melroy

By Jeremy Hsu on September 24, 2024

Popular smart TV models made by Samsung and LG can take multiple snapshots of what you are watching every second – even when they are being used as external displays for your laptop or video game console.

Smart TV manufacturers use these frequent screenshots, as well as audio recordings, in their automatic content recognition systems, which track viewing habits in order to target people with specific advertising. But researchers showed this tracking by some of the world’s most popular smart TV brands – Samsung TVs can take screenshots every 500 milliseconds and LG TVs every 10 milliseconds – can occur when people least expect it.

“When a user connects their laptop via HDMI just to browse stuff on their laptop on a bigger screen by using the TV as a ‘dumb’ display, they are unsuspecting of their activity being screenshotted,” says Yash Vekaria at the University of California, Davis. Samsung and LG did not respond to a request for comment.

Vekaria and his colleagues connected smart TVs from Samsung and LG to their own computer server. Their server, which was equipped with software for analysing network traffic, acted as a middleman to see what visual snapshots or audio data the TVs were uploading.

They found the smart TVs did not appear to upload any screenshots or audio data when streaming from Netflix or other third-party apps, mirroring YouTube content streamed on a separate phone or laptop or when sitting idle. But the smart TVs did upload snapshots when showing broadcasts from the TV antenna or content from an HDMI-connected device.

The researchers also discovered country-specific differences when users streamed the free ad-supported TV channel provided by Samsung or LG platforms. Such user activities were uploaded when the TV was operating in the US but not in the UK.

By recording user activity even when it’s coming from connected laptops, smart TVs might capture sensitive data, says Vekaria. For example, it might record if people are browsing for baby products or other personal items.

Customers can opt out of such tracking for Samsung and LG TVs. But the process requires customers to either enable or disable between six and 11 different options in the TV settings.

“This is the sort of privacy-intrusive technology that should require people to opt into sharing their data with clear language explaining exactly what they’re agreeing to, not baked into initial setup agreements that people tend to speed through,” says Thorin Klosowski at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy non-profit based in California.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2449198-smart-tvs-take-snapshots-of-what-you-watch-multiple-times-per-second/ (paywall!!)

My ipset hash is full!? I'm using Ubuntu Server and I created a separate fail2ban jail that uses "iptables-ipset-proto6-allports" as their ban action (thus using ipset instead of iptables).

However, today I seem to hit the limit: stderr: 'ipset v7.15: Hash is full, cannot add more elements'.

This can be confirmed by running the ipset -t list command:

Name: f2b-manual
Type: hash:ip
Revision: 5
Header: family inet hashsize 32768 maxelem 65536 timeout 0 bucketsize 12 initval 0xbc28aef1
Size in memory: 2605680
References: 1
Number of entries: 65571

Where the 65571 entries exceeds the maxelem (65536). So what now?? Could I create a banlist in a txt file or something? I just want to ban some large tech corps: https://gitlab.melroy.org/-/snippets/619

I am able to use different programming languages. I know most of the well-known languages ​​without any problems: C, C++, Java, Python, JavaScript, Typescript, PHP...

However, I wanted to expand my horizon. Zig didn't do much for me neither did Rust, but now that I've written some Golang. I admit, I'm intrigued by the language.

I love the fact it's compiled to native machine language. There is still one caveat: despite Go being a GC language, you often still need to manage your memory. Sound strange right? But I needed to use io.Copy instead of io.ReadAll to avoid memory issues. But also you need to explicitly call defer res.Body.Close() to avoid Go not cleaning-up the HTTP response.. Ow well, so you learn it the hard way. Overall, I'm still very optimistic with Go. And looking forward to use it more often in some of my open-source projects.

See my first project in Go: https://gitlab.melroy.org/melroy/gitlab-artifact-deployer-go. Which I wrote in 3 days.

Did you try Go? What are your thoughts?

Sad story ahead

Today I fully removed Firefox as my main browser. It's banned from all my devices from now onwards. I used Firefox as my only browser since I was 10 years old. Which is 24 years now (24 years!). I loved

Firefox trying to be a good alternative to Chrome, promoting open-source and showing the world that privacy does matter. Sadly not anymore, recently after Mozilla hostile CEO takeover and moving the company forward to an advertisement company. Neglecting privacy. And fully want the other way around, tracking user data sending back to Mozilla. And at the same time Mozilla has also became an ads company just like Google, so there is no difference anymore really. And it only goes down-hill from here.

Furthermore, Mozilla is spending more money in AI companies then in the product Firefox itself. So..

Luckily, there are plenty great Firefox forks! Look into some of them yourself and really pick an alternative rather sooner than later:

• LibreWolf
• Floorp (I went with Floorp, thus far it's great!!!)
• Waterfox
• Mullvad

Just pick one, anything... from above list!

I know, it's sad. It's very sad, after 24 years I didn't went to leave Firefox, but this last moves was the straw that broke the camel's back. I'm out, cya at the fork!

Each AI generated polar bear, kills one real polar bear.

