taskManeage - Tasks: task #15654, Webpage for videos introducing...

 
 

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task #15654: Webpage for videos introducing Maneage

Submitter:  Mohammad Akhlaghi <makhlaghi>
Submitted:  Wed 20 May 2020 12:54:15 AM UTC
   
 
Should Start On:  Tue 19 May 2020 11:00:00 PM UTC Should be Finished on:  Tue 19 May 2020 11:00:00 PM UTC
Category:  Webpage Priority:  5 - Normal
Status:  Postponed Privacy:  Public
Assigned to:  pedram Percent Complete:  0%
Open/Closed:  Open Effort:  0.00

Jump to the original submission

Tue 20 Jul 2021 07:57:58 PM UTC, comment #15: 

This fixes the link in rich markup on savannah:

[1] https://mastodon.technology/@rysiek/106608761288215266 (archive: https://archive.today/JlkJT)

Boud Roukema <boud>
Group Member
Tue 20 Jul 2021 07:54:51 PM UTC, comment #14: 

Http-only users are subject to risks such as Pegasus/NSO [1] [2] [3] [4]. I'm not sure if it's up to us to warn them on the Maneage website, but anyone reading this task discussion should be aware of the situation.

[1] https://mastodon.technology/@rysiek/106608761288215266 (archive: https://archive.today/JlkJT)

[2] https://citizenlab.ca/2014/08/cat-video-and-the-death-of-clear-text

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/jul/18/revealed-murdered-journalist-number-selected-mexico-nso-client-cecilio-pineda-birto

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_%28spyware%29

Boud Roukema <boud>
Group Member
Mon 12 Jul 2021 12:56:04 AM UTC, comment #13: 

Thanks a lot for the great description of the problem Boud!

I am also adding Mohammadreza to the discussion, because he is a professional on such issues (among many others) ;-). Mohammadreza, please see the previous comment #12 for a full description of the problem.

For the time being (until we find a robust solution), I just added a small notice under the video: "If the video doesn't load after clicking on it, you are probably viewing this page on a HTTP protocol. You have two solutions: either come back with https://maneage.org, or watch the video directly on PeerTube."

I just checked by changing the PeerTube link inside the 'iframe' to 'http' (instead of 'https'). But after doing so, the video wasn't visible in both HTTPS or HTTP (apparently PeerTube only supports HTTPS).

I should say that HTTPS is not just an issue for China users. Users in Iran (and I presume many other independent countries that aren't a USA puppet) will also not be able to load https://maneage.org currently.

This is because the particular server I am using to host Maneage (based in Germany) blocks TLS requests from Iran (and I guess, many other countries): so in this case atleast, its not Iran that is blocking secure access, the censor is Germany! I found this out by tracing the network access with the help of Mohammadreza only recently.

When I originally purchased that host I had no idea about this issue and the decision was only based on price. It was only recently that I have found out about it.

A proper solution to this problem is to move the Maneage server to another hosting server in a more independent country (maybe Switzerland? We have to check). I will certainly do this as soon as I have some free time. But if you have any suggestion, please let me know privately. It is important for me that Maneage be accessible to as many people as possible, and as independent from any political whim.

About the HTTPS links we point to, I hope they are in less restrictive countries. But the user will probably have a way to circumvent the problem (for example with VPN) if the links don't open and the user feels compelled to visit them. For the time being, the important thing is that pages within 'http://maneage.org' work for such visitors without any extra trouble.

Mohammad Akhlaghi <makhlaghi>
Group administrator
Sun 11 Jul 2021 10:48:14 PM UTC, comment #12: 

In commit 1c9e196, we seem to have an http versus https bug/feature. It's a feature from a security point of view [1][2], but a bug for users in China (depending on the specific details of the 's' in https used on maneage.org) [3].

The problem is that if you access the maneage.org webpage as http://maneage.org instead of https://maneage.org, then the https peertube.stream server is considered by some browsers (such as firefox) as incompatible in some way with the non-secure http method for the page as a whole. The embedded video (after allowing all javascript and so on with uMatrix or other safe-browsing features) shows an annulus with a rotating section, against a black background, and continues for some time without showing the video.

(Mohammad found this bug/feature first. :))

A simple solution for many users would be to force https usage, i.e. automatically redirect all users trying http to https e.g. something like

      RewriteEngine On
      RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
      RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}

in apache2.

The problem is that this would block some users in China [3]. China-based users are already blocked from many particular websites by their own government [4], which differs from the github situation of blocking users in some countries/territories in which Microsoft/Github is not based.

There might be a simple hack to cater for both http and https users, but I haven't thought of how to do it. There's no point having redirection to https as the default and having an alternative url 'http://plain-http.maneage.org' (without almost identical content, but without https links) unless users know where to find it. It would be inelegant to have to give both URLs every time we point people to the website.

Youtube has no reason to care about user security - all that counts is retaining political power and advertising funds, so it's unsurprising that we didn't see this bug/feature with Youtube.

