Category: English

Synchronize directories between computers using rsync (and SSH)

https://twitter.com/climagic/status/363326283922419712

I found this command line magic gem some time ago and was using it ever since.

I started using it for synchronizing directories between computers on the same network. But it felt kind of clunky and cumbersome to get the slashes right so that it wouldn’t nest those directories and copy everything. Since both source and destination machine had the same basic directory layout, I thought ‘why not make it easier?’ … e.g. like this:

sync-to other-pc ~/Documents
sync-to other-pc ~/Music --exclude '*.wav'
sync-from other-pc ~/Music --dry-run --delete

It uses rsync for the heavy lifting but does the tedious source and destination mangling for you. 😀

You can find the code in this Gist.

Dracula Untold, For A Good Reason

I like good stories and came across Dracula Untold. I didn’t like it very much. Maybe it’s because of my heightened sensitivity for anti-islamic racism. Or maybe it’s because the main theme of the movie seems to be that: it’s OK to join the forces of evil as long as your intention is to protect your family and your country … if that makes sense to you, it doesn’t to me.

They try to accomplish this by twisting the historic context both with regards to the time and place, the persons involved and in the loyalties they had. Also they try to convey that Evil is not something despicable in itself, but a tool to be used by the powers in charge.

I assume you’ve seen the movies and can relate tho following facts to the plot and the characters.

My first pain point are the movie’s extremely distorted “Vlad” and “Mehmet” figures. They are created from greatly mixing Vlad II …

… and Vlad III.

  • was called the “Prince of Wallachia”
  • who was later called the “Impaler”
  • grew up as a political captive under the Ottomans (together with his brother Radu)
  • Radu had a friendship with Mehmet II, not Vlad
  • had a personal hatred for Radu and Mehmet
  • known for The Night Attack
  • he is often characterized as a tyrant who took sadistic pleasure in torturing and killing his enemies

And by greatly mixing Murad II …

  • actually ruling in 1442
  • tried to establish Ottoman-friendly rulers in Wallachia

… and Mehmet II.

My second and more general pain point are the movie’s morals which are kind of strange to say the least. :/ Among those seem to be:

  • pacting with the devil is OK, as long as it’s against Muslims
  • choosing to become a monster is alright, as long as you can protect your family and your country
  • you can do whatever you like to your enemies (especially using torture or excessively cruel ways of killing), as long as you’re good-looking
  • you can both be a pious Christian and a henchman of the Devil
  • being “the son of the devil” is a source of pride
  • revenge is good
  • prominent characters in western literature must be made to fight Muslims
  • Muslims must be defeated, even if you have rewrite history

I find this extremely troubling. o_O

JavaScript History as Seen From 2035

Gary Bernhardt presents a thought-provoking history of JavaScript as seen from 2035.

His arguments are that

  • With asm.js JavaScript VMs ran code with 50% of native speed (even in 2013)
  • Anything that can be compiled can be compiled into asm.js
  • Asm.js has basically become the universal runtime

So by further moving the JavaScript VM into the kernel we save ourselves the overhead of hardware process isolation as the VM does this any way.

All this lead to interesting consequences

  • Nobody uses binaries any more, everything is asm.js
  • The windowing systems of old have been ported to the DOM
  • Deployments are as simple as a push
  • JavaScript (as a language) is effectively dead
  • Overall developer happiness has increased

:’D

No, You Go First

Bruce Schneier talks about how security companies sat on knowledge and research data about military-grade Regin malware for at least six years. They only decided to share their knowledge because the Intercept was about to publish an article about it. Their arguments for why they withheld their knowledge until now range from “our customers asked us not to disclose what had been found in their networks” to “we didn’t want to interfere with NSA/GHCQ operations”. :/ It’s safe to say that they sit on a bunch more.

Privacy Consequences of the SPE Hack

Bruce Schneier in his comments on the recent Sony Hack cites a Gizmondo article that sums it up very well why privacy is important to everyone even for mundane everyday stuff we do on the internet:

These are people who did nothing wrong. They didn’t click on phishing links, or use dumb passwords (or even if they did, they didn’t cause this). They just showed up. They sent the same banal workplace emails you send every day, some personal, some not, some thoughtful, some dumb. Even if they didn’t have the expectation of full privacy, at most they may have assumed that an IT creeper might flip through their inbox, or that it was being crunched in an NSA server somewhere. For better or worse, we’ve become inured to small, anonymous violations. What happened to Sony Pictures employees, though, is public. And it is total.

And in Bruce’s words:

These people didn’t have anything to hide. They aren’t public figures. Their details aren’t going to be news anywhere in the world. But their privacy has been violated, and there are literally thousands of personal tragedies unfolding right now as these people deal with their friends and relatives who have searched and reads this stuff.

They Don’t Care About Your “Online” Privacy

Messenger apps show your friends’ online status. Anytime you open the app, they’ll notify the service that you’re “online” at the moment. Now everybody else can see it in their contact lists.

And with everybody I mean anybody! If you have a phone number you can check that person’s online status as often as you want from wherever you want (no need to be friends or anything).

So did a group of researchers at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. They used this “feature” to “find out how frequently and how long users spent with their popular messenger” on a random sample of 1000 people in different countries for over eight months.

Looking through the project’s website should make it clear how little the creators of those apps care …

Moreover, we were able to run our monitoring solution against the WhatsApp services from July 2013 to April 2014 without any interruption. Although we monitored personal information of thousands of users for several months — and thus strongly deviated from normal user behaviour — our monitoring efforts were not inhibited in any way.

… and that they don’t want you to be able to care.

Unfortunately, affected messenger services (like WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.) currently provide no option for disabling access to a user’s “online” status. Even WhatsApp’s newly introduced privacy controls fail to prevent online status tracking, as users still cannot opt-out of disclosing their availability to anonymous parties.