#meme #ai #generated #gemini #openai #dall-e #dalle #midjourney #stablediffusion #chatgpt #deepmind #polar #bear #climatechange #climate #heat #til

So thanks to OpenWRT (it's a fork but still..), we have a Banana Pi Wifi 6 router for just 35 dollars/euros.

I have used many many distros in the past, from Debian to Gentoo, from Ubuntu to Arch, etc. etc.. But I need a system that works and does the job well, hence I'm using Linux Mint for the past few years. Linux Mint XFCE Edition to be precise.

However, always during the end of the Linux Mint support cycle.. I have the issue that it's based on Ubuntu LTS, also known as long term support (instead of the latest release), causing a lot of issues in my daily work.

I just want to use the latest clang format & compiler. Or a newer GCC compiler. And/or other tools I love and use on a daily basis... The problem now I need to add a lot of manual package repos / PPA's to the version I want. Furthermore, it introduce sometimes package conflicts. Do NOT get me started with PHP8 from ondrej + Wine stable from WineHQ.

I do not want an unstable distro like Arch, my time is limited (sorry Arch lovers). I also tried Manjaro. Also broke my system once I think, I do like Manjaro. I like Linux Mint a bit more, except at the end of the support cycle (where we are now at).

That all being said, I think I'm ready for something new... Void Linux! That is right, I think I will move over to Void Linux, created from scratch. Using a rolling release, but focused on stability (we will see). It's therefore also using it's own package manager (XBPS). As well as it's own init system: "runit". Non-free packages might be a bit harder to find, but I mainly use VSCodium, Element (Matrix), Nextcloud, KeePass, Firefox, Telegram, Transmission, Wine (Windows games :P), Mumble, Inkscape and of course various dev tools: npm, go, php, gcc/clang, pip, you name it... I use them all. I think Void Linux will be a good fit. I will keep you posted.

Feel free to leave a comment if you have ideas/feedback or your own story on your distro you're using. Are you planning to distro hop again?

I used to work with Photoshop for years (industry standard, I thought). Moving to Linux, GIMP was the next to go logical step. I was never good in manually drawing vectors or embracing the vector image manipulation tooling in general which I regret now that I didn't move to Inkscape from day one. Yes, I used Inkscape back and forth but I used Gimp more in the past years.

Inkscape is 20 years old and improved a lot in terms of usability in the past 10 years! I still think the right-sidebar options are too much hidden to be honest. For some unknown reason to me the Inkscape UI was just confusing for me. But I get the hang of it now (I think :D). Except exporting to plain SVG is still a bit strange where the image size I entered is not becoming the SVG document size during a SVG export. Inkscape still has a lot of room for improvements in those kind of areas.

That being said, I embrace SVG images more and more! I use it for business logo designs and recently also for Mbin logo designs.

I'm not going back to Gimp for logos that is for sure. And you shouldn't either, use Inkscape!

Ledger Live, the most popular crypto hardware wallet software, is tracking and transmitting sensitive user data to third parties.

If you are running big applications on top of PostgreSQL or having a lot of queries your performance might be impacted. By default the default PostgreSQL configuration is to say the least, less than ideal. Same is true for MariaDB but that is out of scope now.

Performance fine tuning your server configuration is key for better overall improvements and making the best use of your hardware! Increasing several key configuration settings in PostgreSQL can already make a huge impact! In the guide below I explain which configuration you need to pay extra attention to and also advise to increase huge pages under Linux when you're using PostgreSQL or MariaDB for that matter.

Please follow the latest PostgreSQL configuration I shared here for Mbin specifically, but can be applied to any application using a PostgreSQL DB: https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/blob/main/docs/admin_guide.md#postgresql-configuration

For more information on fine tuning MariaDB, Nginx, PHP or other Linux kernel configurations, I advise you to checkout my snippets on my GitLab instance: https://gitlab.melroy.org/-/snippets/609, https://gitlab.melroy.org/-/snippets/92, https://gitlab.melroy.org/-/snippets/87

I saw today the infamous pop-up of YouTube again that they will block the video player after 2 more videos if I keep using uBlock Origin. ** Google.

Some people might think you can only use or set environment variable of the service in docker compose eg.:

my-service:
  image: lts-alpine
  environment:
    MY_SECRET_KEY: ${MY_SECRET_KEY}

But the same ${} syntax can be used to set a version of Docker image of PostgreSQL, like in this example below:

my-service:
  image: postgres:${POSTGRES_VERSION:-13}-alpine

If nothing is set, version 13 is the fallback value. Now you can set POSTGRES_VERSION environment via your shell. Or leverage the .env file of Docker:

POSTGRES_VERSION=16

When running: docker compose --env-file .env up, Docker should now use PostgreSQL v16 Alpine as Docker image.

Bonus: The docker-compose.yml filename is an old filename, use compose.yml from now. Same for other Compose files like compose.override.yml.

More info: https://docs.docker.com/compose/environment-variables/set-environment-variables/ and https://docs.docker.com/compose/environment-variables/set-environment-variables/