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Messages - Sandra Asja Eickel

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16
Using NoScript is a bit encumbering at first, but by the time one gets those settings as they should be for the daily cruising ... until they make yet another layer of B$cripts that renders one site unusable until those settings are in place again. But mostly it's not that much bother for normal daily use, since we tend to go through only few sites anyway ..

But not exactly your average joe's thing to go by ... Privacy Badger would be my recommendation for non tech savvy person for daily browsing privacy.

That's why I changed the settings of NoScript to allow JavaScript from the first party site for my mother. This is a good compromise between privacy/security and comfort for normal users. Only for a few sites I had to show her to enable JS from a second site.

I don't know if Privacy Badger runs with our browsers, but it's definitivly a good addition for the list of suggested (or better: must have) extensions.

Greetings,
Sandra-Asja


P.S.: I *REALLY* miss the old OS2.org forum software with its hierarchical tree of replies ... :-(

17
Now your posts. Switch off your picture, take something NOT personal.

???


We need - just like SeaMonkey for Windows - the legacy version at https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock-for-f ... y/releases, which also gets updates from time to time, but these have to be loaded manually.
I get a 404 on that address.

That visible link was shortened by OS2.org and I used that to re-create the links here ... I included a working link at the top of the second part.

Greetings,
Sandra-Asja

18
Ivan, careful: AdblockPlus has a telemetry feature. Might be selling data to 3rd parties.. See Mantis ticket #0002397 @ ArcaNoae

I'm logged in, but trying to go to ticked 2397 just gives an "Access Denied."

19
Hi Sandra,

It is nice to see someone in the industry actually telling others to be aware of computer security.  Thank you.

Although I am now retired I still get asked about problems when someone clicks on an email link or opens an attachment and things go wrong.  I have always used PMMAIL as my email client and if people can't send me text emails then I don't read them, it definitely cuts down on the spam.

Nearly all OS/2 users use computers since decades, but quoting Roderick "many OS/2 users live in caves" ...

There are even new OS/2 users - at our meeting in Cologne (30.11.2019) someone popped up who had just rescued an old IBM ThinkPad from going into trash and we helped him to get OS/2 installed.

Nowadays, you can get computers in every super market somewhere between bread and butter - but even if you go to a computer retail store and order a PC together with a printer there, the best you can hope for is a system which is up to date, not filled with bloatware and has drivers for your printer installed ...

Real configuration or education? Forget about that - and in the rare cases, where it is offered, it's deemed too expensive by the buyer ...

For driving cars, you'll need a driving license. For computers, with whom you can cause accidents all over the world and that simultaneously, a corresponding driving license should be a requirement, too.

For myself I use Adblock Plus and  NoScript in firefox on OS/2, Linux Mint, ZorinOS and my Android tablets, they should also be on firefox on my phone but I use that so infrequently I'm not sure as the latest update might have changed things.

Years ago, I found a comparision between Adblock and uBlock where uBlock was way faster and used significantly less memory - I switched and never looked back.

Greetings,
Sandra-Asja

20
The current version of uBlock Origin Legacy is 1.16.4.18. Get it from https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock-for-firefox-legacy/releases. Since .17 auto updating of this extension works - just tested (the other two are unlikely to see any compatible updates, perhaps there will be one for NoScript in the version 5 branch for users of FF45ESR). Don't forget to update the filter lists with uBlock Origin's dashboard from time to time.

I think we should provide this set of compatible browser extensions with ArcaOS in a convenient way.
For the future QT/Chromium based falcon browser current versions of there extensions can be used.

Greetings,
Sandra-Asja

21
Fix for shortened uBlock Origin download link in part one: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock-for-firefox-legacy/releases.
Part two, also translated via DeepL:


In addition, I have recommended to set the "plain text" view as default in mail programs and to switch to "simplified HTML" if necessary, never to "original HTML".

Secure, longer passwords with at least 12 random upper and lower case letters and digits should be used everywhere - and different ones everywhere - to avoid frequent password changes. Special characters, umlauts and possibly also Y and Z can cause problems if you have to enter them on a foreign language keyboard. Especially e-mail accounts need high quality passwords, because other passwords can be reset with them. It is helpful to use a password manager and additionally keep a printout on a piece of paper as an analog backup.

GnuPG should be trimmed for better key generation, since our version is quite old. The public key part should be made known, for example manually on the homepage or at a special place there, on a key server or by attaching it to your own mails during initial contacts (they should then also be signed).
EnigMail by Patrick Brunschwig https://www.enigmail.net/ can be installed in SeaMonkey or ThunderBird as an extension, in SeaMonkey 2.49.5 for WIndows in version 2.0.9, we might need older ones.

The OSI layer 8 in front of the screen should also be trimmed for security, otherwise it won't help much.

