Not a screenshot of despair. But only because it s not a screenshot.

Due to health reasons I did not have the energy to write individual status updates for February & March, so I ll just combine them with the April update: In February I cleaned out my GitHub account and moved all remaining projects to Codeberg. I archived the repositories on GitHub and added links to the new repositories on Codeberg. GitHub is a platform that is more and more frustrating to use. I still have to use it for my dayjob, though. The number of pull requests and issues that are written either by bots or by users that use bots increased in the last two years. Combined with that, GitHub provides a very low barrier for entitled users who do not want to contribute to a productive environment. GitHub now feels like the Twitter/X of git forges. Codeberg on the other hand is a community project. I feel a lot more at home there and the platform itself feels a lot more responsive than GitHub.

Debian Related Work

• Uploaded wayback 0.3-1 to experimental
• Uploaded slurp 1.6.0-1 to unstable
• Uploaded first a prerelease of sway to experimental to be able to test wlroots 0.20.0 and then uploaded rc1, rc2 and rc3 of the upcoming 1.12 release
• Uploaded waybar 0.15.0-1 to unstable
• Uploaded kanshi 1.9.0-1 to unstable, which was possible because the dependency libscfg finally went through NEW
• Uploaded libscfg 0.2.0-1 to unstable
• Uploaded swaybg 1.2.2-1 to unstable
• Uploaded labwc 0.9.4-1, 0.9.5 & 0.9.6 to unstable
• Fixed the packaging of vali and uploaded version 0.1.1-1 to unstable; then added vali to the build dependencies of kanshi and reuploaded 1.9.0-2 thereof
• Uploaded swaylock 1.8.5-1 to unstable
• Uploaded fcft 3.3.3-1 to unstable
• Uploaded foot 1.26.1-1 to unstable
• Uploaded swayimg 5.0-1 and 5.1-1 to unstable
• Fixed some packaging metadata in libsfdo and uploaded 0.1.4-2 to unstable
• Reverted the upload of slurp from 1.6.0-1 to 1.6.0really1.5.0-1 because the upstream release of 1.6.0 was made by mistake and yanked a week later. Maybe I should add a cooldown period before uploading new releases ;)
• Uploaded mako-notifier 1.11.0-1 to unstable
• Uploaded cage 0.3.0-1 to experimental which uses wlroots 0.20.0
• Uploaded xdg-desktop-portal-wlr 0.8.2-1 to unstable
• Voted

DH Related Work I took part in the DHD 2026 Conference in Vienna, including a hands-on workshop of the dhinfra project. I released 0.60.0, 0.61.0 and 0.62.0 of apis-core-rdf. We rewrote the configuration format for the importer. We previously used TOML files, but that does not give us inheritance. So we now use simply Python classes as configuration format. I implemented a new backend for our apis-bibsonomy Django package. The package is meant to provide a datamodel for storing reference data that links to Bibsonomy or Zotero. Given that we don t use Bibsonomy anymore we now dropped the Bibsonomy backend but added a Zotero backend that allows to cache the entries locally.

Although I never submitted to it, I made several appearances in the now-defunct quote database on bash.org (QDB). I m dealing with a broken keyboard now, and went to dig hard to find this classic in the Wayback machine. I thought I would put it back on the web:

<mako> my letter "eye" stopped worng
<luca> k, too?
<mako> yeah
<luca> sounds like a mountain dew spill
<mako> and comma
<mako> those three
<mako> ths s horrble
<luca> tme for a new eyboard
<luca> 've successfully taen my eyboard apart and fxed t by cleanng t wth alcohol
<mako> stop mang fun of me
<mako> ths s a laptop!

It was, in fact, horrble.

We seem to be entering an AI apocalypse of sorts, they aren t going to kill us or even take our jobs. What they are doing is destroying the Internet commons by filling it with rubbish. This isn t even real AI, just pattern matching and prediction systems, mostly LLMs. The Problem Scott Shambaugh s saga of being attacked and defamed by an OpenClaw AI bot is interesting and raises some disturbing possibilities for future online discussion [1]. Imagine what it would be like if everyone who was in any way notable for free software work had 100 such bots going after them. Dania Dumas wrote an insightful blog post about why OpenClaw is impossible to secure and why it won t go away [2]. Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders wrote an insightful article about the AI generated text arms race [3] primarily concentrating on situations in which text that was assumed to be written by humans but was actually written in bulk by bots was performing a DOS attack on people who were reviewing it. There are many situations such as book publishing and publishing letters to the editor of newspapers where getting new material from unknown people is an important part of the job but where there are also people making low quality submissions that are almost a DOS attack at the best of times. Currently the email spam problem continues to get worse and when LLM use increases it will get significantly worse. Email encryption isn t viable [4]. The PGP web of trust never really worked well as it s too difficult for most users. The amount of AI generated content that s being recommended to users on platforms like YouTube and Facebook is steadily increasing and the amount of LLM generated commentary that purports to be from real people on Twitter and Facebook is also increasing. Here s an informative blog post by Erich Schubert about this [5]. Potential Solutions Surrender? One option and possibly the default option is to surrender to this and just let everything we built on the Internet over decades get destroyed. Whether to surrender is a decision that can be made on a per-service basis. Twitter is pretty much useless anyway, I quit Twitter because Elon deliberately made it suck [6]. In my opinion this is not surrendering to what s being done there, I m just stopping wasting time on it and using better options. I used to have about 300 followers on Twitter and I don t think that many of them would ever choose to stop following me, so I presume that about 1/3 of the people following me have decided to totally quit Twitter and delete their accounts. I also presume that some of the remainder have done the same as me and just kept a mostly inactive account. If Elon suddenly stopped being a stupid asshole it probably wouldn t change anything as the value of the system was connections to others. Some people will consider my abandonment of Twitter as surrender and I accept that it s not an unreasonable opinion. I think that the possibly 100 Twitter followers of mine who deleted their accounts surrendered. Facebook has been becoming a worse service, it s business model is becoming increasingly exploitative and it s interface is designed to be addictive. It s probably best avoided unless you really need it. The only good thing about Facebook at the moment is that Facebook Marketplace doesn t take a cut on sales and there are some really good deals on computers if you know what to look for. Unfortunately Facebook has a large number of users who are from marginalised communities and have no other alternatives for communication. It would be good to get them migrated to other platforms. We could just give up on a lot of general communications services and have everyone accept that good content is drowned out by rubbish and have the Internet become divided between people who accept the rubbish and those who cease using large portions of the Internet environment to avoid it. Using Non Commercial Services Lemmy is a good FOSS federated alternative to Reddit which also covers some of the uses of Facebook. It needs more users to get critical mass but is still quite usable. A post that might get a dozen comments on Reddit may get 1 comment on Lemmy but that one comment will be a good one. Reddit doesn t appear to be attacked much by LLM generated content at least not yet. Even if the Reddit model proves to be resilient to LLM attack the Lemmy software can be used to replace some things that are done on Facebook, Mastodon is a good FOSS federated replacement for Twitter, it has a decent user-base including some VIPs. While it is aimed at the Twitter use case it can also cover a significant part of the Facebook use case. There are some other FOSS social media programs which could take over other parts of the commercial social media environment. Generally commercially run Internet services will have a financial incentive to allow the problems to get worse so we need to rely on FOSS software, non-commercial implementations, and government services. Web Search For a long time Google has had a monopoly on web search, but now they default to including an AI Overview at the start of the results which is sometimes useful but also sometimes very wrong. You can use the search URL https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=web to get google results without rubbish. But I presume that they will break that if it gets too popular. Searxng is a AGPL licensed metasearch engine that aggregates results from other engines, here s the Searxng source [7] and here s a list of Searxng instances if you want to try one [8]. Even using meta search engines like Searxng won t help if the original data is overloaded with spam, but alleviating the problem is a good temporary measure. Web of Trust for the Web? I ve idly considered the possibility of having some sort of rating system for web pages that uses a web of trust so that you can securely use trust ratings of friends of friends etc. But given all the difficulties in using a web of trust for signing GPG key for software developers (the demographic that is most skilled at doing such things) it doesn t seem viable. Should we surrender the idea of having a usable public web? In the early days of the web (before Google) it was standard practice to rely on recommendations from other people or from trusted sites to find other sites, that could be considered to be an informal web of trust. We could go back to that sort of usage pattern if Google and many of the big sites get overwhelmed by LLM generated spam. Wikipedia I believe that Wikipedia will be at the front lines of this battle. It s model has always included anonymous contributions. Benjamin Mako Hill wrote an interesting blog post about research he did with Kaylea Champion into Wikipedia pages on taboo topics which have a larger portion of contributors choosing to be anonymous than non-taboo pages [9]. Wikipedia also has a long history of being abused for various reasons, one that I witnessed was someone putting false content into Wikipedia pages to immediately cite them in support of their facebook arguments. That sort of thing can be dealt with at human scale but a large scale attack by bots is a different problem to solve. Also with the recent developments in AI developing multiple web sites entirely populated for the purpose of supporting one fake entry in Wikipedia is plausible. The upside of these attacks that I predict is that they will attract the attention of all the people who have skills related to developing counter-measures. While LLM bots are filling the inboxes of publishers with rubbish and messing up the stackoverflow comments section not a lot of people are bothered, but once the attacks on Wikipedia get serious everyone will take notice. National AI Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders wrote an interesting blog post about nationalised public AI [10]. While that won t directly address this issue it will get the right technology in the hands of people who can use it in the right way. Conclusion This is going to be a difficult problem to solve, more difficult than the email spam problem we have been unable to solve after 30 years of working on it. This is also a very important problem, we are currently in an age where we have access to information that most people couldn t even dream of 30 years ago. We also have disinformation that combines some of the worst aspects of authoritarian regimes throughout history combined with the worst aspects of cult brainwashing. If we lose access to the information but the disinformation remains (or get worse) then the result will be terrible. I don t have great ideas for solving this. I have outlined some small ideas to mitigate things and I hope that others can expand on them. Please write comments with any good ideas you have, or even ideas that don t totally suck. A problem this difficult is not going to be solved in a blog comment, but a blog comment might point in the right direction.

