This is just a quick update about the video streams of DebConf13 which are available at the following URLs:

• Main talk room, chat on #debconf-talkroom1 on irc.debian.org
• Second talk room, #debconf-talkroom2
• hires streams, with special thanks to Sesse and pkern
• video recordings - already has files up to yesterday!

/me bows to this is pretty fantatic results - and, the view is also fantastic! Especially from down at the lake :-)
P.S.: I ve you missed some technical details in the systemd talk from Lennart, these are probably in here.

Weblate 1.6 is already two weeks out without any regressions, so now it's time to think about features for 1.7. I definitely want to improve support for monolingual translation formats as they currently suffer by various metadata issues (eg. checks not working correctly). This requires quite big change in underlying database, but I think it's quite manageable. When talking about checks, I want to make them configurable per project as global configuration is quite limiting for shared sites like hosted Weblate. I will definitely need to touch registration and authentication, either by supporting latest django-registration API or to move some other solution with support for federated login. Which of these approaches will be used depends on my time, what is always the most limiting factor. This might sound as too few features, but I'd like to make releases more often, so that should fit into this plan. However if you want to push for some feature, you still have two days to fund something on Catincan!

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I recently had to migrate the main Libravatar server to a new virtual machine. In order to minimize risk and downtime, I decided to write a migration plan ahead of time. I am sharing this plan here in case it gives any ideas to others who have to go through a similar process.

Prepare DNS

• Change the TTL on the DNS entry for libravatar.org to 3600 seconds.
• Remove the mirrors I don't control from the DNS load balancer (cdn and seccdn).
• Remove the main server from cdn and seccdn in DNS.

Preparing the new server

• Setup the new server.
• Copy the database from the old site and restore it.
• Copy /var/lib/libravatar from the old site.
• Hack my local /etc/hosts file to point to the new server's IP address:

  xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx www.libravatar.org stats.libravatar.org cdn.libravatar.org
  

• Test all functionality on the new site.

Preparing the old server

• Prepare a static "under migration" Apache config in /etc/apache2/sites-enables.static/:

  <VirtualHost *:80>
      RewriteEngine On
      RewriteRule ^ https://www.libravatar.org [redirect=301,last]
  </VirtualHost>
  <VirtualHost *:443>
      SSLEngine on
      SSLProtocol TLSv1
      SSLHonorCipherOrder On
      SSLCipherSuite RC4-SHA:HIGH:!kEDH
      SSLCertificateFile /etc/libravatar/www.crt
      SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/libravatar/www.pem
      SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/libravatar/www-chain.pem
      RewriteEngine On
      RewriteRule ^ /var/www/migration.html [last]
      <Directory /var/www>
          Allow from all
          Options -Indexes
      </Directory>
  </VirtualHost>
  

• Put this static file in /var/www/migration.html:

  <html>
  <body>
  <p>We are migrating to a new server. See you soon!</p>
  <p>- <a href="http://identi.ca/libravatar">@libravatar</a></p>
  </body>
  </html>
  

• Enable the rewrite module:

  a2enmod rewrite
  

• Prepare an Apache config proxying to the new server in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled.proxy/:

  <VirtualHost *:80>
      RewriteEngine On
      RewriteRule ^ https://www.libravatar.org [redirect=301,last]
  </VirtualHost>
  <VirtualHost *:443>
      SSLEngine on
      SSLProtocol TLSv1
      SSLHonorCipherOrder On
      SSLCipherSuite RC4-SHA:HIGH:!kEDH
      SSLCertificateFile /etc/libravatar/www.crt
      SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/libravatar/www.pem
      SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/libravatar/www-chain.pem
      SSLProxyEngine on
      ProxyPass / https://www.libravatar.org/
      ProxyPassReverse / https://www.libravatar.org/
  </VirtualHost>
  

• Enable the proxy-related modules for Apache:

  a2enmod proxy
  a2enmod proxy_connect
  a2enmod proxy_http
  

Migrating servers

• Tweet and dent about the upcoming migration.
• Enable the static file config on the old server (disabling the Django app).
• Copy the database from the old server and restore it on the new server.
• Copy /var/lib/libravatar from the old server to the new one.

Disable mirror sync

• Log into each mirror and comment out the sync cron jobs in /etc/cron.d/libravatar-slave.
• Make sure mirrors are no longer able to connect to the old server by deleting /var/lib/libravatar/master/.ssh/authorized_keys on the old server.

Testing the main site

• Hack my local /etc/hosts file to point to the new server's IP address:

  xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx www.libravatar.org stats.libravatar.org cdn.libravatar.org
  

• Test all functionality on the new site.
• If testing is successful, update DNS to point to the new server with a short TTL (in case we need to revert).
• Enable the proxy config on the old server.
• Hack my local /etc/hosts file to point to the old server's IP address.
• Test basic functionality going through the proxy.
• Remove local /etc/hosts/ hacks.

