VLC has a really neat feature which consists of time-stretching audio to allow users to speed up or slow video playback with the [ and ] keys without affecting the pitch of the sound. I recently switched to Kodi as my video player of choice and I was looking for the equivalent feature.

Kodi equivalent To enable this feature in Kodi, you first need to enable Sync playback to display in Settings Player Videos. Then map the tempoup and tempodown commands to the same keyboard shorcuts as VLC. In my case however, I wanted to map these functions to buttons on my Streamzap remote and so I put the following in my ~/.kodi/userdata/keymaps/remote.xml:

  <FullscreenVideo>
    <remote>
      <pageminus>PlayerControl(tempodown)</pageminus>
      <pageplus>PlayerControl(tempoup)</pageplus>
    </remote>
  </FullscreenVideo>

which allows me to press the Ch + and Ch - buttons on the remote to adjust the speed while the video is playing (in full-screen mode only, not with the menu displayed).

Examples Here are three ways I use this functionality:

• I set it to 0.9x for movies in languages I'm not totally proficient in.
• I set it to 1.1x for almost everything since the difference is not especially perceptible, but it still allows me to watch 10% more movies in the same amount of time
• I set it to 1.2x for Rick & Morty because it makes Rick even more hilariously reckless and impatient.

Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to set the default tempo value. The closest setting I could find is the one which allows you to set the maximum tempo value maxtempo. If you know of a way, please leave a comment!

Review: Fugitive Telemetry, by Martha Wells

Series:	Murderbot Diaries #6
Publisher:	Tordotcom
Copyright:	April 2021
ISBN:	1-250-76538-2
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	167

Fugitive Telemetry is the fifth Murderbot novella. It is not a sequel to the (as yet) lone novel, Network Effect. Instead, it takes place between Exit Strategy and Network Effect, filling in more of the backstory of the novel. You should not read it before Exit Strategy, but I believe it and Network Effect could be read in any order. A human has been murdered on Preservation Station. That is not a thing that happens on Preservation Station, which is normally a peaceful place whose crime is limited to intoxication-related stupidity. Murderbot's first worry, and the first worry of his humans, is that this may be one of their enemies getting into position to target them. That risk at least makes the murder worth investigating, rather than leaving it solely to Station Security. The problem from Murderbot's perspective is that there is an effective and efficient way of doing such an investigation, which starts with hacking into the security systems to get necessary investigative data and may end with the silent disposal of dead bodies of enemy agents. But this is Preservation Station, not the Corporation Rim, and Murderbot agreed to not do things like casually compromise all the station security systems or murder people who are security threats.

There was a big huge deal about it, and Security was all "but what if it takes over the station's systems and kills everybody" and Pin-Lee told them "if it wanted to do that it would have done it by now," which in hindsight was probably not the best response.

Worse, Murderbot's human wants it to work collaboratively with Station Security. That is a challenge, given that Security has a lot of reasons not to trust SecUnits, and Murderbot has a lot of reasons not to trust a security organization (not to mention considers them largely incompetent). Also, the surveillance systems are totally inadequate compared to the Corporation Rim for various financial and civil rights reasons that are doubtless wonderful except in situations where someone has been murdered. But hopefully the humans won't get in the way too much. This is one of those books (well, novellas) that I finished a while back but then stalled out on reviewing. I think that's because I don't have that much to say about it. Network Effect pushed the world-building and Murderbot's personal storyline forward significantly, but Fugitive Telemetry doesn't pick up those threads. Instead, this is another novella in much the same vein as the first four. If you, like me, are eager to see where Wells takes the story after the events of the novel, this is somewhat disappointing. But if you enjoyed the novellas, this is more of what you enjoyed: snarky comments about humanity, competence porn, Murderbot getting pulled into problems somewhat against its will and then trying to sort them out, and the occasional touching moment of emotional connection that Murderbot escapes from as quickly as possible. It's quite enjoyable, helped considerably by Wells's wise choice to not make the supporting human characters idiots. Collaboration is not Murderbot's strength; it is certain the investigation will be an endless series of frustrations and annoyances given the level of suspicion Station Security starts with. But some humans (and some SecUnits) are capable of re-evaluating their conclusions when given new evidence, and watching that happen is part of the fun of this novella. What this novella is missing is the overarching plot structure of the rest of the series, since where this story sits chronologically doesn't leave much room for advancing or even deepening the plot arc. It therefore feels incidental: delightful while I was reading it, probably missable if you have to, and not something I spent time thinking about after I finished it. If you liked the Murderbot novellas up until now, you will want to read this one. If you haven't started the series yet, this is not a place to start. If you want something more like the Network Effect novel, or a story where Murderbot makes significant decisions about its future, the wait continues. Rating: 8 out of 10

