Please find a 2021 update below and furtherdown a comment from 2024!

Some companies offer their employees to access their corporate computer work space remotely using a remote desktop connection. The company Citrix provides software for such a connection. To connect, the employees need the software Citrix Workspace on their terminal devices. The company provides on their download page also files for Linux including openSUSE. Unfortunately, their version 1912 from 12 December 2019 did not just work on my openSUSE Tumbleweed 64bit computer (and earlier versions I tried neither).

Road Trip from Germany to the Retreat in the Alps

04 Mar 2019 in Travels on Germany, France

At the beginning of March, I started my retreat stay in the French Alps to take care for myself and rest. Before the great rest though, I had to get from Brussels to the Alps: My first road trip.

The black slope for all road trip novices. Photo by Raul Taciu.

If the mountain won’t come to the prophet, then the prophet must go to the mountain.¹

If the mountain is very far away, the prophet is well advised to rather ride by horse, Uber or even take a plane. I was lucky to get the chance to use the car of the family. Unfortunately, this car was not in Brussels, but in North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany. Though, a car is much smaller and more mobile than a mountain, it was again me who had to go get the car.

With some advice from StackOverflow, I wrote a short node script that I placed in the file $HOME/bin/get-cookies.js with the executive bit set via chmod +x $HOME/bin/get-cookies. It relies on the library puppeteer to control a browser instance of headless Chromium, which must be installed first via npm i puppeteer.

Then, you can call get-cookies.js https://google.com to get all installed cookies upon request of the page given as a parameter (here: https://google.com). Note that Puppeteer creates its own Chromium user profile which it cleans up on every run.

Source Code of ‘get-cookies.js’

#!/usr/bin/env node

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

const url = process.argv[2];

(async () => {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch({ headless: true, args: ['--disable-dev-shm-usage'] });
  try {
    const page = await browser.newPage();
    await page.goto(url, { waitUntil: 'networkidle2' });

    var cookies = await page._client.send('Network.getAllCookies');
    cookies = cookies.cookies.map( cookie => {
      cookie.expiresUTC = new Date(cookie.expires * 1000);

      return cookie;
    });

    var persistantCookies = cookies.filter(c => {
      return !c.session;
    });

    console.log({
      persistantCookies: persistantCookies,
      persistantCookiesCount: persistantCookies.length,
    });
  } catch(error) {
    console.error(error);
  } finally {
    await browser.close();
  }
})();

You also do not want to read the lengthy privacy policy https://www.pottermore.com/about/privacy and create an account, just to know your Wizard House Quiz? Here you have a privacy-friendly alternative.

Browsing with HTTP Referer and Data Protection

27 Jun 2018 in Digitalisation on Data-protection Last modified at: 28 Jun 2018

Web browsers inform web servers in many cases about the referring webpage when users browse the web. I consider if this can be a good data protection practice.

Screenshot showing HTTP referer.

Consider a web page with URL α on web server A containing a link to a web page with URL β on web server B. If a web page visitor clicks on the link to β, many browsers send along with the request to server B for the web page β the referring webpage α. This information is sent in form of a HTTP request header.