Hackability Matters

The Unix Way™ provides extreme hackability. The idea is that software should be written as tools to accomplish discrete tasks, and that it should be modular, extensible, and play well with others. It’s like software as a LEGO set — you can put the blocks together however you want, within limits, and make stuff that’s significantly cooler than any of the individual blocks alone.
Clearly this doesn’t work for all applications — things like graphics editors and web browsers don’t really lend themselves to being elegant tools that integrate well with others, right? It’s only natural that they’re bloaty walled gardens. What happens in the browser must stay in the browser, right?
But how sad is it that the one piece of software you use all day, your window into cyberspace, doesn’t play well with the rest of your system? I’d honestly never really been bothered by that fact until stumbling on TabFS. It’s an extension to Chrome that represents the tabs on your browser as if they were files on your local system — The Unix Way™. And what this means is that any other program that can read from or write to a file can open tabs, collect them, change webpages on the fly, and so on. It opens up the browser to you.
[...]
So please, if you’re working on a big software package, or even just writing a plug-in for one, do think about how you can make more of its abilities available to the casual scripter. Otherwise, it’s just plastic blocks that don’t fit with the rest of the set.
-
- Login or register to post comments
Printer-friendly version
- 2046 reads
PDF version
More in Tux Machines
- Highlights
- Front Page
- Latest Headlines
- Archive
- Recent comments
- All-Time Popular Stories
- Hot Topics
- New Members
IBM/Red Hat: Kafka Monthly Digest, Red Hat Upselling, and Cockpit 239
| LibreOffice 7.1.1 Community available for download
LibreOffice 7.1.1 Community, the first minor release of the LibreOffice 7.1 family, targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users, is available for download from https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. LibreOffice 7.1.1 includes over 90 bug fixes and improvements to document compatibility.
For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners, with long-term support options, professional assistance, custom features and Service Level Agreements: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.
LibreOffice Community and the LibreOffice Enterprise family of products are based on the LibreOffice Technology platform, the result of years of development efforts with the objective of providing a state of the art office suite not only for the desktop but also for mobile and the cloud.
Products based on LibreOffice Technology are available for major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and Chrome OS), mobile platforms (Android and iOS) and the cloud. They may have a different name, according to each company brand strategy, but they share the same LibreOffice unique advantages, robustness and flexibility.
|
croc Is A Tool For Resumable, Encrypted File And Folder Transfers Between Computers (Command Line)
croc is a free and open source command line tool for secure file transfers between computers. It uses relay-assisted peer-to-peer transactions and end-to-end encryption via password-authenticated key exchange. The program is written in Go and is available for Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux and *BSD.
The idea behind croc is being able to transfer files and folders between cross-platform computers securely, fast and easy. With support for resumable, peer-to-peer transfers. As a bonus feature, croc is also able to securely transfer a short text or URL directly.
The data transfer is done using a relay, either using raw TCP sockets or websockets. When the sender and the receiver are on the same LAN, croc uses a local relay, otherwise a public relay is used. Thanks to this, croc can send files between computers in the same LAN, or over the Internet, without having port-forwarding enabled.
The data going through the relay is encrypted using a PAKE-generated session key. For this, croc uses code phrases, a combination of three random words. By default, a code phrase can only be used once between two parties, so an attacker would have a chance of less than 1 in 4 billion to guess the code phrase correctly to steal the data.
| Linux distributions: All the talent and hard work that goes into building a good one
I regularly read the Linux Mint Blog, not only because it is useful to keep up with what is happening with the Linux Mint distribution but also because it occasionally gives very interesting insights into the development and maintenance of a Linux distribution in general, and the Linux Mint distribution(s) in particular.
To be honest, I was disappointed some years ago when Clem (Clement Lefebvre) discontinued his Segfault blog, because it always contained good technical information and interesting insights.
|
Recent comments
1 min 1 sec ago
6 hours 6 min ago
7 hours 25 min ago
8 hours 27 min ago
8 hours 55 min ago
8 hours 57 min ago
14 hours 45 min ago
14 hours 50 min ago
15 hours 46 min ago
15 hours 51 min ago