My feeling is that forcing https would be reasonable - given the current world context of cyber-risks and cyber-education - and we could try to think of a solution for non-https users later. Currently, almost all of the links on index.html are https , so in that sense our page is already fairly unusable to http-only users. Many of these https sites that are not yet TLS-1.3+ESNI (I didn't check!) will presumably shift to that soon.

[1] https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/38317/specific-risks-of-embedding-an-https-iframe-in-an-http-page

[2] https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/894/are-there-security-issues-with-embedding-an-https-iframe-on-an-http-page

[3] https://www.zdnet.com/article/china-is-now-blocking-all-encrypted-https-traffic-using-tls-1-3-and-esni

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_mainland_China

Boud Roukema <boud>
Group Member
Thu 01 Jul 2021 03:29:18 PM UTC, comment #11: 

Thanks a lot Boud, it has been merged and the text above tge video is also updated.

About hosting an instance of PeerTube, it is a good idea, but I am personally overwhelmed right now. I am also paying for the hosting personally and have got the cheapest kind of web hosting that doesn't have much transfer rate, storage or RAM.

So if you know a good server to host a PeetTube instance (maybe in an institute server; maneage is an academic project afterall) and can take responsability of maintaining it, you can make it and give me its IP. I will then link that IP to 'peertube.maneage.org'.

Mohammad Akhlaghi <makhlaghi>
Group administrator
Wed 30 Jun 2021 12:44:56 AM UTC, comment #10: 

done:

https://gitlab.com/maneage/webpage/-/merge_requests/2

I'm still a novice at PeerTube. An interesting thing I see is that choices about federating or not, about mirroring videos from other PeerTube instances or not, and so on, are completely decidable by the individual instances.

So a peertube.maneage.org instance could start off as only distributing maneage videos, and only having a very restricted membership for people allowed to upload (those known to be active in the project). The benefit would, if I understand it correctly, be that if a big number of people start downloading the video at once - which is probably the main reason for not encouraging people to download directly from http://git.maneage.org/videos.git/tree/ - then they would act as peers in a bit-torrent like way, so that the load on the server would increase with the number of viewers a lot more slowly than linearly.

Boud Roukema <boud>
Group Member
Wed 23 Jun 2021 11:36:59 PM UTC, comment #9: 

Thanks Boud, Indeed, it was very annoying to have to add YouTube links. I didn't add any embedded YouTube video (like almost all sites that use YouTube do), I just put a picture and when people click on it, they go to YouTube on a new tab.

I was forced to do this because there was no time, but a video presentation really helps people interested in the concept. Note that I didn't even upload these videos to Youtube, they were recorded and uploaded by the organizations that I presented the talks in.

If anyone can volunteer to look into these better alternatives, I would really appreciate it. I am overwhelmed right now :-(.

Mohammad Akhlaghi <makhlaghi>
Group administrator
Tue 22 Jun 2021 03:23:19 PM UTC, comment #8: 

We currently have a youtube advertisement and prominent links to youtube on the main https://maneage.org home page. This is very embarrassing for a project promoting reproducibility and scientific ethics!


The difficulty may be finding a peertube instance in which the default user can upload a video bigger than 100Mb (seems to be the default limit) - or one of us could communicate directly with the group hosting the service to ask for a higher limit...


Boud Roukema <boud>
Group Member
Wed 24 Mar 2021 07:38:39 PM UTC, comment #7: 

Just as a small update: the video of an invited talk at CiTIUS is now also in our video repository (download link). This is in English and also extended (1 hour talk and almost 20 minutes Q/A).

Mohammad Akhlaghi <makhlaghi>
Group administrator
Fri 05 Jun 2020 08:22:21 PM UTC, comment #6: 

The file seems to have uploaded correctly. After downloading, and
if necessary installing uuencode (or the package sharutils
that on debian includes uuencode) and lzip and asciinema,
you can do:


uudecode maneage_navigate-2020-05-21.asciinema.source.lz.uuencode
lzip -d maneage_navigate-2020-05-21.asciinema.source.lz
asciinema play maneage_navigate-2020-05-21.asciinema.source


It's CC-BY, so feel free - anyone with time and patience - to add your name, modify and republish a better version :).

Boud Roukema <boud>
Group Member
Fri 05 Jun 2020 08:11:53 PM UTC, comment #5: 

The problem with making a branch of
http://git.maneage.org/videos.git/tree
on an ethical git server such as codeberg is that (as I understand things),
if I want to keep the git structure, and if what I add is small,
then I will effectively have to upload the full 170 Mb original video
as part of the git tree. While redundancy is generally a good
thing, it seems excessive to do create a git repository of
170 Mb for uploading a 40 kb or so source file.

I had a look at
https://asciinema.org/a/330532 ,
but that does not show as a video without enabling GAFAM services: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAFAM - amazonaws.
For people reading this who don't understand the problem: with GAFAM, "you are the resource" that GAFAM
sells to its clients.

I'll see if Savannah accepts an asciinema source attached here as a plain text
(lzipped, uuencoded) file:

maneage_navigate-2020-05-21_source.lz.uuencode

This should be attached below if all goes well.

