Search Results: "tar"

30 July 2023

Russell Coker: Links July 2023

Phys.org has an interesting article about finding evidence for nanohertz gravity waves [1]. 1nano-Herz is a wavelength of 31.7 light years! Wired has an interesting story about OpenAI saying that no further advances will be made with larger training models [2]. Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders wrote an insightful article about the need for government run GPT type systems [3]. He focuses on the US, but having other countries/groups of countries do it would be good too. We could have a Chinese one, an EU one, etc. I don t think it would necessarily make sense for a small country like Australia to have one but it would make a lot more sense than having nuclear submarines (which are much more expensive). The Roadmap project is a guide for learning new technologies [4]. The content seems quite good. Bigthink has an informative and darkly amusing article Horror stories of cryonics: The gruesome fates of futurists hoping for immortality [5]. From this month in Australia psilocybin (active ingredient in Magic Mushrooms) can be prescribed for depression and MDMA (known as Ecstacy on the streets) can be prescribed for PTSD [6]. That s great news! Slate has an interesting article about the Operation Underground Railroad organisation that purports to help sex trafficed chilren [7]. This is noteworthy now with the controverst over the recent movie about that. Apparently they didn t provide much help for kids after they had been rescued and at least some of the kids were trafficed specifically to fulfill the demand that they created by offering to pay for it. Vigilantes aren t as effective as law enforcement. The ACCC is going to prevent Apple and Google from forcing app developers to give them a share of in-app purchases in Australia [8]. We need this in every country! This site has links to open source versions of proprietary games [9]. Vice has an interesting article about the Hungarian neuroscientist Viktor T th who taught rats to play Doom 2 [10]. The next logical step is to have mini tanks that they can use in real battlefields. Like the Mason s Rats episode of Love Death and Robots on Netflix. Brian Krebs wrote a mind boggling pair of blog posts about the Ashley Adison hack [11]. A Jewish disgruntled ex-employee sending anti-semitic harassment to the Jewish CEO and maybe cooperating with anti-semitic organisations to harass him is one of the people involved, but he killed himself (due to mental health problems) before the hack took place. Long Now has an insightful blog post about digital avatars being used after the death of the people they are based on [12]. Tavis Ormandy s description of the zenbleed bug is interesting [13]. The technique for finding the bug is interesting as well as the information on how the internals of the CPUs in question work. I don t think this means AMD is bad, trying to deliver increasing performance while limited by the laws of physics is difficult and mistakes are sometimes made. Let s hope the microcode updates are well distributed. The Hacktivist documentary about Andrew Bunnie Huang is really good [14]. Bunnie s lecture about supply chain attacks is worth watching [15]. Most descriptions of this issue don t give nearly as much information. However bad you thought this problem was, after you watch this lecture you will realise it s worse than that!

29 July 2023

Shirish Agarwal: Manipur, Data Leakage, Aadhar, and IRCv3

Manipur Lot of news from Manipur. Seems the killings haven t stopped. In fact, there was a huge public rally in support of the rapists and murderers as reported by Imphal Free Press. The Ruling Govt. both at the Center and the State being BJP continuing to remain mum. Both the Internet shutdowns have been criticized and seems no effect on the Government. Their own MLA was attacked but they have chosen to also be silent about that. The opposition demanded that the PM come in both the houses and speak but he has chosen to remain silent. In that quite a few bills were passed without any discussions. If it was not for the viral videos nobody would have come to know of anything . Internet shutdowns impact women disproportionately as more videos of assaults show Of course, as shared before that gentleman has been arrested under Section 66A as I shared in the earlier blog post. In any case, in the last few years, this Government has chosen to pass most of its bills without any discussions. Some of the bills I will share below. The attitude of this Govt. can be seen through this cartoon
The above picture shows the disqualified M.P. Rahul Gandhi because he had asked what is the relationship between Adani and Modi. The other is the Mr. Modi, the Prime Minister who refuses to enter and address the Parliament. Prem Panicker shares how we chillingly have come to this stage when even after rapes we are silent

Data Leakage According to most BJP followers this is not a bug but a feature of this Government. Sucheta Dalal of Moneylife shared how the data leakage has been happening at the highest levels in the Government. The leakage is happening at the ministerial level because unless the minister or his subordinate passes a certain startup others cannot come to know. As shared in the article, while the official approval may take 3-4 days, within hours other entities start congratulating. That means they know that the person/s have been approved.While reading this story, the first thought that immediately crossed my mind was data theft and how easily that would have been done. There was a time when people would be shocked by articles such as above and demand action but sadly even if people know and want to do something they feel powerless to do anything

PAN Linking and Aadhar Last month GOI made PAN Linking to Aadhar a thing. This goes against the judgement given by the honored Supreme Court in September 2018. Around the same time, Moneylife had reported on the issue on how the info. on Aadhar cards is available and that has its consequences. But to date nothing has happened except GOI shrugging. In the last month, 13 crore+ users of PAN including me affected by it I had tried to actually delink the two but none of the banks co-operated in the same Aadhar has actually number of downsides, most people know about the AEPS fraud that has been committed time and time again. I have shared in previous blog posts the issue with biometric data as well as master biometric data that can and is being used for fraud. GOI either ignorant or doesn t give a fig as to what happens to you, citizen of India. I could go on and on but it would result in nothing constructive so will stop now

IRCv3 I had been enthused when I heard about IRCV3. While it was founded in 2016, it sorta came on in its own in around 2020. I did try matrix or rather riot-web and went through number of names while finally setting on element. While I do have the latest build 1.11.36 element just hasn t been workable for me. It is too outsized, and occupies much more real estate than other IM s (Instant Messengers and I cannot correct size it like I do say for qbittorrent or any other app. I had filed couple of bugs on it but because it apparently only affects me, nothing happened afterwards But that is not the whole story at all. Because of Debconf happening in India, and that too Kochi, I decided to try out other tools to see how IRC is doing. While the Debian wiki page shares a lot about IRC clients and is also helpful in sharing stats by popcounter ( popularity-contest, thanks to whoever did that), it did help me in trying two of the most popular clients. Pidgin and Hexchat, both of which have shared higher numbers. This might be simply due to the fact that both get downloaded when you install the desktop version or they might be popular in themselves, have no idea one way or the other. But still I wanted to see what sort of experience I could expect from both of them in 2023. One of the other things I noticed is that Pidgin is not a participating organization in ircv3 while hexchat is. Before venturing in, I also decided to take a look at oftc.net. Came to know that for sometime now, oftc has started using web verify. I didn t see much of a difference between hcaptcha and gcaptcha other than that the fact that they looked more like oil paintings rather than anything else. While I could easily figure the odd man out or odd men out to be more accurate, I wonder how a person with low or no vision would pass that ??? Also much of our world is pretty much contextual based, figuring who the odd one is or are could be tricky. I do not have answers to the above other than to say more work needs to be done by oftc in that area. I did get a link that I verified. But am getting ahead of the story. Another thing I understood that for some reason oftc is also not particpating in ircv3, have no clue why not :(I

Account Registration in Pidgin and Hexchat This is the biggest pain point in both. I failed to register via either Pidgin or Hexchat. I couldn t find a way in either client to register my handle. I have had on/off relationships with IRC over the years, the biggest issue being IIRC is that if you stop using your handle for a month or two others can use it. IIRC, every couple of months or so, irc/oftc releases the dormant ones. Matrix/Vector has done quite a lot in that regard but that s a different thing altogether so for the moment will keep that aside. So, how to register for the network. This is where webchat.oftc.net comes in. You get a quaint 1970 s IRC window (probably emulated) where you call Nickserv to help you. As can be seen it one of the half a dozen bots that helps IRC. So the first thing you need to do is `/msg nickserv help` what you are doing is asking nickserv what services they have and Nickserv shares the numbers of services it offers. After looking into, you are looking for register `/msg nickerv register` Both the commands tell you what you need to do as can be seen by this
Let s say you are XYZ and your e-mail address is xyz@xyz.com This is just a throwaway id I am taking for the purpose of showing how the process is done. For this, also assume your passowrd is 1234xyz;0x something like this. I have shared about APG (Advanced Password Generator) before so you could use that to generate all sorts of passwords for yourself. So next would be `/msg nickserv register 1234xyz;0x xyz@xyz.com` Now the thing to remember is you need to be sure that the email is valid and in your control as it would generate a link with hcaptcha. Interestingly, their accessibility signup fails or errors out. I just entered my email and it errors out. Anyway back to it. Even after completing the puzzle, even with the valid username and password neither pidgin or hexchat would let me in. Neither of the clients were helpful in figuring out what was going wrong. At this stage, I decided to see the specs of ircv3 if they would help out in anyway and came across this. One would have thought that this is one of the more urgent things that need to be fixed, but for reasons unknown it s still in draft mode. Maybe they (the participants) are not in consensus, no idea. Unfortunately, it seems that the participants of IRCv3 have chosen a sort of closed working model as the channel is restricted. The only notes of any consequence are being shared by Ilmari Lauhakangas from Finland. Apparently, Mr/Ms/they Ilmari is also a libreoffice hacker. It is possible that their is or has been lot of drama before or something and that s why things are the way they are. In either way, doesn t tell me when this will be fixed, if ever. For people who are on mobiles and whatnot, without element, it would be 10x times harder. Update :- Saw this discussion on github. Don t see a way out It seems I would be unable to unable to be part of Debconf Kochi 2023. Best of luck to all the participants and please share as much as possible of what happens during the event.

26 July 2023

Enrico Zini: Mysterious DNS issues

Uhm, salsa is not resolving:

$ git fetch
ssh: Could not resolve hostname salsa.debian.org: Name or service not known
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.
$ ping salsa.debian.org
ping: salsa.debian.org: Name or service not known

But... it is?

$ host salsa.debian.org
salsa.debian.org has address 209.87.16.44
salsa.debian.org has IPv6 address 2607:f8f0:614:1::1274:44
salsa.debian.org mail is handled by 10 mailly.debian.org.
salsa.debian.org mail is handled by 10 mitropoulos.debian.org.
salsa.debian.org mail is handled by 10 muffat.debian.org.

It really is resolving correctly at each step:

$ cat /etc/resolv.conf
# This is /run/systemd/resolve/stub-resolv.conf managed by man:systemd-resolved(8).
# Do not edit.
# [...]
# Run "resolvectl status" to see details about the uplink DNS servers
# currently in use.
# [...]
nameserver 127.0.0.53
options edns0 trust-ad
search fritz.box
$ host salsa.debian.org 127.0.0.53
Using domain server:
Name: 127.0.0.53
Address: 127.0.0.53#53
Aliases:
salsa.debian.org has address 209.87.16.44
salsa.debian.org has IPv6 address 2607:f8f0:614:1::1274:44
salsa.debian.org mail is handled by 10 mailly.debian.org.
salsa.debian.org mail is handled by 10 muffat.debian.org.
salsa.debian.org mail is handled by 10 mitropoulos.debian.org.
# resolvectl status
Global
       Protocols: +LLMNR +mDNS -DNSOverTLS DNSSEC=no/unsupported
resolv.conf mode: stub
Link 3 (wlp108s0)
    Current Scopes: DNS LLMNR/IPv4 LLMNR/IPv6
         Protocols: +DefaultRoute +LLMNR -mDNS -DNSOverTLS DNSSEC=no/unsupported
Current DNS Server: 192.168.178.1
       DNS Servers: 192.168.178.1 fd00::3e37:12ff:fe99:2301 2a01:b600:6fed:1:3e37:12ff:fe99:2301
        DNS Domain: fritz.box
Link 4 (virbr0)
Current Scopes: none
     Protocols: -DefaultRoute +LLMNR -mDNS -DNSOverTLS DNSSEC=no/unsupported
Link 9 (enxace2d39ce693)
    Current Scopes: DNS LLMNR/IPv4 LLMNR/IPv6
         Protocols: +DefaultRoute +LLMNR -mDNS -DNSOverTLS DNSSEC=no/unsupported
Current DNS Server: 192.168.178.1
       DNS Servers: 192.168.178.1 fd00::3e37:12ff:fe99:2301 2a01:b600:6fed:1:3e37:12ff:fe99:2301
        DNS Domain: fritz.box
$ host salsa.debian.org 192.168.178.1
Using domain server:
Name: 192.168.178.1
Address: 192.168.178.1#53
Aliases:
salsa.debian.org has address 209.87.16.44
salsa.debian.org has IPv6 address 2607:f8f0:614:1::1274:44
salsa.debian.org mail is handled by 10 muffat.debian.org.
salsa.debian.org mail is handled by 10 mitropoulos.debian.org.
salsa.debian.org mail is handled by 10 mailly.debian.org.
$ host salsa.debian.org fd00::3e37:12ff:fe99:2301 2a01:b600:6fed:1:3e37:12ff:fe99:2301
Using domain server:
Name: fd00::3e37:12ff:fe99:2301
Address: fd00::3e37:12ff:fe99:2301#53
Aliases:
salsa.debian.org has address 209.87.16.44
salsa.debian.org has IPv6 address 2607:f8f0:614:1::1274:44
salsa.debian.org mail is handled by 10 muffat.debian.org.
salsa.debian.org mail is handled by 10 mitropoulos.debian.org.
salsa.debian.org mail is handled by 10 mailly.debian.org.

