How To: Cancel Your LastPass Account

This is just a PSA type of article, about how to cancel your LastPass account. Below are the reasons why you might want to cancel your LastPass account and how you can go about actually canceling that account.

Below is a copy of a recent email from LastPass:

Dear LastPass Customer, 

We recently notified you that an unauthorized party was able to gain access to a third-party cloud-based storage service which is used by LastPass to store backups. Earlier today, we posted an update to our blog with important information about our ongoing investigation. This update includes details regarding our findings to date, recommended actions for our customers, as well as the actions we are currently taking.

We thank you for your patience and continued support of LastPass.

The Team at LastPass

Click the link in the quoted text for more information.

I can no longer trust LastPass with my passwords and wanted to quit their services, closing my account. The only link I could easily find was at the bottom of their email – and that would simply unsubscribe you from their email list.

With the help of @Condobloke on Linux.org, I was eventually able to find how to close my LastPass account (so I’m told by LastPass). When closing my account, they asked for a reason. The reason I gave was:

I no longer have faith in your security

For the record, I had never used LastPass for anything. I had just signed up for an account. I never actually used the extension or their services.

Cancel Your LastPass Account:

The first link you’ll see is in their email, and all that option does is remove you from their mailing list. You’re ONLY unsubscribing to their email list, not actually removing your account. 

That’s this link:

http://417-klk-478.mktoweb.com/lp/logmeintransact/UnsubscribePage.html?mkt_unsubscribe=1

Link left plain on purpose. That link will ONLY remove you from their mailing list. It will not delete your account. So, I recommend deleting your account before removing yourself from the mailing list.

To delete your account, you need a link provided by @Condobloke:

https://lastpass.com/delete_account.php

Again, the link is left plain on purpose. That link will only get you started.

When you have logged in and clicked the button to remove your account, your account is still not deleted. You need to check your email and they send you an additional link. You can use that link to remove your account, remembering to confirm it when they ask time and time again.

When they ask you for a reason as to why you’re removing your account, you might want to tell them that it’s because you can no longer trust their security. They had the chance to be secure and failed. They might be making the ‘right steps’ now, but those steps should have been made before now.

What You Can Do:

If you’re going to use a password manager, you are better off getting one where you control the data. That means you want an ‘offline password manager’ that’s free and (hopefully) open source (so it can be audited, if need be).

I do not have enough experience with offline password managers to make a recommendation. I also am not going to be the one to suggest a specific product only to find out I sent you barking up the wrong tree. So, my suggestion is that you use your favorite search engine and look up ‘offline password manager’. Then, pick what you think works best for you.

I’ve done some looking and this article looks solid. I make no recommendations based on that link, it just looks pretty thorough to me. The article may contain errors and I’m not responsible for that, as I lack the time to dig deeper into this due to a rather impressive winter storm.

Good luck and do due diligence before deciding on a specific offline password manager platform. Read reviews, check security history, make sure it’s easy enough for you to use, and make sure it works with the software you intend it to work with.

Closure:

Well, I don’t use the ‘News’ category often, but this seemed like an important article to get out there. It’s time sensitive so it’s not going to be scheduled for publication, it’ll be published as soon as I’m done proofreading it.

Stay safe out there. Remember, “Practice safe hex!”

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EDIT: Fixed a typo.

Meta: The State Of Linux Tips #13

Today’s article is just a quick one, a meta article. I try to write one of these every month, at the most, or when things happen around the site that I think folks would be interested in.

So, for a while, there were no Google ads. It turned out a site I added to my AdSense account was considered ‘invalid traffic’, which is a vague term that seems to mean it’s whatever Google says it is when they say it. I resolved that issue.

At that point, ads were being shown again – and I know folks clicked on ’em. My readers are kinda creatures of habit, so I’m positive there were clicks. For whatever reason, Google gave me no credit for those clicks.

Then, the pay period ended… 

It could be coincidence, but the site started generating ad revenue when the pay period ended and a new one began. The site has since been getting credit for your clicks. While I like your clicks, I want to remind folks:

Do not click ads to make me happy. Only click ads if you’re truly interested.

If you’re legitimately interested, feel free to click an ad or two… Otherwise, just don’t click. Thanks for both!

Also, I’ve tried to enable a new feature. It’s provided by Google and it’s a nag for those who block ads. This should be EASILY dismissed and not nag you all that often, like once a month or something like that. If the nag in any way interferes with the functioning of the site, please let me know.

For whatever reason, I can’t seem to trigger the ad block nag screen. This makes it difficult to debug.

Meta Stuff:

So, I originally thought the ‘invalid traffic’ was because this site, Linux-Tips, was getting massive increases in traffic. After all, nobody would define ‘invalid traffic’ well enough for me and the site was definitely growing at a good clip. I figured this was the problem, but I was wrong. It was the other site that I added.

What is this massive traffic? Well, it’s not massive when compared to the big sites, but it’s definitely pretty respectable. Last month we had more than 10,000 unique visitors, and those people visited more than 18,000 times. 

