaloceans giving you a 100 free credit by going to co slash dln again go to do.co dln to get started with a 100 free credit on digitalocean's new app platform service we want to thank digital for sponsoring this episode of this week in linux up next in the show let's talk about some enterprise related topics and we have rel or red hat enterprise linux 8.5 beta is out and it has a lot of new improvements it's got new features it's easier for rail users to access and test it out and this release brings live kernel patching to the web console as well as a number of system role improvements and management enhancements so real quick let's talk about some of the system roles so the new rail system roles include update a new system for microsoft sql server allows it administrators and dbas to more quickly install configure and tune uh sql servers in an automated fashion uh also there's a new role for vpns reduces the time to configure vpn tunnels and reduce the risk of misconfiguration or use of non-recommended settings there's also a role for postfix which enables administrators to skip manual configuration of postfix automating how you install configure and start your server as well as specify custom settings to better control how the post fix works in your environment they've also got some stuff for time sync and some storage improvements and also rails web console based on the upstream cockpit project is a web-based interface for managing and monitoring your systems and it has a kernel live patching management via the web console which is awesome because that gives you a lot of control inside of cockpit which is just really cool cockpit is a really interesting project and if you've never used it before you should check it out if you do any kind of virtual machine management and deployment and that sort of stuff enterprise linux has also been very interesting space for the past year since the news about centos linux being deprecated for centaur stream happened and so much more and we got a little bit more to talk about that specifically coming up in the next topic but if you want to learn more about red hat's rail 8.5 beta i'll have links in the show notes so up next we have the opinion that cern has offered for centos stream so as i mentioned there's a lot of changes happening with the enterprise space and cern is the people behind scientific linux and they have been doing analysis on the enterprise space with rel or centos stream and the enterprise linux clones or elc such as rocky linux and alma linux and they also have a discussion right now with red hat about an academic offer that has been made to cern we don't know exactly what that entails but uh it might happen it might not but there is a lot of interesting stuff related to censorship stream that they have said and because they say that we propose to target centos stream eight as the standard distribution for experiments we feel that deploying centos stream eight is low risk and we now have months of experience running production workloads on centos stream eight without any significant issues now this is very interesting because they go on to say that we should we feel that should issues arise with the adoption of census stream eight it would be straightforward to re-evaluate other options before centos stream 8 support ends which by the way is expected to be supported until may 2024 and they also say that trivial migration paths are provided by the various uh clone communities such as alma linux now this is really interesting because there's a huge truck controversy and drama that was created by the change from centos linux and cintastream back last year in december and a lot of people were worried that the new cintostream was going to make it impossible for anyone to use it because it's going to be moving too fast and all that sort of stuff but this is based on cern's testing this is not the case and also they gave some updates about how fast uh security updates were received in cintostream versus centos linux also just the stability and there's it's not as drastic or as dire as people have made it out to be in the past they say that they have months of successfully operating centos stream 8 in production across diverse environments fully supported systems at cern both puppet managed and unmanaged host they say that the rate of change for system depth updates are not as scary as they initially thought they say that the system update stability has been good and they also talk about the continued support for existing workloads that they have for scientific linux 7 as well as cern cintas 7 but going forward they talked about in a roadmap cern and fermilab will continue to evaluate the distribution landscape especially once rail 9 and associated clones or elcs are released for 9 but once centos stream 9 is released they say that they're going to work to support this distribution at cern as well likely around q1 2022 um and i have messed around with cintastream myself and it has been very solid for my uses but of course my use case is much much smaller than what is typically used for these kind of distros especially with like you know cern experimental i don't do any of that stuff but i'm personally excited for the future of centos not only because of what stream offers that it was never possible before because you know for those who don't know it it wasn't really even possible to contribute to centos prior to the change to stream so i'm really happy that they're doing that because there's a lot of people think about you know centos being um or centos linux being a fork of rel they didn't realize that because it was a fork of rail you couldn't do anything in centos that affected rail and now with stream you can and that is a huge game changer for a lot of things and a lot of enterprise deployments as well i'm also excited to play with rail officials since it's possible now for free up to 16 instances as well as you know check out some of the clones like alma linux so i think this is a very interesting