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A simple recipe to run Firefox as a separate user. With almost no drawbacks, this puts one more obstacle in the way of a remote attacker that wants to access your personal data.

First, create an account to run Firefox as. I use adduser for these tasks.

You probably want to add the user to the typical audio and video groups so you can play web videos, etc.

Second, give your normal user permission to run Firefox as the new user, through sudo. This can be done by editing the /etc/sudoers file and adding a line like this one:

Where "your_user" is your normal username. Third, this new user needs to be able to use your X server. Run the following from the X session, X init or window manager startup scripts:

And that’s it. You should be able to run it as sudo -u webbrowser firefox. You can launch it from a GUI launcher icon, or create a script that wraps this operation. By using a wrapper, you can set it for file associations in programs more easily depending on your desktop environment. I have $HOME/bin in my PATH, so I created $HOME/bin/firefox with the following contents.

The original Firefox can still be launched with its full path or by creating a symlink with a slightly different name in a PATH directory.

Caution: an attacker exploiting a Firefox bug could still run code as the user running the Firefox process. They could still take screenshots, or log your key strokes or maybe launch programs and inject input events. Like I said, it’s only one more obstacle.

Safer but more inconvenient approaches could be:

From April 27th to May 1st I traveled to Rome with my wife. She had been wanting to go to Rome all her life, so there was a great deal of anticipation in this trip. It did not let us down a bit and we enjoyed every minute we spent in the city. We’re eager to go back some day and spend a bit more time slowly tasting a few things we didn’t manage to visit and revisiting our favorite places.

I briefly examined the web server logs today and I noticed a couple of interesting things.

First, in spite of Google announcing they’re closing the Google Reader service on July 1, 2013, the number of subscriptions as reported by their bot has not decreased. In fact, it has increased. Other news services don’t seem to be accessing the RSS feed so far.

Second, spammers seem to be accessing files from this blog and leaving a referrer URL behind that links to their spamming sites. I suppose the goal is not to spam anyone reading the server logs, which would be a bit dumb. Maybe if a site provides statistics about referrals and visitors they intend for those stat pages to link back to their site improving the page rank? Have you seen such a thing before?

I like Zelda games a lot, but can’t call myself a Zelda fan because I’ve only played four of the sixteen main titles released so far. Here’s my review of the latest game in the series, which happens to be one of the first ones in the game universe chronology.

If you haven’t played any Zelda games before, they are RPG games. Most of them were played with a top view in the 2D days and changed to third person perspective when 3D was introduced. In them, you play an incarnation of the game protagonist, Link, at some point in time in the Zelda universe, and usually you have to rescue and/or help the incarnation of Princess Zelda defeat the main antagonist.

The first game I played was A Link to the Past for the SNES, which I thought was great at the moment and I devoured it in 3 days when I was a kid and had to be at home fighting the flu.

Then, I played Ocarina of Time for the N64, which was the best game I had ever played at that moment. I seriously think buying the N64 was almost justified only to be able to play that game. I could go on and on about this game but reading the "Reception" section at Wikipedia should be enough. It was one of the highest points in video gaming history.

I couldn’t save enough money to get a copy of Majora’s Mask, which was released for the N64 too, so I had to wait a lot of years until I got to play Twilight Princess for the Wii. For me, Twilight Princess was another amazing game. It couldn’t be as innovative as Ocarina of Time was when it arrived, and that’s its only major "fault". Both games can be directly compared. The technological advances in both graphics and game controls made Twilight Princess essentially a sequel in spirit. In Twilight Princess, you have everything you have in Ocarina of Time, but multiplied by a factor of 10.

So we finally arrive to Skyward Sword. I wanted to play this game about a year ago, a bit after it was released, but I had other important things to do then, and a lot of games were waiting to be played.

While still a Zelda game, it’s no doubt different from Twilight Princess. Most critics would say it’s yet another iteration and improvement in the game series, making it the best game so far. And many praised the game controls and how the Motion Plus controller perfectly tracks your hand and allows you to slash enemies with precision.

