Rubenerd

Today’s Music Monday is more of a commentary post. Pardon, a commentary “piece”. I think I just gagged a bit!

I’ve talked about my disconnection from music on the show a bunch of times. Music was hugely important to my parents growing up, which they passed on to me in spades and other horticultural instruments loaded with tapes. But for the last half a decade or so I’ve listened to so much less of it, and found difficult to dive back in again.

Australian musician and comedian Steven Oliver wrote a great article in a recent Big Issue, emphasis added:

Music is a powerful thing. We have songs that represent our footy clubs, our political ideologies and even our nations. People sing praises to their gods. We have a song to sing for our birthdays, and we use songs to sell products. Yet despite being inundated with songs from everywhere about everything, a few years back I found myself missing music. I know, right? How could I live in a world that is so saturated with songs, and be missing it?

This doesn’t so much hit the nail on the head, as much as it smashes it repeatedly into billions of tiny splinters, like so many failed self tapping screws. That was for you Jim! Turns out I was missing music too, in part due to being inundated with it from a sea of open-ended streaming services and its ubiquity in public places. Music is disposable now.

Dick Clark said music is the soundtrack of our lives. I think it’s evolved into the background music of our lives. It’s not something to be enjoyed as an art form in its own right, it’s what you play when doing something else. That includes everything from walking through food courts with their tinny speakers, to watching over-produced YouTube videos. Music is just there to fill silence.

This has even affected how music is written. Writers always wanted to create catchy tunes, but today’s pop music is specifically engineered with autotune and looping hooks to make them stand out as much as possible in a sea of other fleeting moments and algorithmically-determined playlists. Melody has been replaced with tone colour and heavy beats that verge on the militaristic. I don’t hate music from the last decade, as much as I’m just bored with it.

And I don’t even blame musicians for doing this. The music industry’s response to peer-to-peer downloading was streaming services, a business model in which musicians had no say. It’s fine if you’re a major act, but otherwise you’re getting a pittance. I find it hard to see this as the victory over “piracy” that so many are willing to say.

I was moving some more repositories off GitHub this afternoon. You’d have to disappear into the mountains if you refused to use things made by anyone you didn’t 100% agree with, but the effort to change easily passes the threshold considering the ghastly things they’re proud to take money to host.

Turns out I’d already migrated some repos a few months earlier, and forgot to change the origin URL. I’d still been committing changes to GitHub and didn’t notice. Whoops!

So now I had an updated repo on GitHub, and stale repo at my target that I wanted to use. How to merge the changes on the GitHub version back into the target? Smar had the perfect answer for this use case:

$ git clone $TARGET_REPO_URL
$ cd $TARGET_REPO_NAME
$ git fetch $GITHUB_REPO_URL master:merging
$ git merge --allow-unrelated-histories merging
$ git commit

Some of this is going to my GitLab for now while I finish building my new FreeBSD services box. I might be setting up an OrionVM VM with jails for WebDAV/CalDAV, Git, Subversion, and Minecraft. But you didn’t read that last one yet.

My new-ish 16-inch MacBook Pro has this bizarre UI quirk where the Dock will persist on the screen even when entering Full Screen mode. This is especially problematic when you align it to the correct, left-side of your screen, because it’s guaranteed to have text on it:

Force-quitting the Dock stops this happening:

$ killall Dock

But the behaviour returns after a restart. Hopefully the next Catalina update resolves this, or I may resort to clearing my user account and starting again… it’s that annoying.

Insert obligatory comment that the NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP dock was better than the Mac one, despite Apple having had two decades to fix and improve it. Stacks are about all the features I can think of that Apple have added in this entire time.

I should do a FreeBSD GNUstep follow-up post at some point.

From the Coconut Opening Kit episode of Good Mythical More:

I’m not sure if this is a cultural thing, but I’m struck with how cavalier so much American media treats the homeless. News reports, podcasts, and YouTube channels seemingly do nothing to conceal their contempt or indifference, even shows with hosts I otherwise respect. They’re discussed in subhuman terms, as you would an animal or a pest to be avoided with their acrid smells and dangerous outbursts. It’s even the source of jokes.

Whenever I see this I ask… why are they homeless? Why isn’t anyone helping them? And, most of all, why aren’t they even talking about it?

I don’t want to assume it’s because people don’t care, or that they want to sweep it under the rug. Maybe for some people it is, but surely not those who otherwise live ethical, honest lives. It could be anything from projection to bad personal experiences.

