Category Archives: Tech

Apple Arcade’s TMNT Splintered Fate talking Open-Source and InfoSec

Ever since my Sony PS4 Pro’s HDD broke down last year I’ve been using my iPad as my main gaming device. There are some awesome games such as Moonshot, Dead Cells+ and my personal favorite, LEGO® Star Wars™: Castaways.

A day (or two, I’m not sure) ago, Viacom International Inc. and Paramount Global in collaboration with Nickelodeon released TMNT Splintered Fate. I’ve been playing the game for couple of hours now and I like it very much.

But this is not a game review, as I’m not a reviewer.

I’m not sure if people read/listen to game dialogs these days, but I do.

I just encountered DONATELLO, METALHEAD and APRIL talking about software, open-source and hacking.

Unfortunately, as I was not aware about the conversation, I had to restart the game from scratch twice so I record the the dialog.

Here’s a GIF and the dialog itself 🙂 I hope you appreciate it as much as I did.

Tmnt landscape

DONATELLO: Metalhead, can you give me an update on the microchip I gave you to analyze before?
METALHEAD: Affirmative. Analysis complete. Top-level configuration consists of standard StockGen operational code.
METALHEAD: Command controls for MOUSERs, etcetera.
DONATELLO: Open source?
METALHEAD: Both open source and proprietary, most of which we have already accessed in the past. However… the drive also contains inert sub-configurations, protected by military-grade encryption.
APRIL: What do you mean, ‘inert?’
METALHEAD: Hidden ‘ghost code’ that I posit contain command executables serving an unknown purpose.
DONATELLO: Hm. Kinda like the computer version of a sleeper agent.
METALHEAD: Affirmative.
APRIL: But why would Stockman hide ghost code inside his own code? It’s like he’s hacking himself.
DONATELLO: Yeah… it is strange. But we’ve gotta find out what’s in that hidden code before we can jump to any conclusions.
DONATELLO: Metalhead, do what you can to break through that encryption.
METALHEAD: Command acknowledged.
APRIL: Correct me if I’m wrong, Metalhead, but with this new info we should be able to… shall we say… borrow some StockGen tech to occasionally support you guys from afar?
METALHEAD: If you are equating ‘borrow’ with ‘hack into and control,’ that is affirmative, April O’Neil.
DONATELLO: Well! That’s exciting…
APRIL: Right? So, keep an eye open for some friendly support drops while you’re out there. We’ll have to keep it low key for now. Don’t want to set off any unnecessary alarms with the powers that be.

That’s all folks…

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Antranig Vartanian

April 27, 2023

I use the Skype mobile app once a month, usually to talk with friends and family. I just noticed this.

There’s a new tab/view named “Today” which shows a feed of articles… WHY???

Are all proprietary vendors trying to do “everything, everywhere” or what?

I have no words, I’m still shocked.

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Light & Dark Wallpapers for iOS: Solving a problem that Apple created

One of the best features of macOS is the ability to have Light and Dark, as well as Dynamic Wallpapers. You’d think that Apple has done some Apple-y way to implement that, but not at all.

It’s actually part of the High Efficiency Image File Format that allows sequences which are multiple time-related images.

Here’s an example of Ventura’s default wallpaper.

Ventura graphic

As you can see, it’s multiple images.

So a while back, I thought hey, I can make a Light & Dark wallpaper for myself, which I did.

SCR 20230414 w9m

For some reason, I forgot to use these wallpapers on my iPhone and iPad. Days ago I tried, and oh boy, Apple messed up again.

Here’s how the image looks like on iOS/iPadOS.

Heic

It just loops over the images and if you try to set it as a wallpaper it sets the first one. That’s it…

Anyway, now that I’ve complained about Apple, let me show you how to use “Dynamic” wallpapers. Again, this is just a hack, it would’ve been easier if Apple just tested their own wallpapers on iOS/iPadOS.

Let’s start with iOS first.

Setup two identical wallpapers using the new iOS lock screen customization thingie.

IMG 6553
IMG 6554

After that, setup a Shortcut automation to set the wallpaper based on time. In this case, I use sunset and sunrise.

IMG 6551

The automation itself looks like this.
IMG 6552

Fun fact: Apple messed up again. You know how your iPhone changes appearance automatically between Light and Dark mode based on sunset and sunrise? Well, it doesn’t match with Shortcuts automator! the Shortcut automator will set your wallpaper sooner than iOS changes its appearance. I guess they each have their own “calculation” of when sunset/sunrise is.

Okay, but this wasn’t that hard.

How about iPadOS. Well, that’s more complicated.

First, you need to have a copy of each wallpaper (light and dark), and then you have to put them into an Album.

After that, you need a Shortcut automation that looks for these images and sets them as a wallpaper. Another inconsistency that we really didn’t need between platforms…

Here’s an example.

IMG 0125

Here’s the automation itself

IMG 0127

Fun fact: Sometimes iPadOS will forget to set the wallpaper and you’ll get a notification that says “Missed automation” or something like that. I forgot to screenshot that, but if you have an example, please do send me an image.

Congratulations, now you have Dynamic Wallpapers on iOS/iPadOS.

That’s all folks…

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libucl wrapper in Oberon-2 for Vishap Oberon Compiler

Like I said in my previous post, this is a long project and it relies on a lot of things 🙂

Wrapping libxo was fun, but wrapping libucl was way more complicated. However, it is done. It’s not a complete port, however, it has the basics to get started. The goes is to have all wrappers match the their libraries.

The source is at antranigv/voclibucl and here’s a screenshot of what it can do.