Re-enable mirror sync

• Build a new libravatar-slave package with an updated known_hosts file for the new server.
• Log into each server I control and update that package.
• Test the connection to the master (hacking /etc/hosts on the mirror if needed):

  sudo -u libravatar-slave ssh libravatar-master@0.cdn.libravatar.org
  

• Uncomment the sync cron jobs in /etc/cron.d/libravatar-slave.
• An hour later, make sure that new images are copied over and that the TLS certs are still working.
• Remove /etc/hosts hacks from all mirrors.

Post migration steps

• Tweet and dent about the fact that the migration was successful.
• Send a test email to the support address included in the tweet/dent.
• Take a backup of config files and data on the old server in case I forgot to copy something to the new one.
• Get in touch with mirror owners to tell them to update libravatar-slave package and test ssh configuration.
• Add third-party controlled mirrors back to the DNS load-balancer once they are up to date.
• A few days later, change the TTL for the main site back to 43200 seconds.
• A week later, kill the proxy on the old server by shutting it down.

I'll start with the conclusion: making backwards incompatible version of a language is a terrible idea, and it was bad a mistake. This mistake was somewhat corrected over the years by eventually adding features to both Python 2.7 and 3.3 that actually allow to run a single code base on both Python versions --- which, as I show below, was discouraged by both Guido and the official Python documents (though the latest docs mention it)... Nevertheless, a single code base fixes pretty much all the problems and it actually is fun to use Python again. The rest of this post explains my conclusion in great detail. My hope is that it will be useful to other Python projects to provide tips and examples how to support both Python 2 and 3, as well as to future language designers to keep languages backwards compatible. When Python 3.x got released, it was pretty much a new language, backwards incompatible with Python 2.x, as it was not possible to run the same source code in both versions. I was extremely unhappy about this situation, because I simply didn't have time to port all my Python code to a new language. I read the official documentation about how the transition should be done, quoting:

You should have excellent unit tests with close to full coverage.

1. Port your project to Python 2.6.
2. Turn on the Py3k warnings mode.
3. Test and edit until no warnings remain.
4. Use the 2to3 tool to convert this source code to 3.0 syntax. Do not manually edit the output!
5. Test the converted source code under 3.0.
6. If problems are found, make corrections to the 2.6 version of the source code and go back to step 3.
7. When it's time to release, release separate 2.6 and 3.0 tarballs (or whatever archive form you use for releases).

I've also read Guido's blog post, which repeats the above list and adds an encouraging comment:

Python 3.0 will break backwards compatibility. Totally. We're not even aiming for a specific common subset.

In other words, one has to maintain a Python 2.x code base, then run 2to3 tool to get it converted. If you want to develop using Python 3.x, you can't, because all code must be developed using 2.x. As to the actual porting, Guido says in the above post:

If the conversion tool and the forward compatibility features in Python 2.6 work out as expected, steps (2) through (6) should not take much more effort than the typical transition from Python 2.x to 2.(x+1).

So sometime in 2010 or 2011 I started porting SymPy, which is now a pretty large code base (sloccount says over 230,000 lines of code, and in January 2010 it said almost 170,000 lines). I remember spending a few full days on it, and I just gave up, because it wasn't just changing a few things, but pretty fundamental things inside the code base, and one cannot just do it half-way, one has to get all the way through and then polish it up. We ended up using one full Google Summer of Code project for it, you can read the final report. I should mention that we use metaclasses and other things, that make such porting harder. Conclusion: this was definitely not "the typical transition from Python 2.x to 2.(x+1)". Ok, after months of hard work by a lot of people, we finally have a Python 2.x code base that can be translated using the 2to3 tool and it works and tests pass in Python 3.x. The next problem is that Python 3.x is pretty much like a ghetto -- you can use it as a user, but you can't develop in it. The 2to3 translation takes over 5 minutes on my laptop, so any interactivity is gone. It is true that the tool can cache results, so the next pass is somewhat faster, but in practice this still turns out to be much much worse than any compilation of C or Fortran programs (done for example with cmake), both in terms of time and in terms of robustness. And I am not even talking about pip issues or setup.py issues regarding calling 2to3. What a big mess... Programming should be fun, but this is not fun. I'll be honest, this situation killed a lot of my enthusiasm for Python as a platform. I learned modern Fortran in the meantime and with admiration I noticed that it still compiles old F77 programs without modification and I even managed to compile a 40 year old pre-F77 code with just minimal modifications (I had to port the code to F77). Yet modern Fortran is pretty much a completely different language, with all the fancy features that one would want. Together with my colleagues I created a fortran90.org website, where you can compare Python/NumPy side by side with modern Fortran, it's pretty much 1:1 translation and a similar syntax (for numerical code), except that you need to add types of course. Yet Fortran is fully backwards compatible. What a pleasure to work with! Fast forward to last week. A heroic effort by Sean Vig who ported SymPy to single code base (#2318) was merged. Earlier this year similar pull requests by other people have converted NumPy (#3178, #3191, #3201, #3202, #3203, #3205, #3208, #3216, #3223, #3226, #3227, #3231, #3232, #3235, #3236, #3237, #3238, #3241, #3242, #3244, #3245, #3248, #3249, #3257, #3266, #3281, #3191, ...) and SciPy (#397) codes as well. Now all these projects have just one code base and it works in all Python versions (2.x and 3.x) without the need to call the 2to3 tool. Having a single code base, programming in Python is fun again. You can choose any Python version, be it 2.x or 3.x, and simply submit a patch. The patch is then tested using Travis-CI, so that it works in all Python versions. Installation has been simplified (no need to call any 2to3 tools and no more hacks to get setup.py working). In other words, this is how it should be, that you write your code once, and you can use any supported language version to run it/compile it, or develop in. But for some reason, this obvious solution has been discouraged by Guido and other Python documents, as seen above. I just looked up the latest official Python docs, and that one is not upfront negative about a single code base. But it still does not recommend this approach as the one. So let me fix that: I do recommend a single code base as the solution. The newest Python documentation from the last paragraph also mentions