The fourteenth release of littler as a CRAN package just landed, following in the now fifteen year history (!!) as a package started by Jeff in 2006, and joined by me a few weeks later. littler is the first command-line interface for R as it predates Rscript. It allows for piping as well for shebang scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more consistently and still starts faster. It also always loaded the methods package which Rscript only started to do in recent years. littler lives on Linux and Unix, has its difficulties on macOS due to yet-another-braindeadedness there (who ever thought case-insensitive filesystems as a default were a good idea?) and simply does not exist on Windows (yet the build system could be extended see RInside for an existence proof, and volunteers are welcome!). See the FAQ vignette on how to add it to your PATH. A few examples are highlighted at the Github repo, as well as in the examples vignette. This release brings two new example scripts and command wrappers (compiledDeps.r, silenceTwitterAccount.r), along with extensions, corrections, or polish for a number a of other examples as detailed in the NEWS file entry below.

Changes in littler version 0.3.13 (2021-07-24)

• Changes in examples
  • New script compiledDeps.r to show which dependencies are compiled
  • New script silenceTwitterAccount.r wrapping rtweet
  • The -c or --code option for installRSPM.r was corrected
  • The kitten.r script now passes options bunny and puppy on to the pkgKitten::kitten() call; new options to call the Arma and Eigen variants were added
  • The getRStudioDesktop.r and getRStudioServer.r scripts were updated for a change in rvest
  • Two typos in the tt.r help message were correct (Aaron Wolen in #86)
  • The message in cranIncoming.r was corrected.
• Changes in package
  • Added Continuous Integration runner via run.sh from r-ci.
  • Two vignettes got two extra vignette attributes.
  • The mkdocs-material documentation input was moved.
  • The basic unit tests were slightly refactored and updated.

My CRANberries provides a comparison to the previous release. Full details for the littler release are provided as usual at the ChangeLog page, and now also on the new package docs website. The code is available via the GitHub repo, from tarballs and now of course also from its CRAN page and via install.packages("littler"). Binary packages are available directly in Debian as well as soon via Ubuntu binaries at CRAN thanks to the tireless Michael Rutter. Comments and suggestions are welcome at the GitHub repo. 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.

I just got a new Kobo ebook reader, a Kobo Clara HD. It's pretty similar to the Glo HD I had but which has unfortunately died after 5 years, even after trying to replace the battery.

Quick hardware review This is a neat little device. It's very similar to the Glo HD, which is a bit disappointing: you'd think they would have improved on the design in the 5+ years since the Glo HD has come out.. It does have an "amber" night light which is nice, but the bezel is still not level with the display, and the device is still kind of on the thick side. A USB-C (instead of micro-USB) port would have been nice too. But otherwise, it's pretty slick, and just works. And because the hardware design didn't change, I can still hack at it like a madman, which is really why I bought this thing in the first place. Hopefully it will last longer than 5 years. Ebook readers should really last for decades, not years, but I guess that's too much to expect from our consumerist, suicidal, extinctionist society.

Configuration hacks Here are the hacks I done on the device. I had done many more hacks on the Kobo Glo HD, but I decided to take a more streamlined, minimalist and, hopefully, easier for new users than the pile of hacks I was doing before (which I expand on at the end of the article).

SD card replacement I replaced the SD card. The original card shipped with the Clara HD was 8GB which meant all my books actually fitted on the original, but just barely. The new card is 16GB. Unfortunately, I did this procedure almost at the end of this guide (right before writing the syncthing scripts, below). Next time, that should be the first thing done so the original SD card acts as a pristine copy of the upstream firmware. So even though this seems like an invasive and difficult procedure, I actually do recommend you do it first. The process is basically to:

1. crack open the Kobo case (don't worry, it sounds awful but I've done it often)
2. take the SD card out
3. copy it over to a new, larger card (say on your computer)
4. put the larger card in

This guide has all the details.

