Self-Hosted IRC solutions are better than ever. Alan Pope joins us to make a case for the classic way to communicate online and tells us about a modern client for the web, mobile, and desktop you run on your server.

Plus, follow up on the new Self-Hosted wiki, and more.

Special Guest: Alan Pope.

Links:

• World's Worst Best Drone Retrieval Device - YouTube — Having some fun watching my local flying crew/friends use the World's Worst Best Drone Retrieval Device.
• You don't need a UI for docker containers — You really don't. Managing small deployments of containers from the command line is easier, faster and 'commit-able'. We're not talking about vast fleets of  containers here but in this article I'll cover how I use docker-compose to manage over 30 docker containers in a simple, scalable and faster way than if you were using a UI.
• awesome-selfhosted: A list of Free Software network services and web applications which can be hosted locally. — A list of Free Software network services and web applications which can be hosted locally. Selfhosting is the process of hosting and managing applications instead of renting from Software-as-a-Service providers
• Linux Server Image Status
• Quasseldroid IRC Client — Quassel makes IRC fun again – open a client anywhere, connect to your core, and have all your favourite channels and networks right there.
• The Lounge — A web-based IRC client for the modern world! Once configured and started, users can access it from their browser or mobile device.
• Install theloungeirc for Linux using the Snap Store
• IRCCloud
• Self-Hosted Show Wiki — Here you will find an open source, living and breathing repository of resources that we talk about on the Self Hosted podcast.

A radical new way to do SSH authentication, special guest Jeremy Stott joins us to discuss Zero Trust SSH.

Plus community news, a concerning issue for makers, an Arch server follow up, and more.

Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, Martin Wimpress, and Neal Gompa.

Links:

• The makers of Jif peanut butter team up with Giphy to try to settle the GIF/Jif debate once and for all

Wes and Ell sit down with James Smith to have an honest conversation about what skills are needed to start a career and be successful in Tech and Information Security.

Special Guest: James Smith.

Links:

• OverTheWire Wargames — The wargames offered by the OverTheWire community can help you to learn and practice security concepts in the form of fun-filled games.
• The Five Pillars of an Information/Cyber Security Professional — "Mastering the basics will make you exceptional."
• Security Certification Progression Chart 2020
• Cyber Security Skills Roadmap — Explore this interactive training roadmap to find the right courses for your immediate cyber security skill development and for your long-term career goals.

Microsoft Defender for Linux is in preview, Mozilla's VPN has a secret advantage, and why the community is calling out NPM Inc.

Plus a new report about open source security, and more.

Links:

• Microsoft: Linux Defender antivirus now in public preview — We're aiming to protect the modern workplace environment across everything that it is, being Microsoft or non-Microsoft.
• Microsoft Threat Protection stops attack sprawl and auto-heals enterprise
• Microsoft's Word, Excel and PowerPoint now live under one App
• Microsoft Works - Wikipedia
• Firefox releases an Android app for its VPN service — The Firefox Private Network VPN is powered by Mullvad VPN. Mullvad VPN claims that it won’t log and monitor user data, unlike many other VPN services.
• The Private Internet Access Android app is being open sourced
• IVPN applications are now open source
• Tom Scott video about VPNs
• Android 11 Developer Preview — All the changes we found from Android 10 so far.
• npm struggling to fund FOSS devs — Funding free software is 'still a very unsolved problem' says co-founder
• The Linux Foundation and Harvard’s Lab for Innovation Science Release Census for Open Source Software Security — New analysis identifies most widely used software and uncovers critical questions for the future of securing one of the world’s greatest shared resources
• The Linux Foundation identifies most important open-source software components and their problems — In its latest study, the Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative discovered just how prevalent open-source components are in all software and their shared problems and vulnerabilities.
• Most-used libraries revealed
• The Linux Foundation and Harvard’s Lab for Innovation Science release census for open-source software security — Census II (run by Harvard) wanted to look at language-level packages. Their report discusses some of the challenges. One challenge of many is that the JavaScript environment strongly encourages tiny modules, with around 1/2 of all JavaScript packages having at most one function. As a result, when you start counting dependencies, there are far more dependencies in JavaScript (because each module does so little), and so JavaScript tends to dominate.

We explore the potential of heat-assisted magnetic recording and get excited about a possibly persistent L2ARC.