As it looks like you have to build the older versions of HTTPS Everywhere from the sources yourself, so it is even more complex than expected ...

Just tried it again:
For the releases you can go through the tags, but there you only get the sources. But the finished XPIs still exist - the attempt to list https://www.eff.org/files/ only results in a "Hello world!", but you can take the download link of the currently offered version and just adjust the tags and then use wget. For FireFox 38.8.0, the latest version to be downloaded is 5.2.21 https://www.eff.org/files/https-everywhere-5.2.21-eff.xpi.

Sandra-Asja

22
German original version is part of https://www.os2.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1524&start=50.
Translation done by copying text into https://www.deepl.com/translator.


There are no slides from my talk on internet security, as I showed some settings using the current FireFox on Ubuntu (the FF in the OS/2 VM had decided to do nothing but create 100% system load) and also addressed things beyond that.

Besides some settings of FireFox itself I recommended the following extensions:

HTTPS Everywhere from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF.org)
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
This extension is used to encrypt as much traffic as possible - many pages integrate images or external sources via classic HTTP instead of the now normal HTTPS, and the extension of the Electronic Frontier Foundation also changes URLs entered to HTTPS if it is known that the page delivers the same content.
SeaMonkey on Windows can use the current version, we need to find out which of the releases on https://github.com/EFForg/https-everywhere/releases still work with our browsers.

uBlock Origin by Raymond Hill
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#ublock-origin
If you use other ad blockers, you should clean them out very quickly (compared to uBlock Origin, they are lame, memory-consuming junk), plus the part can do much more.
We need - just like SeaMonkey for Windows - the legacy version at https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock-for-f ... y/releases, which also gets updates from time to time, but these have to be loaded manually.

NoScript by Giorgio Maone
http://noscript.net/
Since PrefBar no longer runs on newer FireFox to disable JavaScript, I switched to NoScript. This can allow JavaScript for single domains/hostnames temporarily or permanently. You can set up that the main page is automatically allowed to use JavaScript - I set this up for my mother, then most pages will work, only for some you have to allow additional hosts.
I use the stricter default setting myself and only allow temporarily - the only exception is the homepage of my QNAP TVS-873e. Basically a number of frequently used JavaScript suppliers are allowed by default.
SeaMonkey for Windows needs the Classic version 5.1.9 from https://noscript.net/getit, we need the 2.9.0.14 version.

By the way, the two extensions HTTPS Everywhere and NoScript are also part of the standard Tor browser based on the ESR versions of FireFox.


In the browser settings for the current FireFox, I have selected the custom setting in Privacy & Security, checked everything and prohibited all third party cookies, as well as all activity tracking in all windows. When you exit the browser, all cookies are deleted (and thus turned into session cookies, which leads to the need to log in to websites again). Turn off everything in permissions. I have allowed sending crash reports, but not the other things (for our older versions even crash reports don't make any sense).


I also reported about PiHole and Unbound, which was the subject of an article in the c't or Heise has appeared online. This software is available for Linux and Raspis.

PiHole works as a DNS server, and it should be configured so that the router uses it and reports it as DNS server to the clients. PiHole itself either queries the external DNS of provider/Google etc. or it is configured to use the DNSSEC-checking recursive resolver unbound, which will then quasi loop through from the root servers and only queries the DNS servers relevant for the name to be resolved.

PiHole itself is fed with several lists containing millions of names/addresses of known ad-, tracking- and malware servers. The queries to the garbage servers run into nothing (either via NXDOMAIN or via IP of the PiHole server, which returns empty documents on HTTP(S) requests), only the clean queries are forwarded to the configured DNS.
This gives you even more filtering than with uBlock Origin, which should be used on supported browsers anyway. Most importantly, you can use it to keep all those other devices and programs in check where you can't install such software.


There is an audio recording of the lecture in two parts, but it is not on my mobile phone ...

Kind regards
Sandra-Asja

23
Article Discussions / Re: Community Ideas BrainStorm for 2020
« on: February 06, 2020, 09:20:48 pm »
Hi David!

[Bitwiseworks]
They still need a lot of donations to pay their developer to finish this QT5/Browser project (see the donation meter at the bottom of their homepage - 0.5% of the estimated amount is from me, sadly I couldn't afford more).

Five percent is good.

I thought I was doing good [...]

Five percent would be REALLY good (that's about a month of development time). It's five per mil, a tenth of that, so you are doing good, even when you had to slow down in the last few months. Sorry about your truck and the companys plant ...

It really wish, that a lot more people would donate regularly (or could spend a larger sum once), because Dmitriy needs to be paid for his full time development job. We can't afford him to have to look for another job to finance his family, as that would drastically reduce the amount of time he could spend on developing for us.