• [1] https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/26wm43e2
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/22ghka6s
• [4] https://tinyurl.com/29to4cw5
• [5] https://www.vitavonni.de/blog/202602/20260213dogfood-the-AI.html
• [6] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2026/03/25/death-of-twitter/
• [7] https://github.com/searxng/searxng
• [8] https://searx.space/
• [9] https://tinyurl.com/26m98gca
• [10] https://tinyurl.com/24xt9gst

Note: I have not published blog posts about my academic papers over the past few years. To ensure that my blog contains a more comprehensive record of my published papers and to surface them for folks who missed them, I will periodically (re) publish blog posts about some older published projects. This post draws material from a previously published post by Kaylea Champion on the Community Data Science Blog.

Taboo subjects such as sexuality and mental health are as important to discuss as they are difficult to raise in conversation. Although many people turn to online resources for information on taboo subjects, censorship and low-quality information are common in search results. In two papers I recently published at CSCW both led by Kaylea Champion we presented a series of analyses showing how taboo shapes the process of collaborative knowledge building on English Wikipedia.

The first study is a quantitative analysis showing that articles on taboo subjects are much more popular and are the subject of more vandalism than articles on non-taboo topics. In surprising news, we also found that they were edited more often and were of higher quality!

Short video of Kaylea s presentation of the work given at Wikimania in August 2023.

The first challenge we faced in conducting this work was identifying taboo articles. Kaylea had a brilliant idea for a new computational approach to doing so without relying on our individual intuitions about what qualifies as taboo (something we understood would be highly specific to our own culture, class, etc). Her approach was to make use of an insight from linguistics: people develop euphemisms as ways to talk about taboos (i.e., think about all the euphemisms we ve devised for death, or sex, or menstruation, or mental health).

We used this insight to build a new machine-learning classifier based on English Wiktionary definitions. If a sense of a word was tagged as euphemistic, we treated the words in the definition as indicators of taboo. The end result was a series of words and phrases that most powerfully differentiate taboo from non-taboo. We then did a simple match between those words and phrases and the titles of Wikipedia articles. The topics were taboo enough that we were a little uncomfortable discussing them in our meetings! We built a comparison sample of articles whose titles are words that, like our taboo articles, appear in Wiktionary definitions. In the first paper, we used this new dataset to test a series of hypotheses about how taboo shapes collaborative production in Wikipedia. Our initial hypotheses were based on the idea that taboo information is often in high demand but that Wikipedians might be reluctant to associate their names (or usernames) with taboo topics. The result, we argued, would be articles that were in high demand but of low quality. We found that taboo articles are thriving on Wikipedia! In summary, we found that in comparison to non-taboo articles:

• Taboo articles are more popular (as expected).
• Taboo articles receive more contributions (contrary to expectations).
• Taboo articles receive more low-quality contributions (as expected).
• Taboo articles are higher quality (contrary to expectations).
• Taboo article contributors are more likely to contribute without an account (as expected), and have less experience (as expected), but that accountholders are more likely to make themselves more identifiable by having a user page, disclosing their gender, and making themselves emailable (all three of these are contrary to expectation!).

Image of the estimated qualiy of articles of the four articles in the second mixed-methods paper. Extreme dips reflect periods of frequent vandalism.

Kaylea attempted to understand these somewhat confusing results by designing a fantastic mixed-methods analysis that sought to unpack some of the nuance missing in the quantitative analysis by delving deep into the life histories of four articles on English Wikipedia: two on taboo topics related to women s anatomy (Clitoris and Menstration) and two nontaboo articles chosen for comparison (Cell membrance and Philip Pullman). Although the findings from the analysis can be difficult to summarize succinctly (as with many qualitative studies), we showed how the taboo example articles success was hard-won amid real challenges and attacks. The paper describes how challenges were overcome through resilient leadership, often provided by a single dedicated individual. The paper provides a template for how taboo can be and frequently is overcome by dedicated Wikipedians in ways that provide useful knowledge resources in real demand. For more details, visualizations, statistics, and more, we hope you ll take a look at our papers, both linked below.

---

The full citation for the papers are: (1) Champion, Kaylea, and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2023. Taboo and Collaborative Knowledge Production: Evidence from Wikipedia. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 7 (CSCW2): 299:1-299:25. https://doi.org/10.1145/3610090. (2) Champion, Kaylea, and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2024. Life Histories of Taboo Knowledge Artifacts. Proceedings of the ACM: Human-Computer Interaction 8 (CSCW2): 505:1-505:32. https://doi.org/10.1145/3687044.

We have also released replication materials for the paper, including all the data and code used to conduct the analyses.

This blog post and the paper it describes are collaborative work by Kaylea Champion and Benjamin Mako Hill.

---

Edited 2026-03-05 18:48 UTC to add a missing --noop-ok to the Salsa CI runes. Thanks to Charlemagne Lasse for the report. Apologies if this causes Debian Planet to re-post this article as if it were new.

comments

Had a discussion about how to pronounce the name of Google s chatbot. Turns out, we were all wrong.

Note: I have not published blog posts about my academic papers over the past few years. To ensure that my blog contains a more comprehensive record of my published papers and to surface these for folks who missed them, I will be periodically (re)publishing blog posts about some older published projects. This post is closely based on a previously published post by Zarine Kharazian on the Community Data Science Blog. For nearly a decade, the Croatian language version of Wikipedia was run by a cabal of far-right nationalists who edited articles in ways that promoted fringe political ideas and involved cases of historical revisionism related to the Usta e regime, a fascist movement that ruled the Nazi puppet state called the Independent State of Croatia during World War II. This cabal seized complete control of the encyclopedia s governance, banned and blocked those who disagreed with them, and operated a network of fake accounts to create the appearance of grassroots support for their policies. Thankfully, Croatian Wikipedia appears to be an outlier. Though both the Croatian and Serbian language editions have been documented to contain nationalist bias and historical revisionism, Croatian Wikipedia seems unique among Wikipedia editions in the extent to which its governance institutions were captured by a small group of users.

The situation in Croatian Wikipedia was well documented and is now largely fixed, but we still know very little about why it was taken over, while other language editions seem to have rebuffed similar capture attempts. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the ACM: Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW), Zarine Kharazian, Kate Starbird, and I present an interview-based study that provides an explanation for why Croatian was captured while several other editions facing similar contexts and threats fared better.

Short video presentation of the work given at Wikimania in August 2023.

Based on insights from interviews with 15 participants from both the Croatian and Serbian Wikipedia projects and from the broader Wikimedia movement, we arrived at three propositions that, together, help explain why Croatian Wikipedia succumbed to capture while Serbian Wikipedia did not:

1. Perceived Value as a Target. Is the project worth expending the effort to capture?
2. Bureaucratic Openness. How easy is it for contributors outside the core founding team to ascend to local governance positions?
3. Institutional Formalization. To what degree does the project prefer personalistic, informal forms of organization over formal ones?

The conceptual model from our paper, visualizing possible institutional configurations among Wikipedia projects that affect the risk of governance capture.