Could it be caching?

# systemctl restart systemd-resolved
$ dpkg -s nscd
dpkg-query: package 'nscd' is not installed and no information is available
$ git fetch
ssh: Could not resolve hostname salsa.debian.org: Name or service not known
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Could it be something in ssh's config?

$ grep salsa ~/.ssh/config
$ ssh git@salsa.debian.org
ssh: Could not resolve hostname salsa.debian.org: Name or service not known

Something weird with ssh's control sockets?

$ strace -fo /tmp/zz ssh git@salsa.debian.org
ssh: Could not resolve hostname salsa.debian.org: Name or service not known
enrico@ploma:~/lavori/legal/legal$ grep salsa /tmp/zz
393990 execve("/usr/bin/ssh", ["ssh", "git@salsa.debian.org"], 0x7ffffcfe42d8 /* 54 vars */) = 0
393990 connect(3,  sa_family=AF_UNIX, sun_path="/home/enrico/.ssh/sock/git@salsa.debian.org:22" , 110) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
$ strace -fo /tmp/zz1 ssh -S none git@salsa.debian.org
ssh: Could not resolve hostname salsa.debian.org: Name or service not known
$ grep salsa /tmp/zz1
394069 execve("/usr/bin/ssh", ["ssh", "-S", "none", "git@salsa.debian.org"], 0x7ffd36cbfde8 /* 54 vars */) = 0

How is ssh trying to resolve salsa.debian.org?

393990 socket(AF_UNIX, SOCK_STREAM SOCK_CLOEXEC SOCK_NONBLOCK, 0) = 3
393990 connect(3,  sa_family=AF_UNIX, sun_path="/run/systemd/resolve/io.systemd.Resolve" , 42) = 0
393990 sendto(3, " \"method\":\"io.systemd.Resolve.Re"..., 99, MSG_DONTWAIT MSG_NOSIGNAL, NULL, 0) = 99
393990 mmap(NULL, 135168, PROT_READ PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7f4fc71ca000
393990 recvfrom(3, 0x7f4fc71ca010, 135152, MSG_DONTWAIT, NULL, NULL) = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)
393990 ppoll([ fd=3, events=POLLIN ], 1,  tv_sec=119, tv_nsec=999917000 , NULL, 8) = 1 ([ fd=3, revents=POLLIN ], left  tv_sec=119, tv_nsec=998915689 )
393990 recvfrom(3, " \"error\":\"io.systemd.System\",\"pa"..., 135152, MSG_DONTWAIT, NULL, NULL) = 56
393990 rt_sigprocmask(SIG_SETMASK, [], NULL, 8) = 0
393990 close(3)                         = 0
393990 munmap(0x7f4fc71ca000, 135168)   = 0
393990 getpid()                         = 393990
393990 write(2, "ssh: Could not resolve hostname "..., 77) = 77

Something weird with resolved?

$ resolvectl query salsa.debian.org
salsa.debian.org: resolve call failed: Lookup failed due to system error: Invalid argument

Let's try disrupting what ssh is trying and failing:

# mv /run/systemd/resolve/io.systemd.Resolve /run/systemd/resolve/io.systemd.Resolve.backup
$ strace -o /tmp/zz2 ssh -S none -vv git@salsa.debian.org
OpenSSH_9.2p1 Debian-2, OpenSSL 3.0.9 30 May 2023
debug1: Reading configuration data /home/enrico/.ssh/config
debug1: /home/enrico/.ssh/config line 1: Applying options for *
debug1: /home/enrico/.ssh/config line 228: Applying options for *.debian.org
debug1: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh/ssh_config
debug1: /etc/ssh/ssh_config line 19: include /etc/ssh/ssh_config.d/*.conf matched no files
debug1: /etc/ssh/ssh_config line 21: Applying options for *
debug2: resolving "salsa.debian.org" port 22
ssh: Could not resolve hostname salsa.debian.org: Name or service not known
$ tail /tmp/zz2
394748 prctl(PR_CAPBSET_READ, 0x29 /* CAP_??? */) = -1 EINVAL (Invalid argument)
394748 munmap(0x7f27af5ef000, 164622)   = 0
394748 rt_sigprocmask(SIG_BLOCK, [HUP USR1 USR2 PIPE ALRM CHLD TSTP URG VTALRM PROF WINCH IO], [], 8) = 0
394748 futex(0x7f27ae5feaec, FUTEX_WAKE_PRIVATE, 2147483647) = 0
394748 openat(AT_FDCWD, "/run/systemd/machines/salsa.debian.org", O_RDONLY O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
394748 rt_sigprocmask(SIG_SETMASK, [], NULL, 8) = 0
394748 getpid()                         = 394748
394748 write(2, "ssh: Could not resolve hostname "..., 77) = 77
394748 exit_group(255)                  = ?
394748 +++ exited with 255 +++
$ machinectl list
No machines.
# resolvectl flush-caches
$ resolvectl query salsa.debian.org
salsa.debian.org: resolve call failed: Lookup failed due to system error: Invalid argument
# resolvectl reset-statistics
$ resolvectl query salsa.debian.org
salsa.debian.org: resolve call failed: Lookup failed due to system error: Invalid argument
# resolvectl reset-server-features
$ resolvectl query salsa.debian.org
salsa.debian.org: resolve call failed: Lookup failed due to system error: Invalid argument
# resolvectl monitor
  Q: salsa.debian.org IN A
  Q: salsa.debian.org IN AAAA
  S: EINVAL
  A: debian.org IN NS sec2.rcode0.net
  A: debian.org IN NS sec1.rcode0.net
  A: debian.org IN NS nsp.dnsnode.net
  A: salsa.debian.org IN A 209.87.16.44
  A: debian.org IN NS dns4.easydns.info

I guess I won't be using salsa today, and I wish I understood why. Update: as soon as I pushed this post to my blog (via ssh) salsa started resolving again.

Shirish Agarwal: Manipur Violence, Drugs, Binging on Northshore, Alaska Daily, Doogie Kamealoha and EU Digital Resilence Act.

Manipur Videos Warning: The text might be mature and will have references to violence so if there are kids or you are sensitive, please excuse. Few days back, saw the videos and I cannot share the rage, shame and many conflicting emotions that were going through me. I almost didn t want to share but couldn t stop myself. The woman in the video were being palmed, fingered, nude, later reportedly raped and murdered. And there have been more than a few cases. The next day saw another video that showed beheaded heads, and Kukis being killed just next to their houses. I couldn t imagine what those people must be feeling as the CM has been making partisan statements against them. One of the husbands of the Kuki women who had been paraded, fondled is an Army Officer in the Indian Army. The Meiteis even tried to burn his home but the Army intervened and didn t let it get burnt. The CM s own statement as shared before tells his inability to bring the situation out of crisis. In fact, his statement was dumb stating that the Internet shutdown was because there were more than 100 such cases. And it s spreading to the nearby Northeast regions. Now Mizoram, the nearest neighbor is going through similar things where the Meitis are not dominant. The Mizos have told the Meitis to get out. To date, the PM has chosen not to visit Manipur. He just made a small 1 minute statement about it saying how the women have shamed India, an approximation of what he said.While it s actually not the women but the men who have shamed India. The Wire has been talking to both the Meitis, the Kukis, the Nagas. A Kuki women sort of bared all. She is right on many counts. The GOI while wanting to paint the Kukis in a negative light have forgotten what has been happening in its own state, especially its own youth as well as in other states while also ignoring the larger geopolitics and business around it. Taliban has been cracking as even they couldn t see young boys, women becoming drug users. I had read somewhere that 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 young person in Afghanistan is now in its grip. So no wonder,the Taliban is trying to eradicate and shutdown drug use among it s own youth. Circling back to Manipur, I was under the wrong impression that the Internet shutdown is now over. After those videos became viral as well as the others I mentioned, again the orders have been given and there is shutdown. It is not fully shut but now only Govt. offices have it. so nobody can share a video that goes against any State or Central Govt. narrative A real sad state of affairs Update: There is conditional reopening whatever that means When I saw the videos, the first thing is I felt was being powerless, powerless to do anything about it. The second was if I do not write about it, amplify it and don t let others know about it then what s the use of being able to blog

Mental Health, Binging on various Webseries Both the videos shocked me and I couldn t sleep that night or the night after. it. Even after doing work and all, they would come in unobtrusively in my nightmares While I felt a bit foolish, I felt it would be nice to binge on some webseries. Little I was to know that both Northshore and Alaska Daily would have stories similar to what is happening here While the story in Alaska Daily is fictional it resembles very closely to a real newspaper called Anchorage Daily news. Even there the Intuit women , one of the marginalized communities in Alaska. The only difference I can see between GOI and the Alaskan Government is that the Alaskan Government was much subtle in doing the same things. There are some differences though. First, the State is and was responsive to the local press and apart from one close call to one of its reporters, most reporters do not have to think about their own life in peril. Here, the press cannot look after either their livelihood or their life. It was a juvenile kid who actually shot the video, uploaded and made it viral. One needs to just remember the case details of Siddique Kappan. Just for sharing the news and the video he was arrested. Bail was denied to him time and time again citing that the Police were investigating . Only after 2 years and 3 months he got bail and that too because none of the charges that the Police had they were able to show any prima facie evidence. One of the better interviews though was of Vrinda Grover. For those who don t know her, her Wikipedia page does tell a bit about her although it is woefully incomplete. For example, most recently she had relentlessly pursued the unconstitutional Internet Shutdown that happened in Kashmir for 5 months. Just like in Manipur, the shutdown was there to bury crimes either committed or being facilitated by the State. For the issues of livelihood, one can take the cases of Bipin Yadav and Rashid Hussain. Both were fired by their employer Dainik Bhaskar because they questioned the BJP MP Smriti Irani what she has done for the state. The problems for Dainik Bhaskar or for any other mainstream media is most of them rely on Government advertisements. Private investment in India has fallen to record lows mostly due to the policies made by the Centre. If any entity or sector grows a bit then either Adani or Ambani will one way or the other take it. So, for most first and second generation entrepreneurs it doesn t make sense to grow and then finally sell it to one of these corporates at a loss GOI on Adani, Ambani side of any deal. The MSME sector that is and used to be the second highest employer hasn t been able to recover from the shocks of demonetization, GST and then the pandemic. Each resulting in more and more closures and shutdowns. Most of the joblessness has gone up tremendously in North India which the Government tries to deny. The most interesting points in all those above examples is within a month or less, whatever the media reports gets scrubbed. Even the firing of the journos that was covered by some of the mainstream media isn t there anymore. I have to use secondary sources instead of primary sources. One can think of the chilling effects on reportage due to the above. The sad fact is even with all the money in the world the PM is unable to come to the Parliament to face questions.
The above poster/question is by Surya Pratap Singh, a retired IAS officer. He asks why the PM is unable to answer in either of the houses. As shared before, the Govt. wants very limited discussion. Even yesterday, the Lok Sabha TV just showed the BJP MP s making statements but silent or mic was off during whatever questions or statements made by the opposition. If this isn t mockery of Indian democracy then I don t know what is Even the media landscape has been altered substantially within the last few years. Both Adani and Ambani have distributed the media pie between themselves. One of the last bastions of the free press, NDTV was bought by Adani in a hostile takeover. Both Ambani and Adani are close to this Goverment. In fact, there is no sector in which one or the other is not present. Media houses like Newsclick, The Wire etc. that are a fraction of mainstream press are where most of the youth have been going to get their news as they are not partisan. Although even there, GOI has time and again interfered. The Wire has had too many 504 Gateway timeouts in the recent months and they had been forced to move most of their journalism from online to video, rather Youtube in order to escape both the censoring and the timeouts as shared above. In such a hostile environment, how both the organizations are somehow able to survive is a miracle. Most local reportage is also going to YouTube as that s the best way for them to not get into Govt. censors. Not an ideal situation, but that s the way it is. The difference between Indian and Israeli media can be seen through this
The above is a Screenshot shared by how the Israeli media has reacted to the Israeli Government s Knesset over the judicial overhaul . Here, the press itself erodes its own by giving into the Government day and night

Binging on Webseries Saw Northshore, Three Pines, Alaska Daily and Doogie Kamealoha M.D. which is based on Doogie Howser M.D. Of the four, enjoyed Doogie Kamealoha M.D. the most but then it might be because it s a copy of Doogie Howser, just updated to the new millenia and there are some good childhood memories associated with that series. The others are also good. I tried to not see European stuff as most of them are twisted and didn t want that space.