Registration bypass hack This guide (from the same author!) has this awesome trick to bypass the annoying registration step. Basically:

1. pretend you do not have wifi
2. mount the device
3. sqlite3 /media/.../KOBOeReader/.kobo/KoboReader.sqlite
4. INSERT INTO user(UserID,UserKey) VALUES('1','');
5. unmount the device

More details in the above guide, again.

Install koreader My e-reader of choise is Koreader. It's just that great. I still don't find the general user interface (ie. the "file browswer") as intuitive as the builtin one, but the book reading just feels better. And anyways it's the easier way to get a shell on the device. Follow those instructions, particularly the NickelMenu instructions (see also the NickelMenu home page). Yes, you need to install some other thing to start koreader, which doesn't start on its own. NickelMenu is the simplest and better integrated I have found. You might also want to install some dictionnaries and configure SSH:

1. mount USB
2. drop your SSH public key in .../KOBOeReader/.adds/koreader/settings/SSH/authorized_keys
3. unmount USB
4. enable SSH in koreader (Gear -> Network -> SSH -> start SSH)

Note that ed25519 keys do not work: try an RSA key. This might be because koreader ships with dropbear (or an older version), but I haven't verified this.

Install syncthing I use Syncthing to copy all my books into the device now. I was previously using Koreader's OPDS support with Calibre's web interface, but that was clunky and annoying, and I'd constantly have to copy books around. Now the entire collection is synchronized. As a bonus, I can actually synchronise (and backup!) the koreader metadata, since it's stored next to the files. So in theory, this means I could use koreader from multiple devices and have my reading progress sync'd, but I haven't tested that feature just yet. I chose Syncthing because it's simple, lightweight, supported on Linux and Android, and statically compiles by default which means it's easy to deploy on the Kobo. Here is how I installed and started Syncthing at first:

1. Download the latest version for ARM
2. extract the archive
3. copy the syncthing binary into .../KOBOeReader/.adds/
4. login over SSH (see above on how to enable) with -p 2222 -l root
5. create the following directory: ~/.config/syncthing/
6. create the following configuration file, named config.xml:

   <configuration version="18">
       <gui enabled="true" tls="false" debugging="false">
           <address>0.0.0.0:8384</address>
       </gui>
   </configuration>
   

7. copy a valid ca-certificates.crt file (say from your Linux desktop) into /etc/ssl/certs/ on the Kobo (otherwise syncthing cannot bootstrap discovery servers)
8. launch syncthing over SSH: /mnt/onboard/.adds/syncthing

You should now be able to connect to the syncthing GUI through your web browser. Immediately change the GUI admin user and password on the Settings: GUI tab. Then, figure out how to start it. Here are your options:

1. on boot (inittab or whatever). downside: power usage.
2. on wifi (udev hacks). downside: unreliable (see wallabako).
3. on demand (e.g. nickel menu, koreader terminal shortcuts). downside: kind of clunky in koreader, did not work in nickel menu.
4. manually, through shell. downside: requires a shell, but then again we already have one through koreader?

What I have done is to write trivial shell scripts (in .../KOBOeReader/scripts) to start syncthing. The first is syncthing-start.sh:

#!/bin/sh
/mnt/onboard/.adds/syncthing serve &

Then syncthing-stop.sh:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/pkill syncthing

This makes those scripts usable from the koreader file browser. Then the folder can be added to the folder shortcuts and a long-hold on the script will allow you to execute it. Still have to figure out why the Nickel Menu script is not working, but it could simply reuse the above to simplify debugging. This is the script I ended up with, in .../KOBOeReader/.adds/nm/syncthing:

menu_item :main    :Syncthing (toggle)    :cmd_spawn         :exec /mnt/onboard/scripts/syncthing-stop.sh
  chain_success:skip:4
    chain_success                      :cmd_spawn          :exec /mnt/onboard/scripts/syncthing-start.sh
    chain_success                      :dbg_toast          :Started Syncthing server
    chain_failure                      :dbg_toast          :Error starting Syncthing server
    chain_always:skip:-1
  chain_success                        :dbg_toast          :Stopped Syncthing server
menu_item :main    :Syncthing (start)    :cmd_output         :exec /mnt/onboard/scripts/syncthing-start.sh
menu_item :main    :Syncthing (stop)    :cmd_output         :exec /mnt/onboard/scripts/syncthing-stop.sh

It's unclear why this doesn't work: I only get "Error starting Syncthing server" for the toggle, and no output for the (start) action. In either case, syncthing doesn't actually start.

