Linux Blimp

Last updated: Nov 19 2018

Today you’ll learn how to opt-out and remove yourself from people search engine sites.

The opt-out procedures will be shown at the bottom of this post, for those who want to skip ahead.

In case you didn’t know.

Your sensitive personal information, including your name, phone number, home address and even financial records are visible on the web.

This means anyone can access that information if they wanted to.

If that doesn’t scare you. Something common amongst internet trolls and cybercriminals is what’s called doxxing.

In essence, doxxing is when an attacker will threaten to leak or expose your personal information to the world if you fail to meet their demand.

The bad news:

Doxxers, criminals and internet trolls don’t have to work very hard in order to find information about their victims. And it’s all thanks to people search sites.

If you’ve never heard of people search sites or people search engines.

It’s a website that allows anyone to freely look up information about specific individuals. Hence the term: people search engines.

Such sites were designed to make it easy for people to find long lost relatives, friends or family. But of course, as you may have guessed, many people have been using it for more nefarious purposes.

Popular Free People Search Sites

There are many people search sites on the web.

If you’ve ever used one before, you’d know that most of them require a payment to view the information.

But there’s also a few sites which are free and provide accurate data.

A very popular one you might’ve heard of is WhitePages.​

Other alternatives to WhitePages:

• Intelius
• Spokeo
• BeenVerified
• FamilyTreeNow
• InstantCheckMate
• PeekYou
• Pipl

I have provided the steps to opt out from these sites at the end of this post.

How Do People Search Sites Obtain My Information?

These websites obtain our information in a variety of ways, both offline and online.

And believe it or not, these companies don’t even need to put a gun to our heads to obtain our information.

Why? Because we’re already giving it away freely!

Such as when you fill out a form or a survey or when you make a purchase or when you register for promotional material.

The details you submit in those forms you fill out are stored and shared with third parties without your knowledge.

That’s why if you’ve ever signed up for a free offer, and a few days later, you started receiving more offers about a similar service.

In addition.

Most information is taken from public sources including (but not limited to):

• Telephone directories
• Business data
• Property listings
• Vehicle records
• Social networking sites
• Online directories, blogs and forums

Each time you fill out and submit a form with your personal details – there’s always a possibility your data will be shared and resold.

How To Protect Yourself and Your Personal Info (online and offline)

In today’s digital age, people are freely broadcasting and sharing information about themselves online.

Social media, for example, is the best place to find information about people, especially since almost everyone you know has one.

Social media sites is also where, people search engines like WhitePages, like to obtain information about people.

In addition, many employers will use social media to look up a person before hiring them, just to see who they really are underneath – another reason why to be careful with what you share online.

In short.

The more social media profiles you have and the more active you are on the internet, the easier it is for people to find and track your digital footprints.

The good news:

There are steps you can take to reduce your digital footprint and protect yourself online and offline.

Here’s how:

• Use multiple email accounts each with a different alias (i.e. don’t use the same email for banking and for shopping, etc)
• When in doubt, use a fake identity when signing up for random and irrelevant things.
• Use a temporary email for non-important, temporary stuff (i.e. when signing up for free offers or creating an account on a random website)
• Don’t give out your personal information to anyone, online and offline (unless you’re 100% sure you trust the other party).
• Be careful what you share on social media and on the internet in general. Anything you share online will remain online forever.
• Always read the privacy policy and terms of services before committing to anything.
• Use cash or disposable credit cards for most online and offline purchases to minimize your footprints and prevent tracking.
• Practice safe online browsing habits. Use browser extensions that block tracking, clear your cookies regularly, avoid linking accounts together.

How To Accurately Find Information About You on Google

If you don’t find any traces of your identity on most people search sites, I wouldn’t break out the champagne bottle just yet.

Another method used to find information about anything, including a person is through Google.

Google has what’s known as Advanced Search Operators which allow you to narrow down your searches to exact keywords or phrases.

Of course, this method won’t show you all your data (if any), only the pages that have been indexed by Google.

Here’s how to do it:

First go on google and type the following:

inurl:”username”

This will show you a list of websites that contain the word/phrase “username” in the URL.

Go ahead and replace “username” with your username or an online alias that you use, and see what you find.