EU Digital Operational Resilience Act and impact on FOSS Few days ago, apparently the EU shared the above Act. One can read about it more here. This would have more impact on FOSS as most development of various FOSS distributions happens in EU. Fair bit of Debian s own development happens in Germany and France. While there have been calls to make things more clearer, especially for FOSS given that most developers do foss development either on side or as a hobby while their day job is and would be different. The part about consumer electronics and FOSS is a tricky one as updates can screw up your systems. Microsoft has had a huge history of devices not working after an update or upgrade. And this is not limited to Windows as they would like to believe. Even apple seems to be having its share of issues time and time again. One would have hoped that these companies that make billions of dollars from their hardware and software sales would be doing more testing and Q&A and be more aware about security issues. FOSS, on the other hand while being more responsive doesn t make as much money vis-a-vis the competitors. Let s take the most concrete example. The most successful mobile phone having FOSS is Purism. But it s phone, it has priced itself out of the market. A huge part of that is to do with both economies of scale and trying to get an infrastructure and skills in the States where none or minimally exists. Compared that to say Pinepro that is manufactured in Hong Kong and is priced 1/3rd of the same. For most people it is simply not affordable in these times. Add to that the complexity of these modern cellphones make it harder, not easier for most people to be vigilant and update the phone at all times. Maybe we need more dumphones such as Light and Punkt but then can those be remotely hacked or not, there doesn t seem to be any answers on that one. I haven t even seen anybody even ask those questions. They may have their own chicken and egg issues. For people like me who have lost hearing, while I can navigate smartphones for now but as I become old I don t see anything that would help me. For many an elderly population, both hearing and seeing are the first to fade. There doesn t seem to be any solutions targeted for them even though they are 5-10% of any population at the very least. Probably more so in Europe and the U.S. as well as Japan and China. All of them are clearly under-served markets but dunno a solution for them. At least to me that s an open question.

Valhalla's Things: Elastic Neck Top

A woman wearing a top in white fabric with thin blue lines and two groups of blue lozenges near the hems. It has a square neck gathered by a yellow elastic, the blue lines are horizontal on the wide sleeves and vertical, and more spaced, on the body.

Since some time I ve been thinking about making myself a top or a dress with a wide gathered neckline that can be work at different widths, including off-the-shoulders. A few years ago I ve been gifted a cut of nice, thin white fabric with a print of lines and lozenges that isn t uniform along the fabric, but looks like it was designed for some specific garment, and it was waiting in my stash for a suitable pattern. And a few days ago, during a Sunday lunch, there was an off-hand mention of a dress from the late 1970s which had an elastic in the neckline, so that it could be optionally worn off-the-shoulders. And something snapped in place. I had plans for that afternoon, but they were scrapped, and I started to draw, measure, cut rectangles of fabric, pin and measure again, cut more fabric. The main pieces of the top laid flat: a big rectangle for the body,

The main pieces of the top laid flat: a big rectangle for the body,

two rectangular tubes for the sleeves laid so that they meet the body just at the corners, and a triangle (a square gusset folded on the diagonal) joins them to the body.

I decided on a pattern made of rectangles to be able to use as much fabric as possible, with the size of each rectangle based mostly on the various sections on the print of the fabric. I ve made the typical sleeves from a rectangle and a square gusset, and then attached them to the body just from the gusset to keep the neckline wide and low. The worn top shown from the side back: there is a strip of vertical lines spaced closer together like on the sleeves, and it continues to the bottom rather than ending with a strip of lozenges.

The worn top shown from the side back: there is a strip of vertical lines spaced closer together like on the sleeves, and it continues to the bottom rather than ending with a strip of lozenges.

The part of the fabric with large vertical stripes had two different widths: I could have made the back narrower, but I decided to just keep a strip with narrower lines to one side. The fabric also didn t have a full second strip of lozenges, so I had to hem it halfway through it. Closeup of the center front and center back of the neckline casing, showing the matched lines.

Closeup of the center front and center back of the neckline casing, showing the matched lines.

The casing for the elastic was pieced from various scraps, but at least I was able to match the lines on the center front and back, even if they are different. Not that it matters a lot, since it s all hidden in the gathering, but I would have known. And since I was working on something definitely modern, even if made out of squares and rectangles, of course I decided to hand-sew everything, mostly to be able to use quite small sewing allowances, since the fabric was pretty thin. In my stash I had a piece of swimsuit elastic that feels nice, looks nice and makes a knot that doesn t slip, so I used it. It s a perfect match, except for the neon yellow colour, which I do like, but maybe is a bit too high visibility? I will see if the haberdasher has the same elastic in dark blue, but right now this will do. It was a quick project anyway: by the end of the working week the top was finished; I think that on a sewing machine it would be easy to make it in a day. the top worn with the neckline pulled down to leave the shoulders bare.

the top worn with the neckline pulled down to leave the shoulders bare.

And it can be worn off the shoulders! Which is something I will probably never do in public (and definitely not outdoors), but now if I wanted I could! :D As usual, the pattern (for what pattern there is) and instructions are on my pattern website under a #FreeSoftWear license, and I ve also added to the site a tip on how I use electrician fish tape to thread things through long casings

23 July 2023

Dirk Eddelbuettel: #41: Another r2u Example Really Simple CI

Welcome to the 41th post in the $R^4 series. Just as the previous post illustrated r2u use to empower interactive Google Colab sessions, today we want to look at continuous integration via GitHub Actions. Actions are very powerful, yet also intimidating and complex. How does one know what to run? How does ensure requirements are installed? What does these other actions do? Here we offer a much simpler yet fully automatic solution. It takes advantage of the fact that r2u integrates fully and automatically with the system, here apt, without us having to worry about the setup. One way to make this very easy is the use of the Rocker containers for r2u. They already include the few lines of simple (and scriptable) setup, and have bspm setup so that R commands to install packages dispatch to apt and will bring all required dependencies automatically and easily. With that the required yaml file for an action can be as simple as this:

name: r2u

on:
  push:
  pull_request:
  release:

jobs:
  ci:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    container:
      image: rocker/r2u:latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: SessionInfo
        run: R -q -e 'sessionInfo()'
      #- name: System Dependencies
      #  # can be used to install e.g. cmake or other build dependencies
      #  run: apt update -qq && apt install --yes --no-install-recommends cmake git
      - name: Package Dependencies
        run: R -q -e 'remotes::install_deps(".", dependencies=TRUE)'
      - name: Build Package
        run: R CMD build --no-build-vignettes --no-manual .
      - name: Check Package
        run: R CMD check --no-vignettes --no-manual $(ls -1tr *.tar.gz   tail -1)

There are only a few key components here. First, we have the on block where for simplicity we select pushes, pull requests and releases. One could reduce this to just pushes by removing or commenting out the next two lines. Many further refinements are possible and documented but not reqired. Second, the jobs section and its sole field ci saythat we are running this CI on Ubuntu in its latest release. Importantly we then also select the rocker container for r2 meaning that we explicitly select running in this container (which happens to be an extension and refinement of ubuntu-latest). The latest tag points to the most recent LTS release, currently jammy aka 22.04. This choice also means that our runs are limited to Ubuntu and exclude macOS and Windows. That is a choice: not every CI task needs to burn extra (and more expensive) cpu cycles on the alternative OS, yet those can always be added via other yaml files possibly conditioned on fewer runs (say: only pull requests) if needed. Third, we have the basic sequence of steps. We check out the repo this file is part of (very standard). After that we ask R show the session info in case we need to troubleshoot. (These two lines could be commented out.) Next we show a commented-out segment we needed in another repo where we needed to add cmake and git as the package in question required local compilation during build. Such a need is fairly rare, but as shown can be be accomodated easily while taking advantage of the rich development infrastructure provided by Ubuntu. But the step should be optional for most R packages so it is commented out here. The next step uses the remotes package to look at the DESCRIPTION file and install all dependencies which, thanks to r2u and bspm, will use all Ubuntu binaries making it both very fast, very easy, and generally failsafe. Finally we do the two standard steps of building the source package and checking it (while omitting vignettes and the (pdf) manual as the container does not bother with a full texlive installation this could be altered if desired in a derived container). And that s it! The startup cost is a few seconds to pull the container, plus a few more seconds for dependencies and let us recall that e.g. the entire tidyverse installs all one hundred plus packages in about twenty seconds as shown in earlier post. After that the next cost is generally just what it takes to build and check your package once all requirements are in. To use such a file for continuous integration, we can install it in the .github/workflows/ directory of a repository. One filename I have used is .github/workflows/r2u.yaml making it clear what this does and how. More information about r2u is at its site, and we answered some question in issues, and at stackoverflow. More questions are always welcome! If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Aurelien Jarno: Welcome Debian riscv64

After many years of effort, I am happy to announce that Debian riscv64 is now an official architecture! This milestone is not the end of the journey but rather the beginning of a new one: the port will need to be rebootstrapped in the official archive, build daemons will have to be reinstalled and handed over to DSA, many bugs will need to be fixed. If everything goes well, the architecture will eventually be released with Trixie. Please note that this process will be long and will span several months. I would like to take this opportunity to thanks everyone who contributed to this significant milestone, including individuals and Debian teams, as well as the organizations and companies that provided us with resources (by rough chronological order): MIT CSAIL, Sifive, Mullvad, tetaneutral.net, OSU Open Source Lab, Microchip, BeagleBoard.org Foundation, RISC-V international, PLCT Lab (ISCAS), StarFive, and Metropolitan Area Network Darmstadt.

21 July 2023

Gunnar Wolf: Road trip through mountain ridges to find the surreal

We took a couple of days of for a family vacation / road trip through the hills of Central Mexico. The overall trip does not look like anything out of the ordinary

Other than the fact that Google forecasted we d take approximately 15.5 hours driving for 852Km that is, an average of almost 55 Km/h. And yes, that s what we signed up for. And that s what we got. Of course, the exact routes are not exactly what Google suggested (I can say we optimized a bit the route, i.e., by avoiding the metropolitan area of Quer taro, at the extreme west, and going via San Juan del R o / Tequisquiapan / Bernal). The first stretch of the road is just a regular, huge highway, with no particular insights. The highways leaving and entering Mexico City on the North are not fun nor beautiful, only they are needed to get nice trips going Mexico City sits at a point of changing climates. Of course, it is a huge city And I cannot imagine how it would be without all of the urbanization it now sports. But anyway: On the West, South, and part of the East, it is surrounded by high mountains, with beautiful and dense forests. Mexico City is 2200m high, and most of the valley s surrounding peaks are ~3000m (and at the South Eastern tip, our two big volcanoes, Popocat petl and Iztacc huatl, get past the 5700m mark). Towards the North, the landscape is flatter and much more dry. Industrial compounds give way to dry grasslands. Of course, central Mexico does not understand the true meaning of flat, and the landscape is full with eh-not-very-big mountains. Then, as we entered Quer taro State, we started approaching Bernal. And we saw a huge rock that looks like it is not supposed to be there! It just does not fit the surroundings.

Shortly after Bernal, we entered a beautiful, although most crumpled, mountain ridge: Sierra Gorda de Quer taro. Sierra Gorda encompasses most of the North of the (quite small 11500Km total) state of Quer taro, plus portions of the neighboring states; other than the very abrupt and sharp orography, what strikes me most is the habitat diversity it encompasses. We started going up an absolute desert, harsh and beautiful; we didn t take pictures along the way as the road is difficult enough that there are almost no points for stopping for refreshments or for photo opportunities. But it is quite majestic. And if you think deserts are barren, boring places well, please do spend some time enjoying them! Anyway At on point, the road passes by a ~3100m height, and suddenly Pines! More pines! A beautiful forest! We reached our first stop at the originally mining town of Pinal de Amoles.

After spending the night there and getting a much needed rest, we started a quite steep descent towards Jalpan de Serra. While it is only ~20Km away on the map, we descended from 2300 to 760 meters of altitude (and the road was over 40Km long).

Being much lower, the climate drastically changed from cool and humid to quite warm and the body attitude in the kids does not lie!

In the mid-18th century, Fray Jun pero Serra established five missions to evangelize the population of this very harsh territory, and the frontispiece for the church and monastery in Jalpan is quite breathtaking.

