- <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_program_should_be_able_to_open_its_own_files_on_Linux.html">A program should be able to open its own files on Linux</a></div>
- <div class="date"> 5th June 2016</div>
- <div class="body"><p>Many years ago, when koffice was fresh and with few users, I
-decided to test its presentation tool when making the slides for a
-talk I was giving for NUUG on Japhar, a free Java virtual machine. I
-wrote the first draft of the slides, saved the result and went to bed
-the day before I would give the talk. The next day I took a plane to
-the location where the meeting should take place, and on the plane I
-started up koffice again to polish the talk a bit, only to discover
-that kpresenter refused to load its own data file. I cursed a bit and
-started making the slides again from memory, to have something to
-present when I arrived. I tested that the saved files could be
-loaded, and the day seemed to be rescued. I continued to polish the
-slides until I suddenly discovered that the saved file could no longer
-be loaded into kpresenter. In the end I had to rewrite the slides
-three times, condensing the content until the talk became shorter and
-shorter. After the talk I was able to pinpoint the problem –
-kpresenter wrote inline images in a way itself could not understand.
-Eventually that bug was fixed and kpresenter ended up being a great
-program to make slides. The point I'm trying to make is that we
-expect a program to be able to load its own data files, and it is
-embarrassing to its developers if it can't.</p>
-
-<p>Did you ever experience a program failing to load its own data
-files from the desktop file browser? It is not a uncommon problem. A
-while back I discovered that the screencast recorder
-gtk-recordmydesktop would save an Ogg Theora video file the KDE file
-browser would refuse to open. No video player claimed to understand
-such file. I tracked down the cause being <tt>file --mime-type</tt>
-returning the application/ogg MIME type, which no video player I had
-installed listed as a MIME type they would understand. I asked for
-<a href="http://bugs.gw.com/view.php?id=382">file to change its
-behavour</a> and use the MIME type video/ogg instead. I also asked
-several video players to add video/ogg to their desktop files, to give
-the file browser an idea what to do about Ogg Theora files. After a
-while, the desktop file browsers in Debian started to handle the
-output from gtk-recordmydesktop properly.</p>
-
-<p>But history repeats itself. A few days ago I tested the music
-system Rosegarden again, and I discovered that the KDE and xfce file
-browsers did not know what to do with the Rosegarden project files
-(*.rg). I've reported <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/825993">the
-rosegarden problem to BTS</a> and a fix is commited to git and will be
-included in the next upload. To increase the chance of me remembering
-how to fix the problem next time some program fail to load its files
-from the file browser, here are some notes on how to fix it.</p>
-
-<p>The file browsers in Debian in general operates on MIME types.
-There are two sources for the MIME type of a given file. The output from
-<tt>file --mime-type</tt> mentioned above, and the content of the
-shared MIME type registry (under /usr/share/mime/). The file MIME
-type is mapped to programs supporting the MIME type, and this
-information is collected from
-<a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-entry-spec/">the
-desktop files</a> available in /usr/share/applications/. If there is
-one desktop file claiming support for the MIME type of the file, it is
-activated when asking to open a given file. If there are more, one
-can normally select which one to use by right-clicking on the file and
-selecting the wanted one using 'Open with' or similar. In general
-this work well. But it depend on each program picking a good MIME
-type (preferably
-<a href="http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">a
-MIME type registered with IANA</a>), file and/or the shared MIME
-registry recognizing the file and the desktop file to list the MIME
-type in its list of supported MIME types.</p>
-
-<p>The <tt>/usr/share/mime/packages/rosegarden.xml</tt> entry for
-<a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/shared-mime-info-spec">the
-Shared MIME database</a> look like this:</p>
-
-<p><blockquote><pre>
-<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