Here are other search operators you can try for yourself:

“exact phrase”	Find all pages that contain the exact phrase in that order (eg. “john snow”)
inurl:”username”	Find all pages with “username” in the URL
intitle:”john snow”	Find all pages that contain “john snow” in the page title
intext:”home address”	Find all pages that have “..” in the body text of a page

PRO TIP
It’s bad privacy practice to use the same username on multiple websites/platforms. Doing so will make it easier to find you online.

Those are just some example as to how powerful advanced searches can be when used correctly.

How To Opt Out From Popular People Search Sites

Now I’ll be showing you how to remove your profile from some of the most popular people search sites.

Something to keep in mind:

Removing yourself from these sites don’t guarantee your data will be removed forever.

In fact, it’s almost certain it will re-appear again in the future, and sometimes in different variations.

For as long as our information is being collected, there’s always going to be a possibility that we’ll end up again on one or most of these sites.

This is why you must set time to repeat this process on a regular basis.

WhitePages

WhitePages is perhaps the most popular people search site on the web. You can find information about people and businesses. Here’s how to remove yourself from whitepages.

You do have to create an account in order to opt-out.

1. ​​​​Search yourself on WhitePages, then copy the URL of your profile. It should look like this:
   http://www.whitepages.com/name/John-Snow/City-ST/b8921x2
2. Create an account (if you haven’t already). Then scroll to the footer (bottom) menu and click “Remove From Directory”. Then paste the URL of your profile.
3. For the last step, they need to verify your identity via automated call. Don’t worry, you just have to press a number and that’s it. No need to talk to humans.

Intelius

Intelius is another popular people search site where you can perform comprehensive background checks. To remove your profile, you can do it via fax, post mail or through their website. Intelius has a more strict opt-out procedure as they require proof of identification such as an ID or driver’s license.

1. Go to the Intelius opt out page.
2. Take a picture of your driver’s license. Then as required, cross out your photo and driver’s license number.
3. Click “Browse” then upload your photo ID. To be notified when your listing has been removed, enter your email.

Spokeo

In addition to name, phone and address search, Spokeo lets you find social media profiles and pictures that are tied to an email address. The opt-out procedure for Spokeo is fairly simple.

1. Search yourself on Spokeo and then copy the URL of your profile. It should look like this:https://www.spokeo.com/John-Snow/State/City/p80085..
2. Then go to the opt-out page and enter the URL of your profile.
3. Enter your email then click “Send Verification Email”. Then check your email and click “Verify Opt Out”.

BeenVerified

If you have multiple profiles on BeenVerified, you have to reach out to them and tell them to remove another listing because they only allow you to opt-out once per email.

1. Go to BeenVerified opt-out page, where you’ll be asked to search yourself.
2. Then find your profile(s), then click “That’s The One”.
3. Enter your email then click “Send Verification Email”. Next, check your email and click “Verify Opt Out”.

FamilyTreeNow

FamilyTreeNow is perhaps the most accurate one of them all, at least from my experience. They show not only accurate information about you, your family, and people you associate with, but they also hold data from decades ago.

1. Go to the opt-out page of FamilyTreeNow, and click “Begin opt-out procedure.”
2. You’ll be asked to search yourself.
3. Click on your profile(s), make sure it’s you, then click the red button that says “Opt Out”.

InstantCheckMate

InstantCheckMate is used for performing background checks. The loading takes quite a while but the information is almost always accurate. They let you opt-out via post mail or through their website.

1. Go to the opt-out page of InstantCheckMate
2. Fill out the form using the exact information shown on their site.
3. To remove multiple profile listings, you’ll need to re-submit multiple forms.

PeekYou

PeekYou is particularly useful for finding social media profiles of people using their username or an alias they go. Here’s how to remove yourself from peekyou:

1. Search yourself on PeekYou and then copy the unique ID of your profile, which is the last digits shown in the URL that looks like this:
   http://www.peekyou.com/donald_trump/80153811
2. Go to PeekYou opt-out page then enter your information.
3. For actions, select “Remove My Entire Listing”, followed by the reason for removal. Then enter the unique ID of your profile then click “Submit”.