My stats are kinda wonky and I’m thinking it’s counting some bot traffic when it’s counting the pages displayed, because in November it claims we displayed more than 1.3 million pages. That’s a whole lot of pages for those visitor numbers, so I think it’s just not accurate.

The bandwidth has gone up accordingly. I now regularly exceed the free tier at the CDN (quic.cloud). Last month, but seemingly not this month, I had to make another deposit to pay for ‘page optimizations’. So, expenses pile up! You don’t have to donate, but you could if you wanted. I will not complain!

I pay for the CDN so that the site is pretty much always available no matter where you are on the globe, and so that it loads quickly from servers that are closer to your location than my actual server. A quick loading site with high availability seems to be a good idea to me.

Some Data:

The three articles that got the most traffic in the past 28 days is:

Find Out Which Display-Manager You’re Using
How To: Disable Sleep And Hibernation on Ubuntu Server
How To: Restart TeamViewer From The Terminal

I am not sure why those are the most popular articles. They’re not the pages I’d think would be the most popular, but I don’t actually have a clue what I’m doing with this whole SEO thing. I just smash buttons and hope something good comes out the other end.

The three most used search terms to find this site via Google, again for the past 28 days, would be:

screenfetch vs neofetch
permitrootlogin prohibit-password
restart teamviewer command line

That’s technically three out of the top four, as the first one is pretty much the same as what’s listed – it’s just in reverse. Lots of people wanna learn about the differences between the two (screenfetch and neofetch) via Google. Again, don’t ask me why. 

So far this month:

The busiest day is Monday, by a good margin.
The vast majority of my traffic is from the United States.
The average person spends 199 seconds (3 min 19 sec) per visit.
96.1% of my visitors are using Linux.
85.5% are using a browser that identifies as Google Chrome.
Google search accounts for most of my traffic.
Linux.org accounts for the second most, but it’s truly dwarfed by Google results.
Last month we used ~25 GB of bandwidth.

Got any other numbers you’re interested in? If so, leave a comment. I’ll be happy to let you know – if I actually have those numbers. It’s also important to realize that every single stat application (especially ones like Google Analytics) is horribly inaccurate. I rely on AWStat the most, because it’s the closest to accurate for some of these numbers. Google Analytics should not be even remotely trusted – but still has some useful information, useful for spotting trends.

Closure:

And there you have it, you have another nice meta article. I’d actually planned on another article, but I decided I’d watch American football and just write a meta article. It seemed like the thing to do. The next article will be published on Christmas day, so we’ll see if we can do something festive for the holiday.

Thanks for reading my meta article! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

Disable WiFi From The Terminal

In today’s article, we’re going to learn how to disable WiFi from the terminal. It’s going to be a simple enough article, with just a few commands to learn. Read on, my dear readers! There’s information to share!

This is certainly a tool that new Linux users could use, you just need to remember to turn WiFi back on when/if you need wireless access again. So, read on, my dear readers, as we venture into a bit of controlling networking with the Linux terminal.

This will will show you how to completely disable WiFi, rendering you unable to connect to any wireless network. There are those folks who will see this as a security measure, as they distrust wireless connections. There are others who may view this as a battery saving measure, as you no longer will have the wireless radio polling for connections or anything like that.

The tool we’ll be using for this is ‘nmcli’. You can do a lot with this command, but the man page describes ‘nmcli’ as this:

nmcli – command-line tool for controlling NetworkManager

And, if you dig a bit deeper, you’ll see that there’s a man page for ‘NetworkManager’. This is described as:

NetworkManager – network management daemon

So, as you can see, we’re gonna be dealing with the network. That’s what I told you in the title and the introductory paragraph! See? We take this seriously! So very, very seriously!

Disable WiFi From The Terminal:

Yup. You read that right. It’s another article that requires an open terminal, so you should open a terminal now. If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal now open, let’s learn how to disable WiFi from the terminal itself. So, to disable WiFi, your command would look like:

Next, of course, we’ll learn to turn it back on again. That command looks like:

If you have other radios, such as a mobile/cellular network, you can actually enable and disable all the radios with just one command:

And to turn all the radios back on again:

And there you have it.. You can disable WiFi from the terminal. If you want to know more about ‘nmcli’ (and it’s a bit of a robust command), it’s just:

You can also check the ‘NetworkManager’ man page with:

Closure:

There it is! It’s another article! This one does what the title says it’s going to do – it shows you how to disable WiFi from the terminal. There’s more to ‘nmcli’ and ‘networkmanager’ so maybe we’ll have another article covering some other options? It could happen!

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

Show A Random Fortune When You Open Your Terminal

In today’s article, which should be a short one, we’re going to learn how to show a random fortune when you open your terminal. This should be pretty quick and easy, easy enough for anyone to follow. Read on, my delightful readers!

NOTE: You gotta be using bash for this, as evidenced by the use of ~/.bashrc.

Why this article? Well, I am having some connectivity issues and I want to ensure I get you a nice article while I have the connection to do so. I don’t want to count on enough time to write a longer article.