We found that both Croatian and Serbian Wikipedias were attractive targets for far-right nationalist capture due to their sizable readership and resonance with national identity. However, we also found that the two projects diverged early in their trajectories in how open they remained to new contributors ascending to local governance positions and in the degree to which they privileged informal relationships over formal rules and processes as the project s organizing principles. Ultimately, Croatian s relative lack of bureaucratic openness and rules constraining administrator behavior created a window of opportunity for a motivated contingent of editors to seize control of the governance mechanisms of the project. Though our empirical setting was Wikipedia, our theoretical model may offer insight into the challenges faced by self-governed online communities more broadly. As interest in decentralized alternatives to Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) grows, communities on these sites will likely face similar threats from motivated actors. Understanding the vulnerabilities inherent in these self-governing systems is crucial to building resilient defenses against threats like disinformation. For more details on our findings, take a look at the published version of our paper.

---

Citation for the full paper: Kharazian, Zarine, Kate Starbird, and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2024. Governance Capture in a Self-Governing Community: A Qualitative Comparison of the Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, and Serbo-Croatian Wikipedias. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 8 (CSCW1): 61:1-61:26. https://doi.org/10.1145/3637338.

This blog post and the paper it describes are collaborative work by Zarine Kharazian, Benjamin Mako Hill, and Kate Starbird.

Note: I have not published blog posts about my academic papers over the past few years. To ensure that my blog contains a more comprehensive record of my published papers and to surface these for folks who missed them, I will be periodically (re)publishing blog posts about some older published projects. It seems natural to think of online communities competing for the time and attention of their participants. Over the last few years, I ve worked with a team of collaborators led by Nathan TeBlunthuis to use mathematical and statistical techniques from ecology to understand these dynamics. What we ve found surprised us: competition between online communities is rare and typically short-lived. When we started this research, we figured competition would be most likely among communities discussing similar topics. As a first step, we identified clusters of such communities on Reddit. One surprising thing we noticed in our Reddit data was that many of these communities that used similar language also had very high levels of overlap among their users. This was puzzling: why were the same groups of people talking to each other about the same things in different places? And why don t they appear to be in competition with each other for their users time and activity? We didn t know how to answer this question using quantitative methods. As a result, we recruited and interviewed 20 active participants in clusters of highly related subreddits with overlapping user bases (for example, one cluster was focused on vintage audio). We found that the answer to the puzzle lay in the fact that the people we talked to were looking for three distinct things from the communities they worked in:

1. The ability to connect to specific information and narrowly scoped discussions.
2. The ability to socialize with people who are similar to themselves.
3. Attention from the largest possible audience.

Critically, we also found that these three things represented a trilemma, and that no single community can meet all three needs. You might find two of the three in a single community, but you could never have all three. The end result is something I recognize in how I engage with online communities on platforms like Reddit. People tend to engage with a portfolio of communities that vary in size, specialization, topical focus, and rules. Compared with any single community, such overlapping systems can provide a wider range of benefits. No community can do everything.

---

This work was published as a paper at CSCW: TeBlunthuis, Nathan, Charles Kiene, Isabella Brown, Laura (Alia) Levi, Nicole McGinnis, and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2022. No Community Can Do Everything: Why People Participate in Similar Online Communities. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 6 (CSCW1): 61:1-61:25. https://doi.org/10.1145/3512908.

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (awards IIS-1908850, IIS-1910202, and GRFP-2016220885). A full list of acknowledgements is in the paper.

Note: I have not published blog posts about my academic papers over the past few years. To ensure that my blog contains a more comprehensive record of my published papers and to surface these for folks who missed them, I will be periodically (re)publishing blog posts about some older published projects. This post is closely based on a previously published post by Kaylea Champion on the Community Data Science Blog.

Many individuals use Tor to reduce their visibility to widespread internet surveillance.

One popular approach to protecting our privacy online is to use the Tor network. Tor protects users from being identified by their IP address, which can be tied to a physical location. However, if you d like to contribute to Wikipedia using Tor, you ll run into a problem. Although most IP addresses can edit without an account, Tor users are blocked from editing.

Tor users attempting to contribute to Wikipedia are shown a screen that informs them that they are not allowed to edit Wikipedia.

Other research by my team has shown that Wikipedia s attempt to block Tor is imperfect and that some people have been able to edit despite the ban. As part of this work, we built a dataset of more than 11,000 contributions to Wikipedia via Tor and used quantitative analysis to show that contributions from Tor were of about the same quality as contributions from other new editors and other contributors without accounts. Of course, given the unusual circumstances Tor-based contributors face, we wondered whether a deeper look at the content of their edits might reveal more about their motives and the kinds of contributions they seek to make. Kaylea Champion (then a student, now faculty at UW Bothell) led a qualitative investigation to explore these questions. Given the challenges of studying anonymity seekers, we designed a novel forensic qualitative approach inspired by techniques common in computer security and criminal investigation. We applied this new technique to a sample of 500 editing sessions and categorized each session based on what the editor seemed to be intending to do. Most of the contributions we found fell into one of the two following categories:

• Many contributions were quotidian attempts to add to the encyclopedia. Tor-based editors added facts, fixed typos, and updated train schedules. There s no way to know whether these individuals knew they were just getting lucky in their ability to edit or were patiently reloading to evade the ban.
• Second, we found harassing comments and vandalism. Unwelcome conduct is common in online environments, and it is sometimes more common when the likelihood of being identified decreases. Some of the harassing comments we observed were direct responses to being banned as a Tor user.

Although these were most of what we observed, we also found evidence of several types of contributor intent:

• We observed activism: when a contributor tried to draw attention to journalistic accounts of environmental and human rights abuses committed by a mining company, only to have editors linked to the mining company repeatedly remove their edits. Another example involved an editor trying to diminish the influence of proponents of alternative medicine.
• We also observed quality maintenance activities when editors used Wikipedia s rules on appropriate sourcing to remove personal websites being cited in conspiracy theories.
• We saw edit wars with Tor editors participating in a back-and-forth removal and replacement of content as part of a dispute, in some cases countering the work of an experienced Wikipedia editor whom even other experienced editors had gauged to be biased.
• Finally, we saw Tor-based editors participating in non-article discussions, such as investigations into administrator misconduct and protests against the Wikipedia platform s mistrust of Tor editors.

An exploratory mapping of our themes in terms of the value a type of contribution represents to the Wikipedia community and the importance of anonymity in facilitating it. Anonymity-protecting tools play a critical role in facilitating contributions on the right side of the figure, while edits on the left are more likely to occur even when anonymity is impossible. Contributions toward the top reflect valuable forms of participation in Wikipedia, while edits at the bottom reflect damage.

In all, these themes led us to reflect on how the risks individuals face when contributing to online communities sometimes diverge from the risks the communities face in accepting their work. Expressing minoritized perspectives, maintaining community standards even when you may be targeted by the rulebreaker, highlighting injustice, or acting as a whistleblower can be very risky for an individual, and may not be possible without privacy protections. Of course, in platforms seeking to support the public good, such knowledge and accountability may be crucial.

---

This work was published as a paper at CSCW: Kaylea Champion, Nora McDonald, Stephanie Bankes, Joseph Zhang, Rachel Greenstadt, Andrea Forte, and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2019. A Forensic Qualitative Analysis of Contributions to Wikipedia from Anonymity Seeking Users. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction. 3, CSCW, Article 53 (November 2019), 26 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359155

This project was conducted by Kaylea Champion, Nora McDonald, Stephanie Bankes, Joseph Zhang, Rachel Greenstadt, Andrea Forte, and Benjamin Mako Hill. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (awards CNS-1703736 and CNS-1703049) and included the work of two undergraduates supported through an NSF REU supplement.

Me: Do you want your coffee in a Japanese or Western style tea cup? M: Yunomi. Me: Apparently not as well as you think I do!

