Tech’s ‘Dirty Secret’: The App Developers Sifting Through Your Gmail

July 3, 2018

Google said a year ago it would stop its computers from scanning the inboxes of Gmail users for information to personalize advertisements, saying it wanted users to “remain confident that Google will keep privacy and security paramount.”

But the internet giant continues to let hundreds of outside software developers scan the inboxes of millions of Gmail users who signed up for email-based services offering shopping price comparisons, automated travel-itinerary planners or other tools. Google does little to police those developers, who train their computers—and, in some cases, employees—to read their users’ emails, a Wall Street Journal examination has found.

This is positively chilling. I have a junk Gmail account I use for non-essential communication and I’m thinking of dumping even that one.

Also, sorry for the subscription-only link. I think I captured the scariest part of the article, though.

Fastmail lets you create referral links and I’m consciously not doing that, just so my saying “Go get Fastmail!” doesn’t seem like a come-on.

Go get Fastmail!

Tech’s ‘Dirty Secret’: The App Developers Sifting Through Your Gmail | The Wall Street Journal (subscription only)

The Linux Setup – Lisa Vitolo, Chakra Linux

June 27, 2018

I haven’t used Chakra in quite some time but Lisa’s appreciation of it is infectious. Lisa has been with the Chakra project for quite a while, seeing it move from an Arch derivative to its own distribution. Lisa is a big fan of package managers, who are the unsung heroes of Linux distributions. They do an amazing amount of work for us, but most of us (myself included!) only notice package managers when they fail; never when they’re doing everything correctly. Sorry package managers!

You can find more of The Linux Setup here.

You can follow Linux Rig on Google+ here and follow me on Twitter here.

  1. Who are you, and what do you do?

    My name is Lisa and I work as a site reliability engineer. I have been interested in computer science and open-source for several years. I am a contributor to Chakra Linux, an independent KDE-centric distribution, as a developer and occasional packager.

  2. Why do you use Linux?

    Beside the obvious answer of working for Chakra and needing it to test my changes, I like GNU/Linux systems because they make it possible to customize a system to your preferences. It’s easy to tinker with things and experiment with new software or setups, which I think is fun. And when something is not working I find it easy to look at low-level details to discover why.

  3. What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?

    Chakra Linux. For a long time I hopped from distro to distro, and landed on Arch Linux for a while. Chakra was originally derived from Arch, so I learned about it, started to use it regularly, and eventually joined the team. I was already using KDE so the transition was smooth.

    Since then, Chakra has separated from Arch and became an independent distro, but they still have similarities.

    Seeing an idea like Chakra develop from a small project into a big and more recognized one has definitely been interesting, and there are always new ideas to explore.

  4. What desktop environment do you use and why do you use it?

    KDE, because Chakra Linux is focused on KDE support. However I had also used KDE previously, on other systems, and found it user-friendly and pleasant to use.

  5. What one piece of Linux software do you depend upon? Why is it so important?

    For day-to-day use, I’d say package managers. With the ever-growing number of applications out there, being able to search from a command line interface and manage all of your updates in one go was one of the first things that made me like Linux over Windows. Over the years the same model has taken hold with things like Ruby gems, But when you apply this to a whole system, it’s a very powerful tool.

    Of course there is the other side of the coin, with the work packages need to do to keep the repositories updated, and to deal with backward incompatibilities or other problems outside of their control. I am excited to see changes coming in this direction: Snaps, Flatpaks, and continuous build services.

  6. What kind of hardware do you run this setup on?

    A quite old HP laptop with 2GB RAM, 500GB hard drive and NVIDIA GF108M video card.

  7. Will you share a screenshot of your desktop?

    Here it is!

Interview conducted June 25, 2017

The Linux Setup is a feature where I interview people about their Linux setups. The concept is borrowed, if not outright stolen, from this site. If you’d like to participate, drop me a line.

You can follow Linux Rig on Google+ here, follow me on Twitter here, and subscribe to the feed here.

I’m Nat Friedman, future CEO of GitHub. AMA.

June 13, 2018

What is your response to people moving repos to GitLab and other providers?
Developers are independent thinkers and will always have a healthy degree of skepticism, but I admit I was sad to see that some felt compelled to move their code. I take the responsibility of earning their trust seriously.

OTOH, I think it’s great that git gives developers the flexibility to move their repos like this, and I hope those who have tried out other Git hosts in the past few days will keep an open mind and consider moving back once we’ve demonstrated our commitment to openness and made GitHub even better. If they choose not to move back, that’s their prerogative and we celebrate developer choice even when developers don’t choose us.

I understand why people are upset about Microsoft buying GitHub, but the whole point of Git is that this kind of thing doesn’t matter. With Git, you have all of the project files on your local machine. Repositories can be easily moved. This is why non-proprietary tools are best. Because when you have to move, you can. It’s encouraging that Friedman gets this.

I host my personal site through GitHub and I’m not moving just yet. I want to see how things shake out. But if I do have to move, I know it’ll be easy.

I’m Nat Friedman, future CEO of GitHub. AMA. | r/AMA

You can now run Linux apps on Chrome OS

June 7, 2018

I’m interested in this because Chromebooks are cheap and pretty light. The idea that I could use it for actual programs, rather than just as a big browser, is interesting. Especially if it happens natively. I know there’s Crouton, but it always seemed risky to buy a machine and potentially break it.

Of course, as we learned earlier this week, I’m still pretty committed to my Thinkpad.

You can now run Linux apps on Chrome OS | TechCrunch

On Old ThinkPads…

June 5, 2018

I remember going to conferences and seeing the older open source people using super old, dirty ThinkPads that looked gigantic and heavy. Whenever I looked at their screens, I had no idea what was going on, nor even what distro they might be using. But I thought it was cool that their technology was old-yet-timeless.

This weekend, taking Amtrak up to a conference, my old, giant, dirty ThinkPad up on my tray, I realized I had become one of those open source people.

It kind of felt nice, but it also kind of made me use a lot of compressed air on it when I got home.