Besides, it’s another good day for a fun article. I am 99% confident that this article will teach you nothing of value! And that’s okay. It’s just you having fun – and having fun is always a good idea. So, this article will just be a bit more of that, some more fun…

First, you should read the previous article and follow the directions. That’s gonna be necessary for the next part. After all, you can’t get a random fortune when you open your terminal unless you’ve installed some software to do that. So, read this article:

How To: Display Your Fortune In The Terminal

Did you read that? Did you install ‘fortune’? Good… Now we can get into this article!

How To: Show A Random Fortune When You Open The Terminal:

Sorry about the ugly headline. Gotta optimize for Google, I guess.

This article requires an open terminal, like oh so many other articles on this site. Just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal now open, we’re going to edit the ~/.bashrc file to make it show a fortune when you open the terminal. We’ll be using nano to do so, and that’s an easy enough process.

NOTE: You don’t need sudo for this, as you already own this file.

With nano opening your ~/.bashrc file for editing, you just need to scroll to the very bottom. When you get to the bottom of the file, just add the following line:

Next, you need to save the file. To save the file with nano, press CTRL + X, then Y, and then ENTER.

Now, you need to reload your bash profile. That looks like:

Now, that should reload the terminal and profile, showing you a ‘fortune’ quote. If you want to be really sure, or if doesn’t show you a fortune, just close your terminal and open it back up again. When you open your terminal again, it should definitely show you a fortune. See? Pretty easy! It’s darned near magical!

Closure:

And there you have it. You now know how to show a random fortune when you open your terminal. ‘Snot all that hard, now is it? If I’ve gotta bang out an article with intermittent connectivity, we might as well have fun with it! Thanks for reading and we’ll get some more serious content coming up – or will we?!? I should have decent connectivity soon. It can’t stay down forever, can it?

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How To: Display Your Fortune In The Terminal

Today’s article is just a silly article, one where you learn how to display your fortune in the terminal. It’ll be fun! It’ll also be quick and easy, probably. If you’re expecting anything serious, this is not the article for you. No… No, it is not!

Once in a while, we remember that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Well, we don’t want to be a dull boy, so let’s do something that serves absolutely no benefit. Let’s just have unadulterated fun. It’s my site, I’ll do what I want!

To be fair, I’ve already cover this same topic. I shared how to use ‘cowsay’ with ‘fortune’. I suppose it’s cheating, but this time we’re just going to use the ‘fortune‘ aspect. Trust me, it’s a very different article.

Yes, it’s an excuse to have a quick and easy article. I had an easy article the last time and I still want an easy article. I don’t want to burnout and we’ve had more than 300 articles. So, an easy spell is nice. It’ll help prevent burnout. I’ll be over it in a day or two, I assume. (Note that I didn’t promise.)

Remember, a goal of the site is to be found by search. So, having a ‘fortune’ specific article isn’t a bad thing. Not everyone will want the silliness of ‘cowsay‘. (They not very fun people, but they’re people and they exist!)

So then, let’s just get going with the silliness…

Display Your Fortune In The Terminal:

Obviously, you need an open terminal! It’s right there in the title! If you don’t know how to open the terminal, you can do so with your keyboard – just press CTRL + ALT + T and your default terminal should open.

With your terminal open, you need to install ‘fortune’. It’s probably available for those using apt and those using rpm based package managers. It may be available for others, but I have not checked. So, to install it:

On apt-based distros:

On rpm-based distros:

With ‘fortune’ happily installed, and feel free to try in other package managers – but leave a comment if they work, you can start with the basic ‘fortune’ command:

Now, as this is just a fun article, I’m actually going to cheat. I’m going to suggest you just use the man page to learn more:

See, this is why I wanted to cover ‘fortune’ by itself. There are a whole lot of options available for such a silly program. Of all of them, my favorite one is the -l flag. That one throws out longer fortunes, like this one:

See?!? The ‘fortune’ command is pure awesomeness! If you’re anything like a cat, or myself, you can bat at the fortune command (as though it was a balled up piece of paper) for way longer than what seems reasonable.

So, check that man page and have fun with ‘fortune’. For example, you can (with the default configuration – and you can do way more with ‘fortune’ than one might ever possibly wish) run one of the following commands:

So, have fun with it. I do! I revisit the command far more often than one might think a grown adult would. Even then, and my memory kinda sucks, I don’t think I’ve read them all. It’s a gift that keeps on giving.

Closure:

And there you have it… You can now display your fortune in the terminal. I mean, it’s probably not really your fortune – but that doesn’t mean you can’t have some fun with it. Life is short, but not too short to have some fun in the Linux terminal.

By the way, like the last article, this article was prompted by an recent article on a forum I frequent. Nobody mentioned the ‘fortune’ command, so I figured I’d return to it and try to give it some justice. It’s a fun application with way more  options than it needs – and that’s awesome.

Thanks for reading! If you want to help, or if the site has helped you, you can donate, register to help, write an article, or buy inexpensive hosting to start your own site. If you scroll down, you can sign up for the newsletter, vote for the article, and comment.

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