In 2017, I led a series of workshops aimed at teaching beginners a better understanding of encryption, how the internet works, and their digital security. Nearly a decade later, there is still a great need to share reliable resources and guides on improving these skills. I have worked professionally in computer security one way or another for well over a decade, at many major technology companies and in many open source software projects. There are many inaccurate and unreliable resources out there on this subject, put together by well-meaning people without a background in security, which can lead to sharing misinformation, exaggeration and fearmongering. I hope that I can offer you a trusted, curated list of high impact things that you can do right now, using whichever vetted guide you prefer. In addition, I also include how long it should take, why you should do each task, and any limitations. This guide is aimed at improving your personal security, and does not apply to your work-owned devices. Always assume your company can monitor all of your messages and activities on work devices. What can I do to improve my security right away? I put together this list in order of effort, easiest tasks first. You should be able to complete many of the low effort tasks in a single hour. The medium to high effort tasks are very much worth doing, but may take you a few days or even weeks to complete them. Low effort (<15 minutes) Upgrade your software to the latest versions Why? I don't know anyone who hasn't complained about software updates breaking features, introducing bugs, and causing headaches. If it ain't broke, why upgrade, right? Well, alongside all of those annoying bugs and breaking changes, software updates also include security fixes, which will protect your device from being exploited by bad actors. Security issues can be found in software at any time, even software that's been available for many years and thought to be secure. You want to install these as soon as they are available. Recommendation: Turn on automatic upgrades and always keep your devices as up-to-date as possible. If you have some software you know will not work if you upgrade it, at least be sure to upgrade your laptop and phone operating system (iOS, Android, Windows, etc.) and web browser (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc.). Do not use devices that do not receive security support (e.g. old Android or iPhones). Guides:

• Activist Checklist: Install the latest software updates
• Consumer Reports: Update your Mac, Windows PC, Chromebook, Android phone, iOS device
• Apple: Obsolete products (obsolete devices do not receive security updates)
• Google: How long you'll get Pixel updates
• Samsung: Devices that receive security updates
• Other brands: check the manufacturer's website

Limitations: This will prevent someone from exploiting known security issues on your devices, but it won't help if your device was already compromised. If this is a concern, doing a factory reset, upgrade, and turning on automatic upgrades may help. This also won't protect against all types of attacks, but it is a necessary foundation. Use Signal Why? Signal is a trusted, vetted, secure messaging application that allows you to send end-to-end encrypted messages and make video/phone calls. This means that only you and your intended recipient can decrypt the messages and someone cannot intercept and read your messages, in contrast to texting (SMS) and other insecure forms of messaging. Other applications advertise themselves as end-to-end encrypted, but Signal provides the strongest protections. Recommendation: I recommend installing the Signal app and using it! My mom loves that she can video call me on Wi-Fi on my Android phone. It also supports group chats. I use it as a secure alternative to texting (SMS) and other chat platforms. I also like Signal's "disappearing messages" feature which I enable by default because it automatically deletes messages after a certain period of time. This avoids your messages taking up too much storage. Guides:

• Activist Checklist: Use Signal
• Activist Checklist: Turn on disappearing messages
• Electronic Frontier Foundation: How to use Signal
• Consumer Reports: Communicate privately with Signal
• Signal: Enabling Incognito Keyboard (Android) to provide slightly more privacy

Limitations: Signal is only able to protect your messages in transit. If someone has access to your phone or the phone of the person you sent messages to, they will still be able to read them. As a rule of thumb, if you don't want someone to read something, don't write it down! Meet in person or make an encrypted phone call where you will not be overheard. If you are talking to someone you don't know, assume your messages are as public as posting on social media. Set passwords and turn on device encryption Why? Passwords ensure that someone else can't unlock your device without your consent or knowledge. They also are required to turn on device encryption, which protects your information on your device from being accessed when it is locked. Biometric (fingerprint or face ID) locking provides some privacy, but your fingerprint or face ID can be used against your wishes, whereas if you are the only person who knows your password, only you can use it. Recommendation: Always set passwords and have device encryption enabled in order to protect your personal privacy. It may be convenient to allow kids or family members access to an unlocked device, but anyone else can access it, too! Use strong passwords that cannot be guessed avoid using names, birthdays, phone numbers, addresses, or other public information. Using a password manager will make creating and managing passwords even easier. Disable biometric unlock, or at least know how to disable it. Most devices will enable disk encryption by default, but you should double-check. Guides:

• Electronic Frontier Foundation: Creating strong passwords
• Electronic Frontier Foundation: Remove fingerprint or face unlock
• How-To Geek: Temporarily disable biometric unlock on Android and iOS
• Electronic Frontier Foundation: How to encrypt your Windows, Mac, or Linux computer, your iPhone, Android Privacy and Security settings
• Consumer Reports: Protect your Mac, Windows PC, Android phone, iPhone devices with encryption

Limitations: If your device is unlocked, the password and encryption will provide no protections; the device must be locked for this to protect your privacy. It is possible, though unlikely, for someone to gain remote access to your device (for example through malware or stalkerware), which would bypass these protections. Some forensic tools are also sophisticated enough to work with physical access to a device that is turned on and locked, but not a device that is turned off/freshly powered on and encrypted. If you lose your password or disk encryption key, you may lose access to your device. For this reason, Windows and Apple laptops can make a cloud backup of your disk encryption key. However, a cloud backup can potentially be disclosed to law enforcement. Install an ad blocker Why? Online ad networks are often exploited to spread malware to unsuspecting visitors. If you've ever visited a regular website and suddenly seen an urgent, flashing pop-up claiming your device was hacked, it is often due to a bad ad. Blocking ads provides an additional layer of protection against these kinds of attacks. Recommendation: I recommend everyone uses an ad blocker at all times. Not only are ads annoying and disruptive, but they can even result in your devices being compromised! Guides:

• Consumer Reports: Add an ad blocker
• uBlock Origin, a highly recommended browser-based ad blocker (Firefox, Chrome)
• AdGuard Ad Blocker is multi-platform and also supports Mac/iOS

Limitations: Sometimes the use of ad blockers can break functionality on websites, which can be annoying, but you can temporarily disable them to fix the problem. These may not be able to block all ads or all tracking, but they make browsing the web much more pleasant and lower risk! Some people might also be concerned that blocking ads might impact the revenue of their favourite websites or creators. In this case, I recommend either donating directly or sharing the site with a wider audience, but keep using the ad blocker for your safety. Enable HTTPS-Only Mode Why? The "S" in "HTTPS" stands for "secure". This feature, which can be enabled on your web browser, ensures that every time you visit a website, your connection is always end-to-end encrypted (just like when you use Signal!) This ensures that someone can't intercept what you search for, what pages on websites you visit, and any information you or the website share such as your banking details. Recommendation: I recommend enabling this for everyone, though with improvements in web browser security and adoption of HTTPS over the years, your devices will often do this by default! There is a small risk you will encounter some websites that do not support HTTPS, usually older sites. Guides:

• Consumer Reports: Set Up HTTPS-Only Mode on your browser

Limitations: HTTPS protects the information on your connection to a website. It does not hide or protect the fact that you visited that website, only the information you accessed. If the website is malicious, HTTPS does not provide any protection. In certain settings, like when you use a work-managed computer that was set up for you, it can still be possible for your IT Department to see what you are browsing, even over an HTTPS connection, because they have administrator access to your computer and the network. Medium to high effort (1+ hours) These tasks require more effort but are worth the investment. Set up a password manager Why? It is not possible for a person to remember a unique password for every single website and app that they use. I have, as of writing, 556 passwords stored in my password manager. Password managers do three important things very well:

1. They generate secure passwords with ease. You don't need to worry about getting your digits and special characters just right; the app will do it for you, and generate long, secure passwords.
2. They remember all your passwords for you, and you just need to remember one password to access all of them. The most common reason people's accounts get hacked online is because they used the same password across multiple websites, and one of the websites had all their passwords leaked. When you use a unique password on every website, it doesn't matter if your password gets leaked!
3. They autofill passwords based on the website you're visiting. This is important because it helps prevent you from getting phished. If you're tricked into visiting an evil lookalike site, your password manager will refuse to fill the password.