Screenshot 2023 04 08 at 6 46 14 PM

Next, I will be improving these wrappers and then work on lzc, a.k.a. Lib_ZFS_Core 😉

See you soon 🙂

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libxo wrapper in Oberon-2 for Vishap Oberon Compile

I’m working on a new project, which is still only 10% done. For that project I chose to use the Oberon–2 programming language and the Vishap Oberon Compiler.

After seeing libxo on FreeBSD, I’m not sure I can go back to write or printf, so I decided to write an Oberon wrapper for it.

I just finished the basics but it’s already usable for day-to-day outputs, containers/lists/instances and exit codes.

The source is at antranigv/voclibxo and here’s a screenshot of what it can do.

Screenshot 2023 04 05 at 4 40 45 PM

Next, I will be wrapping libucl in Oberon.

See you soon 🙂

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Antranig Vartanian

March 28, 2023

I’m sure at this point everyone heard that GitHub updated their RSA SSH host key.

This is a common issue, say you re-installed a server at the same IP/hostname. No problem, you remove a line and put in another one.

But honestly, I thought that GitHub had SSHFP records in their DNS.

$ dig SSHFP github.com +short | wc 
       0       0       0

Not so much… But then again, looks like they DO need to sign their zone first.

$ whois github.com | grep DNSSEC
   DNSSEC: unsigned
DNSSEC: unsigned

I have to say, using SSHFP has changed my life. Obviously there are some issues (Windows and macOS, specifically), but if you’re running a normal, modern operating system (hello BSDs, hello Linux) then it’s like magic!

I just setup one for our hackerspace!

$ whois hackerspace.am | grep DS
   DNS servers (zone signed, 1 DS record):
$ dig hackerspace.am SSHFP +short | wc -l
       6

Anyway, I’m sure many CI/CD pipelines are going crazy because of this… Good luck everyone!

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Design Guidelines vs Pushing The Limits

One of the design guidelines of Jailer is don’t break FreeBSD. As in if someone installed and used Jailer, and then deleted the Jailer binary and libraries, their Jails would still run without any issues. We do this with minimal intervention, for example, jailer init patches FreeBSD’s /etc/rc.d/jail, but in a way that you wouldn’t feel the difference much. We don’t create new rc.conf variables, we just change couple of loops. In a way, you can keep these changes even if you delete Jailer so your system would be much improved. Obviously, we do sent these patches to FreeBSD src.

But I’m in front of an issue right now. On one side, I want to keep these guidelines, on the other, pushing the limit will allow me to improve Jailer way more than I expected.

These are the things that I think about before sleep, or during the shower. I gave a promise, that I will not break the Jail ecosystem. But what if, just what if, the ecosystem was broken in the first place?

Some of you might know, that we’ve been working on integrating libucl with Jail. The experiments have been going well, in such that I feel I want to integrate these experiments with Jailer already, even before they get into FreeBSD (and they might even not get in at all).

My dream of Jailer and its ecosystem is complex. I feel that these integration would do good on the long-term, but I want to keep the short term alive as well.

One idea is to fork Jailer, keep two versions of it. One version that’s FreeBSD compliant, and another one that is pushing the limits.

This is going to be an interesting week…

That’s all folks…

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Link

WordPress.com owner Automattic acquires an ActivityPub plugin so blogs can join the Fediverse

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Tumblr and other web publishing tools, is the new owner of the ActivityPub for WordPress plugin and has also recruited its developer to come work for the company, according to Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg.

This makes me very happy! I’ve been using that plugin for a while now. As a matter of fact, that plugin was the main reason why I moved to WordPress.

The newly acquired plugin allows WordPress.org and WordPress.com blog owners to reach readers on federated platforms, like the Twitter rival Mastodon and others.

I absolutely hate that people are calling Mastodon a rival of Twitter. Mastodon (and the decentralized web) is not a rival to anything. It’s like saying that Coca-Cola’s rival is… water. Nope, Coca-Cola’s rival is Pepsi, Twitter’s rival is <insert a corporate and centralized social media here>, but not ActivityPub based networks.

The Internet is going back to its roots, and I am loving it!

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Antranig Vartanian

March 7, 2023

You’d think that macOS would have a Mission Control shortcut that does “Switch to last used Desktop”, but no, it does not. And this makes macOS very hard to use for people like me, who have 10 Desktops.

Screenshot 2023 03 07 at 2 50 52 PM

On the other hand, WindowMaker, the window manager that “reproduces the elegant look and feel of the NeXTSTEP user interface”, which macOS also was based on, had that shortcut for almost exactly 10 years.

Screenshot 2023 03 07 at 2 50 12 PM

Someone PLEASE add this simple and powerful feature.

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Call For Testing: Jailer v0.1.1

Well, it’s finally here! After a week of sleepless work, I cleaned up the Jailer codebase and added many features (and removed some as well!) that I wanted since last year 🙂

If you are reading this, please consider testing Jailer on FreeBSD. The codebase is at illuria/jailer.

The README.md should have all the info that you need to run Jailer.

If find any issues, please report to illuria/jailer/issues or you can email me personally at antranigv [at] freebsd [dot] am

Here’s the roadmap for what’s coming next

  1. Complete NetGraph support using jng.
  2. Jailerfile, which will be something similar to Dockerfile, allowing developers to create consistent images.
  3. jailerd and jailerctl, for remote jailer automation. This will be an open-source port of what illuria has already developed.
  4. Distributed Jailer, where jailerctl list will show not just what’s on a remote machine, but on a remote datacenter, inspired by Triton. Again, we have this at illuria, but we need to create an open-source port.

This release is dedicated to

Thank you for reading 🙂

That’s all folks…

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