The commands uuencode and uudecode are standard GNU/Linux tools, especially for email - e.g. https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/sharutils


(file #49215)

Boud Roukema <boud>
Group Member
Sat 30 May 2020 12:59:32 AM UTC, comment #4: 

Thanks Boud! I had a fast look at it and will look at it completely after submitting the paper :-). Would you like to submit it as a branch on the videos Git repository so we merge it in there?

But an interesting idea occurred to me while looking at how you copied the 'printf' commands with your explanation, and just pressed enter, you already have them written somewhere right? So implementing this suggestion may be easy:

Put a 'sleep 2' after every 'printf' and just execute the whole thing as a script that starts by activating asciinema. This way, only your messages will be printed and the screen won't be filled with repeated sentences.

Also another small suggestion: for demo purposes, using a larger font can help, I think that given the resolution of the recording, the font is a little too small (readable, but requiring a little focusing of the eye). A larger font will make it easier for someone who is not at all familiar with Maneage (allowing them to focus on the content).

By the way, since its asciinema, maybe you can also upload it to their own server to show nicely like this one: https://asciinema.org/a/330532 . The text is in vector resolution and is even select-able.

Also, one other related thing: at the IAC we have started a series of talks called SMACKS (Short Meetings on Astro Computing Knowledge). We record one every month and they are broadcast by IAC's seminar team, on IAC's YouTube channel (I am not a fan of YouTube, but this is what IAC is doing for all the institute talks! It was beyond our control!). We even have a Git repository for the lecture notes. For example here is the first three talks so far:

  • SMACK 1: History of the POSIX operating systems and basic linux command-line, I presented these slides on the history of Unix-like operating systems. You can see it on Invidious. I mentioned GNU's entry into the history a little bad (apparently putting emphasis on not paying money!), It was really bad (caused by the stress of the moment!).




  • SMACK 4: planned for next month, draft lecture notes are available. But we will be improving them a lot! If you like, your help/suggestions would be very welcome.


Another IAC member will then introduce Git, but you can see the planned set of introductions here. We have had very positive feedback so far by IAC researchers, recently people from other Spanish institutes are also joining the talk (it is announced in the Spanish Astronomical Society is well)!.

Mohammad Akhlaghi <makhlaghi>
Group administrator
Fri 29 May 2020 10:26:27 PM UTC, comment #3: 

Here's another maneage video:

maneage_navigate-2020-05-21 - 15 minutes directory navigation tour

https://peertube.live/videos/watch/52b8cb7c-037c-4f7e-8a0d-332acaaf185d

Made with asciinema - I also tried ttyrec, but that's a bit more difficult to tidy up in terms of the recorded text file.

The video mixes a few elementary shell skills with a directory
tour - for users who know a bit of shell, but not too much.

Boud Roukema <boud>
Group Member
Fri 22 May 2020 09:33:11 PM UTC, comment #2: 

PeerTube is indeed an interesting option, I didn't know about it, thanks for linking it there. Later, we can consider hosting an instance of PeerTube ;-).

I am impressed by Framasoft and I just saw in Wikipedia, that they are based in Lyon! I wish I knew about them while I was there ;-).

Mohammad Akhlaghi <makhlaghi>
Group administrator
Thu 21 May 2020 10:34:17 PM UTC, comment #1: 

The long-term option for hosting videos would be to host
a peertube instance [1]. For example, our first maneage video
is now also hosted at:

https://peertube.live/videos/watch/862f11c4-d63d-4484-b81c-81206ccfc14d

A peertube instance would be federated through the ActivityPub
protocol [2] with other peertube instances, and the creation of
accounts on the maneage server would best be strongly moderated.
On peertube.live, where I just created an account and uploaded
862f11c4-d63d-4484-b81c-81206ccfc14d , aka
http://git.maneage.org/videos.git/commit/?id=d10b58d9e
but reformatted slightly to satisfy the 100 Mb/day upload
limit to ordinary peertube.live users like me. It seems that the
upload of a 70 Mb h264 file was converted for internal server
purposes to another format (or multiple formats) of about 300 Mb.

For videos, this seems to me a better long-term solution than
git LFS. Of course, someone would have to maintain the server,
update it for security upgrades, and so on, and I'm not
volunteering. The alternative is to use community peertube
servers, such as peertube.live, which lists 'science' as one
of its themes.

[1] https://joinpeertube.org/faq
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub ; https://activitypub.rocks/


Boud Roukema <boud>
Group Member
Wed 20 May 2020 12:54:15 AM UTC, original submission:  

Following the discussion in task #15620, we now have our first recorded video on Maneage to help new users. We also have them on our own servers, so it would be great if we can add a dedicated page on the Maneage webpage where users can directly open the videos (embedded into the page, using our own server). Maybe through the <video> tag?

We'll add many introductions on the various components of Maneage, as well as tutorials to help people get started.

We can then add a short description of the video above it to help people choose what video to view.

Mohammad Akhlaghi <makhlaghi>
Group administrator

 

(Note: upload size limit is set to 16384 kB, after insertion of the required escape characters.)

Attached Files
file #49215:  maneage_navigate-2020-05-21_source.lz.uuencode added by boud (48KiB - application/octet-stream)

 

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