Yet I didn’t enjoy it so much as Twilight Princess. The game is long and the story is interesting, as always, but I found 3 minor flaws worth pointing out.

First, the game controls sometimes lose the screen center point. This means you can be pointing at the middle of the screen and the game responds as if you were pointing at one of the edges or corners. It’s not very frequent and I’m sure game developers were aware of this small problem, because they made the Wii remote down arrow a "reset" for this problem. You point to the center of the screen, hit the down arrow and that’s the center from then on. Also, while the game follows your movement almost perfectly, it interprets a slash when you move the remote fast. In the heat of battle sometimes I moved the remote too fast while preparing to hit and it considered it a premature slash in the wrong direction. This detail can be important in the game because enemies defend themselves from attacks coming from one side or another.

The second minor flaw is that some side missions don’t seem that well integrated into the main game as with other titles, and the gameplay is a bit too linear at some points.

Finally, and maybe I’m getting old, I found the game too easy for my taste. I’m now playing it in "hero" mode, which you have access to after finishing the game for the first time, and I really think it’s a bit more balanced this way. Most dungeon puzzles were easy too.

As for the score, those minor flaws prevent me from giving it a 10 out of 10. It’s a score I prefer to preserve for other games. This one is a superb game that you should definitely play and it’s a 9 or 9.5 out of 10. Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess get a 10 out of 10, but this one is, after all, a Zelda game and I’m a spoiled child. :-)

If you’re a package maintainer for a Linux distribution, or a user who likes to compile a few packages by yourself, you’ll have faced the problem of noticing when a piece of software has a new release.

In the Windows world, which (still) lacks a centralized repository of software packages and users normally download and install the programs they need, it’s almost a requirement nowadays to include some kind of version checking mechanism with your program. Many major programs have it, like Firefox and Thunderbird, Chrome, Adobe Flash, Oracle Java, Steam, etc. Windows itself has Windows Update.

In the Linux world, usually you don’t want to be notified in-app because the user who is running the program doesn’t have privileges to overwrite program files without an intermediate mechanism like sudo and, furthermore, the version they’re running probably has been installed as a package and the proper way to upgrade the program is by upgrading its package. Still, package maintainers need to be notified of new releases.

Before Github and Bitbucket, many FOSS packages were hosted at SourceForge. In this site, you can create a user account and subscribe to file releases for any project hosted there. If the project was self-hosted or hosted anywhere else, or even if it was hosted at SourceForge, you also had the option of going to Freecode (formerly Freshmeat). It’s a project database (it doesn’t hold project contents) and also allowed subscribing to new releases. Many people still use it to announce new releases reliably (for example, I’m subscribed to Iotop). Release announcements are approved by humans, but everyone can submit new releases for any project which hasn’t forbidden doing so. This can make announcing new releases a collective effort. Obviously, it works best if it’s the project maintainer who submits releases. Notably, Freecode also features an API that can be used to get and post releases automatically. It started more than 9 years ago as an XML-RPC API. Now I feel old because I remember reading that announcement when it was published.

The best solution to the problem, in my humble opinion, is the announce mailing list, but not many projects have one. It’s a simple read-only mailing list that only gets release announcements. By being read-only, spam is not a problem and you only get what you’re interested in, but it requires setting up mailing list software and a server somewhere, which is not an immediate option for many FOSS authors. Some other projects have mailing lists but not an announce one, which exposes you to much more traffic. A few examples of projects that have one: Valgrind, i3 (see the bottom of the page) or Wireshark.

In the Wireshark mailing lists page you can see what is in my opinion the second best solution to this problem. They publish an RSS feed of Wireshark announce messages. RSS feeds need no subscription (in the mailing list sense) and barely any infrastructure. If the site you’re hosting your project in gives you a bit of web space, you can automatically create and host an RSS feed, leveraging the power of the web to provide information in a standardized format that is easy to manage for your users. This seems to be the best solution when hosting in Github or by yourself.

As I’m myself guilty of not providing proper release announcements for my software sometimes, nothing’s better than a public promise to do the right thing in the future. If you’re the maintainer of a FOSS project, consider using RSS feeds or announce mailing lists if possible.