Author Archives: Rainer Müller

We value your privacy now, but maybe not later

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Everybody knows these modal dialogs when visiting a website for the first time that ask you to accept cookies and consent to being tracked by third-party advertising networks. It actually became a habit for me to always click through these things and reject any kind of tracking or use of my personal information except for the “required” cookies.

But today, I came across this dialog on atlasobscura.com with the title We value your privacy:

I highly doubt Atlas Obscura actually values my privacy when the only option is to “accept”. By the way, if you actually follow to the privacy policy to “withdraw consent”, access to the content is still blocked by this modal dialog on the next visit. Leaving technical details aside, for the layperson there is in fact no other choice than clicking “accept”, if they want to get access to the website.

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openbox-passmenu

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I recently started to manage my passwords with the pass(1) password store. I integrated access into Firefox via passff and also found a nice GUI with QtPass. While this works nicely, in places outside the browser, it was still quite cumbersome for me to enter passwords. I was still required to open a terminal window to run pass or use the QtPass GUI to copy and paste the password.

I had seen others using passmenu together with dmenu to copy or insert a password anywhere. That seemed very elegant, as it could be used everywhere.

However, I prefer to use tools that are less minimalistic. For years, my Linux desktop has been LXDE with the Openbox window manager. I discovered that it is possible to write dynamic menu for Openbox, which seemed like a perfect fit for this task.

The result is now openbox-passmenu, a script that provides a menu for Openbox to access the passwords inside the pass(1) password store.

If you also want to use this, please head over to the GitHub project for instructions on how to install and where it has to be integrated with the Openbox configuration.

Interactive git rebase with non-interactive editing

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When working with git and especially GitHub, I often have commits on my local branch that were already submitted as a pull request. Sometimes I continue working and later notice that I have commits on the branch that have nothing to do with the next thing I am already working on. Therefore I want to remove them from the current branch.

$ git log --oneline @{upstream}..
e159d1e Commit C
70140e3 Commit B
16ed14a Commit A

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Postfix with relayhost over stunnel on macOS 10.12 Sierra

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I like to have a working mail setup on all machines as this allows to be notified about cronjobs that failed and also to be able to send other notifications that would otherwise be lost. It is also especially useful for things like git send-email or automatically sending GPG signatures with caff to others.

However, mails cannot just be sent from any device and mail servers on the internet usually reject mails from dial-up IPs or public WiFi networks. To fight spam, techniques like SPF have been developed that restrict the mail servers that are allowed to send mails for the domain name used in the From: field. Therefore the best way is to relay all outgoing mail through the mail server that is responsible for your domains.

While most tools also allow you to configure an external SMTP server, it is on one hand tedious to configure it everywhere and on the other hand also insecure if you have to write the username and password for authentication to many user-readable configuration files on your system. Therefore I am running a local MTA on all the computers I administrate to relay mails to a central mail server.

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Goodbye Sailfish OS and Jolla

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Already in September 2017 I migrated away from Sailfish OS and I am now using an Android phone. For me, this is the first time I left the niche market of alternative phone operating systems to go mainstream. Originally I used a Nokia dumb phone and then in 2009 got the Nokia N900 as my first smartphone with Maemo as OS, which was so much joy, easily extensible due to the open platform, and had a sliding keyboard. After a few years I continued with the Nokia N9 with the now abandoned Meego. The N9 was released shortly before the Nokia phone department was switched to produce Windows phones for Microsoft. However, a group of former Nokia developers formed Jolla, a company producing an alternative phone operating system called SailfishOS.

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