news from cern it might subdue some of the you know doomsday predictions and whatnot maybe not i don't know but i think overall when you consider that every factor when you're talking about the clones that exist where you're talking about cinta stream and how it updates nowhere near as fast as people thought or chaotic as people thought it would and how rel is now available for more people in easier ways and even free in a lot of cases i think the enterprise space for linux has become super interesting and just continues to develop in that if you'd like to learn more about this news from centos or cern i'll have links to a pdf uh slideshow that they released related to this news uh in the show notes below speaking of all my linux we've also got some news from them as they have announced that membership in the amalenix foundation is now open to everyone and it's 100 free to become a member what does this mean exactly well this is one of the reasons why i'm so interested in alma linux when it comes to the various centos clones there are many clones but in regards to governance and structure i think alma linux seems to be checking every box so alma linux foundation was created as a 501c6 non-profit in order to put ownership of the os and the ip and the direction of the project in general into the hands of the community now there are clones that are controlled by companies but to my knowledge i think omelinics is the only one of this kind of implementation so that's why i'm more interested in on the linux and by joining as a member people have the right and the ability to vote on board members and the direction of the project now to quote on the linux they say that we all own alma linux now and no one can change that forever not cloud linux not any other corporation or anyone else our fate and future are in the hands of every member and is ours alone to control we're no longer bound by one person a group or entity it cannot be bought nor sold nor transferred or fought about now this is really interesting and for my personal needs i put alma linux in my top three choices right up there with using rail directly thanks to the 16 free license i mentioned in the last topic and also centos stream because contrary to popular belief it doesn't seem to be that bad now it's not verbatim of what cern said about it but you know close enough so i it's really interesting that they're doing this and if you are wanting to be involved in the way of becoming a member for all for alma linux you can learn you can find more about what they're doing and how to become a member in the show notes below this episode of this week in linux is brought to you by bit warden get started right now with your free account at bitwarden.com dln bit warden is an awesome password manager that allows you to have peace of mind knowing that your online accounts are secure how does it do that well it provides you with a bunch of great tools such as the 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started and thanks again to bit warden for sponsoring this week in linux and speaking of passwords bit warden makes it really easy to generate a new twitch password for those who have a twitch account if you're not familiar twitch has been dealing with some messy stuff recently with uh bot hate raids which of course are pathetic and awful but it seems to have gotten worse for twitch twitch has confirmed that there has been a data breach of course they haven't been very forthcoming about what all happened within this breach but based on the reports it's not good in fact the reports say that 125 gigabytes of company data has been leaked now there is no indication yet that it includes login details it's probably a good idea to just change your twitch password anyway just in case also they have announced that they were changing the keys for every single account so if you are a twitch user you do have to go in and change the key to make sure your streams work again now there there is some information that we have based on the reports about this leak and as far as what it contains so it says that twitch's source code with repository commit history going back to its early beginnings is included in this leak which is very very interesting mobile desktop and video game console twitch clients are included in this various proprietary sdks and internal aws services used by twitch uh every other property that twitch owns including igdb and curseforge is apparently included the leak also shows that uh amazon game studios is working on a steam competitor called vapor now that's pretty interesting and i do want to cover that when it comes out because a steam competitor is something that could be interesting to talk about we that's all we know is just a little bit that you know that that much is all we know uh and also streamer payout reports showing some people's uh like how much money they've gotten from being a streamer on twitch also twitch's security tools are included and this data dump was labeled as a part one by the person who posted it on 4chan and if it is a multi-part release well it could get pretty ugly for twitch we'll have to wait and see what happens here but you know if you want to change your password it'd be really easy to do that with bit warden so think about it and if you want to learn more about this twitch news i'll have links in the show notes below up next on the show let's talk about the fairphone 4 which is coming soon pre-orders will be available very soon i think in the beginning of november now we talked about the fairphone 4 in detail on episode 45 of hardware addicts which was released yesterday so if you want to have a full in-depth look at the fairphone 4 then check that out i have links in the show notes for episode 45 of hardware addicts but some of the highlights that i want to talk about is the the aims to be eco-friendly sustainable and even modular in design making it possible to replace many parts of the phone that's one of the reasons why i'm so interested in the fair