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Like I guessed about two years ago, Google are now trying to undermine the ad blocking market by releasing their own ad blocker, which will of course not block ads served by Google. It will probably also not block other privacy invasions or tracking systems that would benefit Google or its customers. Since Google is the world’s largest advertisement company, that’s quite a few. This is likely just the first step of several that they might take while abusing their browser dominance. Watch carefully as things get worse the higher Chrome’s market share climbs. ...

Canonical are apparently preparing for an IPO. If that happens, I’m pretty sure Microsoft will grab a good chunk of them and maybe absorb them completely later. While Microsoft has been focusing more on the container side with Docker lately, they have also been cuddling with Ubuntu. Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), which runs Ubuntu in a cage, is only one of these examples. Observe also that e.g. Microsoft’s MS-SQL adapter for PHP only explicitly supports Ubuntu and RedHat, none of the other distros. ...

Microsoft yesterday announced Windows 10 S, a cut-down version of Windows 10 for the education market. They plan to make it available to PC makers to sell laptops with, for as little as US$ 200 a pop. “Like a Chromebook, then”, you say? Exactly, like a Chromebook. Services as drugs for kids This is the start of a new turf war for child mindshare. Like drug dealers, Microsoft and Google know that it’s best to get them early, get them young, make them depend on your products. Microsoft even helpfully supplies teaching aids. ...

Some games happen to have wonderful audio (and music), like Wolfenstein: The New Order. Some games happen not to be available natively for Linux, like… err… also Wolfenstein: The New Order. So we play them with WINE, and sometimes there are slight audio issues. But have no fear: If you get audio crackling in such games (especially if your audio device is not running at 44.1 KHz), the following environment variable might fix it for you like it did for me: ...

For a long time I thought there is no such thing as bidirectional clipboard support when using KVM. It turns out I was very, very wrong. All you need to install on Debian-like guest systems is the package spice-vdagent. You may have to start the service afterwards: apt-get install spice-vdagent systemctl start spice-vdagentd Again, this goes on the guest system. On the host system you just have to make sure you’re connecting through spice with a spice client (outdated documentation about that is here). If you use the Virt-Manager GUI, this is all set up correctly by default for Linux guests. ...

The PaperColor theme has been my favorite vim color theme for quite some time now, and I’m happy to find the same theme in Atom as well, even by the same author! This is PaperColor light And this is PaperColor dark They have been ported to the Base16 color scheme system. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, it doesn’t matter at all. Thanks a lot, Nguyen Nguyen, aka NLKNguyen. If I knew how to reach you, I’d send you beer money. ...

Update: This issue is largely resolved nowadays because modern desktop environments include configuration tools for libinput and its acceleration profiles. If you have a recent Debian testing release, you might have noticed that your mouse now behaves very differently. For me, I noticed it when my aiming turned wobbly in Quake. Quake has extremely tight controls and shouldn’t feel as if you’re playing a 2016 console FPS with jelly dildos in place of fingers. So I was a bit surprised when it suddenly did. Also, I couldn’t reliably hit e.g. a close button on a window. ...

TL;DR: Mozilla is largely dependent on Yahoo! We must make sure it is funded by individuals’ donations and a diverse roster of companies to keep it independent, to fight Google’s increasing browser dominance and to ensure our privacy. We must also let Mozilla know what we expect from them. Read on to hear my reasoning. ...

I recently found out about the Decentraleyes add-on for Firefox. To understand why Decentraleyes is a good idea and why it can help you protect your privacy, here’s what’s been happening so far: Web developers all over the world have started using the same libraries of Free Software code to solve the same common problems. This is good. Web developers thought it would be a good idea to host this code on CDNs (distributed content delivery networks). This makes pages load faster and takes the (financial) burden of hosting them off the web developers. This is also good. Large companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook – who make money by analyzing and recording your behavior in order to sell private details about you to other companies – have started offering such library hosting for free. This is bad. Because every time you visit a website that refers to such a hosted library, and that’s hundreds of thousands or millions of websites, you give away your intentions to the company hosting the library. You tell Google where you’ve been on the Internet, and by pinging them every time you open any number of websites, they can track where you’re going, whether you’re using your phone, your tablet or your computer, when your preferred time for web surfing is, etc. ...

Once again, I’m on a rampage to destroy all tearing. But this time not on Nvidia but on Intel. I had this problem on both 4400 and 3000 series Intel chips, but I fixed it with this option for the graphics device in xorg.conf: Option "TearFree" "true" Thanks, one more time, the Arch Linux wiki.