But we were just passing by Jalpan. A short visit to the church and to the ice-cream shop, and we were again on our way. We crossed the state border, entering San Luis Potos , and arrived to our main destination: Xilitla, the little town in the beautiful Huasteca where the jungle meets surrealism. Xilitla was chosen by the British poet and patron of various surrealist artists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_James. He was a British noble (an unofficial grandson of King Edward VII), and heir to a huge fortune. I m not going to repeat here his very well known biography suffice to say that he got in love with the Huasteca, and bought a >30ha piece of jungle and mountain close to the Xilitla town, and made it his house. With very ample economic resources, in the late 1940s he started his lifelong project of building a surrealist garden. And Well, that s enough blabbering for me. I m sharing some pictures I took there. The place is plainly magic and wonderful. Edward James died in 1984, and his will decrees that after his death, the jungle should be allowed to reclaim the constructions so many structures are somewhat crumbling, and it is expected they will break down in the following decades. But for whoever comes to Mexico This magic place is definitely worth the heavy ride to the middle of the mountains and to the middle of the jungle.

Xilitla now also hosts a very good museum with sculptures by Leonora Carrington, James long-time friend, but I m not going to abuse this space with even more pictures. And of course, we did more, and enjoyed more, during our three days in Xilitla. And for our way back I wanted to try a different route. We decided to come back to Mexico City crossing Hidalgo state instead of Quer taro. I had feared the roads would be in a worse shape or would be more difficult to travel And I was happy to be proven wrong!

This was the longest driving stretch approximately 6:30 for 250Km. The roads are in quite decent shape, and while there are some stretches where we were quite lonely (probably the loneliest one was the sharp ascent from Tamazunchale to the detour before Orizatl n), the road felt safe and well kept at all times. The sights all across Eastern Hidalgo are breathtaking, and all furiously green (be it with really huge fern leaves or with tall, strong pines), until Zacualtip n.

And just as abruptly or more as when we entered Pinal de Amoles We crossed Orizatl n, and we were in a breathtaking arid, desert-like environment again. We crossed the Barranca de Metztitl n natural reserve, and arrived to spend the night at Huasca de Ocampo. There are many more things we could have done starting at Huasca, a region where old haciendas thrived, full of natural formations, and very very interesting. But we were tired and pining to be finally back home. So we rested until mid-morning and left straight back home in Mexico City. Three hours later, we were relaxing, preparing lunch, the kids watching whatever-TV-like-things are called nowadays. All in all, a very beautiful vacation!

19 July 2023

Shirish Agarwal: RISC-V, Chips Act, Burning of Books, Manipur

RISC -V Motherboard, SBC While I didn t want to, a part of me is hyped about this motherboard. This would probably be launched somewhere in November. There are obvious issues in this, the first being unlike regular motherboards you wouldn t be upgrade as you would do.You can t upgrade your memory, can t upgrade the CPU (although new versions of instructions could be uploaded, similar to BIOS updates) but as the hardware is integrated (the quad-core SiFive Performance P550 core complex) it would really depend. If the final pricing is around INR 4-5k then it may be able to sell handsomely provided there are people to push and provide support around it. A 500 GB or 1 TB SSD coupled with it and a cheap display unit and you could use it anywhere although as the name says it s more for tinkering as the name suggests. Another board that could perhaps be of more immediate use would be the beagleboard. They launched the same couple of days back and called it Beagle V-Ahead. Again, costs are going to be a concern. Just a year before the pandemic the Beagleboard Black (BB) used to cost in the sub 4k range, today it costs 8k+ for the end user, more than twice the price. How much Brexit is to be blamed for this and how much the Indian customs we would never know. The RS Group that is behind that shop is head-quartered in the UK. As said before, we do not know the price of either board as it probably will take few months for v-ahead to worm its way in the Indian market, maybe another 6 months or so. Even so, with the limited info. on both the boards, I am tilting more towards the other HiFive one. We should come to know about the boards say in 3-5 months of time.

CHIPS Act I had shared about the Chips Act a few times here as well as on SM. Two articles do tell how the CHIPS Act 2023 is more of a political tool, an industrial defence policy rather than just business as most people tend to think.

Cancelation of Books, Books Burning etc. Almost 2400 years ago, Plato released his work called Plato s Republic and one of the seminal works within it is perhaps one of the most famous works was the Allegory of the Cave. That is used again and again in a myriad ways, mostly in science-fiction though and mostly to do with utopian, dystopian movies, webseries etc. I did share how books are being canceled in the States, also a bit here. But the most damning thing has happened throughout history, huge quantities of books burned almost all for politics But part of it has been neglect as well as this time article shares. What we have lost and continue to lose is just priceless. Every book has a grain of truth in it, some more, some less but equally enjoyable. Most harmful is the neglect towards books and is more true today than any other time in history. Kids today have a wide variety of tools to keep themselves happy or occupied, from anime, VR, gaming the list goes on and on. In that scenario, how the humble books can compete. People think of Kindle but most e-readers like Kindle are nothing but obsolescence by design. I have tried out Kindle a few times but find it a bit on the flimsy side. Books are much better IMHO or call me old-school. While there are many advantages, one of the things that I like about books is that you can easily put yourself in either the protagonist or the antagonist or somewhere in the middle and think of the possible scenarios wherever you are in a particular book. I could go on but it will be a blog post or two in itself. Till later. Happy Reading.

Update:Manipur Extremely horrifying visuals, articles and statements continue to emanate from Manipur. Today, 19th July 2023, just couple of hours back, a video surfaced showing two Kuki women were shown as stripped, naked and Meitei men touching their private parts. Later on, we came to know that this was in response of a disinformation news spread by the Meitis of few women being raped although no documentary evidence of the same surfaced, no names nothing. While I don t want to share the video I will however share the statement shared by the Kuki-Zo tribal community on that. The print gives a bit more context to what has been going on.
Update, Few hours later : The Print also shared more of a context about six days ago. The reason we saw the video now was that for the last 2.5 months Manipur was in Internet shutdown so those videos got uploaded now. There was huge backlash from the Twitter community and GOI ordered the Manipur Police to issue this Press Release yesterday night or just few hours before with yesterday s time-stamp.
IndianExpress shared an article that does state that while an FIR had been registered immediately no arrests so far and this is when you can see the faces of all the accused. Not one of them tried to hide their face behind a mask or something. So, if the police wanted, they could have easily identified who they are. They know which community the accused belong to, they even know from where they came. If they wanted to, they could have easily used mobile data and triangulation to find the accused and their helpers. So, it does seem to be attempt to whitewash and protect a certain community while letting it prey on the other. Another news that did come in, is because of the furious reaction on Twitter, Youtube has constantly been taking down the video as some people are getting a sort of high more so from the majoritarian community and making lewd remarks. Twitter has been somewhat quick when people are making lewd remarks against the two girl/women. Quite a bit of the above seems like a cover-up. Lastly, apparently GOI has agreed to having a conversation about it in Lok Sabha but without any voting or passing any resolutions as of right now. Would update as an when things change. Update: Smriti Irani, the Child and Development Minister gave the weakest statement possible
As can be noticed, she said sexual assault rather than rape. The women were under police custody for safety when they were whisked away by the mob. No mention of that. She spoke to the Chief Minister who has been publicly known as one of the provocateurs or instigators for the whole thing. The CM had publicly called the Kukus and Nagas as foreigners although both of them claim to be residing for thousands of years and they apparently have documentary evidence of the same . Also not clear who is doing the condemning here. No word of support for the women, no offer of intervention, why is she the Minister of Child and Women Development (CDW) if she can t use harsh words or give support to the women who have gone and going through horrific things Update : CM Biren Singh s Statement after the video surfaced
This tweet is contradictory to the statements made by Mr. Singh couple of months ago. At that point in time, Mr. Singh had said that NIA, State Intelligence Departments etc. were giving him minute to minute report on the ground station. The Police itself has suo-moto (on its own) powers to investigate and apprehend criminals for any crime. In fact, the Police can call for questioning of anybody in any relation to any crime and question them for upto 48 hours before charging them. In fact, many cases have been lodged where innocent persons have been framed or they have served much more in the jail than the crime they are alleged to have been committed. For e.g. just a few days before there was a media report of a boy who has been in jail for 3 years. His alleged crime, stealing mere INR 200/- to feed himself. Court doesn t have time to listen to him yet. And there are millions like him. The quint eloquently shares the tale where it tells how both the State and the Centre have been explicitly complicit in the incidents ravaging Manipur. In fact, what has been shared in the article has been very true as far as greed for land is concerned. Just couple of weeks back there have been a ton of floods emanating from Uttarakhand and others. Just before the flooding began, what was the CM doing can be seen here. Apart from the newspapers I have shared and the online resources, most of the mainstream media has been silent on the above. In fact, they have been silent on the Manipur issue until the said video didn t come into limelight. Just now, in Lok Sabha everybody is present except the Prime Minister and the Home Minister. The PM did say that the law will take its own course, but that s about it. Again no support for the women concerned. Update: CJI (Chief Justice of India) has taken suo-moto cognizance and has warned both the State and Centre to move quickly otherwise they will take the matter in their own hand.
Update: Within 2 hours of the CJI taking suo-moto cognizance, they have arrested one of the main accused Heera Das
The above tells you why the ban on Internet was put in the first place. They wanted to cover it all up. Of all the celebs, only one could find a bit of spine, a bit of backbone to speak about it, all the rest mum
Just imagine, one of the women is around my age while the young one could have been a daughter if I had married on time or a younger sister for sure. If ever I came face to face with them, I just wouldn t be able to look them in the eye. Even their whole whataboutery is built on sham. From their view Kukis are from Burma or Burmese descent. All of which could be easily proved by DNA of all. But let s leave that for a sec. Let s take their own argument that they are Burmese. Their idea of Akhand Bharat stretches all the way to Burma (now called Myanmar). They want all the land but no idea with what to do with the citizens living on it. Even after the video, the whataboutery isn t stopping, that shows how much hatred is there. And not knowing that they too will be victim of the same venom one or the other day Update: Opposition was told there would be a debate on Manipur. The whole day went by, no debate. That s the shamelessness of this Govt. Update 20th July 19:25 Center may act or not act against the perpetrators but they will act against Twitter who showed the crime. Talk about shooting the messenger
We are now in the last stage. In 2014, we were at 6

Ian Jackson: Installing Debian bookworm without systemd

Instructions

Get the official installation image from the usual locations. I got the netinst CD image via BitTorrent.
Boot from the image and go through the installation in the normal way.
1. You may want to select an alternative desktop environment (and unselect GNOME). These steps have been tested with MATE.
2. Stop when you are asked to remove the installation media and reboot.
Press Alt + Right arrow to switch to the text VC. Hit return to activate the console and run the following commands (answering yes as appropriate):

chroot /target bash
apt-get install sysvinit-core elogind ntp dbus-x11
apt-get autoremove
exit

Observe the output from the apt-get install. If your disk arrangements are unusual, that may generate some error messages from update-initramfs.
Go back to the installer VC with Alt + Left arrow. If there were no error messages above, you may tell it to reboot.
If there were error messages (for example, I found that if there was disk encryption, alarming messages were printed), tell the installer to go Back . Then ask it to Install GRUB bootloader (again). After that has completed, you may reboot.
Enjoy your Debian system without systemd.

Discussion This is pleasingly straightforward, albeit with an ugly wart. This recipe was not formally developed and tested; it s just what happened when I tried to actually perform this task. The official installation guide has similar instructions although they don t seem to have the initramfs workaround. update-initramfs The need to go back and have the installer reinstall grub is because if your storage is not very straightforward, the update-initramfs caused by apt-get install apparently doesn t have all the right context. I haven t investigated this at all; indeed, I don t even really know that the initramfs generated in step 3 above was broken, although the messages did suggest to me that important pieces or config might have been omitted. Instead, I simply chose to bet that it might be broken, but that the installer would know what to do. So I used the installer s install GRUB bootloader option, which does regenerate the initramfs. So, I don t know that step 6 is necessary. In principle it would be better to do the switch from systemd to sysvinit earlier in the installation process, and under the control of the installer. But by default the installer goes straight from the early setup questions through to the set the time or reboot questions, without stopping. One could use the expert mode, or modify the command line, or something, but all of those things are, in practice, a lot more typing and/or interaction. And as far as I m aware the installer doesn t have an option for avoiding systemd . The apt-get install line sysvinit-core is the principal part of the sysvinit init system. Asking to install that causes the deinstallation of systemd s init and ancillary packages. systemd refuses to allow itself to be deinstalled, if it is already running, so if you boot into the systemd system you can t then switch init system. This is why the switch is best done at install time. If you re too late, there are instructions for changing init system post-installation. elogind is a forked version of some of systemd s user desktop session functionality. In practice modern desktop environments need this; without it, apt will want to remove things you probably want to keep. Even if you force it, you may find that your desktop environment can t adjust the audio volume, etc. ntp is needed because nowadays the default network time client is systemd-timesyncd (which is a bad idea even on systems with systemd as init). We need to specify it because the package dependencies don t automatically give you any replacement for systemd-timesyncd. dbus-x11 is a glue component. In theory it ought to be installed automatically. However, there have been problems with the dependencies that meant that (for example) asking for emacs would try to switch the init system. Specifying dbus-x11 explicitly is a workaround for that, which I nowadays adopt out of caution. Perhaps it is no longer needed. (On existing systems, it may be necessary to manually install orphan-sysvinit-scripts, which exists as a suboptimal technical workaround for the sociopolitical problems of hostile package maintainers and Debian s governance failures. The recipe above seems to install this package automatically.) usrmerge This recipe results in a system which has merged-/usr via symlinks. This configuration is a bad one. Ideally usrmerge-via-symlinks would be avoided. The un-merged system is declared not officially supported by Debian and key packages try very hard to force it on users. However, merged-/usr-via-symlinks is full of bugs (mostly affecting package management) which are far too hard to fix (a project by some folks to try to do so has given up). I suspect un-merged systems will suffer from fewer bugs in practice. But I don t know how to persuade d-i to make one. Installer images I think there is room in the market for an unofficial installer image which installs without systemd and perhaps without usrmerge. I don t have the effort for making such a thing myself. Conclusion Installing Debian without systemd is fairly straightforward. Operating Debian without systemd is a pleasure and every time one of my friends has some systemd-induced lossage I get to feel smug.

