Linux and OSS hints

PGP/S-MIME on Linux Command Line, helping Kontact (and other Mailers)

I recently had to decrypt a PGP/S-MIME encrypted mail. It’s been a long time since I was confronted with that format, and KDE’s Kontact does not seem to support this out of the box– actually only Thunderbird seems to do, and that’s not on my machines. Here’s what I did.

This Mail came in.

Encrypted Mail

With the right PGP-Key I could decrypt it:

decrypted

Upsii… there’s another encrypted file in there, exactly as the standard RFC from 2001 defines – this way even attachments are hidden from those that don’t have the private PGP key.

Since KDE’s crypto engine couldn’t help, and Thunderbird is not configured on my machines, I went to the command line. I saved the attachment “encrypted.asc” and ran the command “gpg –output uncrypted.asc –decrypt encrypted.asc“:

mfeilner@alquarismi:~/Downloads> gpg –output uncrypted.asc –decrypt encrypted.asc
gpg: WARNUNG: Unsichere Zugriffsrechte des Home-Verzeichnis `/home/mfeilner/.gnupg’
gpg: verschlüsselt mit 4096-Bit RSA Schlüssel, ID XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, erzeugt 2015-04-24
(…)
gpg: verschlüsselt mit 2048-Bit RSA Schlüssel, ID XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, erzeugt 2018-12-25
(…)
mfeilner@alquarismi:~/Downloads>

… and that way I got a file named uncrypted.asc that I could open with my favorite text editor or emacs.

Things I Read

Nice article by the Guardian on how COVID is changeing us…

Since early 2020 I’ve been telling my friends that I doubt there is a back to pre-corona thing. And I told them this is a stress test for societies, health systems, but also for the variety of authoritarian systems or non-authoritarism. I didn’t foresee that China and some Asia countries can party again while the free western world is locked in, but who would? 

Has a year of living with Covid-19 rewired our brains? | World news | The Guardian

“People talk about the return to normality, and I don’t think that is going to happen,” says Frank Snowden, a historian of pandemics at Yale, and the author of Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present. Snowden has spent 40 years studying pandemics. Then last spring, just as his phone was going crazy with people wanting to know if history could shed light on Covid-19, his life’s work landed in his lap. He caught the coronavirus. Snowden believes that Covid-19 was not a random event. All pandemics “afflict societies through the specific vulnerabilities people have created by their relationships with the environment, other species, and each other,” he says. Each pandemic has its own properties, and this one – a bit like the bubonic plague – affects mental health. Snowden sees a second pandemic coming “in the train of the Covid-19 first pandemic … [a] psychological pandemic”.

Linux and OSS hints

#OSS rocks. #Linux Rocks. Autorotate PDFs

#Linux has some mighty PDF Toolkits. One of them is pdftk. I am using it so that we don’t have to bother anymore about orientation of Files on the scanner. We just delete the wrong ones. 🙂

!/bin/bash
INFILE=ls.txt
ls *pdf -1 > $INFILE
while IFS=”²” read -r line
do
PDF='basename $line | rev | cut -c 5- | rev‘
#Links drehen:
pdftk “$line” cat 1-endwest output “$PDF”_left.pdf
#Rechts drehen:
pdftk “$line” cat 1-endeast output “$PDF”_right
#180 degrees:
pdftk “$line” cat 1-endsouth output “$PDF”_upsidedown.pdf
done <$INFILE

(use the right upticks ` in the basename line, wordpress messes them up…)
References

Presentation on “Bubble Out”- Event of MFG Baden-Württemberg

On October 22nd 2020, Markus Feilner had a presentation on “Open Source in the field of Mixed Reality” in the event “Bubble Out”.

“Bubble Out” is a series of events about new impulses and connection out of the bubble for museums and other cultural and memorial institutions, so-called GLAMs, from Baden-Württemberg. The events include inspiring evening programs with surprising insights and offer the opportunity to connect and discuss innovative topics with members of different branches than IT. Weeks before the event, Markus was on the jury of “Open Culture BW meets VR” and was allowed to present the keynote at the award ceremony. He held the laudatio speech for the winner of the award “Most Innovative”, which was the team of the Game “Apollonia’s nightmare”: Judith Langer, Stefan Bregenzer, Jan Detting, Louis Trouillier, Ben Ruff, all students of Hochschule Furtwangen.

Global Change

Die bisher letzte Klimaapokalypse

“Unsere derzeitigen anthropogenen Emissionen sind jedoch etwa 14-mal
höher als die Spitzenemissionen während des Aussterbens”, gibt Jurikova
zu bedenken. “Tausend Jahre sind erdgeschichtlich gesehen gar nichts”,
so Forscherin. “Die rund 200 Jahre seit der Industrialisierung hingegen
sind ein winziger Zeitraum für derart große Mengen an CO₂.”

https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/natur/die-bisher-letzte-klimaapokalypse-und-was-wir-daraus-lernen-koennen-a-e41e887a-b050-4533-9307-c4415f37e15b#ref=rss

Things I Read

Perfect Weapon

‘There’s a whole war going on’: the film tracing a decade of cyber-attacks | Documentary films | The Guardian

In under an hour and a half, The Perfect Weapon blisters through the proliferation of cyberwarfare in the last decade-plus: how offensive ransomware and disinformation campaigns have morphed from a undercover sideshow – as late as 2007, cyberwarfare was not even listed as a pressing concern on the US military’s threat assessment – into a relatively cheap, accessible and potentially devastating staple of international relations.

Things I Read

open sourced TransCoder

Deep learning to translate between programming languages

We’ve developed and open sourced TransCoder , an entirely self-supervised neural transcompiler system that can make code migration far easier and more efficient. Our method is the first AI system able to translate code from one programming language to another without requiring parallel data for training. We’ve demonstrated that TransCoder can successfully translate functions between C++, Java, and Python 3. TransCoder outperforms open source and commercial rule-based translation programs. In our evaluations, the model correctly translates more than 90 percent of Java functions to C++, 74.8 percent of C++ functions to Java, and 68.7 percent of functions from Java to Python. In comparison, a commercially available tool translates only 61.0 percent of functions correctly from C++ to Java, and an open source translator is accurate for only 38.3 percent of Java functions translated into C++.