Recommendation: These benefits are extremely important, and setting up a password manager is often one of the most impactful things you can do for your digital security. However, they take time to get used to, and migrating all of your passwords into the app (and immediately changing them!) can take a few minutes at a time... over weeks. I recommend you prioritize the most important sites, such as your email accounts, banking/financial sites, and cellphone provider. This process will feel like a lot of work, but you will get to enjoy the benefits of never having to remember new passwords and the autofill functionality for websites. My recommended password manager is 1Password, but it stores passwords in the cloud and costs money. There are some good free options as well if cost is a concern. You can also use web browser- or OS-based password managers, but I do not prefer these. Guides:

• Activist Checklist: Use a password manager
• Electronic Frontier Foundation: An animated overview of password managers
• Electronic Frontier Foundation: Choosing a password manager
• Consumer Reports: Get a password manager

Limitations: Many people are concerned about the risk of using a password manager causing all of their passwords to be compromised. For this reason, it's very important to use a vetted, reputable password manager that has passed audits, such as 1Password or Bitwarden. It is also extremely important to choose a strong password to unlock your password manager. 1Password makes this easier by generating a secret to strengthen your unlock password, but I recommend using a long, memorable password in any case. Another risk is that if you forget your password manager's password, you will lose access to all your passwords. This is why I recommend 1Password, which has you set up an Emergency Kit to recover access to your account. Set up two-factor authentication (2FA) for your accounts Why? If your password is compromised in a website leak or due to a phishing attack, two-factor authentication will require a second piece of information to log in and potentially thwart the intruder. This provides you with an extra layer of security on your accounts. Recommendation: You don't necessarily need to enable 2FA on every account, but prioritize enabling it on your most important accounts (email, banking, cellphone, etc.) There are typically a few different kinds: email-based (which is why your email account's security is so important), text message or SMS-based (which is why your cell phone account's security is so important), app-based, and hardware token-based. Email and text message 2FA are fine for most accounts. You may want to enable app- or hardware token-based 2FA for your most sensitive accounts. Guides:

• Activist Checklist: Enable two-factor authentication
• Electronic Frontier Foundation: How to enable two-factor authentication
• Consumer Reports: Set up multifactor authentication
• Apps: There are many different choices available. The linked guides recommend the open source app Ente. Other options include Google and Microsoft Authenticator, Duo, etc.
• Hardware tokens: Common choices include Yubikey and Google's Titan Security Key

Limitations: The major limitation is that if you lose access to 2FA, you can be locked out of an account. This can happen if you're travelling abroad and can't access your usual cellphone number, if you break your phone and you don't have a backup of your authenticator app, or if you lose your hardware-based token. For this reason, many websites will provide you with "backup tokens" you can print them out and store them in a secure location or use your password manager. I also recommend if you use an app, you choose one that will allow you to make secure backups, such as Ente. You are also limited by the types of 2FA a website supports; many don't support app- or hardware token-based 2FA. Remove your information from data brokers Why? This is a problem that mostly affects people in the US. It surprises many people that information from their credit reports and other public records is scraped and available (for free or at a low cost) online through "data broker" websites. I have shocked friends who didn't believe this was an issue by searching for their full names and within 5 minutes being able to show them their birthday, home address, and phone number. This is a serious privacy problem! Recommendation: Opt out of any and all data broker websites to remove this information from the internet. This is especially important if you are at risk of being stalked or harassed. Guides:

• Consumer Reports: Remove your contact information from people-search sites
• Electronic Frontier Foundation: Manage your digital footprint
• Big Ass Data Broker Opt Out List (BADBOOL), maintained by Yael Grauer
• State-specific tools for residents of: California, Oregon

Limitations: It can take time for your information to be removed once you opt out, and unfortunately search engines may have cached your information for a while longer. This is also not a one-and-done process. New data brokers are constantly popping up and some may not properly honour your opt out, so you will need to check on a regular basis (perhaps once or twice a year) to make sure your data has been properly scrubbed. This also cannot prevent someone from directly searching public records to find your information, but that requires much more effort. "Recommended security measures" I think beginners should avoid We've covered a lot of tasks you should do, but I also think it's important to cover what not to do. I see many of these tools recommended to security beginners, and I think that's a mistake. For each tool, I will explain my reasoning around why I don't think you should use it, and the scenarios in which it might make sense to use. "Secure email" What is it? Many email providers, such as Proton Mail, advertise themselves as providing secure email. They are often recommended as a "more secure" alternative to typical email providers such as GMail. What's the problem? Email is fundamentally insecure by design. The email specification (RFC-3207) states that any publicly available email server MUST NOT require the use of end-to-end encryption in transit. Email providers can of course provide additional security by encrypting their copies of your email, and providing you access to your email by HTTPS, but the messages themselves can always be sent without encryption. Some platforms such as Proton Mail advertise end-to-end encrypted emails so long as you email another Proton user. This is not truly email, but their own internal encrypted messaging platform that follows the email format. What should I do instead? Use Signal to send encrypted messages. NEVER assume the contents of an email are secure. Who should use it? I don't believe there are any major advantages to using a service such as this one. Even if you pay for a more "secure" email provider, the majority of your emails will still be delivered to people who don't. Additionally, while I don't use or necessarily recommend their service, Google offers an Advanced Protection Program for people who may be targeted by state-level actors. PGP/GPG Encryption What is it? PGP ("Pretty Good Privacy") and GPG ("GNU Privacy Guard") are encryption and cryptographic signing software. They are often recommended to encrypt messages or email. What's the problem? GPG is decades old and its usability has always been terrible. It is extremely easy to accidentally send a message that you thought was encrypted without encryption! The problems with PGP/GPG have been extensively documented. What should I do instead? Use Signal to send encrypted messages. Again, NEVER use email for sensitive information. Who should use it? Software developers who contribute to projects where there is a requirement to use GPG should continue to use it until an adequate alternative is available. Everyone else should live their lives in PGP-free bliss. Installing a "secure" operating system (OS) on your phone What is it? There are a number of self-installed operating systems for Android phones, such as GrapheneOS, that advertise as being "more secure" than using the version of the Android operating system provided by your phone manufacturer. They often remove core Google APIs and services to allow you to "de-Google" your phone. What's the problem? These projects are relatively niche, and don't have nearly enough resourcing to be able to respond to the high levels of security pressure Android experiences (such as against the forensic tools I mentioned earlier). You may suddenly lose security support with no notice, as with CalyxOS. You need a high level of technical know-how and a lot of spare time to maintain your device with a custom operating system, which is not a reasonable expectation for the average person. By stripping all Google APIs such as Google Play Services, some useful apps can no longer function. And some law enforcement organizations have gone as far as accusing people who install GrapheneOS on Pixel phones to be engaging in criminal activity. What should I do instead? For the best security on an Android device, use a phone manufactured by Google or Samsung (smaller manufacturers are more unreliable), or consider buying an iPhone. Make sure your device is receiving security updates and up-to-date. Who should use it? These projects are great for tech enthusiasts who are interested in contributing to and developing them further. They can be used to give new life to old phones that are not receiving security or software updates. They are also great for people with an interest in free and open source software and digital autonomy. But these tools are not a good choice for a general audience, nor do they provide more practical security than using an up-to-date Google or Samsung Android phone. Virtual Private Network (VPN) Services What is it? A virtual private network or VPN service can provide you with a secure tunnel from your device to the location that the VPN operates. This means that if I am using my phone in Seattle connected to a VPN in Amsterdam, if I access a website, it appears to the website that my phone is located in Amsterdam. What's the problem? VPN services are frequently advertised as providing security or protection from nefarious bad actors, or helping protect your privacy. These benefits are often far overstated, and there are predatory VPN providers that can actually be harmful. It costs money and resources to provide a VPN, so free VPN services are especially suspect. When you use a VPN, the VPN provider knows the websites you are visiting in order to provide you with the service. Free VPN providers may sell this data in order to cover the cost of providing the service, leaving you with less security and privacy. The average person does not have the knowledge to be able to determine if a VPN service is trustworthy or not. VPNs also don't provide any additional encryption benefits if you are already using HTTPS. They may provide a small amount of privacy benefit if you are connected to an untrusted network with an attacker. What should I do instead? Always use HTTPS to access websites. Don't connect to untrusted internet providers for example, use cellphone network data instead of a sketchy Wi-Fi access point. Your local neighbourhood coffee shop is probably fine. Who should use it? There are three main use cases for VPNs. The first is to bypass geographic restrictions. A VPN will cause all of your web traffic to appear to be coming from another location. If you live in an area that has local internet censorship policies, you can use a VPN to access the internet from a location that lacks such policies. The second is if you know your internet service provider is actively hostile or malicious. A trusted VPN will protect the visibility of all your traffic, including which websites you visit, from your internet service provider, and the only thing they will be able to see is that you are accessing a VPN. The third use case is to access a network that isn't connected to the public internet, such as a corporate intranet. I strongly discourage the use of VPNs for "general-purpose security." Tor What is it? Tor, "The Onion Router", is a free and open source software project that provides anonymous networking. Unlike with a VPN, where the VPN provider knows who you are and what websites you are requesting, Tor's architecture makes it extremely difficult to determine who sent a request. What's the problem? Tor is difficult to set up properly; similar to PGP-encrypted email, it is possible to accidentally not be connected to Tor and not know the difference. This usability has improved over the years, but Tor is still not a good tool for beginners to use. Due to the way Tor works, it is also extremely slow. If you have used cable or fiber internet, get ready to go back to dialup speeds. Tor also doesn't provide perfect privacy and without a strong understanding of its limitations, it can be possible to deanonymize someone despite using it. Additionally, many websites are able to detect connections from the Tor network and block them. What should I do instead? If you want to use Tor to bypass censorship, it is often better to use a trusted VPN provider, particularly if you need high bandwidth (e.g. for streaming). If you want to use Tor to access a website anonymously, Tor itself might not be enough to protect you. For example, if you need to provide an email address or personal information, you can decline to provide accurate information and use a masked email address. A friend of mine once used the alias "Nunya Biznes" Who should use it? Tor should only be used by people who are experienced users of security tools and understand its strengths and limitations. Tor also is best used on a purpose-built system, such as Tor Browser or Freedom of the Press Foundation's SecureDrop. I want to learn more! I hope you've found this guide to be a useful starting point. I always welcome folks reaching out to me with questions, though I might take a little bit of time to respond. You can always email me. If there's enough interest, I might cover the following topics in a future post:

• Threat modelling, which you can get started with by reading the EFF's or VCW's guides
• Browser addons for privacy, which Consumer Reports has a tip for
• Secure DNS, which you can read more about here

Stay safe out there!