Pipl

Pipl is a little different since they don’t give you an option to opt-out. If your information is shown on their site, that’s because it’s available from other sources. If you look yourself up, they tell you where exactly they’re getting your information from.

Once you remove your data from those sites, your listing on Pipl will be removed.

1. Go to pipl and look yourself up.
2. On the results page, click on your name then scroll down till you see a blue box that looks like the one in the image shown below.
3. Here, you’ll see a list of websites where Pipl is getting their information from. Your job now is to contact those sites and find out how to remove your data.

You can use this email script to contact the website owner and ask them to remove your profile.

Overall, privacy is something that’s very rare to have on the internet.

Everything you do online is being tracked and saved in a database somewhere. If not by the websites you visit, by your internet service provider.

And as long as we’re online, our data will be collected.

Lastly.​

Do your loved ones a favor and remove their profile listings as well. Or better yet, share this article with them!

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AWS Server Migration Service is an agentless service which makes it easier and faster for customers to migrate on-premises workloads to AWS from VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V environments. It allows customers to automate, schedule, and track incremental replications of live server volumes, making it easier to coordinate large-scale server migrations. Previously, customers could only choose between 12 and 24 hours as the interval for their incremental replications of live servers. With this announcement, customers are able to run their incremental replication jobs every hour.

This capability exists in all AWS Regions where AWS Server Migration Service is currently available. To learn more, visit AWS Server Migration Service (SMS).

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PDF is an integral part of our everyday life. It’s a document format that’s trusted by every single platform. Often times, important documents and books are in PDF format. It’s so widespread that without an appropriate PDF tool at hand, no system is complete. Ubuntu offers a great flexibility in terms of software availability. It’s also one of the most popular Linux distros for being so simple yet powerful and fast, extremely suitable for new to moderate Linux users. Let’s grab PDFtk – the ultimate PDF toolkit you’ll ever need!

There are 2 versions of PDFtk available – Free, Pro ($3.99) and Server. The Pro version offers all the additional features like rotating the PDF, stamping etc. The Server version is the command-line utility for performing various tasks.

PDFtk is available in the default Ubuntu software repository. However, on the latest Ubuntu releases, it’s not accessible directly. You have to use a little trick to get in on your system.

Method 1

Run the following commands –

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:malteworld/ppa
sudo apt update

Method 2

You can also download and build PDFtk by yourself. For doing so, you need the Java build tools and dependencies.

Run the following commands –

sudo apt install default-jre-headless libcommons-lang3-java libbcprov-java

sudo apt install git default-jdk-headless ant
libcommons-lang3-java libbcprov-java

git clone https://gitlab.com/pdftk-java/pdftk.git

cd pdftk
mkdir libs
ln -st libs /usr/share/java/.jar

ant jar
java -jar build/jar/pdftk.jar –help

Method 3 (recommended)

Install the PDFtk snap –

Note that this is the “Server” version of PDFtk.

Using PDFtk

After the installation is complete, check out the app working perfectly –

In fact, running this command will show a short guide you can use. For the long, in-depth guide, run the following command –

For checking out the guide later, export it to a text file –

pdftk –help > ~/Desktop/pdftk.txt

Here are some of the most used tasks you can do with PDFtk.

Encrypt a PDF (128-bit encryption)

pdftk dummy.pdf output dummy.128.pdf owner_pw foo user_pw 123

Decrypt a PDF

pdftk dummy.128.pdf input_pw 123 output dummy.unsecured.pdf

Join multiple PDFs into one

pdftk dummy1.pdf dummy2.pdf cat output dummy_merged.pdf

You can also use wildcard –

pdftk *.pdf cat output combined.pdf

Rotate PDF document (must be 1 page document)

# 90° clockwise rotate

pdftk dummy.pdf

cat

1east

2

-end output dummy_90.pdf

# 180° rotate
pdftk dummy.pdf cat 1-endsouth output dummy_180.pdf

Enjoy!