phone it's also fair trade certified which is fantastic and i think the only phone that is fair trade certified now the specs of this phone are not too shabby so it's a 6.3 inch full hd plus display a 5g support flexibility with two sim cards it also has support for ease and e sim slot for additional number uh that has a clean version of android 11. they talk about clean version as in they remove all of the uh that comes with android uh there's also expandable storage which is rare in phones these days it has two uh two cameras a 40 48 megapixel qual quality main lens also has a front camera it has a light sensor and also ability to do 4k video recording which is awesome now the thing that's actually kind of depressing for me is that it's available only for europe i think it's only europe but it might be other parts of the world but i do know it is not available for me to get very easily so just a quick request fair phone please make it easier for me to get it i appreciate that uh but if you want to learn more about this i'll have links in the show notes but also check out the latest episode of hardware x we dig in so much more into this phone it is such an interesting story about the fine the fair phone so check it out i have links in the show notes for that as well um next in the show we have some distro news and we're going to be talking about farron os 2021.10 now we've covered fair and os in the past but it's been too way too long so let's talk about what the latest release of 21 or 2021.10 has there are new wallpapers from unsplash one of the things i wanted to talk about is the splash screen and the launch screen has been completely redesigned for this latest release and the end goal is to polish the feel for the process of logging in and smoothly transitioning from the splash screen and the login screen to the desktop now when it relates to the lock screen they're also using some elements from kde plasma's lock screen combined with their own effects and their own approaches so they have a you know featuring a sliding media status a new interactive screen overall and just many features related to the lock screen now this latest version of 2021.10 is based on linux 5.11 kernel and it uses kde plasma 5.22 so you'll have the nice uh quick settings page that was released in plasma 522 as well as all the other improvements that came with that and if you'd like to learn more about what came out in plasma 522 you can check out twill 155 for more information about that now another thing i want to talk about is we could we discussed some stuff that firefox is doing in like recently and how we're going to talk about that on destination linux so be sure to join us tomorrow for that live stream on dlnlive.com but something's really cool in fahren os is that mozilla firefox has a lot of modifications for example they have made it so that the compact mode and no title bar by default or set so it looks really nice also none of the stories stuff in the new tabs page are there they also say that they remove some other new tab distractions they've also uh disabled pocket by default so anybody who didn't like the fact that pocket was there in their firefox and also some there was some telemetry stuff that some people do not like now i'm not completely against telemetry i think that there are uh times where telemetry is valuable not only good but actually helpful and that sort of stuff but there is sometimes it can be taken too far and in many cases we've covered in the past where some applications did take it too far now i don't think that firefox is one of those applications but some people do not agree with the way that they're doing it and in the if you were if you wanted to use uh fairness you can just know that telemetry has been turned off on most of the things and even some settings that you and even some things you can change that are not available in the settings but are available for like the about config and that kind of thing there's also many more tweaks for the firefox layout in fahrenhes and if you're interested in checking out fairness i think that pharyn makes a lot of cool experimental stuff with plasma and makes you know it's a very really cool experience if you wanted to see a you know as a bespoke interesting approach to plasma then check out fern os 2021.10 link in the show notes i'm next in the show let's do a little bit of housekeeping and i want to tell you about the latest episode of destination linux episode 246. we talked about the linux challenge that linus tech tips is doing and it's a very interesting conversation but i also saw an update on their latest edition of the wan show where lidus linus mentioned that he wanted to have an experience that was more like what an average user would have access to so he didn't want to take advantage of special treatment that he could have had because of course he could have had it a lot of people have offered it whether they're you know average users or whether they're you know me i did as well on twitter and even just show developers have offered assistance and he said he didn't want to take advantage of that because it's kind of a special treatment that most people wouldn't have the access to do and i agree to with him with that about that point specifically however it doesn't seem to be he doesn't seem to be using any resources that are available to average users such as for example the dlnforum.com anyone can join the dln forum and get help with you know getting started in linux or really anything else related to linux and open source and one of the best things about the linux community is the willingness to help and with the dlinform.com that willingness is available to everyone and anyone so this is something that he could use and just you know whether you're linus from clients tech tips or not you can check out dlnforum.com as well to get help with linux or in just any questions you may have related to linux and open source so check it out dealinforum.com also be sure to join us tomorrow