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18 July 2023

Sergio Talens-Oliag: Testing cilium with k3d and kind

This post describes how to deploy cilium (and hubble) using docker on a Linux system with k3d or kind to test it as CNI and Service Mesh. I wrote some scripts to do a local installation and evaluate cilium to use it at work (in fact we are using cilium on an EKS cluster now), but I thought it would be a good idea to share my original scripts in this blog just in case they are useful to somebody, at least for playing a little with the technology.

LinksAs there is no point on explaining here all the concepts related to `cilium` I m providing some links for the reader interested on reading about it:
What is CNI?
What is Cilium?
What is eBPF?
What is Hubble?
Why use Cilium with Kubernetes?
All the scripts and configuration files discussed in this post are available on my cilium-docker git repository.

InstallationFor each platform we are going to deploy two clusters on the same docker network; I ve chosen this model because it allows the containers to see the addresses managed by metallb from both clusters (the idea is to use those addresses for load balancers and treat them as if they were public). The installation(s) use cilium as CNI, metallb for BGP (I tested the cilium options, but I wasn t able to configure them right) and nginx as the ingress controller (again, I tried to use cilium but something didn t work either). To be able to use the previous components some default options have been disabled on k3d and kind and, in the case of k3d, a lot of k3s options (traefik, servicelb, kubeproxy, network-policy, ) have also been disabled to avoid conflicts. To use the scripts we need to install cilium, docker, helm, hubble, k3d, kind, kubectl and tmpl in our system. After cloning the repository, the sbin/tools.sh script can be used to do that on a linux-amd64 system:

$ git clone https://gitea.mixinet.net/blogops/cilium-docker.git
$ cd cilium-docker
$ ./sbin/tools.sh apps

Once we have the tools, to install everything on k3d (for kind replace k3d by kind) we can use the sbin/cilium-install.sh script as follows:

$ # Deploy first k3d cluster with cilium & cluster-mesh
$ ./sbin/cilium-install.sh k3d 1 full
[...]
$ # Deploy second k3d cluster with cilium & cluster-mesh
$ ./sbin/cilium-install.sh k3d 2 full
[...]
$ # The 2nd cluster-mesh installation connects the clusters

If we run the command cilium status after the installation we should get an output similar to the one seen on the following screenshot:

The installation script uses the following templates:

tmpl/k3d-config.yaml: configuration to deploy the k3d cluster.
tmpl/kind-config.yaml: configuration to deploy the kind cluster.
tmpl/metallb-crds.yaml and tmpl/ippols.yaml: configurations for the metallb deployment.
tmpl/cilium.yaml: values to deploy the cilium using the helm chart.

Once we have finished our tests we can remove the installation using the sbin/cilium-remove.sh script.

Some notes about the configuration

As noted on the documentation, the cilium deployment needs to mount the bpffs on /sys/fs/bpf and cgroupv2 on /run/cilium/cgroupv2; that is done automatically on kind, but fails on k3d because the image does not include bash (see this issue).To fix it we mount a script on all the k3d containers that is executed each time they are started (the script is mounted as /bin/k3d-entrypoint-cilium.sh because the /bin/k3d-entrypoint.sh script executes the scripts that follow the pattern /bin/k3d-entrypoint-*.sh before launching the k3s daemon). The source code of the script is available here.
When testing the multi-cluster deployment with k3d we have found issues with open files, looks like they are related to inotify (see this page on the kind documentation); adding the following to the /etc/sysctl.conf file fixed the issue:
```
# fix inotify issues with docker & k3d
fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 524288
fs.inotify.max_user_instances = 512
```
Although the deployment theoretically supports it, we are not using cilium as the cluster ingress yet (it did not work, so it is no longer enabled) and we are also ignoring the gateway-api for now.
The documentation uses the cilium cli to do all the installations, but I noticed that following that route the current version does not work right with hubble (it messes up the TLS support, there are some notes about the problems on this cilium issue), so we are deploying with helm right now.The problem with the helm approach is that there is no official documentation on how to install the cluster mesh with it (there is a request for documentation here), so we are using the cilium cli for now and it looks that it does not break the hubble configuration.

TestsTo test cilium we have used some scripts & additional config files that are available on the test sub directory of the repository:

cilium-connectivity.sh: a script that runs the cilium connectivity test for one cluster or in multi cluster mode (for mesh testing).If we export the variable HUBBLE_PF=true the script executes the command cilium hubble port-forward before launching the tests.
http-sw.sh: Simple tests for cilium policies from the cilium demo; the script deploys the Star Wars demo application and allows us to add the L3/L4 policy or the L3/L4/L7 policy, test the connectivity and view the policies.
ingress-basic.sh: This test is for checking the ingress controller, it is prepared to work against cilium and nginx, but as explained before the use of cilium as an ingress controller is not working as expected, so the idea is to call it with nginx always as the first argument for now.
mesh-test.sh: Tool to deploy a global service on two clusters, change the service affinity to local or remote, enable or disable if the service is shared and test how the tools respond.

Running the testsThe cilium-connectivity.sh executes the standard cilium tests:

$ ./test/cilium-connectivity.sh k3d 12
   Monitor aggregation detected, will skip some flow validation
steps
  [k3d-cilium1] Creating namespace cilium-test for connectivity
check...
  [k3d-cilium2] Creating namespace cilium-test for connectivity
check...
[...]
  All 33 tests (248 actions) successful, 2 tests skipped,
0 scenarios skipped.

To test how the cilium policies work use the http-sw.sh script:

kubectx k3d-cilium2 # (just in case)
# Create test namespace and services
./test/http-sw.sh create
# Test without policies (exaust-port fails by design)
./test/http-sw.sh test
# Create and view L3/L4 CiliumNetworkPolicy
./test/http-sw.sh policy-l34
# Test policy (no access from xwing, exaust-port fails)
./test/http-sw.sh test
# Create and view L7 CiliumNetworkPolicy
./test/http-sw.sh policy-l7
# Test policy (no access from xwing, exaust-port returns 403)
./test/http-sw.sh test
# Delete http-sw test
./test/http-sw.sh delete

And to see how the service mesh works use the mesh-test.sh script:

# Create services on both clusters and test
./test/mesh-test.sh k3d create
./test/mesh-test.sh k3d test
# Disable service sharing from cluster 1 and test
./test/mesh-test.sh k3d svc-shared-false
./test/mesh-test.sh k3d test
# Restore sharing, set local affinity and test
./test/mesh-test.sh k3d svc-shared-default
./test/mesh-test.sh k3d svc-affinity-local
./test/mesh-test.sh k3d test
# Delete deployment from cluster 1 and test
./test/mesh-test.sh k3d delete-deployment
./test/mesh-test.sh k3d test
# Delete test
./test/mesh-test.sh k3d delete

Jamie McClelland: What am I missing about AI?

Last month I blogged about how the mainstream media is focusing on the wrong parts of the Artificial Intelligence/ChatGPT story. One of the comments left on the post was:

I encourage you to dig a little deeper. If LLM s were just probability
machines, no one would be raising any flags.
Hinton, Bengio, Tegmark and many others are not simpletons. It is the fact that
the architecture and specific training (deep NN, back prop / gradient descend)
produces a system with emergent properties, beyond just a probability machine,
when the system size reaches some thresholds, that has them spooked.
They do understand mathematics and stats and probabilities, i assure you. It is
just that you may have only read the layman s articles and not the scientific
ones

I confess: I haven t made much progress in this regard. I gave Vicky Boykis' Embeddings a go, and started to get a handle on the math, but honestly had a hard time following it. I m open to suggestions from anyone with a few good recommendations for scientific papers accessible to non-math professionals, particularly ones that explain the emergent properties and what that means. Meanwhile, regardless of the scientific truths or falsehoods around chat GPT, the mainstream media continues to miserably fail in helping the rest of us understand the implications of this technology. Most recently, I listend to This American Life s First Contact (part of their Greetings People of Earth show). They interviewed several Microsft AI researchers who first experimented with ChatGPT 4 prior to it s big release. The focus of the researchers was: can we demonstrate chat GPT s general intelligence ability by presenting it with logic problems it could not possibly have encountered before? And the answer: YES! The two examples were:

Stacking: the researcher asked chat GPT how to stack a number of odd objects in a stable way (a book, a dozen eggs, a nail, etc) and chat GPT gave both the correct answer and a reasonable explanation of why.
Hidden state: the researcher described two people in a room with a cat. One person put the cat in a basket and left. The other moved the cat to a box ad left. And, remarkably, chat GPT could explain that when they returned, the first person would think the cat is in the basket and the second person would know it s in the box.

I thought this was pretty cool. So I fired up chat GPT (and even ponied up for chat GPT version 4). I asked it my own stacking question and, hm, chat GPT thought a plate should be placed on top of a can of soda instead of beneath it. So, well, mostly right but I m pretty sure any reasonable human would put the can of soda on the plate not the other way around (chat GPT 3.5 wanted the can of soda to be balanced on the tip of the nail). I then asked it my own simple version of the cat problem and it got it right. Very good. But when I asked it a much more complicated and weird version of the cat problem (involving beetles in a mansion with a movie theater and changing movies and a butler with a big mustache) it got the answer flat out wrong. Did anyone at This American Life try this? Really? It seems like a basic responsibility of journalism to fact check the experts. Maybe the scientists would have had a convincing response? Or maybe scientists are just like everyone else and can get caught up in the excitement and make mistakes? I am amazed and awed by what chat GPT can do - it truly is remarkable. And, I think that a lot of human intelligence is synthesizing what we ve seen and simply regurgitating it in a different context - a task that chat GPT is way better at doing than we are. But the overriding message of most mainstream media stories is that chat GPT is somehow going beyond word synthesis and probability and magically tapping into a form of logic. If the scientific papers are demonstrating this remarkable feat, I think the media needs to do a way better job reporting it.

Lukas M rdian: A declarative approach to Linux networking with Netplan

Linux networking can be confusing due to the wide range of technology stacks and tools in use, in addition to the complexity of the surrounding network environment. The configuration of bridges, bonds, VRFs or routes can be done programmatically, declaratively, manually or with automated with tools like ifupdown, ifupdown2, ifupdown-ng, iproute2, NetworkManager, systemd-networkd and others. Each of these tools use different formats and locations to store their configuration files. Netplan, a utility for easily configuring networking on a Linux system, is designed to unify and standardise how administrators interact with these underlying technologies. Starting from a YAML description of the required network interfaces and what each should be configured to do, Netplan will generate all the necessary configuration for your chosen tool. In this article, we will provide an overview of how Ubuntu uses Netplan to manage Linux networking in a unified way. By creating a common interface across two disparate technology stacks, IT administrators benefit from a unified experience across both desktops and servers whilst retaining the unique advantages of the underlying tech. But first, let s start with a bit of history and show where we are today.

The history of Netplan in Ubuntu Starting with Ubuntu 16.10 and driven by the need to express network configuration in a common way across cloud metadata and other installer systems, we had the opportunity to switch to a network stack that integrates better with our dependency-based boot model. We chose systemd-networkd on server installations for its active upstream community and because it was already part of Systemd and therefore included in any Ubuntu base installation. It has a much better outlook for the future, using modern development techniques, good test coverage and CI integration, compared to the ifupdown tool we used previously. On desktop installations, we kept using NetworkManager due to its very good integration with the user interface. Having to manage and configure two separate network stacks, depending on the Ubuntu variant in use, can be confusing, and we wanted to provide a streamlined user experience across any flavour of Ubuntu. Therefore, we introduced Netplan.io as a control layer above systemd-networkd and NetworkManager. Netplan takes declarative YAML files from `/etc/netplan/` as an input and generates corresponding network configuration for the relevant network stack backend in `/run/systemd/network/` or `/run/NetworkManager/` depending on the system configuration. All while keeping full flexibility to control the underlying network stack in its native way if need be.

