Things n' Stuff Thoughts about the universe in general

Trying to register for the Twitter API (for personal use and mucking around), and this is how the “accepts our terms of service” page looks:

Mind you, the “I accept” and “Submit” buttons still work very well, you just have no idea what you’re signing up for… 🤦

Apparently, Tiktok is an essential application that everyone needs to have and cannot be removed – so said Samsung.

This is a public response to Johan Thelin’s post “The API wars – 16 years later. His blog commenting system looks a bit broken and regardless – I think its an important enough discussion to publish here. The main premise of the article is that the web APIs have won the “API war” in the context of Joel’s Spolsky’s “How Microsoft lost the API war” article from 2014 but the main winner is the globally domineering Google and we should subvert their victory by moving to the new runtime – the WebAssembly, that is better in every way.

Here’s what I had to say about that:

This is a bit of a weird script day – the script is pretty simple but the integration is interesting. I’m scratching my own itch here and also demonstrating how to:

• Use dbus-monitor to listen to D-Bus events
• Use SystemD user services to run a session service
• Update KDE configuration safely from scripts

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Recently I had to move a lot of data between an old GSuite Business account and a new GSuite Business account. Google support for such a migration is… well… can stand to be improved. The main pain points are email¹, Drive², Team Drives³, Calendar⁴, and for everything else – there is no migration. Google+ posts, password storage, Sites, Forms have to be recreated manually, and my pet peeve: Google Groups Archives.

If you’re not familiar with this awesome GSuite feature, which is based on the Google Groups usenet-like service, Google Groups for Business is a mailing list manager that in addition to distributing emails to recipients, also stores each email in an accessible archive – so new users can have access to old communications (this is great for accounting and support) and on top of that you can get forum like features with posting replies to topics and such. Unfortunately Google Groups has no export feature and because the archive is all about past communications, you can’t actually reproduce that data manually when you move to a new GSuite account.

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1. The built-in data migration tool in the admin console – which is the only data migration tool available – only moves emails, and is not 100% reliable with that, and doesn’t move rules or other settings [↩]
2. There are external tools available, I’m using Multcloud, but sharing is a problem – the best you can get is to get a copy of each shared file and Google Docs without any sharing information attached, so that breaks the sharing. Other tools may convert all your Google Docs to Microsoft formats [↩]
3. Which surprisingly works very well – you just share the team drive to a user on the new domain and they can move all the files to a new team drive they create on the new account. Sharing information is lost and you have to reshare, but documents retain comments by the old users and there is no duplications [↩]
4. You can manually export all calendars to ical format and then manually import them one by one. Also not 100% [↩]

That I’ve seen in a while anyway. If you go to Stack Overflow today, you’d find a helpful rubber duck in the corner that will help you solve all of your (code) problems:

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In the past, I’ve discussed using SSH to circumvent restricted networks with censoring transparent proxies, but that relied on the restricted network allowing free SSH access on port 22 (what we call in the industry – the single network requirement for getting work done).

Unfortunately, there are restricted networks that don’t even allow that – all you get is the transparent censoring HTTP proxy (which has recently became the case with the free Wi-Fi on the Israeil Railways trains).

But fortunately for us, there is still one protocol which they can’t block, they can’t proxy and they can’t man-in-the-middle  – or else they’d break the internet even for people who only read news, search google and watch YouTube – that is HTTPS.

In this article I’ll cover running SSH-over-HTTPS using ProxyTunnel and Apache. The main consideration is that the target web server is also running some other websites that we can’t interrupt. The main content is based on this article by Mark S. Kolich, but since it only covers using plain HTTP and in addition to some simple changes in the example configurations I also wanted to cover getting an SSL certificate, here’s my version of the tutorial:

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This is an open letter to Chris Fisher from Jupiter Broadcasting (and friends) regarding the recent tirade against Google “winning” the court battle against Oracle for the use of the Java APIs.

A short summary for the uninitiated:

After Oracle bought Sun including their Java implementation, they sued Google who implemented (some of) the Java APIs for use in the Android operating system, for copyright infringement in some source code, copyright infringement on the API definitions themselves and a couple of software patents they held about how to implement some Java behavior. Round one: Some source code was ruled infringing, APIs were found non-copyrightable  and patents were found not-infringing. Round two: A federal court (that normally rules on patent issues) held the ruling of copying (for Oracle) and patents (for Google) but ruled APIs copyrightable and Google infringing on that. Third round: a jury found that Google’s use of the Java APIs was fair-use and no damages should be awarded.

After the last jury decision, there was a lot of back and forth on the internet, notably one Ars Technica article (“op-ed”), by an Oracle lawyer claimed that the result boils down to nullifying any and all open source licenses:

if you offer your software on an open and free basis, any use is fair use.

Then we come to Chris Fisher – as the host of his Linux Action Show podcast, he has spoke out against Google many times in the past, but this tirade in the discussion of the Oracle vs. Google action in the most recent Linux Action Show #419, really demonstrates well the extents of his Googlephobia (LAS #419, 0:46:42):

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Cloud-init is a Linux technology that allows easy setup and automation of virtual machines. The concept is very simple – the VM infrastructure provides some way of setting some custom data for each virtual machine (many providers call this “user data”), and when the operating system starts the cloud-init service reads that configuration, loads a bunch of modules to handle various parts and let them configure the system. As a user it is very convenient – you write a setup scenario using the variety of tools offered by cloud-init, you can store the scenario in a source control to allow to develop the scenario further, then just launch a bunch of machines with the specified scenario and watch them configure themselves.

The situation is much worse on the MS-Windows side of the fence: want to have an MS-Windows server configured and ready to go? Start a virtual machine, connect to is using RDP and Next, Next, Finish until your fingers are sore. Need to deploy a new version? either retrofit an existing image (again, manually) and risk deployment side effects, or do the whole process again from scratch.

Here’s a script to try to help a bit with the problem – at least on Amazon Web Services: a poor man’s cloud-init-like for MS-Windows server automation.

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As can be evident across the web (for example in this article), the current discussion fueled by Google’s self driving car news and a the possible development plans of other small and large companies is often concerning itself with the morals of a software driven car¹. Which is, frankly, unfortunate.

I think that the only people that should be really bothered by all this talk of “who should the autonomous car kill (in case of an accident)” discussion are the programmers hard at Google and other companies, who are suddenly held to a much higher moral standard than expected of programmers who are responsible, today, to hundreds of lives in each instances – such as programmers for railway systems and passenger jets flight control software.

When you look at the problem from the perspective of autonomous transport control software, that is right now being used to safely transport millions of humans daily, its obvious that the main concern of the designers is to have quantitatively better response (more consistent and faster, in that order) than a human, for adverse situations, but qualitatively better – that is, the systems will not pretend to make decisions morally better than a human would do at any given situation, just perform better on the exact same actions that the human it replaces will have taken anyway.

So when a Google self-driving car programmer comes answer to the “trolley problem” or the “fat man problem” discussed in the linked article, they should not be held to a higher moral standard than the average driver, because that is who they are replacing.

Related articles

• Google’s self-driving car tests in California ruined by human error(digitalspy.co.uk)

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• Google Software: Safer Than Human Drivers?(insights.dice.com)

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• These crazy new cars will save lives(news.com.au)

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• Consumer Group Worries Over Safety of Google’s Self-Driving Cars(technewsworld.com)

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1. that is, immediately after the “ooh, technology is so awesome” debate [↩]