Archive for the ‘ Webtechnology’ posts

Archive for the ‘Webtechnology’ Category

Fixing Firefox: Failed to register/update a ServiceWorker for scope

Saturday, February 1st, 2020

For users that take privacy serious, Progressive Web Apps and the Push API and Notifications API are a real headache. They offer good performance and service, but privacy wise they are not that nice. Something like a supercookie. You like them but somewhere you know, you don’t really want them.

So in Firefox, Service Worker APIs are hidden and cannot be used when the user is in private browsing mode.

But also when users have Delete cookies and site data when Firefox is closed checked, sites can not register a Service Worker.

An error in the Javascript console will show up:

Failed to register/update a ServiceWorker for scope ‘https://domain/path’: Storage access is restricted in this context due to user settings or private browsing mode.

SecurityError: The operation is insecure.

Most solutions suggest that the user should change or uncheck that setting, but that is not necessarily needed. A better solution is to create an exception for a that particular site. Like there own. Or they want a limited set of sites they trust to enable service workers.

Press the Manage Permissions button and add an exception for your domain.

That way you can use Progressive Web Apps or service workers on a selected collection of trusted sites, and still keep your privacy settings on a high level.

Tags: firefox
Posted in Webtechnology | No Comments »

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Trying out DeepSpeech on a Raspberry Pi 4

Friday, January 3rd, 2020

Deep Speech is an open speech-to-text engine by Mozilla. Speech synthesis and Speech to text are fun to try out, and I read that it could run on a Raspberry Pi4 with ease on one core, so I decided to give it a try.

The Raspberry Pi version is using Google’s TensorFlow Lite for an implementation of Baidu’s DeepSpeech architecture.

Installing it on a Raspberry 4 Buster distribution was not straightforward. First I read instructions on the Github page and tried to download and install the git version and, but I ran into problems. It was taking ages and I ran into the famous `wheels` problem.

Failed building wheel for scipy

After tweaking and trying a few times, i gave up on the Github version and tried the instructions here, but also that was a bumpy road. But success waits in the end.

Let’s go, how to install DeepSpeech on the RPI4

Create a dev directory:

mkdir dev
cd dev

Create a Python Virtual environment.

python3 -m venv deepspeech-train-venv

Activate the virtual environment

source dev/deepspeech-train-venv/bin/activate

Create the deepspeech directory

mkdir deepspeech
cd deepspeech

Install deepspeech

pip install deepspeech

Download pre-trained English model

curl -LO https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech/releases/download/v0.6.0/deepspeech-0.6.0-models.tar.gz
tar xvf deepspeech-0.6.0-models.tar.gz

Download example audio files

curl -LO https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech/releases/download/v0.6.0/audio-0.6.0.tar.gz
tar xvf audio-0.6.0.tar.gz

Done, run, well , eh, I tried to run the example on the instruction page

deepspeech --model deepspeech-0.6.0-models/output_graph.pbmm --lm deepspeech-0.6.0-models/lm.binary --trie deepspeech-0.6.0-models/trie --audio audio/2830-3980-0043.wav

Errors!?! I installed a missing dependency:

sudo apt install libatlas3-base

Still errors

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'numpy.core._multiarray_umath'

So I check if I had numpy installed

pip install numpy
Looking in indexes: https://pypi.org/simple, https://www.piwheels.org/simple
Requirement already satisfied: numpy in /home/pi/dev/deepspeech-train-venv/lib/python3.7/site-packages (1.15.4)

I decided to update numpy:

pip install --upgrade numpy
Looking in indexes: https://pypi.org/simple, https://www.piwheels.org/simple
Collecting numpy
Using cached https://www.piwheels.org/simple/numpy/numpy-1.18.0-cp37-cp37m-linux_armv7l.whl
tensorboard 2.0.2 has requirement setuptools>=41.0.0, but you'll have setuptools 40.8.0 which is incompatible.
Installing collected packages: numpy
Found existing installation: numpy 1.15.4
Uninstalling numpy-1.15.4:
Successfully uninstalled numpy-1.15.4
Successfully installed numpy-1.18.0

So i decided to update setuptools too:

pip install --upgrade setuptools
Looking in indexes: https://pypi.org/simple, https://www.piwheels.org/simple
Collecting setuptools
Using cached https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/f9/d3/955738b20d3832dfa3cd3d9b07e29a8162edb480bf988332f5e6e48ca444/setuptools-44.0.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl
Installing collected packages: setuptools
Found existing installation: setuptools 40.8.0
Uninstalling setuptools-40.8.0:
Successfully uninstalled setuptools-40.8.0
Successfully installed setuptools-44.0.0