for destination linux because we're going to be talking about the firefox topic i mentioned earlier in the show so be there at dlnlive.com at 1 pm us eastern up next in the show we have some gaming news and that is the latest version of ppsspp is available with 1.12 now this is a psp emulator and after eight months of work it now has support for android 12 and the new android storage model called scoped storage now android 11 plus made some changes to how storage permissions worked which resulted in the pp sspp having to introduce the support for the new storage model if you'd like more details on this you'll find links in the show notes for that and in addition to this fully supporting android 12 pp sspp is a lot a lot of stuff to say 1.12 includes a lot of bug fixes and new features from new ui background options to a lot of game fixes and for those of you adventurous enough to try the experimental multiplayer support it works better than ever before now this the list is way too long to mention here so i'll have a link in the show notes for more details but for some of the highlights lots of updated ui like a new a joystick collaboration system and many new touch control options as well as new backgrounds also built-in crc calculator to be able to check with others that your iso is valid many graphical glitches have been fixed and new texture filtering options for auto max quality for smooth texturing has been added there's also new audio options to choose like whether to switch between you know newly newly plugged in devices also reverb volume and a lot more if you want to check out the latest version of pp sspp 1.12 i'll have links in the show notes below at last week's linux foundation open source summit slash embedded linux conference there was a presentation by sony about their history with open source and linux and how they've been accelerating their efforts into contributions for open source sony talked about how they have utilized open source and linux over the past 20 years and their consumer electronics and how their relationship with open source has evolved over that time it also covered their work on establishing an open source program office at the company and much more now starting off using linux on digital video recorders in the early 2000s they now talked about about relying on linux and open source for a wide range of products from robotics and medical products to consumer electronics and so much now in recent years sony has established more internal training around open source clearing up the policies for their engineers to contribute to upstream open source and now with their 20 20 or 20 plus phase they plan to accelerate contributions to linux which is fantastic unfortunately there isn't a recording of the talk but a pdf of the slides can be downloaded i'll have that in the show notes if you're interested in checking it out and i found something very interesting on slide 19 of the slide deck sony mentions that they are expanding into game and film they didn't offer much detail as to what that means exactly but i'm hoping i'm hoping we may see a linux powered playstation at some point because that would be awesome now we've talked about this on destination linux in the past uh for related to how sony and the playstation could be integrated with linux because sony has such a great opportunity to integrate their gaming platform with linux to battle microsoft's xbox slash windows approach and i'm only expecting of course but i think it would be a very smart play in a lot of ways if sony were to do that even if it wasn't based on linux necessarily but had support between the playstation and linux as a as a pc operating system really really hope that that's what they're talking about uh hopefully and and we'll get some more information about that in the future but we'll have to wait and see where that goes but if you'd like to learn more i'll have links for the details about this uh new growing uh open source culture inside of sony i've links of that in the show notes next in the show we have a couple topics to talk about related to google and first up google recently announced a 10 billion dollar commitment to cyber security defense including 100 million to support third party foundations that manage open source security priorities and help fix vulnerabilities google has committed one million dollars in funding to the secure open source uh pilot program or sas which financially rewards developers for enhancing the security of critical open source projects that we all depend on this pilot program is run by the linux foundation with initial sponsorship from the from google or more specifically the google open source security team or gust and they state that we are starting one with one million dollar investment and plan to expand the scope of the program based on community feedback so for eligible open source developers you can earn anywhere from 505 dollars for small improvements up to ten thousand dollars for complicated high impact and lasting improvements now not everything is going to be available for not all open source projects linux foundation says that it's a criteria for critical projects is informed by the executive order on improving the nation's cyber security issue issued in may and corresponding guidance from nist or the national institute of standards and technology there are also some other considerations being taken as to what is eligible for the program if you'd like to learn more about that i'll have links in the show notes but it's great to see google taking some initiative to help improve security in a broader sense like this again if you like to learn more i'll have links in the show notes from one google topic to another well this one's not good you know something google is kind of a fickle beast sometimes they do good things like funding security programs like sauce which we just talked about and then they follow that up with super sketch stuff that just makes you facepalm so a few weeks ago google released chrome 