Avoided tasks This list wouldn't be complete without listing more explicitly the stuff I have done before on the Kobo Glo HD and which I have deliberately decided not to do here because my time is precious:

• plato install: beautiful project, but koreader is good enough
• wallabako setup: too much work to maintain, Wallabag articles are too distracting and available on my phone anyways
• using calibre to transfer books: not working half the time, different file layout than the source, one less Calibre dependency
• using calibre to generate e-books based on RSS feeds (yes, I did that, and yes, it was pretty bad and almost useless)
• SSH support: builtin to koreader

Now maybe I'll have time to actually read a book...

I'm creating a program that uses the web browser for its user interface, and I'm reasonably sure I'm not the first person doing this. Normally such a problem would listen to a port on localhost, and tell the browser to connect to it. Bonus points for listening to a randomly allocated free port, so that one does not need to involve some amount of luck to get the program started. However, using a local port still means that any user on the local machine can connect to it, which is generally a security issue. A possible solution would be to use AF_UNIX Unix Domain Sockets, which are supported by various web servers, but as far as I understand not currently by browsers. I checked Firefox and Chrome, and they currently seem to fail to even acknowledge the use case. I'm reasonably sure I'm not the first person doing this, and yes, it's intended as an understatement. So, dear Lazyweb, is there a way to securely use a browser as a UI for a user's program, without exposing access to the backend to other users in the system? Access token in the URL Emanuele Di Giacomo suggests to add an access token to the URL that gets passed to the browser. This would work to protect access on localhost: even if the application cannot use HTTPS, other users cannot see packets that go through the local interface, so both the access token and the session cookie that one could send afterwards would be protected. Network namespaces I thought about isolating server and browser in a private network namespace with something like unshare(1), but it seems to require root. Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues wrote to correct that:

It's possible to unshare the network namespace by first unsharing the user namespace and thus becoming root which is possible without being root since #898446 got fixed. For example you can run this as the normal user: lxc-usernsexec -- lxc-unshare -s NETWORK -- ip addr If you don't want to depend on lxc, you can write a wrapper in Perl or Python. I have a Perl implementation of that in mmdebstrap.

Firewalling Martin Schuster wrote to suggest another option:

I had the same issue. My approach was "weird", but worked: Block /outgoing/ connections to the port, unless the uid is correct. That might be counter-intuitive, but of course all connections /to/ localhost will be done /from/ localhost also. Something like: iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp -d localhost --dport 8123 -m owner --uid-owner joe -j ACCEPT iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp -d localhost --dport 8123 -j REJECT

BBI Kenya and live Supreme Court streaming on YT The last few weeks have been unrelenting as all sorts of news have been coming in, mostly about the downturn in the Economy, Islamophobia in India on the rise, Covid, and electioneering. However, in the last few days, Kenya surpassed India in live-streaming proceeds in a Court of Appeals about BBI or Building Bridges Initiative. A background filler article on the topic can be found in BBC. The live-streaming was done via YT and if wants to they can start from

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIQzpmVKvro One can also subscribe to K24TV which took the initiative of sharing the proceedings with people worldwide. If K24TV continues to share SC proceedings of Kenya, that would add to the soft power of Kenya. I will not go into the details of the case as Gautam Bhatia who has been following the goings-on in Kenya is a far better authority on the subject. In fact, just recently he shared about another Kenyan judgment from a trial which can be seen here. He has shared the proceedings and some hot takes on the Twitter thread started by him. Probably after a couple of weeks or more when he has processed what all has happened there, he may also share some nuances although many of his thoughts would probably go to his book on Comparative Constitutional Law which he hopes to publish maybe in 2021/2022 or whenever he can. Such televised proceedings are sure to alleviate the standing of Kenya internationally. There has been a proposal to do similar broadcasts by India but with surveillance built-in, so they know who is watching. The problems with the architecture and the surveillance built-in have been shared by Srinivas Kodali or DigitalDutta quite a few times, but that probably is a story for another day.