Regardless of which approach you choose, porting is not as hard or time-consuming as you might initially think.

Well, I encourage you to browse through the pull requests that I linked to above for SymPy, NumPy or SciPy. I think it is very time consuming, and that's just converting from 2to3 to single code base, which is the easy part. The hard part was to actually get SymPy to work with Python 3 (as I discussed above, that took couple months of hard work), and I am pretty sure it was pretty hard to port NumPy and SciPy as well. The docs also says:

It /single code base/ does lead to code that is not entirely idiomatic Python

That is true, but our experience has been, that with every Python version that we drop, we also delete lots of ugly hacks from our code base. This has been true for dropping support for 2.3, 2.4 and 2.5, and I expect it will also be true for dropping 2.6 and especially 2.7, when we can simply use the Python 3.x syntax. So not a big deal overall. To sum this blog post up, as far as I am concerned, pretty much all the problems with supporting Python 2.x and 3.x are fixed by having a single code base. You can read the pull requests above to see how to implemented things (like metaclasses, and other fancy stuff...). Python is still quite the same language, you write your code, you use a Python version of your choice and things will just work. Not a big deal overall. The official documentation should be fixed to recommend this approach, and deprecate the other approaches. I think that Python is great and I hope it will be used more in the future.

Written with StackEdit.

This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (167.67 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. The Debian Administrator s Handbook After the successful crowdfunding campaign, I had a bunch of rewards to ship: I subcontracted most of the job but I had to take care of the books with dedication. I also dealt regularly with books/stickers coming back to the sender (due to invalid address or people not picking up their parcels in the post-office). After the rewards, we had to take care to actually finalize the liberation of the French translation. I merged the translations we had in Git and Roland updated/translated a few strings that weren t in the original book in French. Then I have put the book online. Last but not least, I started to work on updating the English book for Debian 7 (Roland started way before me) and we have put some updated chapters up for review. Debian France Elections. After Debian France s general assembly, the new board of administrators voted the officers: I have been re-elected as President, Sylvestre continues as Treasurer but we have a new Secretary in the person of Alexandre Delano . Welcome Alexandre! I did the administrative work to register the new board/officers in the Tribunal d instance and to give access to the internal git repositories to the new members. Galette. I also did a bunch of tests on Galette s new features that Debian France ordered to the upstream author. They should all land in the next upstream release due in the next weeks. \o/ Accounting. I worked on the accounting to bring it up-to-date so that Sylvestre can pick up the work from now on. We re learning how to best use ledger for our needs. PTS rewrite I continued to spend about 12 hours a week to mentor Marko Lalic who is rewriting the Package Tracking System. I m pretty happy with the results so far so I marked him as pass for the mid-term evaluation required by Google. You can have a look at the documentation and the web interface is starting to show some content. The email interface is fully working and I have configured the real PTS to forward all mails to our test instance (pts.debian.net) so that you can use the rewritten PTS for real-life work. Mail your subscription commands to control@pts.debian.net and start using it! Thanks to the test driven development methodology we re using, we re pretty confident that it works reasonably well! I also packaged python-django-jsonfield (still in NEW) since Marko has been using this python module in his code, and filed bug #717900 on sqlite3 to raise a limit that we have hit with queries made by the PTS. Kali Linux I used the Calxeda Highbank node donated to Debian by Offensive Security to test the new -armmp kernel flavor on it. It seemed to work except for a missing network driver (filed in #717269). Misc Debian work Issues with social networks. With the move of identi.ca to pump.io, we don t have any possibility to auto-post status updates based on RSS feeds. Identi.ca s @debian account was also configured to push updates to the @debian account on twitter.com (and from there it was grabbed in the Debian page on Facebook). This is also gone so to limit the damage, I setup twitterfeed.com so that the twitter/facebook accounts continue to have updates). If you re looking for a development project, here s an area that is not well covered by free software! We need code to do what twitterfeed does and we need that code to also support pump.io. Dpkg work. It s been a long time since I last pushed some code to dpkg s git repository. I took care of reworking and merging a patch submitted by Steve Langasek to fix #716948 (an issue with dpkg-maintscript-helper rm_conffile messing with conffiles that the package no longer owns). Git mail notification. When I was still administrator of Alioth, I wrote git-commit-notice (a fork of Git s post-receive-email) and many packaging projects are using this hook script to send commit notices to mailing lists. This script has not been updated for multiple years and it started spewing warnings recently due to deprecated features in Wheezy s git. So I looked at updating it and while doing so I discovered a much better replacement with git-multimail. Thus I adapted git-commit-notice to work on top of this new script. The result has now been installed on git.debian.org (this is to be properly announced in the next DeveloperNews). Misc work. I packaged sql-ledger 3.0.5-1, forwarded #714739 on publican, and I participated in discussions to move the French Debian planets to planet.debian.org. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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Roundcube is one of the well known OpenSource solutions for accessing Mails via webinterface. Unfortunately the package in wheezy is ~2 years old.
In Debian unstable the package was updated, but #714727 is blocking the migration to jessie. In the meanwhile I backported the package to wheezy. For everybody still using the sqlite (v2) backend, see here. There is no automatic migration from sqlite to sqlite3 backend.
For everybody using the package roundcube-plugins-extra, I created an updated package for roundcube 0.9 and submitted my changes to the Debian Roundcube Maintainers. If you want to give it a try, you could install the packages from my wheezy-backports repository:

# wget "http://ftp.cyconet.org/debian/sources.list.d/wheezy-backports-cyconet.list" \
    -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/wheezy-backports-cyconet.list
# aptitude update
# aptitude -t wheezy-backports install roundcube-mysql roundcube-plugins roundcube-plugins-extra

For adding my archive key, you can just install the package "debian-cyconet-archive-keyring"

I have finished preparing the beta 2 of the next release of OpenStack. It is currently only available from out Git on Alioth (in /git/openstack), and directly from my jenkins repository, which creates Wheezy backports for it:

deb ftp://havana.pkgs.enovance.com/debian havana main
deb http://archive.gplhost.com/debian havana-backports main

As for every OpenStack release, a large number of Python modules needed to be packaged and are waiting in the FTP master NEW queue to be approved: oslo-sphinx, python-django-discover-runner, python-hacking, python-jsonrpclib, python-lesscpy, python-neutronclient, python-nosehtmloutput, python-requestbuilder, python-termcolor, sphinxcontrib-httpdomain and sphinxcontrib-pecanwsme. Let s hope that they will be approved before the next beta release in september (time where OpenStack Havana will be in feature freeze). The total number of packages maintained by the OpenStack team (on which I really am the only active maintainer for the moment ), there s 53 packages, plus these 11 packages waiting in the NEW queue. That s a big number of package, and I wouldn t mind some help One thing that annoyed all the community is that Quantum, the OpenStack network virtualization module, had to be renamed as Neutron, because of a trademark from Quantum (you probably remember the Quantum Fireball hard drives? Well, it s the same company ). Another good news is that my openstack-debian-images package has just been approved and landed in Sid. With it, you can automate the process of building a Debian image for OpenStack with a simple shell command (there s a man page that I wrote with it: read it if you need to build images). It is made of a single shell script to build the image, using kpartx, parted, mbr, debootstrap, extlinux and friends. I tried to keep it simple, not involving a huge amount of components. With the release of cloud-init 0.7.2-3, I have fixed a few bugs (3 important bugs, out of which 2 where RC bugs), thanks to contributions in the debian-cloud@lists.debian.org mailing list. This includes adding new init.d scripts, so we now have support for user data. This doesn t only benefits OpenStack images, but anyone willing to start virtual machines in the cloud (nowadays, every cloud implementation needs cloud-init installed in the virtual images). This means you can include a script in the metadata of the virtual machine you start it, and it will be executed at startup. If everything goes as planned (that is, no new RC bug), I will upload an update of cloud-init to backports in 5 days (there is already a version there, but it doesn t have the necessary init.d scripts to execute the user data scripts), and openstack-debian-images in 9 days. Then it will be possible to build OpenStack images with absolutely all the tools available from Wheezy (and backports). I hope to be able to discuss that during Debconf 13.

Given a model:
class PASPPoint(models.Model): point = models.PointField() when = DateTimeField() user = models.ForeignKey(User) objects = models.GeoManager()
The following Query:
counts = PASPPoint.objects.filter( user=user, when__year= 2013 , when__month= 4 , ).extra( day : date_trunc( day , when) ).values( day ).order_by().annotate(count=Count( id ))
will error out with a SyntaxError. It didn t hit me until some PostgreSQL debugging that this was because when is a SQL-ish word. D oh. Changing when to timestamp fixed the problem.