I tried to run the example on the instruction page again
# Transcribe an audio file

deepspeech --model deepspeech-0.6.0-models/output_graph.pbmm --lm deepspeech-0.6.0-models/lm.binary --trie deepspeech-0.6.0-models/trie --audio audio/2830-3980-0043.wav

Another error

Loading model from file deepspeech-0.6.0-models/output_graph.pbmm
TensorFlow: v1.14.0-21-ge77504a
DeepSpeech: v0.6.0-0-g6d43e21
ERROR: Model provided has model identifier '='+;', should be 'TFL3'

Didn’t work. I needed to change the model to `tflite`

deepspeech --model deepspeech-0.6.0-models/output_graph.tflite --lm deepspeech-0.6.0-models/lm.binary --trie deepspeech-0.6.0-models/trie --audio audio/2830-3980-0043.wav

Success in the end!

Loading model from file deepspeech-0.6.0-models/output_graph.tflite
TensorFlow: v1.14.0-21-ge77504a
DeepSpeech: v0.6.0-0-g6d43e21
INFO: Initialized TensorFlow Lite runtime.
Loaded model in 0.0019s.
Running inference.
why should one hault on the way
Inference took 4.091s for 2.735s audio file.

Then I played the audio-file:

aplay audio/4507-16021-0012.wav

Must say DeepSpeech is much smarter then me, I couldn’t understand it:
why should one hault on the way

BTW good question. No I need another engine to answer that!

Way to go, folks.

Tags: rpi
Posted in raspberrypi, Webtechnology | 4 Comments »

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Fixing the iPhone CSS hover problem on iOS

Wednesday, November 6th, 2019

Mobile phones don’t have a mouse, your greasy fat touchy fingers have to do the job, they kinda act like a giant mouse.

There is major difference: a mouse can click, drag and hover above the screen, while your fingers can click and swipe, but not hover. Well they can, but nothing is happening then. 🙂

The official terms here are: mouse-events, touch events, and pointer events, for both mouse and touch events. So touch events don’t know about hover, cause that is a mouse event.

So those nice old style CSS-only dropdown menu’s won’t work on your phone, because the depend on :hover.

Hover events work on mobile Android or Firefox browsers, as those browser vendors looked for compatibility, and made a click with your fingers act like hover on elements that are not a link. That is smart thinking, and good care for compatibility. Keep old sites working. Keep sites accessible without forcing Javascript.

But they don’t work on iPhone or mobile Safari, so we need a solution for that.

Plain HTML is and has always been responsive. It’s the CSS that destroyed it, by setting explicit width. Well there was no max-width, so designers had not much choice. But remove all CSS and magically your HTML will be responsive, except for tables and large images, but at least you can scroll them into sight so everything is still accessible.

Pity the Apple people. An iPhone with mobile Safari doesn’t do :hover, breaking compatibility for old sites, and forcing webdevelopers to use `Javascript` for these trivial things. Annoying.

There are examples on the internet how to fix that, like adding an onclick attribute to every element you want the :hover rule for, but that’s adding a lot of code, and the elements the don’t hide again when you click somewhere else.

We need better solutions!

How to make :hover work on Safari iOS on iPhones and iPads.

Here are a few very simple options, that I came up with having a new iPhone 11 around for a couple of days. Tested on the latest iOS 13.
(more…)

Tags: iphone ios
Posted in browser, CSS3, HTML5, mobile, Webtechnology | 13 Comments »

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How to check the Signing Certificate on an Android app / apk.

Thursday, January 3rd, 2019

If you own a Android Phone, and you want to use Signal instead of Whatsapp or Telegram for privacy matters, and, for the same privacy matters, you don’t have a Google Account on your phone, or you don’t use Google Play but the free F-Droid, there is a solution. You can download the Signal APK from their website: https://signal.org/android/apk/

They give a warning:

Advanced users with special needs can download the Signal APK directly. Most users should not do this under normal circumstances.

What are normal circumstances these days? You can’t trust Facebook anymore, maybe you can trust Google, but you don’t wanna trust Google, because trusting Google is telling Google where you are, what you do, what you say, what and who you see and who your friends are.

It’s not a matter of trust, it’s a matter of privacy and decency that you don’t do that.