Design overview (netplan.io)

Who is using Netplan? Recent versions of Netplan are available and ready to be installed on many distributions, such as Ubuntu, Fedora, RedHat Enterprise Linux, Debian and Arch Linux.

Ubuntu As stated above, Netplan has been installed by default on Ubuntu systems since 2016 and is therefore being used by millions of users across multiple long-term support versions of Ubuntu (18.04, 20.04, 22.04) on a day-to-day basis. This covers Ubuntu server scenarios primarily, such as bridges, bonding, VLANs, VXLANs, VRFs, IP tunnels or WireGuard tunnels, using systemd-networkd as the backend renderer. On Ubuntu desktop systems, Netplan can be used manually through its declarative YAML configuration files, and it will handle those to configure the NetworkManager stack. Keep reading to get a glimpse of how this will be improved through automation and integration with the desktop stack in the future.

Cloud It might not be as obvious, but many people have been using Netplan without knowing about it when configuring a public cloud instance on AWS, Google Cloud or elsewhere through cloud-init. This is because cloud-init s Networking Config Version 2 is a passthrough configuration to Netplan, which will then set up the underlying network stack on the given cloud instance. This is why Netplan is also a key package on the Debian distribution, for example, as it s being used by default on Debian cloud images, too.

Our vision for Linux networking We know that Linux networking can be a beast, and we want to keep simple things simple. But also allow for custom setups of any complexity. With Netplan, the day-to-day networking needs are covered through easily comprehensible and nicely documented YAML files, that describe the desired state of the local network interfaces, which will be rendered into corresponding configuration files for the relevant network stack and applied at (re-)boot or at runtime, using the netplan apply CLI. For example /etc/netplan/lan.yaml:

network:
  version: 2
  renderer: networkd
  ethernets:
    enp3s0:
      dhcp4: true

Having a single source of truth for network configuration is also important for administrators, so they do not need to understand multiple network stacks, but can rely on the declarative data given in /etc/netplan/ to configure a system, independent of the underlying network configuration backend. This is also very helpful to seed the initial network configuration for new Linux installations, for example through installation systems such as Subiquity, Ubuntu s desktop installer or cloud-init across the public and private clouds. In addition to describing and applying network configuration, the netplan status CLI can be used to query relevant data from the underlying network stack(s), such as systemd-networkd, NetworkManager or iproute2, and present them in a unified way.

At the Netplan project we strive for very high test automation and coverage with plenty of unit tests, integration tests and linting steps, across multiple Linux distros, which gives high confidence in also supporting more advanced networking use cases, such as Open vSwitch or SR-IOV network virtualization, in addition to normal wired (static IP, DHCP, routing), wireless (e.g. wwan modems, WPA2/3 connections, WiFi hotspot, controlling the regulatory domain, ) and common server scenarios. Should there ever be a scenario that is not covered by Netplan natively, it allows for full flexibility to control the underlying network stack directly through systemd override configurations or NetworkManager passthrough settings in addition to having manual configuration side-by-side with interfaces controlled through Netplan.

The future of Netplan desktop integration On workstations, the most common scenario is for end users to configure NetworkManager through its user interface tools, instead of driving it through Netplan s declarative YAML files, which makes use of NetworkManager s native configuration files. To avoid Netplan just handing over control to NetworkManager on such systems, we re working on a bidirectional integration between NetworkManager and Netplan to further improve the single source of truth use case on Ubuntu desktop installations. Netplan is shipping a libnetplan library that provides an API to access Netplan s parser and validation internals, that can be used by NetworkManager to write back a network interface configuration. For instance, configuration given through NetworkManager s UI tools or D-Bus API can be exported to Netplan s native YAML format in the common location at `/etc/netplan/`. This way, administrators just need to care about Netplan when managing a fleet of Desktop installations. This solution is currently being used in more confined environments, like Ubuntu Core, when using the NetworkManager snap, and we will deliver it to generic Ubuntu desktop systems in 24.04 LTS. In addition to NetworkManager, libnetplan can also be used to integrate with other tools in the networking space, such as cloud-init for improved validation of user data or installation systems when seeding new Linux images.

Conclusion Overall, Netplan can be considered to be a good citizen within a network environment that plays hand-in-hand with other networking tools and makes it easy to control modern network stacks, such as systemd-networkd or NetworkManager in a common, streamlined and declarative way. It provides a single source of truth to network administrators about the network state, while keeping simple things simple, but allowing for arbitrarily complex custom setups.
If you want to learn more, feel free to follow our activities on Netplan.io, GitHub, Launchpad, IRC or our Netplan Developer Diaries blog on discourse.

Russ Allbery: Review: Legends & Lattes

Review: Legends & Lattes, by Travis Baldree

Series:	Legends & Lattes #1
Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	2022
ISBN:	1-250-88609-0
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	293

Legends & Lattes is a sword and sorcery fantasy novel of the RPG-inspired, post-Dungeons-and-Dragons subtype. It was Travis Baldree's first novel. Viv is an orc, the heavy muscle for a roving band of adventurers who take jobs for hire in a way familiar to any Dungeons and Dragons player. As this book opens, she's been an adventurer for twenty-two years, and she's done. Her band have defeated the Scalvert Queen and gained its hoard, but all that Viv wants is the stone in its head. With that in hand and some vague lore about how to use it, Viv leaves, rather abruptly, and heads for the city of Thune to chase a dream she's never told anyone else about. Viv wants to start a coffee shop. Legends & Lattes is an unapologetic comfort story. Viv doesn't entirely know what she's doing, but she has a lot of experience hiring people, negotiating, and figuring things out, and she's willing to do a lot of hard work. She's blunt and a bit rough, but she's ethical and kind, which lets her attract and retain her first two employees: a taciturn expert carpenter Viv picks out by watching people work at the docks, and a succubus she hires as a barista. From there, the story slowly turns into a found family dynamic, full of people that you like and are rooting for. There is one actual villain who shows up towards the end of the book to give it some conflict, but mostly this is the story of Viv building a small business while being a good employer and friend. The subtitle of "a novel of high fantasy and low stakes" is therefore an excellent description. (Pedantic aside: This is "high fantasy" in the literary sense of not involving an otherwise-normal world, not "high" in the RPG sense of having less realistic, more mythic characters.) You are not going to be surprised by the outcome of the story, or even most of the events along the way. It's a book full of basically good people trying to do the right thing, largely succeeding, and building a community in the process. If that feels relaxing and fun, you have precisely the right idea. Sometimes you want a book in which good things happen to good people, and that's exactly what Baldree delivers. There are also a lot of specific details about explaining coffee to everyone and setting up a portion of the menu of a modern coffee shop in a fantasy world, and those parts I found less interesting. Baldree uses the handwave of gnomish machinery to import big chunks of 2020s coffee technology wholesale, which felt oddly out of step with the vaguely medieval-ish Dungeons and Dragons world. This is also one of those books where the characters independently reinvent multiple ideas that historically came from different regions and slow processes of refinement. Here it's drinks and pastries rather than major technological advances, which I guess is a little bit better, but I find this style of world-building grating. The obligatory coffee shop cat is delightfully strange and suits the fantasy setting. I wish more of the coffee shop trappings had similar twists. That said, everything else about the book worked for me, and the characters are thankfully more central to the book than the coffee shop trappings. I liked all of them and had no trouble rooting for them. The found family bits worked for me and the character relationships developed slowly enough to be believable but fast enough to be satisfying. Viv is refreshingly blunt, so I wasn't annoyed by communication failures. And the succubus, Tandri, is a fun, complex character and a great counterpoint to Viv. If you're looking for something challenging or deep, this isn't the book, but if you're in the mood for a predictable comfort read, this hit the spot. Recommended. Followed by Bookshops & Bonedust (not yet published), but Legends & Lattes is a complete story. My edition has a novella (maybe a novelette) at the end of the short novel. "Pages to Fill": This is a prelude to the novel, telling the story of Viv's first encounter with a coffee shop and the point where she made the decision to stop adventuring. That's not the main plot of the story, though. She and her team are pursuing a shapeshifting thief, which leads to Viv having some unexpected reactions. This was fairly slight and predictable, but once you've read the novel, it's fun to see how the story began. The best part is seeing more of Gallina, the gnome who was by far my favorite of Viv's old team. (6) Rating: 8 out of 10

17 July 2023

Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in June 2023

I uploaded sgt-puzzles to unstable. This brought in the new upstream version previously in experimental. I incorporated an updated German translation from Helge Kreutzmann, and made translation updates less tricky to do.
I made some changes to the nfs-utils package:
- Completed the transition from setting command-line options in /etc/default to /etc/nfs.conf.d.
- Made its shell scripts shellcheck-clean and added shellcheck to CI. (Thanks to who sent a patch for the init scripts.)
These were included in version 1:2.6.3-1.
I accepted several MRs on Salsa:
- linux/master: [armhf] drivers/staging/media/rkvdec: enable rkvdec as module
- linux/master: Update to 6.4-rcX
- linux/bookworm: udeb: add r8188eu to nic-wireless-modules (Closes: #1035824)
- nfs-utils/master: Rely on the generator units for the rpc_pipefs mount
- linux/master: mm: Enable Multi-Gen LRU implementation (by default)
- linux/master: d/rules.real: Also remove executable bit from dtbo files
- linux/master: [mips*]: Fixes for boston kernel
- linux/sid: Ignore ABI changes for xfrm_bpf_md_dst (only for use in xfrm subsystem)
I uploaded linux versions 6.4~rc6-1~exp1 and 6.4~rc7-1~exp1 to experimental.
I updated the buster-security (4.19) branch of linux to stable version 4.19.288, but didn't upload it this month.
I fixed build regressions for linux/experimental on several architectures, and sent the changes upstream where appropriate (hppa, m68k, and preemptively sparc).
I created a bookworm-backports branch for the linux package, but that suite is not yet open to uploads.
I uploaded linux version 6.1.27-1~bpo11+1 and firmware-nonfree version 20230210-5~bpo11+1 to bullseye-backports, but they still haven't been accepted.
I fixed a build regression and many other bugs in dadhi-linux.
I realised that the linux test-patches script still wasn't building all the packages needed to make the linux-headers package (or, on some architectures, the linux-image package) installable. I fixed this for unstable, backported those changes to bookworm, and backported all the test-patches changes to bullseye.
I prepared a backport of firmware-nonfree version 20220913-1 to bullseye (not -backports). This is based on the work Tobias Frost did to update it in buster-security (Debian LTS).
I updated the Debian Kernel Handbook to use the Debian stylesheet. This is now in the live version but I haven't uploaded the package.
I started backporting various kernel security fixes to the affected stable branches. These are not yet tested or submitted upstream.
I fixed a regression in cpu_rmap in the Linux kernel.
I reported a regression in rtl8192 on Linux stable branches.
I co-organised the Debian release party in Leuven. and posted a group photo of this on Mastodon.
The amdgpu driver lists some firmware files as potentially needed that aren't packaged or even publicly available, which leads to warnings from initramfs-tools on systems using this driver. I queried these upstream, which should hopefully lead to a resolution of the bug.
I wrote the arm, mips, and riscv parts of the fix for CVE-2023-3269 a.k.a. StackRot.

Shirish Agarwal: WordPress Cookies, Debdelta, RISC, Manipur, Libraries in Kerala.