Uttar Pradesh Population Control Bill

Hindus comprise 83% of Indian couples with more than two child children

The U.P. Population Bill came and it came with lot of prejudices. One of the prejudices is the idea that Muslims create or procreate to have the most children. Even with data is presented as shared above from NFHS National Family Health Survey which is supposed to carry our surveys every few years did the last one around 4 years back. The analysis from it has been instrumental not only in preparing graphs as above but also sharing about what sort of death toll must have been in rural India. And as somebody who have had the opportunity in the past, can vouch that you need to be extremely lucky if something happens to you when you are in a rural area. Even in places like Bodh Gaya (have been there) where millions of tourists come as it is one of the places not to be missed on the Buddhism tourist circuit, the medical facilities are pretty underwhelming. I am not citing it simply because there are too many such newspaper reports from even before the pandemic, and both the State and the Central Govt. response has been dismal. Just a few months back, they were recalled. There were reports of votes being bought at INR 1000/- (around $14) and a bottle or two of liquor. There used to be a time when election monitoring whether national or state used to be a thing, and you had LTO s (Long-time Observers) and STO s (Short-Term Observers) to make sure that the election has been neutral. This has been on the decline in this regime, but that probably is for another time altogether. Although, have to point out the article which I had shared a few months ago on the private healthcare model is flawed especially for rural areas. Instead of going for cheap, telemedicine centers that run some version of a Linux distro. And can provide a variety of services, I know Kerala and Tamil Nadu from South India have experimented in past but such engagements need to be scaled up. This probably will come to know when the next time I visit those places (sadly due to the virus, not anytime soonish.:( ) . Going back to the original topic, though, I had shared Hans Rosling s famous Ted talk on population growth which shows that even countries which we would not normally associate with family planning for e.g. the middle-east and Africa have also been falling quite rapidly. Of course, when people have deeply held prejudices, then it is difficult. Even when sharing China as to how they had to let go of their old policy in 2016 as they had the thing for leftover men . I also shared the powerful movie So Long my Son. I even shared how in Haryana women were and are trafficked and have been an issue for centuries but as neither suits the RW propaganda, they simply refuse to engage. They are more repulsed by people who publish this news rather than those who are actually practicing it, as that is culture . There is also teenage pregnancy, female infanticide, sex-selective abortion, etc., etc. It is just all too horrible to contemplate. Personal anecdote I know a couple, or they used to be a couple, where the gentleman wanted to have a male child. It was only after they got an autistic child, they got their DNA tested and came to know that the gentleman had a genetic problem. He again forced and had another child, and that too turned out to be autistic. Finally, he left the wife and the children, divorced them and lived with another woman. Almost a decade of the wife s life was ruined. The wife before marriage was a gifted programmer employed at IBM. This was an arranged marriage. After this, if you are thinking of marrying, apart from doing astrology charts, also look up DNA compatibility charts. Far better than ruining yours or the women s life. Both the children whom I loved are now in heaven, god bless them If one wants to, one can read a bit more about the Uttar Pradesh Population bill here. The sad part is that the systems which need fixing, nobody wants to fix. The reason being simple. If you get good health service by public sector, who will go to the private sector. In Europe, AFAIK they have the best medical bang for the money. Even the U.S. looks at Europe and hopes it had the systems that Europe has but that again is probably for another day.

South Africa and India long-lost brothers. As had shared before, after the 2016 South African Debconf convention, I had been following South Africa. I was happy when FeesMustFall worked and in 2017 the then ANC president Zuma declared it in late 2017. I am sure that people who have been regular visitors to this blog know how my position is on student loans. They also must be knowing that even in U.S. till the 1970s it had free education all the way to be a lawyer and getting a lawyer license. It is only when people like Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr., and others from the civil rights movement came out as a major force that the capitalists started imposing fees. They wanted people who could be sold to corporate slavery, and they won. Just last week, Biden took some steps and canceled student loans and is working on steps towards broad debt forgiveness. Interestingly, NASA has an affirmative diversity program for people from diverse backgrounds, where a couple of UC (Upper Caste) women got the job. While they got the job, the RW (Right-Wing) was overjoyed as they got jobs on merit . Later, it was found that both the women were the third or fourth generation of immigrants in U.S.