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Given last week’s new images release of the rolling-release, systemd-free, original-creation Void Linux I decided to take it for a spin with some fresh benchmarking as it had been two years or so since last trying out that Linux distribution with its XBPS packaging system. For seeing how the performance compares, I benchmarked it against some of the other primarily enthusiast/rolling-release/performant Linux distributions including Antergos, Clear Linux, Debian Buster Testing, Fedora Workstation 29, Manjaro 18.0, Sabayon Linux, Solus, and Ubuntu 18.10.

 

 

These nine Linux distributions were tested on the new Intel Core i9 9900K eight-core / sixteen-thread processor. The i9-9900K was running at its stock speeds with the ASUS PRIME Z390-A motherboard, 2 x 8GB DDR4-3000 memory, Samsung 970 EVO 256GB NVMe SSD, and Radeon RX Vega 56 graphics.

Each of the Linux distributions were tested out-of-the-box for seeing how they stack up against each other. All of the Linux distribution benchmarks were run via the open-source and fully-automated Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.

 

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GNOME Games is an open source software project, a graphical application that provides users with an easy-to-use interface for browsing and managing their games libraries.

With the GNOME Games app you can easily locate the game you want to play right now and launch it. The software also comes with support for several emulators and gaming consoles.

GNOME Games has been developed as part of the GNOME desktop environment, but you should be able to use it under any other open-source window manager or graphical desktop environment.

System requirements

• The standard GNOME 2.10 libraries and librsvg with a correctly installed gdk-pixbuf plugin. Some games also require a C compiler or the Guile scheme interpreter (version 1.6 or newer).

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The bash man page is close to 40K words. It’s not
quite War and Peace, but it could hold its
own in a rack of cheap novels.
Given the size of bash’s documentation, missing a useful feature
is easy to do when looking through the man page.
For that reason, as well as to look for new features,
revisiting the man page occasionally can be a useful
thing to do.

The sub-section of interest today is Parameter Expansion—that is, $var in its many forms.
Don’t be confused by the name though, it’s really about parameter
and variable expansion.

I’m not going to cover all the different forms of parameter
expansion here, just some that I think may not be as
widely known as others.
If you’re completely new to parameter expansion,
check out my ancient post or one of the
many articles elsewhere on the internet.

Case Conversion

Gone are the days of using tr ‘[[:lower:]]’ ‘[[:upper:]]’
to convert strings to uppercase:

$ a=hello
$ echo $ # First character only
Hello
$ echo $ # All characters
HELLO

And for going to lowercase:

$ a=HELLO
$ echo $ # First character only
hELLO
$ echo $ # All characters
hello

You also can specify a character after the operator and change
the case only of characters that match:

$ a=hello
$ echo $ # First character if it is an ‘l’
hello
$ echo $ # All characters that are ‘l’s
heLLo

Names Starting with Some Prefix

Need a list of all the variables whose names match a certain prefix? Do this:

$ mya=1
$ myb=2
$ yourc=3
$ echo ${!my*}
mya myb

Indirection

Bash even can give you a taste of the good-old days of programming
C and Assembler and using indirect addressing—well sort of:

$ var=somevalue
$ var_name=var
$ echo ${!var_name}
somevalue

What’s happening here is that the value of var_name gives you
the name of the actual variable to be expanded.
That variable then is expanded and becomes the result of the
expansion.
In this case, “var_name” has the value “var”,
so the variable “var” is expanded to yield the ultimate
value of “somevalue”.

Short Detour into Namerefs

As a bit of an aside, because it’s not really about “parameter
expansion”, let’s take a quick look at namerefs in bash.
A nameref variable is a variable that references another variable:

$ var=no
$ declare -n ref=var # -n == nameref
$ ref=yes
$ echo $ref
yes

The variable “ref” is a reference to the variable “var”.
When you assign to “ref”, you actually change the value of “var”.
This can be particularly handy in getting values out of a
function by passing the name of a variable to the function:

$ cat nref.sh
function func()
{
local -n up_value=$1 # -n == nameref
up_value=new_value
echo “Changing ‘${!up_value}’ in $”
}

aval=old_value
echo
echo “Before function call, aval is $aval”
func aval # pass var *name* to func
echo “After function call, aval is $aval”

Running that, you get:

$ bash nref.sh
Before function call, aval is old_value
Changing ‘aval’ in func
After function call, aval is new_value

Since indirection is automatic with nameref variables,
you don’t use the exclamation point expansion to get the value
of the referenced variable; normal $var expansion works.
In the case of namerefs, the exclamation point expansion
yields a different result: the name of the referenced variable.
So, this slight detour dealt with parameter expansion after all.