Since 2 weeks I'm faced with some problems at a Xen hosting environment based on Debian wheezy. The issue is, that one specific domU is regularly failing network. The investigations showed, that no network packets from and to this system are seen on the the network interface in the domU and on the bridge interface in the dom0.
The funny part is, that the firewall on the dom0 now is logging packet rejects on the interface of the effected system and one interface of an other specific domU for the destination address. One pack and rejects on both interfaces ... really strange!
Shutting down the domU and recreating them doesn't help. Even if restarting other domUs, those are also effected by now. The only way to fix is to reboot the entire dom0. After several investigations I stumpled upon the following in the dmesg:

vif-xm116: Frag is bigger than frame.
vif-xm116: fatal error; disabling device
xenbr0: port 4(vif-xm116) entering disabled state

A quick search at the famouse search engine revealed, there seems something bigger. Even a Debian bug is open since February. Unfortunately this problem is still unfixed in wheezy and squeeze.
But ... there is hope in sight! Ian Campbell provided packages based on top of the latest kernel packages with a call for testing. Installing them seems to fix the issue in my environment. So we just have to hope this will get fixed soon, as this regression is really annoying. Thanks to all who make this happen in advance!

The Scope of the Problem Security is inherently complex because of the large number of ways of circumventing it. For example Internet facing servers have been successfully attacked based on vulnerabilities in the OS, the server application, public key generation, DNS, SSL key certificates (and many other programs and algorithms in use), as well as the infrastructure and employees of all companies in the chain. When all those layers work reasonably well (not perfectly but well enough to not obviously be the weakest link) there are attacks on the end user systems that access the servers (such as the trojan horse programs used to attack PCs used for online banking). My Area of Interest The area of security that interests me is Linux software development. There are many related areas such as documentation and default configurations to make it easier for people to secure their systems (instead of insecure systems being the default option) which are all important. There are also many related fields such as ensuring that all people with relevant access are trustworthy. There are many interesting problems to solve in such areas most of which aren t a good match for my skills or just require more time than I have available. I sometimes write blog posts commenting on random security problems in other areas. Sometimes I hope to inspire people to new research, sometimes I hope to just inform users who can consider the issues when implementing solutions to security problems. Bugs In the software development side there are ongoing problems of bugs in code that weaken security. The fact that the main area of concern for people who are interested in securing systems is fixing bugs is an indication that the problem of software quality needs a lot of work at the moment. The other area that gets a reasonable amount of obvious work is in access control. Again it s an area that needs a lot of work, but the fact that we re not done with that is an indication of how far there is to go in generally improving computer security. Authenticating Software Releases There have been cases where source code repositories have been compromised to introduce trojan horse code, the ones I ve read about have been discovered reasonably quickly with little harm done but there could be some which weren t discovered. Of course it s likely that such attacks will be discovered because someone will have the original and the copies can be compared. Repositories of binaries are a bigger problem, it s not always possible to recompile a program and get a binary which checks out as being identical (larger programs often include the build time in the binary). Even for build processes which don t include such data it can be very difficult to determine the integrity of a build process. For example programs compiled with different versions of libraries, header files, or compilers will usually differ slightly. As most developers frequently change the versions of such software they will often be unable to verify their own binaries and any automated verification of such binaries will be impossible for anyone else. So if a developer s workstation was compromised without their knowledge it might be impossible for them to later check whether they released trojan binaries without just running the binaries in question and looking for undesired behavior. The problem of verifying past binaries is solvable for large software companies, Linux distributions, and all other organisations that have the resources to keep old versions of all binaries and libraries used to build software. For proprietary software companies the verification process would have to start with faith in the vendor of their OS and compiler doing the right thing. For Linux distributions and other organisations based on free software it would start by having the source to everything which can then be verified in theory although in practice verifying all source for compilers, the OS, and libraries would be a huge undertaking. Espionage There is a well documented history of military espionage, people who are sworn to secrecy have been subverted by money, blackmail, and by having political beliefs which don t agree with their government. The history of corporate espionage is less well documented but as corporations perform less stringent background checks than military organisations I think it s safe to assume that corporate espionage is much more common. Presumably any government organisation that can have any success at subverting employees of a foreign government can be much more successful in subverting programmers (either in companies such as Microsoft or in the FOSS community). One factor that makes it easier to launch such attacks is the global nature of software development. Government jobs that involve access to secret data have requirements about where the applicant was born and has lived, corporate jobs and volunteer positions in free software development don t have such requirements. The effort involved in subverting an existing employee of a software company or contributor to free software or the effort involved in getting an agent accepted in such a project would be quite small when compared to a nuclear weapons program. Therefore I think we should assume that every country which is capable of developing nuclear weapons (even North Korea) can do such things if they wish. Would the government of such a country want to subvert a major software project that is used by hundreds of millions of people? I can imagine ways that such things could benefit a government and while there would be costs for such actions (both in local politics and international relations) it seems most likely that some governments would consider it to be worth the risk and North Korea doesn t seem to have much to lose. Conclusion We would like every computer to be like a castle with a strong wall separating them from the bad things which can t be breached in ways that aren t obvious. But the way things are progressing with increasingly complex systems depending on more people and other systems it s becoming more like biology than engineering. We can think of important government systems as being comparable to the way people with compromised immune systems are isolated from any risk of catching a disease, the consequences of an infection are worse so greater isolation measures are required. For regular desktop PCs getting infected by a trojan is often regarded as being similar to getting a cold in winter. People just accept that their PC will be infected on occasion and don t bother making any serious effort to prevent it. After an infection is discovered the user (or their management for a corporate PC) tend not to be particularly worried about data loss in spite of some high profile data leaks from companies that do security work and the ongoing attacks against online banking and webcam spying on home PCs. I don t know what it will take for users to start taking security risks seriously. I think that a secure boot is a good step in the right direction, but it s a long way from being able to magically solve all security problems. I ve previously described some of the ways that secure boot won t save you [1]. The problems of subverting developers don t seem to be an immediate concern (although we should consider the possibility that it might be happening already without anyone noticing). The ongoing trend is that the value of computers in society is steadily increasing which therefore increases the rewards for criminals and spy agencies who can compromise them. Therefore it seems that we will definitely face the problems of subverted developers if we can adequately address the current technical problems related to flaws in software and inadequate access control. We just need to fix some of the problems which are exploited more easily to force the attackers to use the more difficult and expensive attacks. Note that it is a really good thing to make attacks more difficult, that decreases the number of organisations that are capable of attack even though it won t stop determined attackers. For end user systems the major problem seems to be related to running random programs from the Internet without a security model that adequately protects the system. Both Android and iOS make good efforts at protecting a system in the face of random hostile applications, but they have both been shown to fail in practice (it might be a good idea to have a phone for games that is separate from the phone used for phone calls etc). More research into OS security is needed to address this. But in the mean time users need to refrain from playing games and viewing porn on systems that are used for work, Internet banking, and other important things. While PCs are small and cheap enough that having separate PCs for important and unimportant tasks is practical it seems that most users don t regard the problems as being serious enough to be worth the effort.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/12/28/secure-boot-protecting-against-root/