94 for desktop and android and a new feature was added that somehow didn't make a lot of waves this feature is an api called idle detection google describes it as this the idle detection api notifies developers when a user is idle indicating such things as lack of interaction with a keyboard mouse screen activation of screen saver locking of the screen or moving to a different screen a developer defined threshold triggers the notification the api goes outside of operations of the browser itself to look at the user's keyboard mouse and stuff like that this makes that information available to any website like leveraging this api now this is obviously not great but google says that somehow this is necessary because and i quote applications which facilitate collaboration require more global signals about whether the user is idle than are provided by existing mechanisms that only consider a user's interaction with the application's own tab because that's how it should be i don't need a web app to have control have access to things that i'm not touching the web app for it doesn't need to know if i'm using my keyboard if i'm not using the web app very very sketch and very awful so uh the tantech select i'm not sure how to say that sorry about that web standards lead at firefox browser developer for mozilla has commented on this particular situation and says that it as it is currently specified i consider the idle detection api too tempting of an opportunity for surveillance capitalism motivated websites to invade an aspect of the user's physical privacy you can also keep long-term records of physical user user behaviors discerning daily rhythms and using that for proactive psychological manipulation in fact in addition such course patterns could be used by websites to max out local compute resources for proof of proof of work computation such as crypto mining wasting electricity and also other things without users consent so this is not a thing that most people are going to be happy about also other chromium-based browsers are not happy about this specifically john von techner the founder and ceo of vivaldi commented on this by the way we had a fascinating interview with john von techner on destination linux episode 243 that you should definitely check out if you learned more about vivaldi but in regards to the idle detection api he says that this principle of actually monitoring that you're not in front of the computer we see that as a privacy problem and we see it as a security problem we we do see that there is maybe the potential for someone to recognize oh you're not on your computer maybe we can do some damage while you're not there like mining cryptocurrency or stuff like that and also uh brave has announced that they will have this turned off by default as well so this just it's very weird because google is just is such a confusing and disappointing company because on one hand they do things that are great like funding open source security and make cool services that have helped people many people over the years and then on the other hand they do awful stuff like this so firefox is one of the last refuges for for the open and private web and even they are kind of doing some silly stuff lately like i mentioned earlier nowhere near as bad as google let's be clear about that it is nowhere near as bad but you know somewhat questionable i guess and if you're interested in learning more about what i mean about that for firefox then of course tune in tomorrow for destination linux as we'll be talking about that very subject if you'd like to learn more about the idol detection issue with chrome link in the show notes thanks for watching this episode of this week in linux and if you like what i do here on this show please like that smash button and be sure to subscribe if you like to support the show and the channel we have multiple ways to contribute via patreon sponsors and others you can learn more by going to tuxedo.com contribute and if you do become a patron you can join me during the live stream in the recording stadium to discuss things between the topics and also hang out every week before and after the show i typically say just after the show but we're now doing a pre-show patron-only hangout that is available if you become a patron you can also support the show by ordering the linux's everywhere t-shirt or the this week in linux shirt that i'm currently wearing at thedealinstore.com plus while you're there you can check out all the other great stuff at the dylan store like the hats the mugs the hoodies the stickers the aprons and so much cool stuff at dlnstore.com and also if you like some more podcasting goodness from me then check out the latest episodes of destination linux and hardware addicts as i'm a co-host of both of those shows on the destination linux network and also while you're there check out all the other great stuff i deal in like the pseudo show dln extend game sphere and so much more all of that at destinationlinux.network and just a reminder this show is live every saturday at 1pm eastern or 1700 utc so join us in the live chat room to discuss all the latest linux canoes each and every week by going to dlnlive.com thanks again for watching i'm michael snail with the destination linux network and i'll see you next week for another episode of your weekly source for linux good news [Music] you

Channel: Michael Tunnell - TuxDigital

Views: 5,953

Keywords: Linux, open source, DLN, linux podcast, podcast, tech podcast, technology, linux news, tech news, linux distro, Destination Linux, Android 12, AOSP, Asahi Linux, Linux on Apple, Linux on M1 Mac, Mozilla, Firefox 93, Firefox, RHEL 8.5, RHEL, Red Hat, CERN, CentOS Stream, AlmaLinux, Twitch Data Leak, Twitch, Fairphone 4, Feren OS, Linus Tech Tips, Linux Challenge, PPSSPP, PSP Emulator, Sony Linux, Google, Open Source Security, Idle Detection, m1 mac, m1 mac linux, apple silicon

Id: orok1TfYj5s

Length: 41min 27sec (2487 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 09 2021