-<mime-info xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info">
- <mime-type type="audio/x-rosegarden">
- <sub-class-of type="application/x-gzip"/>
- <comment>Rosegarden project file</comment>
- <glob pattern="*.rg"/>
- </mime-type>
-</mime-info>
-</pre></blockquote></p>
-
-<p>This states that audio/x-rosegarden is a kind of application/x-gzip
-(it is a gzipped XML file). Note, it is much better to use an
-official MIME type registered with IANA than it is to make up ones own
-unofficial ones like the x-rosegarden type used by rosegarden.</p>
-
-<p>The desktop file of the rosegarden program failed to list
-audio/x-rosegarden in its list of supported MIME types, causing the
-file browsers to have no idea what to do with *.rg files:</p>
-
-<p><blockquote><pre>
-% grep Mime /usr/share/applications/rosegarden.desktop
-MimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition;audio/x-rosegarden-device;audio/x-rosegarden-project;audio/x-rosegarden-template;audio/midi;
-X-KDE-NativeMimeType=audio/x-rosegarden-composition
-%
-</pre></blockquote></p>
-
-<p>The fix was to add "audio/x-rosegarden;" at the end of the
-MimeType= line.</p>
+ <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Experience_and_updated_recipe_for_using_the_Signal_app_without_a_mobile_phone.html">Experience and updated recipe for using the Signal app without a mobile phone</a></div>
+ <div class="date">10th October 2016</div>
+ <div class="body"><p>In July
+<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/How_to_use_the_Signal_app_if_you_only_have_a_land_line__ie_no_mobile_phone_.html">I
+wrote how to get the Signal Chrome/Chromium app working</a> without
+the ability to receive SMS messages (aka without a cell phone). It is
+time to share some experiences and provide an updated setup.</p>
+
+<p>The Signal app have worked fine for several months now, and I use
+it regularly to chat with my loved ones. I had a major snag at the
+end of my summer vacation, when the the app completely forgot my
+setup, identity and keys. The reason behind this major mess was
+running out of disk space. To avoid that ever happening again I have
+started storing everything in <tt>userdata/</tt> in git, to be able to
+roll back to an earlier version if the files are wiped by mistake. I
+had to use it once after introducing the git backup. When rolling
+back to an earlier version, one need to use the 'reset session' option
+in Signal to get going, and notify the people you talk with about the
+problem. I assume there is some sequence number tracking in the
+protocol to detect rollback attacks. The git repository is rather big
+(674 MiB so far), but I have not tried to figure out if some of the
+content can be added to a .gitignore file due to lack of spare
+time.</p>
+
+<p>I've also hit the 90 days timeout blocking, and noticed that this
+make it impossible to send messages using Signal. I could still
+receive them, but had to patch the code with a new timestamp to send.
+I believe the timeout is added by the developers to force people to
+upgrade to the latest version of the app, even when there is no
+protocol changes, to reduce the version skew among the user base and
+thus try to keep the number of support requests down.</p>
+
+<p>Since my original recipe, the Signal source code changed slightly,
+making the old patch fail to apply cleanly. Below is an updated
+patch, including the shell wrapper I use to start Signal. The
+original version required a new user to locate the JavaScript console
+and call a function from there. I got help from a friend with more
+JavaScript knowledge than me to modify the code to provide a GUI
+button instead. This mean that to get started you just need to run
+the wrapper and click the 'Register without mobile phone' to get going
+now. I've also modified the timeout code to always set it to 90 days
+in the future, to avoid having to patch the code regularly.</p>
+
+<p>So, the updated recipe for Debian Jessie:</p>
+
+<ol>
+
+<li>First, install required packages to get the source code and the
+browser you need. Signal only work with Chrome/Chromium, as far as I
+know, so you need to install it.
+
+<pre>
+apt install git tor chromium
+git clone https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop.git
+</pre></li>
+
+<li>Modify the source code using command listed in the the patch
+block below.</li>
+
+<li>Start Signal using the run-signal-app wrapper (for example using
+<tt>`pwd`/run-signal-app</tt>).
