Month: September 2021

Enlarge / Roku Streambar owners can use their device as a center audio channel in a 3.1 or 5.1 speaker configuration. (credit: Roku)

Today, Roku announced a new streamer in its lineup, the Streaming Stick 4K, alongside a “plus” version of the device with a better remote. The company also confirmed that Roku OS 10.5 will begin rolling out “in the coming weeks,” bringing new audio features and improved search and voice capabilities to compatible Roku devices.

The Roku Mobile app also boasts a few new functions, including a feature to fix audio delays on wireless earbuds paired to Roku streamers. We also have a preview of a new wireless soundbar from TCL and a refresh to the Walmart-exclusive Roku Ultra LT.

Roku OS 10.5 and the Roku Mobile app

Sound is a big theme in Roku’s latest release. The mobile app’s new audio/video sound sync feature is aimed at fixing delays for those using wireless headphones with their Rokus. It works by first attempting to fix sync issues automatically, via a headphone-specific troubleshooter. If the issue persists, users can activate their smartphone camera from within the Roku app to visually assist in syncing audio. A preloaded video will play on-screen as it instructs you to point the phone camera at it to allow the app to attempt to properly sync the audio and video.

Enlarge (credit: Tom Roberts)

Epik has now confirmed that an "unauthorized intrusion" did in fact occur into its systems. The announcement follows last week's incident of hacktivist collective Anonymous leaking 180 GB of data stolen from online service provider Epik. To mock the company's initial response to the data breach claims, Anonymous had altered Epik's official knowledge base, as reported by Ars.

Epik is a domain registrar and web services provider known to serve right-wing clients, some of which have been turned down by more mainstream IT providers due to the objectionable and sometimes illicit content hosted by the clients. Epik's clients have included the Texas GOP, Parler, Gab, and 8chan, among others.

Epik hack impacts millions of non-customers, too

Turns out, the leaked data dump contains 15,003,961 email addresses belonging to both Epik's customers and non-customers, and not everyone is pleased with the news. This occurred as Epik had scraped WHOIS records of domains, even those not owned by the company, and stored these records. In doing so, the contact information of those who have never transacted with Epik directly was also retained in Epik's systems.

Enlarge / Getting the hang of iteratively building commands interactively is all it really takes to become a command line wizard. (credit: Bashar Shglila / Getty Images)

In our first tutorial on command line wizardry, we covered simple redirection and the basics of sed, awk, and grep. Today, we're going to introduce the concepts of simple variable substitution and loops—again, with a specific focus on the Bash command line itself, rather than Bash scripting.

If you need to write a script for repeated use—particularly one with significant logical branching and evaluation—I strongly recommend a "real language" instead of Bash. Luckily, there are plenty of options. I'm personally a big fan of Perl, in part because it's available on pretty much any *nix system you'll ever encounter. Others might reasonably choose, say, Python or Go instead, and I wouldn't judge.

The real point is that we're focusing on the command line itself. Everything below is something you can easily learn to think in and use in real time with a little practice.