There s been some media coverage at the start of this week about blocking child porn. Except it s not about child porn that s a trojan horse. People who want to access pornography that is already illegal (Protection of Children Act 1978) are probably already using security tools to hide their downloading and will be unaffected by this unless they re pretty stupid. And the announcement, about the same time as the predicted birth of a royal baby, third in line to the throne, seems like a cynical attempt to bury bad news taken straight from the Blair Government. That would almost be enough reason to oppose it: they don t want the media to look at this too closely for some reason. So what s this actually about? It looks like a way to force through widespread acceptance of the ability to censor most UK internet users by shouting won t somebody think of the children? If you doubt it, take a look at the list of filtered topics:

• Dating
• Drugs, Alcohol and Tobacco
• File Sharing Sites
• Gambling
• Games
• Pornography
• Social Networking
• Suicide and Self-Harm
• Weapons and Violence

So if they get away with this censorship, you won t be able to use Twitter or contact the Samaritans until you deactivate it. Except I suspect you will because they re pretty big and the Cameron Government won t want to pick a fight with them: it ll be the next Twitter and the next Samaritans, currently much smaller and unable to defend themselves, who get shut out of UK homes. So what can we do, besides explaining this and writing to our MPs? Are we better off joining parties who oppose this censorship, like the Pirate Party, or joining existing parties and trying to overturn their stupid support for it?

I'm just replacing the code running planet alug from a (very old) Planet 2.0 to Venus, appears that the transition has mostly worked, but maybe it's time to think about what to replace that with too, it'd be nice, for instance, to use something shiny and django based so that some more people can add feeds (with out me having to go edit the file!).

Mailscanner is an e-mail security and anti-spam solution for e-mail gateways. In combination of postfix it uses a very ugly way messing around in postfixs queue directories. Anyways .. if you are still interested, keep reading. Mailscanner was removed from Debian, so it's not available in wheezy. Anyways ... there is a web 2.0 Frontend for Mailscanner, called Baruwa, which provides mailscanner packages for Debian. Add the baruwa sources file

cat > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mailscanner.list << 'EOF'
deb http://apt.baruwa.org/debian wheezy main
deb-src http://apt.baruwa.org/debian wheezy main
EOF

Optional, install the GPG key for the reprosority

wget -O - http://apt.baruwa.org/baruwa-apt-keys.gpg   apt-key add -

If you're running squeeze with Mailscanner, you should do this before upgrading to wheezy. If you are installing Mailscanner on a fresh wheezy, just:

aptitude update && aptitude install mailscanner

As of Version 4.78 and above, you can place you local changes into /etc/MailScanner/conf.d/, no need to mess directly around into /etc/MailScanner/MailScanner.conf

The latest release of the Wayland protocol and support library along with the Weston compositor is now out. For the GNOME community this release is particularly interesting:

• It is the first one to advertise a stable API for the implementation of compositors (libwayland-server) which will prove useful with the porting of gnome-shell & mutter to Wayland
• Two new protocol enhancements have been staged for inclusion: subsurfaces from Pekka Paalanen which will be the basis for implementing Clutter-GTK on Wayland and support for input methods from Jan Arne Petersen. These are not yet in the core of the Wayland protocol but will be moved there when the API has been proven.
• HiDPI support Alexander Larsson implemented this for Wayland and GTK+ too

At GUADEC i ll be speaking about the current state of the Wayland project and plans going forward. If you have a particular topic or question you d like me to cover please let me know in the comments.