+
+<li>Click on the 'Register without mobile phone', will in a phone
+number you can receive calls to the next minute, receive the
+verification code and enter it into the form field and press
+'Register'. Note, the phone number you use will be user Signal
+username, ie the way others can find you on Signal.</li>
+
+<li>You can now use Signal to contact others. Note, new contacts do
+not show up in the contact list until you restart Signal, and there is
+no way to assign names to Contacts. There is also no way to create or
+update chat groups. I suspect this is because the web app do not have
+a associated contact database.</li>
+
+</ol>
+
+<p>I am still a bit uneasy about using Signal, because of the way its
+main author moxie0 reject federation and accept dependencies to major
+corporations like Google (part of the code is fetched from Google) and
+Amazon (the central coordination point is owned by Amazon). See for
+example
+<a href="https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37">the
+LibreSignal issue tracker</a> for a thread documenting the authors
+view on these issues. But the network effect is strong in this case,
+and several of the people I want to communicate with already use
+Signal. Perhaps we can all move to <a href="https://ring.cx/">Ring</a>
+once it <a href="https://bugs.debian.org/830265">work on my
+laptop</a>? It already work on Windows and Android, and is included
+in <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ring">Debian</a> and
+<a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ring">Ubuntu</a>, but not
+working on Debian Stable.</p>
+
+<p>Anyway, this is the patch I apply to the Signal code to get it
+working. It switch to the production servers, disable to timeout,
+make registration easier and add the shell wrapper:</p>
+
+<pre>
+cd Signal-Desktop; cat <<EOF | patch -p1
+diff --git a/js/background.js b/js/background.js
+index 24b4c1d..579345f 100644
+--- a/js/background.js
++++ b/js/background.js
+@@ -33,9 +33,9 @@
+ });
+ });
+
+- var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-staging.whispersystems.org';
++ var SERVER_URL = 'https://textsecure-service-ca.whispersystems.org';
+ var SERVER_PORTS = [80, 4433, 8443];
+- var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments-staging.s3.amazonaws.com';
++ var ATTACHMENT_SERVER_URL = 'https://whispersystems-textsecure-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com';
+ var messageReceiver;
+ window.getSocketStatus = function() {
+ if (messageReceiver) {
+diff --git a/js/expire.js b/js/expire.js
+index 639aeae..beb91c3 100644
+--- a/js/expire.js
++++ b/js/expire.js
+@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
+ ;(function() {
+ 'use strict';
+- var BUILD_EXPIRATION = 0;
++ var BUILD_EXPIRATION = Date.now() + (90 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000);
+
+ window.extension = window.extension || {};
+
+diff --git a/js/views/install_view.js b/js/views/install_view.js
+index 7816f4f..1d6233b 100644
+--- a/js/views/install_view.js
++++ b/js/views/install_view.js
+@@ -38,7 +38,8 @@
+ return {
+ 'click .step1': this.selectStep.bind(this, 1),
+ 'click .step2': this.selectStep.bind(this, 2),
+- 'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3)
++ 'click .step3': this.selectStep.bind(this, 3),
++ 'click .callreg': function() { extension.install('standalone') },
+ };
+ },
+ clearQR: function() {
+diff --git a/options.html b/options.html
+index dc0f28e..8d709f6 100644
+--- a/options.html
++++ b/options.html
+@@ -14,7 +14,10 @@
+ <div class='nav'>
+ <h1>{{ installWelcome }}</h1>
+ <p>{{ installTagline }}</p>
+- <div> <a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}</a> </div>
++ <div> <a class='button step2'>{{ installGetStartedButton }}</a>
++ <br> <a class="button callreg">Register without mobile phone</a>
++
++ </div>
+ <span class='dot step1 selected'></span>
+ <span class='dot step2'></span>
+ <span class='dot step3'></span>
+--- /dev/null 2016-10-07 09:55:13.730181472 +0200
++++ b/run-signal-app 2016-10-10 08:54:09.434172391 +0200
+@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
++#!/bin/sh
++set -e
++cd $(dirname $0)
++mkdir -p userdata
++userdata="`pwd`/userdata"
++if [ -d "$userdata" ] && [ ! -d "$userdata/.git" ] ; then
++ (cd $userdata && git init)
++fi
++(cd $userdata && git add . && git commit -m "Current status." || true)
++exec chromium \
++ --proxy-server="socks://localhost:9050" \
++ --user-data-dir=$userdata --load-and-launch-app=`pwd`
+EOF
+chmod a+rx run-signal-app
+</pre>
projects / homepage.git / blobdiff