Plus Jim's journeys with Clear Linux, and why Ubuntu 18.04.4 is a maintenance release worth talking about.

Links:

• Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS: here's what's new — It's not as shiny and exciting as entirely new versions, of course, but it does pack in some worthwhile security and bugfix upgrades, as well as support for more and newer hardware.
• 18.04.4 - Ubuntu Wiki
• MobaXterm — Enhanced terminal for Windows with X11 server, tabbed SSH client, network tools and much more.
• Linux distro review: Intel’s own Clear Linux OS — There's not much question that Clear Linux is your best bet if you want to turn in the best possible benchmark numbers. The question not addressed here is, what's it like to run Clear Linux as a daily driver? We were curious, so we took it for a spin.
• Clear Linux* Project — Clear Linux OS is an open source, rolling release Linux distribution optimized for performance and security, from the Cloud to the Edge, designed for customization, and manageability.
• swupd — Documentation for Clear Linux* project
• clr-boot-manager: Kernel & Boot Loader Management
• Cannot compile zfs for 5.5-rc2 · Issue #9745 · zfsonlinux/zfs
• Persistent L2ARC might be coming to ZFS on Linux — The primary ARC is kept in system RAM, but an L2ARC device can be created from one or more fast disks. In a ZFS pool with one or more L2ARC devices, when blocks are evicted from the primary ARC in RAM, they are moved down to L2ARC rather than being thrown away entirely. In the past, this feature has been of limited value, both because indexing a large L2ARC occupies system RAM which could have been better used for primary ARC and because L2ARC was not persistent across reboots.
• Persistent L2ARC by gamanakis · Pull Request #9582 · zfsonlinux/zfs — This feature implements a light-weight persistent L2ARC metadata structure that allows L2ARC contents to be recovered after a reboot. This significantly eases the impact a reboot has on read performance on systems with large caches.
• LINUX Unplugged 303: Stateless and Dateless — We visit Intel to figure out what Clear Linux is all about and explain a few tricks that make it unique.
• LINUX Unplugged Blog: Clear Linux OS 2019
• HAMR don’t hurt ’em: laser-assisted hard drives are coming in 2020 — Although the 2012 "just around the corner" HAMR drives seem to have been mostly vapor, the technology is a reality now. Seagate has been trialing 16TB HAMR drives with select customers for more than a year and claims that the trials have proved that its HAMR drives are "plug and play replacements" for traditional CMR drives, requiring no special care and having no particular poor use cases compared to the drives we're all used to.
• HAMR Milestone: Seagate Achieves 16TB Capacity on Internal HAMR Test Units
• Western Digital debuts 18TB and 20TB near-MAMR disk drives
• Previously on TechSNAP 341: HAMR Time — We've got bad news for Wifi-lovers as the KRACK hack takes the world by storm; We have the details & some places to watch to make sure you stay patched. Plus, some distressing revelations about third party access to your personal information through some US mobile carriers. Then we cover the ongoing debate over HAMR, MAMR, and the future of hard drive technology & take a mini deep dive into the world of elliptic curve cryptography.

Brent sits down with Heather Ellsworth, Software Engineer on Canonical's Ubuntu Desktop Team, a GNOME Foundation Member, and former Purism Librem 5 Documentation Engineer. We discuss her deep history in experimental high energy physics at CERN, the similarities and synergies between the sciences and software engineering, her love of documentation, her newly established maintainership of LibreOffice, and how empathy factors into good bug reporting.

Special Guest: Heather Ellsworth.

Links:

• Canonical
• Ubuntu
• LibreOffice - Snapcraft
• Snap Documentation - Snapcraft
• CERN - European Organization for Nuclear Research
• CERN - Wikipedia
• Higgs boson - Wikipedia
• The GNOME Foundation
• cherrytree — A hierarchical note taking application
• Librem 5 - Purism
• Librem 5 Documentation - Purism
• Open Source Summit
• Free Software Foundation
• Free as in Freedom 2.0 (PDF) — Richard Stallman and the Free Software Revolution
• Free as in Freedom 2.0, by Richard Stallman - FSF Shop
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar - Wikipedia
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond
• Onitama - BoardGameGeek
• A Feast for Odin - BoardGameGeek
• Magic: the Gathering - BoardGameGeek
• Brent Gervais - @brentgervais on Twitter