Menu Close

Removal of Facebook Login

views

Starting today the option to use the Facebook login to authenticate on this blog has been removed.

From what I have learned, during 2023 Facebook changed its terms of service making the business verification of developer accounts a requirement for being given access to the data necessary to use the Login function. Initially it was however possible to register as a Business simply by providing your identity card.

After a few months they changed their terms again and it became necessary to provide proof of a real business activity (registration with the chamber of commerce, etc.).

Consequently, it is no longer possible to use the Facebook Login for purely amateur purposes by individual users. I’m sorry, but it’s not my fault.

For now, logins via Google and Twitter remain active.

Goodbye Nicklaus Wirth

views

Niklaus WirthOn January 1, 2024, Niklaus Wirth, the inventor of the Pascal, Modula2 and other less widespread programming languages, left us.

He is one of the names that marked global IT evolution in the 80s and 90s. His very famous book “Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs” was the textbook in many university courses around the world, and established the foundations of structured programming.

Pascal, in Borland’s Turbo Pascal version on Ms-Dos PC, was the only “serious” programming language I ever used aside from bash scripting.

I created a small program for generating statistics on the JAM message base of RemoteAccess, the software I used for my FidoNet BBS. It had a certain following among sysops for a while but then fell into disuse and I also lost the sources.

RIP Professor Wirth.

30 years of Slackware!

views

slackware30

Slackware Linux has officially turned 30!

Today July 17th is the anniversary of the release of version 1.0 which took place on July 17th 1993.

Ten years ago I wrote a post for the twentieth anniversary, in which I indicated some risks and problems that the development of Slackware could have faced in the following years, in particular the advent of systemd and wayland.

Now, after 10 years, the situation has seen some evolutions and confirmations. Most notably, Slackware has managed to still remain systemd-free. While by now there is an entire generation of system administrators and Linux users who only know systemd and have never interacted with anything else, sysvinit, rc scripts, resolv.conf and a whole series of traditional – but not less effective – commands and logics remain in Slackware. And we can only be happy about it. However, a minimum of compatibility needed with systemd and logind has been achieved with the use of elogind, and for the moment it seems to be sufficient to keep up with the times.

As far as Wayland is concerned, the use of elogind has made it possible to use it on Slackware in a relatively simple way and for some time now it has been possible to launch KDE Plasma in a wayland session without particular problems. Other desktops and WE using wayland also manage to work on Slackware.

In conclusion, the various threats that posed to a peaceful survival of Slackware over the years seem to have not yet caused irreparable damage after a decade and therefore we celebrate this anniversary with some optimism and good hopes for many more years of satisfaction and joy with the best Linux distribution. 😀

Reverse proxy and SSO

views

Nginx logoIn recent times I have made some technological changes to the LoneStar Network services, which are not directly visible but which have improved and made them safer. In particular, I proceeded to place all websites behind nginx reverse proxy. In this way, therefore, the various web servers that present the services are not directly exposed to the network but are located behind the barrier constituted by the reverse proxy.

This also added some flexibility in being able to add subservices presented as subfolders of the main sites.

I have also added a Single Sign On service, to allow access with a centralized account. Not all the services I use support it yet, but over time it should become the only login system.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 .