So downloading the Signal APK is probably what you should do these days. But how to be sure you download the real one?

The websites tells you to verify the signing certificate on the APK matches this SHA256 fingerprint. Unfortunately they don’t tell you how to do that.

Verify the signing certificate on the Signal APK.

This one-liner will show you the SHA256 Fingerprint that has to be checked:

unzip -p Signal-website-release-4.31.6.apk META-INF/SIGNAL_S.RSA > /tmp/tmp.cert ; keytool -printcert -file /tmp/tmp.cert

You get this output:

Owner: CN=Whisper Systems, OU=Research and Development, O=Whisper Systems, L=Pittsburgh, ST=PA, C=US
Issuer: CN=Whisper Systems, OU=Research and Development, O=Whisper Systems, L=Pittsburgh, ST=PA, C=US
Serial number: 4bfbebba
Valid from: Tue May 25 17:24:42 CEST 2010 until: Tue May 16 17:24:42 CEST 2045
Certificate fingerprints:
SHA1: 45:98:9D:C9:AD:87:28:C2:AA:9A:82:FA:55:50:3E:34:A8:87:93:74
SHA256: 29:F3:4E:5F:27:F2:11:B4:24:BC:5B:F9:D6:71:62:C0:EA:FB:A2:DA:35:AF:35:C1:64:16:FC:44:62:76:BA:26
Signature algorithm name: SHA1withRSA
Subject Public Key Algorithm: RSA (1024)
Version: 3

As you can see the SHA256 is the same fingerprint as on the Signal download page.

It’s verified. The Signal apk is safe to use now.

UPDATE 2022 (see new blogpost)

Tags: android
Posted in mobile, Webtechnology | 5 Comments »

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Fixing the network after upgrading to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS from 16.04 LTS

Tuesday, December 18th, 2018

Just updated 16.04LTS to 18.04LTS, went easier and smoother than expected.

Under the hood there are major changes in Ubuntu, I decided to stick to Unity rather then the new Gnome 3, it’s much smoother on older hardware. You only change the setting at login once and you done.

The only nasty thing: DNS (Pi-Hole) was not working. I could fix that by manually setting the DNS server in /etc/resolv.conf from `nameserver 127.0.0.53` to the DNS of my router, but that would not persist a restart.

To get info about your network and DNS:


systemd-resolve --status

Link 1 (eth0)
      Current Scopes: none
       LLMNR setting: yes
MulticastDNS setting: no

Current scopes is none, but it should be DNS

Seems there was something wrong with the NetworkManager. Somehow in the past I’ve manually edited `/etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf` file. Can’t remember when I did that, could be years ago, Ubuntu 10.04 or something ;).

I had to comment out the line that explicitly set `no-auto-default`, meaning don’t let the NetworkManager create a default wired connection for my ethernet card.

[main]
...
#no-auto-default=<mac-adress>
...
[ifupdown]
managed=false

After commenting it out, NetworkManager could create a default connection and after restart (the daemon), everything was OK. DNS was working.

systemd-resolve --status

Link 1 (eth0)
Current Scopes: DNS
LLMNR setting: yes
MulticastDNS setting: no

As you can see DNS is now working

Maybe this can help you, if you experience the same troubles.

Posted in Webtechnology | No Comments »

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How to find your IPv4 and IPv6 ip-addresses?

Friday, December 7th, 2018

How to check your IPv4 and IPv6 ip-adresses on the command line

Sure you can start up your browser and use Google to find a suitable website, but why not keep it simple and use the command line for this trivial task. Fire up a terminal and type:

> my_ip
> 2001:db8:85a3::8a2e:370:7334
> 172.16.254.1

Above IP-addresses are bogus, but you got my drift. To do this simply create the following bash script:

#!/bin/bash
# bin/my_ip

curl -6 v6.ifconfig.co
curl -4 v6.ifconfig.co

It will first output your IPv6 address. If you don’t have one, it it will tell you:

> curl: (7) Couldn't connect to server
> xx.xx.xx.xxx

The script uses the great curl application with the simple -6 and -4 flags, to connect with IPv6 and IPv4.

Of course you could extend the script a bit to include geographical information:

#!/bin/bash
# bin/my_ip

curl -6 v6.ifconfig.co
curl -6 v6.ifconfig.co/city
curl -6 v6.ifconfig.co/country
curl -4 v6.ifconfig.co
curl -4 v6.ifconfig.co/city
curl -4 v6.ifconfig.co/country

Now you will get info about your city and country as well.