WordPress Cookies, Debdelta One of the most irritating things about WordPress is whenever I start a firefox session, WordPress aks for cookie selection. I make my choices but it s not persistent. The next session the same thing happens again. It does keep my identity but for some unknown reason doesn t respect the Cookie selection. I usually use Firefox ESR (102.13.0esr-1) on Testing. Also, for more than a week I have found debdelta not working as it should. To give a brief history, the idea of debdelta is to save bandwidth, whether it 100 kbps or 1 mbit or whatever, the moment you give debdelta-upgrade it will try to see if there is a delta of the debs that you want to upgrade. The sequence is as follows or at least that is what I do

`$sudo apt update` (updates the index files of apt and tells you how many packages are upgradable). IIRC, every 4-5 hours there is an index runs that basically catches any new debian packages. You can see the index generated dynamically each time you run the above command in `/var/lib/apt/lists`

2. `$ sudo debdelta-upgrade` Now the debdelta algorithim goes to work. Debdelta has its own mirror. I think sometime after the indexes are updated, debdelta does it own run, probably an hour or two later. The algorithim sees how big the diff between the two packages and generates a delta. If the generated delta (diff.) between the old and the new is less than 70% then the generated delta is kept or otherwise thrown. The delta is kept in debdelta mirror. You can from 1 day history how big it is. And AFAIK, it is across all the hardware and platforms that Debian supports. My issue has been simply that debdelta just doesn t work and even after debdelta-upgrade I am forced to get all the files from the server. Have shared more details here. 3. The last step is $ sudo aptitude upgrade or $ sudo aptitude install and give package names if you know some packages are broken or non-resolvable or have some bugs.
RISC I had shared about RISC chips couple of weeks back. One of the things that I had forgotten to share that Android is also supporting RISC-V few months back. How I forgot that crucial bit of info. is beyond me. There are number of RISC-V coming out in the next few months to early 2024. One of the more interesting boards that came up in 2021/2022 was HiFive Unmatched. The problem is that the board although interesting on specs is out of reach of most Indians. I am sure most people would be aware of the chicken and egg problem and that is where it is. Pricing will be key component. If they get the pricing right and are able to produce in good numbers, we might see more of these boards soon. At least with Android that issue gets somewhat resolved. There is possibility that we may see more Android set-top boxes and whatnot paired with RISC paving more money for RISC development and a sort of virtuous cycle. While I m in two minds, I decide not to share what chips are coming unless and until we know what the pricing is, otherwise they just become part of a hype cycle. But it s definitely something to watch out for. One of the more interesting articles that I read last week also tells how Linux has crossed 3% desktop space and his views on the same. I do very much agree with his last paragraph but at the same time biased as am an old time desktop user. I just don t find myself happy on small factor keyboards. I will leave the rest for some other time depending how things happen.

Manipur Before I start sharing about Manipur, I should thank Praveen A. few years back, Praveen wanted to see the 7 sisters and in fact had even proposed to partially sponsor me so that we could together visit the 7 states of North-East. For reasons I don t remember, I just wasn t able to go. Probably some work and responsibilities at home. For almost 2.5 months now, Manipur, one of the States in the 7 states has been burning. There have been talks and sharing of genocidial murder of Christians in Manipur. This is not just me or some random person talking about, even BJP (the ruling party in the Center), their functionaries both in Manipur and its neighboring state Mizoram have been sharing. Mizoram s State BJP President in fact resigned just few days back saying it s state sponsored activity. Couple of days back, European Parliament held a session about Manipur and even passed a resolution. The BJP tried to hit back saying Colonial Mindset but when asked if it s the same when India invited European Parliamentarians to visit Kashmir in 2019, the silence is deafening. The Wire has interviewed all the prominent leaders and sort of players in Manipur politics but apart from calling Kukis foreigners they have no proof. In one of the interviews one of the Meitei leaders calls Kuki s foreigners but doesn t have any Government data to support his belief. The census of India was last held in 2011. People from the civil society have time and again asked the Government to do the census but GOI has been giving one excuse after another. They in fact, wanted to do a caste census but that too they themselves took on back foot probably as they believe that both census may give results not to their liking. In fact, this Government is also known as No Data Government as almost in everything, it denies data. I am not going to go to that otherwise would not be able to complete blog post till couple of days. I will just share this bit of info. that this Govt. hasn t given Household Consumption Survey data for last four years. Going back to the topic though, neither the Prime Minister, the Home Minister, the Defence Minister nobody has been able to utter the word Manipur till date. I have no idea when they will wake up. People from all ethnicities have tried to make representations to GOI but no one has been able to meet them, neither the Kukis, nor the Nagas, nor the Meiteis even though it is a sensitive border area.

Libraries in Kerala I wanted to end on a somewhat positive note. So just a few days back, the Miinistry of Culture shared the number of Libraries per state. As can be seen from the infographic, Kerala is a giant in that. If I do find a table, would share that as well, so those who can t see can hear the data. Till later.

Russ Allbery: Review: The Unkindest Tide

Review: The Unkindest Tide, by Seanan McGuire

Series:	October Daye #13
Publisher:	DAW
Copyright:	2019
ISBN:	0-7564-1255-2
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	355

This is the 13th book in the long-running October Daye urban fantasy series. There is a strong series arc and a plot that builds on previous books, so this is a series with both significant spoilers and significant confusion if read out of order. The Unkindest Tide in particular is closely tied to the previous book, Night and Silence, and should not be read before it. For once, this story does not start with someone Toby loves being attacked or going missing, or with someone trying to attack her. It instead starts with the Luidaeg. For several books now, she's been dropping hints about the debts that Toby owes to her and the favors she will someday call in. That time is now; she's going to address a problem that she has been putting off for years, and Toby is going to help her. This was a Luidaeg book, so I knew going in that I was going to enjoy it, and indeed I did. That said, I thought it was a bit awkward. This is a moment that McGuire has been building up to for quite some time (series readers may have a few guesses at what the Luidaeg is up to) and she wanted it to land with a lot of force while adding some last-minute complications and letting Toby take her typical role as the stubborn hero. But the primary complication she adds felt unrelated at first, and while the story does tie everything together in the end, it left the story feeling disjointed. The novel needed some fight scenes and some opportunities for people to worry about Toby, so those were provided, but I'm not sure they flowed naturally out of the story. There are some truly great moments here between Toby and the Luidaeg, and between Toby and a few of the other people involved in the story (naming them would be spoilers). Some of the banter is really fun. But I thought the best emotional moment of the book was a underplayed and could have used some more focus, build-up, and time to breathe, rather than shifting the Luidaeg off-stage for a big chunk of the story. McGuire has a bit of a power level problem here and finds some deft ways to avoid it, but I think that hurt the emotional arc. We're also told a lot about the emotional impacts of the plot, but I wish it had been shown more. The one character touchpoint the reader has is mostly uninvolved, and her involvement is a bit disappointing when it does happen. The biggest flaw in this book is the biggest flaw in the series: McGuire has a formula, and while it's more varied from book to book than a lot of long-running series, it's still predictable. Toby and Tybalt say the same things, Toby gets into the same kind of trouble, she worries about the same things, the banter goes in predictable ways, and the fights go very similarly to the fights in previous series entries. A lot of the novel won't be very surprising. There are always a few moments in each book that stir strong emotions, and personally I love the world-building and am eager to read more of it, but there are also sections of these books that I read very fast without feeling like I'm missing much. I've said this about this series before, which is another angle at the same problem. I think the world-building is getting more interesting as the series goes along, but the writing is not; if anything, it's getting a bit worse. It's far from bad enough to stop me from reading, and this was one of the better series entries overall, but it does keep the series firmly in the "reliable fun" category rather than the "excellent and worthy of savoring" category. It's still reliable fun, though. If you're this far along, you'll want to keep reading. The Unkindest Tide felt a bit like the end of an arc, so I'm curious to see where the story goes next. Followed by A Killing Frost. As is typical of the last few books, there is a novella included at the end. "Hope Is Swift": The novella at the end of Night and Silence was the best part of that book and focused on exactly the character I was hoping it would focus on. At the end of this book, I really wanted another novella about Gillian and directly related to the main novel. Unfortunately, what we get instead is a story about Raj that is entirely unrelated to the rest of the book. Raj is fine as a supporting character, I suppose, but he's not one of the series characters I care very much about, and sadly this novella did nothing to change my mind. It's a story of teenagers and of the perils of fae/human interactions that I found rather predictable, a bit anxiety-inducing (constant discussion of medical procedures), and entirely forgettable apart from the bits I didn't like. The takeaway lessons felt so obvious that they could have been the moral at the end of a Saturday morning cartoon from my youth. Maybe if you're a cat person you'd get a bit more out of it? I kind of regretted reading it, sadly. (4) Rating: 7 out of 10

14 July 2023

Aurelien Jarno: Goodbye Debian GNU/kFreeBSD

Over the years, the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port has gone through various phases. After many years of development, it was released as technology preview with the release of Squeeze and eventually became an official architecture with the release of Wheezy. However it ceased being an official architecture a couple of years later with the release of Jessie, although a jessie-kfreebsd suite was available in the official archive. Some years later, it was moved to the debian-ports archive, where it slowly regressed over the years. The development totally has now been stopped for over a year, and the port has been removed from the debian-ports archive. It's time to say it goodbye! I feel a touch of nostalgia as I was deeply involved in the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port for nearly a decade, starting in 2006. There are many different reasons to like GNU/kFreeBSD ranging from political to technical considerations. Personally, I liked the technical aspect, as the FreeBSD kernel, at that time, was ahead of the Linux kernel in term of features: jails, ZFS, IPv6 stateful firewalling, and at a later point superpages. That said it was way behind for hardware support and to the best of my knowledge this remains unchanged. Meanwhile, the Linux kernel development accelerated in the latter stages of the 2.6.x series, and eventually closed the feature gap. At some point, I began to lose interest, and also to lack time, and slowly stepped away from its development.

12 July 2023

Reproducible Builds: Reproducible Builds in June 2023

Welcome to the June 2023 report from the Reproducible Builds project In our reports, we outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As always, if you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.

We are very happy to announce the upcoming Reproducible Builds Summit which set to take place from October 31st November 2nd 2023, in the vibrant city of Hamburg, Germany. Our summits are a unique gathering that brings together attendees from diverse projects, united by a shared vision of advancing the Reproducible Builds effort. During this enriching event, participants will have the opportunity to engage in discussions, establish connections and exchange ideas to drive progress in this vital field. Our aim is to create an inclusive space that fosters collaboration, innovation and problem-solving. We are thrilled to host the seventh edition of this exciting event, following the success of previous summits in various iconic locations around the world, including Venice, Marrakesh, Paris, Berlin and Athens. If you re interesting in joining us this year, please make sure to read the event page] which has more details about the event and location. (You may also be interested in attending PackagingCon 2023 held a few days before in Berlin.)

This month, Vagrant Cascadian will present at FOSSY 2023 on the topic of Breaking the Chains of Trusting Trust:

Corrupted build environments can deliver compromised cryptographically signed binaries. Several exploits in critical supply chains have been demonstrated in recent years, proving that this is not just theoretical. The most well secured build environments are still single points of failure when they fail. [ ] This talk will focus on the state of the art from several angles in related Free and Open Source Software projects, what works, current challenges and future plans for building trustworthy toolchains you do not need to trust.

Hosted by the Software Freedom Conservancy and taking place in Portland, Oregon, FOSSY aims to be a community-focused event: Whether you are a long time contributing member of a free software project, a recent graduate of a coding bootcamp or university, or just have an interest in the possibilities that free and open source software bring, FOSSY will have something for you . More information on the event is available on the FOSSY 2023 website, including the full programme schedule.

Marcel Fourn , Dominik Wermke, William Enck, Sascha Fahl and Yasemin Acar recently published an academic paper in the 44th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy titled It s like flossing your teeth: On the Importance and Challenges of Reproducible Builds for Software Supply Chain Security . The abstract reads as follows:

The 2020 Solarwinds attack was a tipping point that caused a heightened awareness about the security of the software supply chain and in particular the large amount of trust placed in build systems. Reproducible Builds (R-Bs) provide a strong foundation to build defenses for arbitrary attacks against build systems by ensuring that given the same source code, build environment, and build instructions, bitwise-identical artifacts are created.

However, in contrast to other papers that touch on some theoretical aspect of reproducible builds, the authors paper takes a different approach. Starting with the observation that much of the software industry believes R-Bs are too far out of reach for most projects and conjoining that with a goal of to help identify a path for R-Bs to become a commonplace property , the paper has a different methodology:

We conducted a series of 24 semi-structured expert interviews with participants from the Reproducible-Builds.org project, and iterated on our questions with the reproducible builds community. We identified a range of motivations that can encourage open source developers to strive for R-Bs, including indicators of quality, security benefits, and more efficient caching of artifacts. We identify experiences that help and hinder adoption, which heavily include communication with upstream projects. We conclude with recommendations on how to better integrate R-Bs with the efforts of the open source and free software community.

A PDF of the paper is now available, as is an entry on the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security website and an entry under the TeamUSEC Human-Centered Security research group.

On our mailing list this month:

Martin Monperrus asked whether there are any project[s] where reproducibility is checked in a continuous integration pipeline? which received a number of replies from various projects.
Vagrant Cascadian mentioned that Packaging Con 2023 is being held in Berlin, the weekend before the Reproducible Builds summit later this year. In particular, Vagrant noticed that the Call for Proposals (CFP) closes at the end of July.
Larry Doolittle was searching Usenet archives and discovered a thread from December 1999 titled Time independent checksum(cksum) on comp.unix.programming. Larry notes that it starts with Jayan asking about comparing binaries that might have difference in their embedded timestamps (that is, perhaps, Foreshadowing diffoscope, amiright? ) and goes on to observe that:

The antagonist is David Schwartz, who correctly says There are dozens of complex reasons why what seems to be the same sequence of operations might produce different end results, but goes on to say I totally disagree with your general viewpoint that compilers must provide for reproducability [sic]. Dwight Tovey and I (Larry Doolittle) argue for reproducible builds. I assert Any program especially a mission-critical program like a compiler that cannot reproduce a result at will is broken. Also it s commonplace to take a binary from the net, and check to see if it was trojaned by attempting to recreate it from source.

