1. Go to https://www.epanorama.net/cgi-bin/semi.cgi?keyword= on your mobile browser.
2. Select from your broser menu to create an icon to your smart phone start screen.
3. Now you have an icon that starts this web app as any mobile app (as long as you have Internet connectivity)

In this way you can convert also other tools and web pages to something that looks like “app” on the smart phone start screen.

The Finnish government announced on Monday nationwide school closures in order to help prevent the spread of coronavirus. Read more on the following aricles:

Finland closes schools, declares state of emergency over coronavirus
https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finland_closes_schools_declares_state_of_emergency_over_coronavirus/11260062

Daycare centres are to stay open but parents were asked to keep their kids home if possible. The government also published a 19-point list of emergency legislation that takes effect on 18 March.

Coronavirus latest: 359 cases confirmed in Finland, S-Group shuts its Helsinki eateries, bankruptcy fears mount
https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/coronavirus_latest_359_cases_confirmed_in_finland_s-group_shuts_its_helsinki_eateries_bankruptcy_fears_mount/11249610

Here is a link to an earlier post related to Coronavirus:
https://www.epanorama.net/blog/2020/02/12/mobile-trends-2020-mwc-canceled/

Old ePanorama.net ULRs that start with http should all still work and are automatically forwarded to https address.

The internet is stitched together by an incalculable number of hyperlinks, but much like cells in an organism, the sources and destinations have a finite lifespan. Essentially, links can and do die.
Most “link rot” is the result of website restructuring, or entities going out of business and pulling their website offline.
This idea of a public record is at the heart of why digital decay is an issue worth addressing. What record will remain of people’s thoughts and feelings in that era?

Supreme Court decisions and academia lean heavily on citations to build their arguments. What happens when those citations simply vanish? Also Wikipedia, has serious issues caused by digital decay.

Thankfully we’re finally taking steps to combat digital decay. The most well-known solution is Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which has archived hundreds of billions webpages over the past 20 years. 

I have known about the link dacay for a long time when tried to keep the huge link list in aPanorama.net up to date. Over years I have had to scale down the maintenance on them – too much work to try to keep everything up to date all the time (need for some automation?)

It seems that RSS did not fully live up to the promise for end user perspective. It is useful technology that I use in this blog (http://www.epanorama.net/newepa/feed/). RSS feeds have been very popular, but are are somewhat fading in popularity, even to point that some articles expect death of RSS. Nowadays the trend is that people follow Twitter and Facebook instead of RSS. One of the best aspects of email subscriptions (and Twitter) is that you can actually see who’s taken interest in your work. 

Is RSS dead or not? To me, anytime someone says a tech is dead it usually means that tech is not very interesting to discuss anymore, or isn’t seeing the most innovative companies doing new things with it. Ultimately RSS will stick around as a way for content services to talk to each other (it does that well). The protocol is still very much alive, while people can get the data from other means than RSS from various services, very often RSS is the method that gets the data to the service people use. On thing to remember is to make sure that your RSS feed content is valid, I tested my feed to pass the validation service at https://validator.w3.org/feed/.

I still offer RSS feed at http://www.epanorama.net/newepa/feed/. I also post updates to Twitter and Facebook.

If you prefer to get update on material posted to this blog to clutter your email box (I post here quite often), there are many RSS to mail services.  From various alternatives I found out that Blogtrottr worked the way I liked. You can get information on new postings to your e-mail box using Blogtrottr by giving URL http://www.epanorama.net/newepa/feed/ and your e-mail address to this service, and selecting feed type (Realtime works well).

I started this blog in March 2009, so the average posting rate has been approximately one posting per day. I try to keep it that way.

First step was to analyze the problem: Does my system have vulnerable bas version? The answer is yes to pretty much every Linux system around (bug was introduced over 20 years ago) unless they have been specifically update for this. So I am pretty sure I have the problem. Running tests told I had the problem.

Does it pose serious danger is next question? There are several attack surfaces. The SSH attack surface is not very dangerous in my case, because using it needs the attacker to have login credentials for the system. There are very few login credentials in use and they have already quite much rights, so user trying to use to bug to get more rights is not a serious thread to worry much about. The more serious is HTTP attack surface, where anyone could include bash commands to HTTP headers… This site still uses some services implemented with CGI-BIN interface and bash (some of them put originally on-line 15 years). This attack vector needed something to be done quickly. I verified with CVE-2014-6271/CVE-2014-7169 test page that I really has the problem.

The alternatives to solve the problem are fixing the bash to a working version and/or using some form of protection that blocks dangerous request from getting into the system. So I first checked if the problem could be easily solved out just by running Linux update. In this case this did not work that easily.

So I had to try the other option, which was to block the potentially dangerous traffic. Red Hat article Bash Code Injection Vulnerability via Specially Crafted Environment Variables (CVE-2014-6271, CVE-2014-7169) article give instructions how to block potentially dangerous traffic using mod_security and IPtables. I started with the simple IPtables trick, it worked but caused some collateral damage blocking something that should get through. That was the first cure, the benefit to damages ratio was acceptable.

This give some time to work on real fix, which was to update bash. To do that I needed to figure out the best way to get the new bash version and make sure things work well with it. I ended up compiling it from the source code similarly to methods described at https://shellshocker.net/. Then some testing with the new bash version. The services turned to work well with it. Then some manual hacking to get it replace all the ways the old bash could be called. And then testing that there is no issues with new bash. Things worked well. So now I can again run the system without that problematic firewall rule to block potentially dangerous HTTP requests.

Things are working well again. The plus-side of this whole story is that I have learned more on bash, IPtables and mod_security. Things have worked pretty well despite all the work going on (not any serious problems). On the weekend there was also a short service outage due Amazon’s massive messy EC2 reboot.

You can get information on new postings to your e-mail box using Blogtrottr by giving URL http://www.epanorama.net/newepa/feed/ and your e-mail address to this service, and selecting feed type (Realtime works well but you can try also other options if you wish).

Just fill in subscribe form in the web page, wait until you get verification e-mail, click the link on the verification mail to get feed started. If you want to unsubscribe, it is easy: Every mail update you receive has unsubscribe link.

I have added those instructions also to ePanorama Social Media page.

I have used Twitter for a long time, but earlier I has to post information new postings to Twitter.  I had wanted to automate this task for some time to work so that every time I post a new article here, it gets reported on Twitter as a new twit. After major upgrade on the blog to a newer WordPress version I started to look for all kinds of plug-ins for it that make my work easier.

For WordPress to Twitter I used WP to Twitter tool. WP to Twitter posts Tweets from WordPress to Twitter every time a new article is published. There were several steps that needed to do to make everything work (configuration, authenticating to Twitter etc..), but following the instructions I could to those tasks without problems.

I also wanted my Tweets to show on this site. For that I found Kebo Twitter Feed to be a hassle-free and user-friendly way to add a Twitter Feed to ePanorama.net. You can see the Twitter feed at ePanorama.net SOME page.

Then I wanted also to post automatically updates to ePanorama.net Facebook page. I had seen some Facebook updates made by some people though Twitter, so there needs to be some kind of sensible way to do that integration. Twitter document page Using Twitter with Facebook showed how I connect Twitter and Facebook accounts so that Tweets will automatically post to Facebook page.

You can find ePanorama.net also on Twitter at https://twitter.com/epanoramanet.