And with the new GCC 9.2 port including many things in the toolchain, porting (or maintaining) other tools and applications has become a lot easier, because now it's "only" needed to fiddle with OS/2-specific things instead of having to do a lot of hacks to get the newer sources to compile at all with the old version 4 of GCC.
A compiler is not an end user tool like OpenOffice, but it's essential for providing such applications - you can buy a sponsor unit dedicated for GCC if you want.
And a library like QT5 is also not an end user tool, but a lot of applications are built using it, so it's essential, too.

I'll go to miss SeaMonkey in the future, but even on other platforms it massivly lags behind FireFox, as there are so many breaking changes coming in ever faster release cycles, without huge manpower it simply wasn't feasible to try to keep somehow up with them.
To be able to provide a new browser for OS/2 without so much hassle, a webkit/chromium based browser like falcon became the new target. As this required a current QT5 (we had QT4) and also could provide us with a lot more current end user software, the port was started.

For an IT project it is good in time, but there were several other things to do beside just porting QT5 itself, like porting current versions of GCC and other tools, as they are prerequisites for being able to finish QT5. More time means more money is needed, best in form of a steady flow.

So I absoluetly agree with Martins #1: Support Arca Noae and Bitwise works.


With the upcoming USB 3 support (and later UEFI) from Arca Noae, a lot more modern hardware can be used, so there will be enough stuff to add or update Martins #2: More reports and list of supported hardware.

I like #6: More Instructions, articles on how to build a development environment.
It's probably never been easier to turn an end user system into a development machine.
Install all those development stuff via ANPM onto your PC.
Do some magic ...
And with luck, it is just a git clone and a make ...
That would be a dream and #9: Porting open source software to OS/2-ArcaOS.

Sandra-Asja

24
I know this is a really old topic, but I think it's worth refreshing with a new link to Arca Noae about exactly this theme:

https://www.arcanoae.com/what-arca-noaes-upcoming-uefi-support-means-for-arcaos/

In other threads, I've written more about this topic and USB 3 (XHCI) support.

Greetings,
Sandra-Asja

25
Article Discussions / Re: Community Ideas BrainStorm for 2020
« on: February 05, 2020, 08:26:27 pm »
But sadly we don't have enough resources like money, people and skills (or even a business case) to pull a full OS/2 open source clone. Resources are basically set on Arca Noae creating drivers to allow OS/2 run on today's hardware. But there is not a longer term strategy to became an open platform and try to clone it to have a high level of compatibility with native OS/2 software.

Don't forget Bitwiseworks http://www.bitwiseworks.com/ - without them we wouldn't have much current software, like OpenOffice 4.1.7, our older FireFox and now QT 5.13 in beta (and GCC 9.2 together with a lot of new or refreshed tools to be able to continue porting Linux stuff - see https://github.com/bitwiseworks) with the goal of a new chromium based browser in the not too far future.

They still need a lot of donations to pay their developer to finish this QT5/Browser project (see the donation meter at the bottom of their homepage - 0.5% of the estimated amount is from me, sadly I couldn't afford more). Most of their software is free, but they ask for the OpenOffice for OS/2 binary money (this more or less allows for keeping the port current, but doesn't generate otherwise income to finance other tasks). All money (except the Austrian VAT) goes into development, the owners have other jobs to generate income for their living.

And unlike some other companies in the past, Arca Noae and Bitwiseworks DO deliver, even if the progress is not as fast as we all wish, but with tight budgets and very few developers, their output and progress is astonishing. Who would have thought it to be possible to run our old Operating System on UEFI systems without BIOS compatibility, /2?

See https://www.arcanoae.com/what-arca-noaes-upcoming-uefi-support-means-for-arcaos/ - I hope that USB 3 (XHCI) support will make it into 5.0.5, because that is even more pressing (USB 2.0 ports on modern board are in reality speed-crippled USB 3 ports with enhanced compatibility for problematic USB devices, not real EHCI ports which would work with our older drivers). Both features work on at least some of the tested environments.

Greetings,
Sandra-Asja

26
Hardware / Re: Thinkpad X60s + X6 UltraBase
« on: January 26, 2020, 05:59:46 pm »
The restored ArcaNoae Server (they had a hardware failure in December) runs inside a VirtualBox and its network behaviour is really bad. I didn't have corrupted or broken downloads, but wget is kicked out after downloading a single file (and so it doesn't timestamp the file to server time), the connection is slow (around 3 MBit/s - that would be okay for 50 parallel downloads, but not for three).

We can hope that this will get better in a week or so ...

Greetings,
Sandra-Asja

27
Setup & Installation / Re: Airboot & GPT
« on: January 25, 2020, 01:41:40 am »
Maybe AirBoot can be extended independently to continue booting from a GPT boot partition on a secondary disk without modifying that disk.