Transformation

There are also a number of expansions of the form $,
where the “?” is one of the letters “Q”, “E”, “P”, “A” or “a”
that can transform the value or get you information about
the variable itself.
For example:

$ declare -a array=(1 2)
$ echo Attributes: $
Attributes: a # i.e. array was declared with -a

Check the man page for more information about these “@” expansions.

Unset or Null

And to wrap it up, one other subtle thing that can be easy to
overlook when reading the parameter expansion section relates
to the colon (:) in many of the expansions.
For example, the :- form of expansion allows a default value
to be specified if a variable is unset or null:

unset var
$ echo var: $
var: default

var=
$ echo var: $
var: default

And now if you leave out the colon:

unset var
$ echo var: $
var: default

var=
$ echo var: $
var:

So leaving out the colon changes the test from “unset or null” to
just a test for “unset”.
This applies to the :-, :=, :?, and :+ forms of
parameter expansion as well.

Your Mileage May Vary

If something doesn’t seem to work, check your bash version:

$ echo $BASH_VERSION
4.4.23(1)-release

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Posted On: Nov 16, 2018

The Serverless Application Repository now supports applications with the following additional resources: Application Auto Scaling, Amazon Athena, AWS AppSync, AWS Certificate Manager, Amazon CloudFront, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodePipeline, AWS Glue, AWS IAM, Amazon SNS, Amazon SQS, AWS Systems Manager, and AWS StepFunctions. These new resources make it easier for teams and organizations to publish, store, and distribute a wider and more powerful set of serverless applications.

Using the Serverless Application Repository, you don’t need to clone source code, build and package it, and publish it to AWS before deploying it. Instead, you can simply deploy pre-built applications in your serverless architecture, helping you and your team members reduce duplicate work, ensure organizational best practices, and get to market faster. The Serverless Application Repository enables teams, organizations, and individual developers to share applications publicly or privately within teams using specific AWS accounts.

To get started, define your application using the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) and share your applications using the AWS Command Line Interface or the AWS Management Console. To deploy an application, you can continue to use the AWS Lambda console. To review the complete list of resources supported by the Serverless Application Repository, read the documentation.

Support for new AWS resources in the AWS Serverless Application Repository is available in all regions where the Serverless Application Repository is available: US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Canada (Central), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), EU (London), and South America (São Paulo) regions.

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Hey everybody, Welcome. Dash is the topic that we are going to discuss today. Dash is developed by Plotly. Some of you might have got an idea that Dash is perhaps about graphs because of Plotly. And yes, you are absolutely right. Dash is about representation of graphs in a web UI (user interface). Web UI doesn’t mean that Dash requires an active internet connection to run, rather it just needs a server and will run on “localhost” or “127.0.0.1”. Dash happens to run on port 8050 by default, so when you run your Dash application on your browser you would go on the address as “127.0.0.1:8050”.

First of all, we have to install Dash on our system. Hit Ctrl+Alt+T on your Ubuntu, it would open up terminal. In order to run Dash applications on our system, we would install 4 to 5 packages using following command:

$ sudo pip install dash dash-renderer dash-html-components dash-core-components plotly

OR

$ sudo -H pip install dash dash-renderer dash-html-components dash-core-components plotly

When you will add -H it would not issue a warning because you would get to the Home variable by using -H in the command. Even if you don’t use it, it would be okay as it would display a warning but Dash would get installed anyway.