Note: I have not published blog posts about my academic papers over the past few years. To ensure that my blog contains a more comprehensive record of my published papers and to surface these for folks who missed them, I will be periodically (re)publishing blog posts about some older published projects. This particular post is closely based on a previously published post by Nate TeBlunthuis from the Community Data Science Blog. Many online platforms are adopting AI and machine learning as a tool to maintain order and high-quality information in the face of massive influxes of user-generated content. Of course, AI algorithms can be inaccurate, biased, or unfair. How do signals from AI predictions shape the fairness of online content moderation? How can we measure an algorithmic flagging system s effects? In our paper published at CSCW, Nate TeBlunthuis, together with myself and Aaron Halfaker, analyzed the RCFilters system: an add-on to Wikipedia that highlights and filters edits that a machine learning algorithm called ORES identifies as likely to be damaging to Wikipedia. This system has been deployed on large Wikipedia language editions and is similar to other algorithmic flagging systems that are becoming increasingly widespread. Our work measures the causal effect of being flagged in the RCFilters user interface.

Screenshot of Wikipedia edit metadata on Special:RecentChanges with RCFilters enabled. Highlighted edits with a colored circle to the left side of other metadata are flagged by ORES. Different circle and highlight colors (white, yellow, orange, and red in the figure) correspond to different levels of confidence that the edit is damaging. RCFilters does not specifically flag edits by new accounts or unregistered editors, but does support filtering changes by editor types.

Our work takes advantage of the fact that RCFilters, like many algorithmic flagging systems, create discontinuities in the relationship between the probability that a moderator should take action and whether a moderator actually does. This happens because the output of machine learning systems like ORES is typically a continuous score (in RCFilters, an estimated probability that a Wikipedia edit is damaging), while the flags (in RCFilters, the yellow, orange, or red highlights) are either on or off and are triggered when the score crosses some arbitrary threshold. As a result, edits slightly above the threshold are both more visible to moderators and appear more likely to be damaging than edits slightly below. Even though edits on either side of the threshold have virtually the same likelihood of truly being damaging, the flagged edits are substantially more likely to be reverted. This fact lets us use a method called regression discontinuity to make causal estimates of the effect of being flagged in RCFilters.

Charts showing the probability that an edit will be reverted as a function of ORES scores in the neighborhood of the discontinuous threshold that triggers the RCfilters flag. The jump in the increase in reversion chances is larger for registered editors compared to unregistered editors at both thresholds.

To understand how this system may affect the fairness of Wikipedia moderation, we estimate the effects of flagging on edits on different groups of editors. Comparing the magnitude of these estimates lets us measure how flagging is associated with several different definitions of fairness. Surprisingly, we found evidence that these flags improved fairness for categories of editors that have been widely perceived as troublesome particularly unregistered (anonymous) editors. This occurred because flagging has a much stronger effect on edits by the registered than on edits by the unregistered. We believe that our results are driven by the fact that algorithmic flags are especially helpful for finding damage that can t be easily detected otherwise. Wikipedia moderators can see the editor s registration status in the recent changes, watchlists, and edit history. Because unregistered editors are often troublesome, Wikipedia moderators attention is often focused on their contributions, with or without algorithmic flags. Algorithmic flags make damage by registered editors (in addition to unregistered editors) much more detectable to moderators and so help moderators focus on damage overall, not just damage by suspicious editors. As a result, the algorithmic flagging system decreases the bias that moderators have against unregistered editors. This finding is particularly surprising because the ORES algorithm we analyzed was itself demonstrably biased against unregistered editors (i.e., the algorithm tended to greatly overestimate the probability that edits by these editors were damaging). Despite the fact that the algorithms were biased, their introduction could still lead to less biased outcomes overall. Our work shows that although it is important to design predictive algorithms to avoid such biases, it is equally important to study fairness at the level of the broader sociotechnical system. Since we first published a preprint of our paper, a follow-up piece by Leijie Wang and Haiyi Zhu replicated much of our work and showed that differences between different Wikipedia communities may be another important factor driving the effect of the system. Overall, this work suggests that social signals and social context can interact with algorithmic signals, and together these can influence behavior in important and unexpected ways.

---

The full citation for the paper is: TeBlunthuis, Nathan, Benjamin Mako Hill, and Aaron Halfaker. 2021. Effects of Algorithmic Flagging on Fairness: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Wikipedia. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5 (CSCW): 56:1-56:27. https://doi.org/10.1145/3449130.

We have also released replication materials for the paper, including all the data and code used to conduct the analysis and compile the paper itself.

tl;dr: There is a Debian git transition plan. It s going OK so far but we need help, especially with outreach and updating Debian s documentation.

• Goals of the Debian git transition project
  • Achievements so far, and current status
• Core engineering principle
  • Correspondence between dsc and git
  • Patches-applied vs patches-unapplied
  • Consequences, some of which are annoying
• Distributing the source code as git
  • Tracking the relevant git data, when changes are made in the legacy Archive
  • Why *.dgit.debian.org is not Salsa
• Roadmap
  • In progress
  • Future Technology
• Mindshare and adoption - please help!
  • A rant about publishing the source code
  • Documentation
• Personnel
  • Thanks

Goals of the Debian git transition project

0. Everyone who interacts with Debian source code should be able to do so entirely in git.

That means, more specifically:

1. All examination and edits to the source should be performed via normal git operations.
2. Source code should be transferred and exchanged as git data, not tarballs. git should be the canonical form everywhere.
3. Upstream git histories should be re-published, traceably, as part of formal git releases published by Debian.
4. No-one should have to learn about Debian Source Packages, which are bizarre, and have been obsoleted by modern version control.

This is very ambitious, but we have come a long way! Achievements so far, and current status We have come a very long way. But, there is still much to do - especially, the git transition team needs your help with adoption, developer outreach, and developer documentation overhaul. We ve made big strides towards goals 1 and 4. Goal 2 is partially achieved: we currently have dual running. Goal 3 is within our reach but depends on widespread adoption of tag2upload (and/or dgit push). Downstreams and users can obtain the source code of any Debian package in git form. (dgit clone, 2013). They can then work with this source code completely in git, including building binaries, merging new versions, even automatically (eg Raspbian, 2016), and all without having to deal with source packages at all (eg Wikimedia 2025). A Debian maintainer can maintain their own package entirely in git. They can obtain upstream source code from git, and do their packaging work in git (git-buildpackage, 2006). Every Debian maintainer can (and should!) release their package from git reliably and in a standard form (dgit push, 2013; tag2upload, 2025). This is not only more principled, but also more convenient, and with better UX, than pre-dgit tooling like dput. Indeed a Debian maintainer can now often release their changes to Debian, from git, using only git branches (so no tarballs). Releasing to Debian can be simply pushing a signed tag (tag2upload, 2025). A Debian maintainer can maintain a stack of changes to upstream source code in git (gbp pq 2009). They can even maintain such a delta series as a rebasing git branch, directly buildable, and use normal git rebase style operations to edit their changes, (git-dpm, 2010; git-debrebase, 2018) An authorised Debian developer can do a modest update to any package in Debian, even one maintained by someone else, working entirely in git in a standard and convenient way (dgit, 2013). Debian contributors can share their work-in-progress on git forges and collaborate using merge requests, git based code review, and so on. (Alioth, 2003; Salsa, 2018.) Core engineering principle The Debian git transition project is based on one core engineering principle: Every Debian Source Package can be losslessly converted to and from git. In order to transition away from Debian Source Packages, we need to gateway between the old dsc approach, and the new git approach. This gateway obviously needs to be bidirectional: source packages uploaded with legacy tooling like dput need to be imported into a canonical git representation; and of course git branches prepared by developers need to be converted to source packages for the benefit of legacy downstream systems (such as the Debian Archive and apt source). This bidirectional gateway is implemented in src:dgit, and is allowing us to gradually replace dsc-based parts of the Debian system with git-based ones. Correspondence between dsc and git A faithful bidirectional gateway must define an invariant: The canonical git tree, corresponding to a .dsc, is the tree resulting from dpkg-source -x. This canonical form is sometimes called the dgit view . It s sometimes not the same as the maintainer s git branch, because many maintainers are still working with patches-unapplied git branches. More on this below. (For 3.0 (quilt) .dscs, the canonical git tree doesn t include the quilt .pc directory.) Patches-applied vs patches-unapplied The canonical git format is patches applied . That is: If Debian has modified the upstream source code, a normal git clone of the canonical branch gives the modified source tree, ready for reading and building. Many Debian maintainers keep their packages in a different git branch format, where the changes made by Debian, to the upstream source code, are in actual patch files in a debian/patches/ subdirectory. Patches-applied has a number of important advantages over patches-unapplied:

• It is familiar to, and doesn t trick, outsiders to Debian. Debian insiders radically underestimate how weird patches-unapplied is. Even expert software developers can get very confused or even accidentally build binaries without security patches!
• Making changes can be done with just normal git commands, eg git commit. Many Debian insiders working with patches-unapplied are still using quilt(1), a footgun-rich contraption for working with patch files!
• When developing, one can make changes to upstream code, and to Debian packaging, together, without ceremony. There is no need to switch back and forth between patch queue and packaging branches (as with gbp pq), no need to commit patch files, etc. One can always edit every file and commit it with git commit.

The downside is that, with the (bizarre) 3.0 (quilt) source format, the patch files files in debian/patches/ must somehow be kept up to date. Nowadays though, tools like git-debrebase and git-dpm (and dgit for NMUs) make it very easy to work with patches-applied git branches. git-debrebase can deal very ergonomically even with big patch stacks. (For smaller packages which usually have no patches, plain git merge with an upstream git branch, and a much simpler dsc format, sidesteps the problem entirely.) Prioritising Debian s users (and other outsiders) We want everyone to be able to share and modify the software that they interact with. That means we should make source code truly accessible, on the user s terms. Many of Debian s processes assume everyone is an insider. It s okay that there are Debian insiders and that people feel part of something that they worked hard to become involved with. But lack of perspective can lead to software which fails to uphold our values. Our source code practices in particular, our determination to share properly (and systematically) are a key part of what makes Debian worthwhile at all. Like Debian s installer, we want our source code to be useable by Debian outsiders. This is why we have chosen to privilege a git branch format which is more familiar to the world at large, even if it s less popular in Debian. Consequences, some of which are annoying The requirement that the conversion be bidirectional, lossless, and context-free can be inconvenient. For example, we cannot support .gitattributes which modify files during git checkin and checkout. .gitattributes cause the meaning of a git tree to depend on the context, in possibly arbitrary ways, so the conversion from git to source package wouldn t be stable. And, worse, some source packages might not to be representable in git at all. Another example: Maintainers often have existing git branches for their packages, generated with pre-dgit tooling which is less careful and less principled than ours. That can result in discrepancies between git and dsc, which need to be resolved before a proper git-based upload can succeed. That some maintainers use patches-unapplied, and some patches-unapplied, means that there has to be some kind of conversion to a standard git representation. Choosing the less-popular patches-applied format as the canonical form, means that many packages need their git representation converted. It also means that user- and outsider-facing branches from browse,git .dgit.d.o and dgit clone are not always compatible with maintainer branches on Salsa. User-contributed changes need cherry-picking rather than merging, or conversion back to the maintainer format. The good news is that dgit can automate much of this, and the manual parts are usually easy git operations. Distributing the source code as git Our source code management should be normal, modern, and based on git. That means the Debian Archive is obsolete and needs to be replaced with a set of git repositories. The replacement repository for source code formally released to Debian is *.dgit.debian.org. This contains all the git objects for every git-based upload since 2013, including the signed tag for each released package version. The plan is that it will contain a git view of every uploaded Debian package, by centrally importing all legacy uploads into git. Tracking the relevant git data, when changes are made in the legacy Archive Currently, many critical source code management tasks are done by changes to the legacy Debian Archive, which works entirely with dsc files (and the associated tarballs etc). The contents of the Archive are therefore still an important source of truth. But, the Archive s architecture means it cannot sensibly directly contain git data. To track changes made in the Archive, we added the Dgit: field to the .dsc of a git-based upload (2013). This declares which git commit this package was converted from. and where those git objects can be obtained. Thus, given a Debian Source Package from a git-based upload, it is possible for the new git tooling to obtain the equivalent git objects. If the user is going to work in git, there is no need for any tarballs to be downloaded: the git data could be obtained from the depository using the git protocol. The signed tags, available from the git depository, have standardised metdata which gives traceability back to the uploading Debian contributor. Why *.dgit.debian.org is not Salsa We need a git depository - a formal, reliable and permanent git repository of source code actually released to Debian. Git forges like Gitlab can be very convenient. But Gitlab is not sufficiently secure, and too full of bugs, to be the principal and only archive of all our source code. (The open core business model of the Gitlab corporation, and the constant-churn development approach, are critical underlying problems.) Our git depository lacks forge features like Merge Requests. But:

• It is dependable, both in terms of reliability and security.
• It is append-only: once something is pushed, it is permanently recorded.
• Its access control is precisely that of the Debian Archive.
• Its ref namespace is standardised and corresponds to Debian releases.
• Pushes are authorised by PGP signatures, not ssh keys, so traceable.

The dgit git depository outlasted Alioth and it may well outlast Salsa. We need both a good forge, and the *.dgit.debian.org formal git depository. Roadmap In progress Right now we are quite focused on tag2upload. We are working hard on eliminating the remaining issues that we feel need to be addressed before declaring the service out of beta. Future Technology Whole-archive dsc importer Currently, the git depository only has git data for git-based package updates (tag2upload and dgit push). Legacy dput-based uploads are not currently present there. This means that the git-based and legacy uploads must be resolved client-side, by dgit clone. We will want to start importing legacy uploads to git. Then downstreams and users will be able to get the source code for any package simply with git clone, even if the maintainer is using legacy upload tools like dput. Support for git-based uploads to security.debian.org Security patching is a task which would particularly benefit from better and more formal use of git. git-based approaches to applying and backporting security patches are much more convenient than messing about with actual patch files. Currently, one can use git to help prepare a security upload, but it often involves starting with a dsc import (which lacks the proper git history) or figuring out a package maintainer s unstandardised git usage conventions on Salsa. And it is not possible to properly perform the security release as git. Internal Debian consumers switch to getting source from git Buildds, QA work such as lintian checks, and so on, could be simpler if they don t need to deal with source packages. And since git is actually the canonical form, we want them to use it directly. Problems for the distant future For decades, Debian has been built around source packages. Replacing them is a long and complex process. Certainly source packages are going to continue to be supported for the foreseeable future. There are no doubt going to be unanticipated problems. There are also foreseeable issues: for example, perhaps there are packages that work very badly when represented in git. We think we can rise to these challenges as they come up. Mindshare and adoption - please help! We and our users are very pleased with our technology. It is convenient and highly dependable. dgit in particular is superb, even if we say so ourselves. As technologists, we have been very focused on building good software, but it seems we have fallen short in the marketing department. A rant about publishing the source code git is the preferred form for modification. Our upstreams are overwhelmingly using git. We are overwhelmingly using git. It is a scandal that for many packages, Debian does not properly, formally and officially publish the git history. Properly publishing the source code as git means publishing it in a way that means that anyone can automatically and reliably obtain and build the exact source code corresponding to the binaries. The test is: could you use that to build a derivative? Putting a package in git on Salsa is often a good idea, but it is not sufficient. No standard branch structure git on Salsa is enforced, nor should it be (so it can t be automatically and reliably obtained), the tree is not in a standard form (so it can t be automatically built), and is not necessarily identical to the source package. So Vcs-Git fields, and git from Salsa, will never be sufficient to make a derivative. Debian is not publishing the source code! The time has come for proper publication of source code by Debian to no longer be a minority sport. Every maintainer of a package whose upstream is using git (which is nearly all packages nowadays) should be basing their work on upstream git, and properly publishing that via tag2upload or dgit. And it s not even difficult! The modern git-based tooling provides a far superior upload experience. A common misunderstanding dgit push is not an alternative to gbp pq or quilt. Nor is tag2upload. These upload tools complement your existing git workflow. They replace and improve source package building/signing and the subsequent dput. If you are using one of the usual git layouts on salsa, and your package is in good shape, you can adopt tag2upload and/or dgit push right away. git-debrebase is distinct and does provides an alternative way to manage your git packaging, do your upstream rebases, etc. Documentation Debian s documentation all needs to be updated, including particularly instructions for packaging, to recommend use of git-first workflows. Debian should not be importing git-using upstreams release tarballs into git. (Debian outsiders who discover this practice are typically horrified.) We should use only upstream git, work only in git, and properly release (and publish) in git form. We, the git transition team, are experts in the technology, and can provide good suggestions. But we do not have the bandwidth to also engage in the massive campaigns of education and documentation updates that are necessary especially given that (as with any programme for change) many people will be sceptical or even hostile. So we would greatly appreciate help with writing and outreach. Personnel We consider ourselves the Debian git transition team. Currently we are:

• Ian Jackson. Author and maintainer of dgit and git-debrebase. Co-creator of tag2upload. Original author of dpkg-source, and inventor in 1996 of Debian Source Packages. Alumnus of the Debian Technical Committee.
• Sean Whitton. Co-creator of the tag2upload system; author and maintainer of git-debpush. Co-maintainer of dgit. Debian Policy co-Editor. Former Chair of the Debian Technical Committee.