So, does anyone have any clue what's happened, because I'm at a loss. Apparently I didn't blog about the loss of my Dad back in December, he was found in Union Canal on the 13th December 2012, with his dinner in a carrier bag and his bike. The 'official' date of death is the 13th December 2012, but as far as we can work out (and I'm fairly sure on it), he died between 1930 and 2030 on the 12th. I was on the phone to him at 1930, and I was trying to call him back at 2030 on leaving a pub and wandering back in to town, apparently I wasn't the only one trying to call him, but we all put it down to him being out of signal at the time, until I got a call from my brother on the 13th at just gone midday, saying that the police had been round to tell him they'd found Dad in the canal that morning. The funeral was held on the 22nd January 2013, with a large turnout of friends and family, it was a good send off for the old chap, and we made damned sure that it was an even better wake - The Brewery Tap did a fantastic job for us, and all that turned up (ok, with some exceptions, but we can block them out!) were fantastic. The boy knew more people than we could possibly imagine, and most of them turned up to either the funeral, the wake or both. Still miss him, don't expect that to change anytime soon, if only because I used to talk to him most evenings after work between the train station and the pub, and I really miss being able to talk shit with him and being able to relate. Next week we should finally have the Certificate of Representation so that we can actually empty his canal boat ready to sell, at which point it's likely to go back down to Wilton Marina to be sold off. It's not a bad little boat, but it was his sanctuary, and none of us feel comfortable keeping it. In other news, work has been slightly a bit busy since then, and I'm still playing a bit of catchup from missing fair chunks of January (though, I was mostly still working from home when I could!). I'm sure other stuff must have happened... Oh, yeah, I got older, but obviously no wiser. I went and visited The Brewery Tap for Father's Day (that was a good day, 7 hours trains for 5 hours in the pub, but well worth it). Coming up: Cambridge Visitations! The August Bank Holiday Debian Party in Cambridge - now, that I am looking forward to!

Cory Doctorow published a letter from a 14yo who had just read his novel Homeland [1]. I haven t had anything insightful to say about Aaron Swartz, so I think that this link will do [2]. Seth Godin gave an interesting TED talk about leading tribes [3]. I think everyone who is active in the FOSS community should watch this talk. Ron Garrett wrote an interesting post about the risk of being hit by a dinosaur killer [4]. We really need to do something about this and the cost of defending against asteroids is almost nothing compared to defence spending. Afra Raymond gave an interesting TED talk about corruption [5]. He focussed on his country Trinidad and Tobago but the lessons apply everywhere. Wikihouse is an interesting project that is based around sharing designs for houses that can be implemented using CNC milling machines [6]. It seems to be at the early stages but it has a lot of potential to change the building industry. Here is a TED blog post summarising Dan Pallotta s TED talk about fundraising for nonprofits [7]. His key point is that moral objections to advertising for charities significantly reduce their ability to raise funds and impacts the charitable mission. I don t entirely agree with his talk which is very positive towards spending on promotion but I think that he makes some good points which people should consider. Here is a TED blog post summarising Peter Singer s TED talk about effective altruism [8]. His focus seems to be on ways of cheaply making a significant difference which doesn t seem to agree with Dan Pallotta s ideas. Patton Oswalt wrote an insightful article about the culture of stand-up comedians which starts with joke stealing and heckling and ends with the issue of rape jokes [9]. Karen Eng wrote an interesting TED blog post about Anthony Vipin s invention of HAPTIC shoes for blind people [10]. The vibration of the shoes tells the person which way to walk and a computer sees obstacles that need to be avoided. David Blaine gave an interesting TED talk about how he prepared for a stunt of holding his breath for 17 minutes [11].

• [1] http://craphound.com/?p=4521
• [2] https://torforge.wordpress.com/2013/02/04/cory-doctorow-on-aaron-swartz/
• [3] http://www.ted.com/talks/seth_godin_on_the_tribes_we_lead.html
• [4] http://blog.rongarret.info/2013/02/its-question-of-when-not-if.html
• [5] http://www.ted.com/talks/afra_raymond_three_myths_about_corruption.html
• [6] http://www.wikihouse.cc/
• [7] http://tinyurl.com/d3jnmqt
• [8] http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/01/effective-altruism-peter-singer-at-ted2013/
• [9] http://tinyurl.com/krxvrnx
• [10] http://tinyurl.com/nlrq5k6
• [11] http://www.ted.com/talks/david_blaine_how_i_held_my_breath_for_17_min.html

If we can t write diversity into sci-fi, then what s the point? You don t create new worlds to give them all the same limits of the old ones.
Jane Espenson (from interview with Advocate)

Basically reblogged from here: I couldn't resist, because it's just oh-so-damn-right.
And this should always apply when we imagine new worlds, no matter if for writing them or for fighting for them.