The first thing you might be able to do with a GPT disk is creating a trap dump partition on it :-).
We need a new facility for that as the old one is limited to FAT16 (with a maximum partition size of 2GB) and modern computers have much more RAM than that, used even by our operating system.

But don't expect anything soon - and in a crashed state normal drivers don't work, so this highly experimental GPT support is limited to dumps and has to be extended to LVM/DASD and such and then needs thorough testing.


UEFI boot and XHCI (USB 3.0) support are in beta test now and hopefully end up in 5.0.5 together with the first few NLS versions sometime this year; this feature is way before that stage, perhaps it is presented (if it is further than requiring a system crash) as a sneak preview during WSE or WS US like it had been with UEFI (without CSM) boot to PM with installer to show ongoing research efforts and their results.


So keep your ArcaOS or Driver Subscriptions current and don't forget to send a few sponsor units regularly to BWW, too, to keep our system alive! Progress is not a fast as we all wish, but with those few people behind it, they do deliver a lot and with quality.


Perhaps a different tool like Acronis TrueImage (optionally with universal restore) or DFSee could do the task - there might be registry hacks required to prepare for a change between the two partitioning schemes, also the disk order could require tweaks to the boot config of windows. Just to repeat: Don't try this without a working backup - of both disks!

Sandra-Asja

28
Applications / Re: Odin on Warp 4.52 virtualbox
« on: January 21, 2020, 09:38:24 pm »
The insufficient disk space problem means usually, that the program is using a signed 32bit value and the free space modulo 4GB is between 2 and 4 GB, which causes the value to be treated as negative. This can be fixed be filling up the hard disk. For DOS programs there is a tool that reports always less than 2GB.

Greetings
Sandra-Asja

29
Hardware / Re: Another odd question
« on: January 21, 2020, 09:28:19 pm »
Hi ivan!

Since a number of these workstations will be moved (rolling trolleys) more things to be unplugged is not a case (the TP-Link unit I mentioned can be fixed to the back of the workstation and is powered from it. Then there is only the power cable between the workstation and no other cables to trip over.

Depending if you have a multi-outlet power strip on the trolleys, you could either screw the wireless repeater to it or you could use powerline adapters - these would even work when the PC is directly connected to the wall outlet. Just put a powerline adapter with has a power outlet on it's front, plug PC power cable and ethernet cable in it and tie them together, then it would be still only one cord to trip over.

Yes, I know USB 3 is under development but the impression I got from the last presentation video was that it would work with keyboard and trackball if nothing else.  You mention USB 2 add in cards.  Unless they are based on the Via chipset they have a tendency not to work because they are built on a USB 3 chipset and use the USB 2 pass-through feature.

The minimum requirement to be useful would be support for keyboard, mouse and mass storage devices in the new USB 3.0 driver. The new 32bit USB stack does not support isochronous transfers as required for audio or video. On my test system, the XHCI (USB 3.0) driver does not work, but UEFI installation was okay with a CD-ROM attached to USB 2.0 (the Lenovo X250 notebook has a setup setting to switch between USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 host controllers).

For old PCI slots it's easier and cheaper to find real USB 2.0 adapter cards.
For PCIe, I bought a "StarTech.com 7 Port PCI Express Low Profile High Speed USB 2.0 Adapter Card", which adds six external and one internal (that one has only pins) high speed USB 2.0 ports to any PCIe compatible PC. It came with a full profile bracket (which I use) and a driver CD for other operating systems. Part # PEXUSB7LP, BarCode 065030837408. It needs a floppy type power connector. IIRC, there is also a slightly cheaper version of this card with four ports (3+1).

Not all modern motherboards have PS/2 ports, many of them just have USB ports and as far as I have been able to find out you need a PS/2 port that is designed as a dual port to run both keyboard and trackball.

Some modern boards have still two PS/2 ports, but those that have only one usually support both mouse and keyboard simultaneously with a splitter cable (and a little bit of luck, that it has the corresponding wiring scheme, there are multiple versions for this task). Of course, without a PS/2 port you'll need a supported USB host controller like on the adapter card mentioned above.

Greetings
Sandra-Asja

30
Hardware / Re: Another odd question
« on: January 20, 2020, 07:46:28 pm »
Why not using a wireless repeater or powerline adapter with ethernet port and connect that to OS/2?

USB3 development is on the way as is UEFI boot without need for CSM, but it's not ready yet.

You can buy real USB2 cards for PCIe (or old PCI slots), I have such a card on my i7-7700K, the mainboard has also a PS/2 port (with a Y-cable it's possible to connect both mouse and keyboard to a single PS/2 port).

Greetings from Germany
Sandra-Asja

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