Lastly, there were a few changes to our website this month too, including Bernhard M. Wiedemann adding a simplified Rust example to our documentation about the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH environment variable [ ], Chris Lamb made it easier to parse our summit announcement at a glance [ ], Mattia Rizzolo added the summit announcement at a glance [ ] itself [ ][ ][ ] and Rahul Bajaj added a taxonomy of variations in build environments [ ].

Distribution work 27 reviews of Debian packages were added, 40 were updated and 8 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A new `randomness_in_documentation_generated_by_mkdocs` toolchain issue was added by Chris Lamb [ ], and the `deterministic` flag on the `paths_vary_due_to_usrmerge` issue as we are not currently testing `usrmerge` issues [ ] issues.
Roland Clobus posted his 18th update of the status of reproducible Debian ISO images on our mailing list. Roland reported that all major desktops build reproducibly with `bullseye`, `bookworm`, `trixie` and `sid` , but he also mentioned amongst many changes that not only are the `non-free` images being built (and are reproducible) but that the live images are generated officially by Debian itself. [ ]
Jan-Benedict Glaw noticed a problem when building NetBSD for the VAX architecture. Noting that Reproducible builds [are] probably not as reproducible as we thought , Jan-Benedict goes on to describe that when two builds from different source directories won t produce the same result and adds various notes about sub-optimal handling of the `CFLAGS` environment variable. [ ]
F-Droid added 21 new reproducible apps in June, resulting in a new record of 145 reproducible apps in total. [ ]. (This page now sports missing data for March May 2023.) F-Droid contributors also reported an issue with broken resources in APKs making some builds unreproducible. [ ]
Bernhard M. Wiedemann published another monthly report about reproducibility within openSUSE

Upstream patches

Bernhard M. Wiedemann:

`bcachefs` (sort find / filesys)

`build-compare` (reports files as identical)

`build-time` (toolchain date)

`cockpit` (merged, gzip mtime)

`gcc13` (gcc13 toolchain LTO parallelism)

`ghc-rpm-macros` (toolchain parallelism)

`golangcli-lint` (date)

`gutenprint` (date+time)

`mage` (date (golang))

`mumble` (filesys)

`pcr` (date)

`python-nss` (drop sphinx .doctrees)

`python310` (merged, bisected+backported)

`warpinator` (merged, date)

`xroachng` (date)

Chris Lamb:

#1037159 filed against `elinks`.

#1037205 filed against `multipath-tools`.

#1037216 filed against `mkdocstrings-python-handlers`.

#1038730 filed against `fribidi`.

#1038957 filed against `jtreg7`.

#1039932 filed against `python-bitstring` (forwarded upstream).

Vagrant Cascadian:

#1037235 filed against `gradle-kotlin-dsl`.

#1037240 filed against `libsdl-console`.

#1037267 filed against `kawari8`.

#1037269 filed against `freetds`.

#1037272 filed against `gbrowse`.

#1037276 filed against `bglibs`.

#1037277 filed against `advi`.

#1037278 filed against `afterstep`.

#1037280 filed against `simstring`.

#1037296 filed against `manderlbot`.

#1037298 filed against `erlang-proper`.

#1037300 filed against `comedilib`.

#1037309 filed against `libint`.

#1037427 filed against `newlib`.

#1038908 filed against `binutils-msp430`.

#1038970 & #1038971 filed against `c-munipack`.

#1039044 filed against `python-marshmallow-sqlalchemy`.

#1039457 filed against `mplayer`.

#1039493 & #1039500 filed against `menu`.

#1039506 filed against `mini-buildd`.

#1039610 filed against `pnetcdf`.

#1039617 & #1039618 filed against `liblopsub`.

#1039619 filed against `wcc`.

#1039623 filed against `shotcut`.

#1039624 filed against `icu`.

#1039741 filed against `libapache-poi-java`.

#1039808 filed against `atf`.

#1039865 filed against `valgrind`.

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project operates a comprehensive testing framework (available at tests.reproducible-builds.org) in order to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. In June, a number of changes were made by Holger Levsen, including:

Additions to a (relatively) new Documented Jenkins Maintenance (djm) script to automatically shrink a cache & save a backup of old data [ ], automatically split out previous months data from logfiles into specially-named files [ ], prevent concurrent remote logfile fetches by using a lock file [ ] and to add/remove various debugging statements [ ].

Updates to the automated system health checks to, for example, to correctly detect new kernel warnings due to a wording change [ ] and to explicitly observe which old/unused kernels should be removed [ ]. This was related to an improvement so that various kernel issues on Ubuntu-based nodes are automatically fixed. [ ]

Holger and Vagrant Cascadian updated all thirty-five hosts running Debian on the `amd64`, `armhf`, and `i386` architectures to Debian bookworm, with the exception of the Jenkins host itself which will be upgraded after the release of Debian 12.1. In addition, Mattia Rizzolo updated the email configuration for the `@reproducible-builds.org` domain to correctly accept incoming mails from `jenkins.debian.net` [ ] as well as to set up DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) signing [ ]. And working together with Holger, Mattia also updated the Jenkins configuration to start testing Debian trixie which resulted in stopped testing Debian buster. And, finally, Jan-Benedict Glaw contributed patches for improved NetBSD testing.

If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

IRC: `#reproducible-builds` on `irc.oftc.net`.

Mailing list: `rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org`

Twitter: @ReproBuilds

Matt Brown: 2023 Mid Year Review

I m six months into my journey of building a business which means its time to reflect and review the goals I set for the year.

No further investment in co2mon.nz In March I made the decision to focus on completing the market research for co2mon.nz. The results of that research led to two key conclusions:

Indoor air quality/ventilation is not a problem many people are actively thinking about or looking to spend money to improve.

Even when introduced to the problem and educated about the need, most people are looking for a one-off expense or solution (e.g. the physical monitor) and are much less interested in a monitoring software service.

Based on that, it was clear that this is not an opportunity that I should continue pursuing and I ve put co2mon.nz into maintenance mode. I ve committed to maintaining the infrastructure to support existing customers, but I won t be investing time or energy in developing it further.

Discipline in selecting product opportunities The decision to stop investing more time into co2mon.nz was straightforward given the results of the research, but it was also painful given the time I ve already sunk into it. I hindsight it s clear that my enthusiasm to solve a problem with technology I enjoyed was my driving force rather than a deep understanding of the wants and needs of potential customers. I don t entirely regret trying my luck once - but it s not time efficient and I know that following that pattern again is not a sustainable or viable path to building a successful business. I ve decided to use the following list of questions to bring more discipline to how I evaluate product opportunities in future:

Problem: Is this something that a sizeable number of people are struggling with AND are willing to spend money solving?

I find the framework from Excuse me, is there a problem? really useful in thinking about this question.

Capability: Can I deliver a solution that solves the problem in a reliable and cost-effective way?

Excitement: Am I excited and motivated to invest time in building the solution to this problem?

Trust: Do I have the expertise and experience to be trusted to solve the problem by potential customers?

Execution: Can I package, market and sell that solution in a profitable manner?

My plan is to answer these questions and then make an evaluation of the potential before I commit time to building any part of a product. As an example of how I think that will help, here s what I think the answer to those questions for ventilation monitoring would have been:

Problem: No - as the market research eventually showed.

Capability: Low - The part of the solution which customers primarily value (the hardware) is complex and outside of my core experience. The software I can easily deliver is not where the value is seen.

Excitement: Yes - this was the primary driver of starting the project.

Trust: Low - I m trusted to build software, but cannot claim any specific expertise in air quality and ventilation.

Execution: Low confidence - These skills are not ones I ve exercised a lot in my career to date.

What these answers point to is that identifying the problem alone is not enough. I don t expect every question to have a perfect answer, but I want to hold myself to only pursuing opportunities where there s only one major area of doubt. In this case, even had the market research demonstrated a problem that many customers would pay to solve, there were still some big answers missing to the trust, capability and execution questions. Overall my conclusion is that co2mon.nz was not the ideal business to start my journey with given the number of open questions in the plan. I like to think that conclusion would also have been clear to me six months ago had I taken the time to go through this process then!

Prioritising areas of growth Applying those questions to my other product ideas results in a lot of I don t know yet answers to the problem and capability questions, further reinforcing the lesson that I need to spend more understanding if there is a problem with a viable business model attached in those areas before progressing any of those ideas. Beyond that lesson, a more interesting observation comes from the last question regarding execution. My answers to the first four questions vary between ideas, but my answers to this last question are always the same - I don t have a lot of confidence in my sales and marketing skills to sell a product. That s not a surprise. My career to date has been focused on software development and leadership, I don t have a lot of experience with sales and marketing. The opportunity to grow and develop those skills is actually a large part of my motivation for choosing the path of building my own business. But seeing that this is a common factor that will need significant investment regardless of which opportunity I pursue sends me a strong signal that I should focus on growth in this area as a priority. Following that logic through to the next step of what creating that focus would look like reveals a conflict: The nature of the mission I ve set for myself draws me to products in areas that are new to me, which means there s also a need to invest in building expertise in those areas. Again not a surprise, but the time and focus required to develop that expertise competes with time spent growing my sales and marketing skills. So I have a prioritisation problem. Solving it is going to require changing the type of product I m trying to build in the short term: I need to build a product that uses my existing expertise and strengths as much as possible, so that I can put the majority of my energy into growing the core business skills where my confidence is currently lacking. Trying to deliver meaningful improvements to a big problem in an area I don t have past experience in while also learning how to sell and market a product is biting off more than I chew right away.

Changing the goal posts With those lessons in hand I m making three changes to my 2023 Goals:

Reducing the product development goal from several ideas to two. The first was co2mon.nz. The second will be drawn from my existing expertise - not one of the previously stated ideas that require me to develop expertise in a new area.

Moving the consulting and product development goals to be alternatives - I expect I can achieve at most one of them this year.

Reducing the publishing target for this site from at least once a week to once a month . I thought I d have more to say this year, but the words are coming very slowly to me.

Reducing scope and ambition is humbling, but that s reality. I hope it turns out to be a case of slow down and lay the foundations in order to then move faster. The good news is that I don t feel the need to make any changes to the vision, mission and strategy I m following - I think they re still the right destination and overall path for me even though the first six months has proven bumpy. I just need to be a bit more realistic on the short-term goals that will feed into them.

The next few months I m choosing to prioritise the product development goal. I m aiming to complete the market research/problem definition phase for a product opportunity I ve identified in the SRE/DevOps space (where my previous experience is) and make a decision on whether to start development by mid August. In making that decision I plan to gather the answers to my questions, and then diligently evaluate whether the opportunity is worth committing to or not. I will write more about this process in coming weeks. If I decide to proceed that gives me 2-3 months to get an MVP in the hands of customers and get concrete validation of whether the product has revenue and growth potential before the end of the year. Tight, but if things go well, and I don t take any further consulting work, there s a reasonable chance I can complete the revised goal successfully. In the event that I decide the product opportunity I m currently researching is not the right one to commit to, I will likely revert to focusing on my consulting goal in the remaining 2-3 months of the year rather than attempt a third product development iteration. Thanks for reading this far! As always, I d love your thoughts and feedback.

Appendix: Revised 2023 Goals Putting all that together, the ultimate outcome of this review (including updated progress scoring) looks like:

Execute a series of successful consulting engagements, building a reputation for myself and leaving happy customers willing to provide testimonials that support a pipeline of future opportunities. Score: 3/10 - I focused entirely on co2mon.nz during April, May and June to the detriment of my pipeline of consulting work. This score is unlikely to improve given the above plan unless I decide not to commit to developing the idea I m currently investigating.

Grow my product development skill set by taking two ideas (co2mon.nz, an SRE/DevOps focused product) to MVP stage with customer feedback received, and generate revenue and has growth potential from one of them. Score: 4/10 - I launched co2mon.nz and got feedback, I discovered it didn t solve a problem relevant to customers and therefore did not generate substantial revenue or growth potential. Idea number two is in still in progress.

Develop and maintain a broad professional network.

To build a professional relationship with at least 30 new people this year. Score: 6/10 - This is going well. On track for a 10/10 score.

To publish a piece of writing on this site once a month and for many of those to generate interesting conversations and feedback. Score: 6/10 - 4 out of 6 months have featured a post meeting this goal so far.

To support the growth of my local technical community by volunteering my experience and knowledge with others. Score: 5/10 - I ve given one talk and helped with SREcon23 APAC, but not as much other work in this area as I d like.

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