Cameron Russell (who works as an underwear model) gave an interesting TED talk about beauty [1]. Ben Goldacre gave an interesting and energetic TED talk about bad science in medicine [2]. A lot of the material is aimed at non-experts, so this is a good talk to forward to your less scientific friends. Lev wrote a useful description of how to disable JavaScript from one site without disabling it from all sites which was inspired by Snopes [3]. This may be useful some time. Russ Allbery wrote an interesting post about work and success titled The Why? of Work [4]. Russ makes lots of good points and I m not going to summarise them (read the article, it s worth it). There is one point I disagree with, he says You are probably not going to change the world . The fact is that I ve observed Russ changing the world, he doesn t appear to have done anything that will get him an entry in a history book but he s done a lot of good work in Debian (a project that IS changing the world) and his insightful blog posts and comments on mailing lists influence many people. I believe that most people should think of changing the world as a group project where they are likely to be one of thousands or millions who are involved, then you can be part of changing the world every day. James Morrison wrote an insightful blog post about what he calls Penance driven development [5]. The basic concept of doing something good to make up for something you did which has a bad result (even if the bad result was inadvertent) is probably something that most people do to some extent, but formalising it in the context of software development work is a cencept I haven t seen described before. A 9yo boy named Caine created his own games arcade out of cardboard, when the filmmaker Nirvan Mullick saw it he created a short movie about it and promoted a flash mob event to play games at the arcade [6]. They also created the Imagination Foundation to encourage kids to create things from cardboard [7]. Tanguy Ortolo describes how to use the UDF filesystem instead of FAT for USB devices [8]. This allows you to create files larger than 2G while still allowing the device to be used on Windows systems. I ll keep using BTRFS for most of my USB sticks though. Bruce Schneier gave an informative TED talk about security models [9]. Probably most people who read my blog already have a good knowledge of most of the topics he covers. I think that the best use of this video is to educate less technical people you know. Blaine Harden gave an informative and disturbing TED talk about the concentration camps in North Korea [10]. At the end he points out the difficult task of helping people recover from their totalitarian government that will follow the fall of North Korea. Bruce Schneier has an interesting blog post about the use of a motherboard BMC controller (IPMI and similar) to compromise a server [11]. Also some business class desktop systems and laptops have similar functionality. Russ Allbery wrote an insightful article about the failures of consensus decision-making [12]. He compares the Wikipedia and Debian methods so his article is also informative for people who are interested in learning about those projects. The TED blog has a useful reference article with 10 places anyone can learn to code [13]. Racialicious has an interesting article about the people who take offense when it s pointed out that they have offended someone else [14]. Nick Selby wrote an interesting article criticising the Symantic response to the NYT getting hacked and also criticises anti-viru software in general [15]. He raises the point that most of us already know, anti-virus software doesn t do much good. Securing Windows networks is a losing game. Joshua Brindle wrote an interesting blog post about security on mobile phones and the attempts to use hypervisors for separating data of different levels [16]. He gives lots of useful background information about how to design and implement phone based systems.

• [1] http://tinyurl.com/be6eel3
• [2] http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_battling_bad_science.html
• [3] http://levlafayette.com/node/383
• [4] http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2013-01/021.html
• [5] http://www.sorced.com/2012/03/penance-driven-development.html
• [6] http://cainesarcade.com/
• [7] http://www.imagination.is/
• [8] http://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article93/usb-udf
• [9] http://www.ted.com/talks/bruce_schneier.html
• [10] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SAWKDRHZuw
• [11] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/01/the_eavesdroppi.html
• [12] http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2013-01/026.html
• [13] http://blog.ted.com/2013/01/29/10-places-where-anyone-can-learn-to-code/
• [14] http://tinyurl.com/q2vl2fv
• [15] http://tinyurl.com/awtv7ka
• [16] http://securityblog.org/2013/02/11/security-anti-pattern-mobile-hypervisors/

We are proud to announce that 16 students have been accepted to work on improving Debian this summer through the Google Summer of Code! This is great news, following our 15 accepted students in 2012, and 9 accepted students in 2011. Here is the list of accepted students and projects:

• Aarsh Shah: Improvements to Debian Search and the Search Interface
• Aron Xu: ZFS on Linux integration
• Boris Bobrov: Debian Metrics Portal
• Catalin Usurelu: Enabling free multimedia real-time communications (RTC) with Debian
• Eleanor Chen: MIPS N32/N64 ABI Port
• Emmanouil Kiagias: Redesign metapackage creation for Debian Blends
• Eugenio Cano-Manuel: Leiningen & Clojure packaging
• Fabian Gr nbichler: Add CROTP support to oath-toolkit and dynalogin
• Gustavo Alkmim: Bootstrappable Debian
• Justus Winter: Debian GNU/Hurd Debianish initialization
• Lei Wang: OpenRC init system in Debian
• L o Cavaill : scan-build on the Debian archive
• Marko Lalic: PTS rewrite in Django
• Pawel Sarbinowski: Debian Android Application
• Shuxiong Ye: OpenJDK and Debian
• Simon Chopin: Implementation of message passing in the Debian infrastructure

If you're interested in one of the projects, please follow the links and talk directly to the students or the mentors, or come hang out with us on IRC. Welcome everyone, and let's make sure we all have an amazing summer!