We wear the following hats related to the git transition:

• Maintainers of src:dgit
• tag2upload Delegates; operators of the tag2upload service.
• service operators of the git depository *.dgit.debian.org.

You can contact us:

• By email: Ian Jackson ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk; Sean Whitton spwhitton@spwhitton.name; git-debpush@packages.d.o.
• By filing bugs in the Debian Bug System against src:dgit.
• On OFTC IRC, as Diziet and spwhitton.

We do most of our heavy-duty development on Salsa. Thanks Particular thanks are due to Joey Hess, who, in the now-famous design session in Vaumarcus in 2013, helped invent dgit. Since then we have had a lot of support: most recently political support to help get tag2upload deployed, but also, over the years, helpful bug reports and kind words from our users, as well as translations and code contributions. Many other people have contributed more generally to support for working with Debian source code in git. We particularly want to mention Guido G nther (git-buildpackage); and of course Alexander Wirt, Joerg Jaspert, Thomas Goirand and Antonio Terceiro (Salsa administrators); and before them the Alioth administrators.

comments

Here s my monthly but brief update about the activities I ve done in the FOSS world.

Debian

Whilst I didn t get a chance to do much, here are still a few things that I worked on:

• Did a few sessions with the new DFSG team to help kickstart things, et al.
• Assited a few folks in getting their patches submitted via Salsa.
• Mentoring for newcomers.
• Moderation of -project mailing list.

---

Ubuntu

I joined Canonical to work on Ubuntu full-time back in February 2021. Whilst I can t give a full, detailed list of things I did, here s a quick TL;DR of what I did:

• Successfully released Resolute Snapshot 1!
  • This one was particularly interesting as it was done without the ISO tracker and cdimage access.
  • There are some wrinkles that need ironing out for the next snapshot.
• Resolute Raccoon is now fully and formally open.
• Assisted a bunch of folks with my Archive Admin and Release team hats to:
  • review NEW packages for Ubuntu Studio.
  • remove old binaries that are stalling transition and/or migration.
  • LTS requalification of Ubuntu flavours.
  • bootstrapping dotnet-10 packages.
  • removal of openjdk-19 from Jammy, which sparked some interesting discussions.

---

Debian (E)LTS

This month I have worked 22 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and on its sister Extended LTS project and did the following things:

• wordpress: There were multiple vulnerabilities reported in Wordpress, leading to Sent Data & Cross-site Scripting.
  • [bookworm]: Roberto rightly pointed out that the upload to bookworm hadn t gone through last month, so I re-uploaded wordpress/6.1.9+dfsg1-0+deb12u1 to bookworm-security.
  • This is now released as DSA 6075-1.
• ruby-rack: There were multiple vulnerabilities reported in Rack, leading to DoS (memory exhaustion) and proxy bypass.
  • [ELTS]: Last month I had backported fixes for CVE-2025-46727 & CVE-2025-32441 to buster and stretch but the other backports were being a bit tricky due to really old versions.
  • I spent a bit more time but there s a lot to demystify. Gonna take a bit of break from this one and come back to this after doing other updates. Might even consider sending a RFH to the list.
• libwebsockets: Multiple issues were reported in LWS causing denial of service and stack-based buffer overflow.
  • [LTS]: For bullseye, these were fixed via 4.0.20-2+deb11u1. And released as DLA 4373-1.
• mako: It was found that Mako, a Python template library, was vulnerable to a denial of service attack via crafted regular expressions.
  • [LTS]: For bullseye, these were fixed via 1.1.3+ds1-2+deb11u1. And released as DLA 4393-1.
  • Backporting tests was an interesting exercise as I had to make them compatible with the bullseye version. :)
• ceph: Affected by CVE-2024-47866, using the argument x-amz-copy-source to put an object and specifying an empty string as its content leads to the RGW daemon crashing, resulting in a DoS attack.
  • [LTS]: Whilst the patch is straightforward, backports are a bit tricky. I ve prepared the update but would like to reach out to zigo, the maintainer, to make sure nothing regresses.
  • [ELTS]: Same as LTS, I d like to get a quick review and upload to LTS first before I start staging uploads for ELTS.
• [LTS] Attended the monthly LTS meeting on IRC. Summary here.
  • It was also followed by a 50-minute post-meeting technical discussion/question session.
• [E/LTS] Monitored discussions on mailing lists, IRC, and all the documentation updates. Thanks, Sylvain, for a great documentation summary.

---

Until next time.
:wq for today.

My current playlist is this diorama of Lulu the Piggy channeling Tupac Shakur in a toy vending machine in the basement of New World Mall in Flushing Chinatown.

A concerned nutritional epidemiologist in Tokyo realizes that if you are what you eat, that means

It s a similar situation in Seoul, albeit with less oil and more confidence.

I realize that because I have several chairs, the phrase my chair is ambiguous. To reduce confusion, I will refer to the head of my academic department as my office chair going forward.

The Wikipedia article on antipopes can be pretty confusing! If you d like to be even more confused, it can help with that!

Market Data section of the Financial Times US Edition print edition from May 5, 2021.

If you ve flipped through printed broadsheet newspapers, you ve probably seen pages full of tiny text listing prices and other market information for stocks and commodities. And you ve almost certainly just turned the page. Anybody interested in this market prices today will turn to the internet where these numbers are available in real time and where you don t need to squint to find what you need. This is presumably why many newspapers have stopped printing these types of pages or dramatically reduced the space devoted to them. Major financial newspapers however like the Financial Times (FT) still print multiple pages of market data daily. But does anybody read them? The answer appears to be no. How do I know? I noticed an error in the FT s Market Data page that anybody looking in the relevant section of the page would have seen. And I have seen it reproduced every single day for the last 18 months. In early May last year, I noticed that the Japanese telecom giant Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) was listed twice on the FT s list of the 500 largest global companies: once as Nippon T&T and also as Nippon TT. One right above the other. All the numbers are identical. Clearly a mistake. Wondering if it was a one-off error, I looked at a copy of the paper from about a week before and saw that the error did not exist then. I looked at a copy from one day before and saw that it did. Since the issue was apparently recurring, but new at the time, I figured someone at the paper would notice and fix it quickly. I was wrong. It has been 18 months now and the error has been reproduced every single day. Looking through the archives, it seems that the first day the error showed up was May 5, 2021. I ve included a screenshot from the electronic paper version from that day and from the fifth of every month since then (or the sixth if the paper was not printed on the fifth) that shows that the error is reproduced every day. A quick look in the archives suggests it not only appears in the US edition but also in the UK, European, Asian, and Middle East editions. All of them. Why does this matter? The FT prints over 112,000 copies of its paper, six days a week. This duplicate line takes up almost no space, of course, so it s not a big deal on its own. But devoting two full broadsheet pages to market data that is out date as soon as it is printed much of which nobody appears to be reading doesn t seem like a great use of resources. There s an argument to made that papers like the FT print these pages not because they are useful but because doing so is a signal of the publications identities as serious financial papers. But that hardly seems like a good enough reason on its own if nobody is looking at them. It seems well past time for newspapers to stop wasting paper and ink on these pages. I respect that some people think that printing paper newspapers at all is wasteful when one can just read the material online. Plenty of people disagree, of course. But who will disagree with a call to stop printing material that evidence suggests is not being seen by anybody? If an error this obvious can exist for so long, it seems clear that nobody not even anybody at the FT itself is reading it.