I’m probably missing some context here, but all I could think of was that it’s become so normalised, people unintentionally tune it out as a concern. Maybe it’s a coping mechanism; people don’t want to confront it given how they’re but a few paycheques away from the same fate, or an expensive hospital visit in a country without universal healthcare. Or at the top end of town, higher income earners don’t want to think about the opportunity cost of their latest tax cut, and for whom that pittance could have represented a second chance at life.

As for jokes, dark humour lets us discuss taboo subjects by shining a light and being candid and honest. It makes us uncomfortable, but that’s the point.

Still, I can’t help but cringe when someone on a show tallies the number of homeless people hunkering in a warm train carriage, without any further comment. Where’s the empathy? Even a remark that they feel for them? I’d bet most, if not all of them riding on those plastic seats for days at a time wouldn’t be there by choice.

We have enough food in the world to fill every tummy, enough housing to shelter everyone, and enough resources to provide mental health services to those doing it tough. Every single homeless person is someone society has failed. The least we can do—literally—is offer them some respect.

Last weekend felt like summer, but it got chilly and foggy again this week. Nothing like Karl, but still adds an air of mystery. By which I mean water vapour.

Recently I learned that VP9 video can be re-containerised to something other than webm, without re-encoding the original video and/or audio. This is useful for importing into tools that support the VP9 codec, but not the webm container.

Recent versions of ffmpeg(1) have a -c copy shorthand for instructing the audio and video encoders to just copy the source:

$ ffmpeg -i example.webm -c copy example.mp4

Note that you’ll get an error if you try to output to a mov container, as I’ve seen plenty of bloggers and forum posts erroneously suggest:

[mov @ 0xHEX] vp9 only supported in MP4

ffmpeg can also re-containerise into my preferred Matroska, which I’ve also since learned is the format on which webm is based:

$ ffmpeg -i example.webm -c copy example.mkv  

Tools like DaVinci Resolve can now import your VP9 video, albeit with variable results. You may need to re-encode entirely if the output is garbled.

$ ffmpeg -i example.webm example.h264.mp4

The Stanford Digital Economy Lab tweeted this by Sinan Aral:

Breaking up Facebook will not solve any of the market failures of big tech. We need social network portability, data portability, and social network portability. We need structural reform. Competition is key.

I have a lot of time Sinan, especially his commentary about social media’s impact on our mental health in The Hype Machine. He echoed what I’ve been saying here for years: we need to get back in control of our data, and give us agency over its use.

Here comes the but… his Facebook point is a fallacy. Politicians and journalists routinely deflect by saying we should only be attacking causes. It sounds superficially logical, but there’s a reason we also treat symptoms.

I don’t see why we can’t break up abuse companies, and reform the system. I agree just doing the former will only result in another hydra taking its place, but that’s where the reforms he advocates for come in. Letting the foxes run the hen house has left us with nothing but feathers thus far.

Last Saturday marked the thirtieth anniversary of German reunification, and the end of the first Cold War. So I thought it was only fitting to share my dad’s favourite tune of all time to mark the occasion.

What a fucking powerful song. And yet I fear the West has only become more authoritarian to fill the void.

I was remote-troubleshooting another person’s Mac recently, and discovered why it had been running slower of late. Buried in their tmp folder they had some suspicious binaries:

$ ls -1F /private/tmp
==> i2pd/
==> i2pd2/
==> jFCQhxfZDM*
==> mtfsftpnhl*
==> vgcqphbkrm
==> vgcqphbkrm_md5

Ten of the scanners on VirusTotal reported a trojan in the two executables, and none of these were the names everyone knows, which is a tad worrying. GData and SentinelOne called it out specifically as a coin miner. The obfuscated data file and md5 hash didn’t trigger alarms.

I immediately killed the processes and deleted them without grabbing any usage data to quote below, but at a glance mtfsftpnhl was using around 20% of a core. The designers of this were smart enough not to peg a whole CPU and make it obvious.

What I found interesting this time were the two folders at the top of the listing. Searching returned this project:

i2pd (I2P Daemon) is a full-featured C++ implementation of I2P client.

I2P (Invisible Internet Protocol) is a universal anonymous network layer. All communications over I2P are anonymous and end-to-end encrypted, participants don’t reveal their real IP addresses.

I2P client is a software used for building and using anonymous I2P networks. Such networks are commonly used for anonymous peer-to-peer applications (filesharing, cryptocurrencies) and anonymous client-server applications (websites, instant messengers, chat-servers).

So presumably this is how the payload and c&c operations were delivered. I liked that they specifically called out cryptocurrencies.

The person in question may or may not have freely admitted to trialling pirated versions of major Apple applications like Logic and Final Cut. I couldn’t correlate them specifically, but this hints at the possibility that illegitimate software is now being distributed with coin miners.

At that stage, it was time for a wipe and reinstall.