Now, you would go on to create a python script. Our first example of code would just display a simple output in our web browser on the server address and port mentioned above. In the example, first 3 lines would be the imports of dash, dash-core-components and dash-html-components respectively. Dash-core-components as dcc means that wherever we want to use dash-core-components we can use ‘dcc’ instead and similarly where we want to use dash-html-components, we can use ‘html’. Dash() is the built in class which holds the default code for Dash applications. ‘app.layout’ represents everything in web UI which means anything you want to display in the browser in Dash application, it has to be written in the operating zone of ‘app.layout’. Following our first simple code example which just displays a simple output:

import dash
import dash_core_components as dcc
import dash_html_components as html

app = dash.Dash()

app.layout = html.Div(‘LinuxHint YouTube Hi’)

if __name__ == ‘__main__’:
app.run_server(debug=True)

Second example is about creating a graph. We would use ‘dcc’ which essentially means dash-core-components and we would create a graph using it. In our example, we have drawn an example graph of Energy and Time with random values of ‘x’ and ‘y’ by giving a type of ‘line’ to Energy and a type of ‘bar’ to Time. We would do all of that inside a method dcc.Graph() in which we would name our both axis of the graph and set the title of graph as well.

Code Example#2:

import dash
import dash_core_components as dcc
import dash_html_components as html

app = dash.Dash()

app.layout = html.Div(children=[
html.Div(children=’LinuxHint Youtube Hi’),
dcc.Graph(
id=’graphss’,
figure={
‘data’: [
{‘x’:[1,2,3,4,5,6,7], ‘y’:[11,12,22,23,24,44,55], ‘type’:’line’, ‘name’:’Energy’},
{‘x’:[1,2,3,4,5,6,7], ‘y’:[13,15,26,27,34,44,65], ‘type’:’bar’, ‘name’:’Time’},
],
‘layout’: {
‘title’: ‘Graph for Time and Energy’
}
}
)
])

if __name__ == ‘__main__’:
app.run_server(debug=True)

Pro Tip: While writing python script, use a python IDE or a smart text editor which indents the code automatically for you. Avoid using simple notepad or text editor for python scripts as indentation of code is an important factor in python while running it.

I will explain this in more details in video form as well.

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Mozilla took the next step today in the fight to defend the web and consumers from the FCC’s attack on an open internet. Together with other petitioners, Mozilla filed our reply brief in our case challenging the FCC’s elimination of critical net neutrality protections that require internet providers to treat all online traffic equally.

The fight for net neutrality, while not a new one, is an important one. We filed this case because we believe that the internet works best when people control for themselves what they see and do online.

The FCC’s removal of net neutrality rules is not only bad for consumers, it is also unlawful. The protections in place were the product of years of deliberation and careful fact-finding that proved the need to protect consumers, who often have little or no choice of internet provider. The FCC is simply not permitted to arbitrarily change its mind about those protections based on little or no evidence. It is also not permitted to ignore its duty to promote competition and protect the public interest. And yet, the FCC’s dismantling of the net neutrality rules unlawfully removes long standing rules that have ensured the internet provides a voice for everyone.

Meanwhile, the FCC’s defenses of its actions and the supporting arguments of large cable and telco company ISPs, who have come to the FCC’s aid, are misguided at best. They mischaracterize the internet’s technical structure as well as the FCC’s mandate to advance internet access, and they ignore clear evidence that there is little competition among ISPs. They repeatedly contradict themselves and have even introduced new justifications not outlined in the FCC’s original decision to repeal net neutrality protections.

Nothing we have seen from the FCC since this case began has changed our mind. Our belief in this action remains as strong as it was when its plan to undo net neutrality protections last year was first met with outcry from consumers, small businesses and advocates across the country.

We will continue to do all that we can to support an open and vibrant internet that is a resource accessible to all. We look forward to making our arguments directly before the D.C. Court of Appeals and the public. FCC, we’ll see you in court on February 1.

Mozilla v FCC – Joint Reply Brief

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Docker Swarm is a container orchestration and clustering tool to manage Docker hosts, and is a part of Docker Engine. It’s a native clustering tool provided by Docker which provides high-availability and high-performance for your application. The primary objective of Docker Swarm is to group multiple Docker hosts into a single logical virtual server???this ensures availability and high performance for your application by distributing it over a number of Docker hosts instead of just one.

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• Docker Swarms With New Application Virtualization Technology(Dec 04, 2014)
• Docker 1.9 Offers Improved Networking, Storage Features(Nov 08, 2015)
• Docker Advances With Trio of Orchestration Tools(Feb 26, 2015)
• Using Docker Swarm in Production(Feb 24, 2016)

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