NASA Federal Equal Opportunity Policy Directive NPD 3713 2H

Going back to the original question and topic, while there has been a concerning spate of violence, some calling it the worst sort of violence not witnessed since 1994. The problem, as ascertained in that article, is the same as here in India or elsewhere. Those, again, who have been on my blog know that merit 90% of the time is a function of privilege and there is a vast amount of academic literature which supports that. If, for a moment, you look at the data that is shared in the graph above which shows that 83% of Hindus and 13% of Muslims have more than 2 children, what does it show, it shows that 83+13 = 96% of the population is living in insecurity. The 5% are the ones who have actually consolidated more power during this regime rule in India. Similarly, from what I understood living in Cape Town for about a month, it is the Dutch Afrikaans as they like to call themselves and the immigrants who come from abroad who have enjoyed the fruits of tourism and money and power while the rest of the country is dying due to poverty. It is the same there, it is the same here. Corruption is also rampant in both countries, and the judiciary is virtually absent from both communities in India and SA. Interestingly, South Africa and India have been at loggerheads, but I suspect that is more due to the money and lobbying power by the Dutch. Usually, those who have money power, do get laws and even press on their side, and it is usually the ruling party in power. I cannot help but share about the Gupta brothers and their corruption as I came to know about it in 2016. And as have shared that I m related to Gupta s on my mother s side, not those specific ones but Gupta as a clan. The history of the Gupta dynasty does go back to the 3rd-4th century. Equally interesting have been Sonali Ranade s series of articles which she wrote in National Herald, the latest on exports which is actually the key to taking India out of poverty rather than anything else. While in other countries Exporters are given all sort of subsidies, here it is being worked as how to give them less. This was in Economic times hardly a week back

Export incentive schemes being reduced

I can t imagine the incredible stupidity done by the Finance Minister. And then in an attempt to prove that, they will attempt to present a rosy picture with numbers that have nothing to do with reality. Interestingly enough, India at one time was a major exporter of apples, especially from Kashmir. Now instead of exporting, we are importing them from Afghanistan as well as Belgium and now even from the UK. Those who might not want to use the Twitter link could use this article. Of course, what India got out of this trade deal is not known. One can see that the UK got the better deal from this. Instead of investing in our own capacity expansion, we are investing in increasing the capacity of others. This is at the time when due to fuel price hike (Central taxes 66%) demand is completely flat. And this is when our own CEA (Chief Economic Adviser) tells us that growth will be at the most 6-7% and that too in 2023-2024 while currently, the inflation rate is around 12%. Is it then any wonder that almost 70% are living on Govt. ration and people in the streets of Kolkata, Assam, and other places have to sell kidneys to make sure they have some money for their kids for tomorrow. Now I have nothing against the UK but trade negotiation is an art. Sadly, this has been going on for the last few years. The politicians in India fool the public by always telling of future trade deals. Sadly, as any businessman knows, once you have compromised, you always have to compromise. And the more you compromise, the more you weaken the hand for any future trade deals.

IIT pupil tries to sell kidney to repay loan, but no takers for Dalit organ.

The above was from yesterday s Times of India. Just goes to show how much people are suffering. There have been reports in vernacular papers of quite a few people from across regions and communities are doing this so they can live without pain a bit. Almost all the time, the politicians are saved as only few understand international trade, the diplomacy and the surrounding geopolitics around it. And this sadly, is as much to do with basic education as much as it is to any other factor

Suli Deals About a month back on the holy day of Ramzan or Ramadan as it is known in the west, which is beloved by Muslims, a couple of Muslim women were targeted and virtually auctioned. Soon, there was a flood and a GitHub repository was created where hundreds of Muslim women, especially those who have a voice and fearlessly talk about their understanding about issues and things, were being virtually auctioned. One week after the FIR was put up, to date none of the people mentioned in the FIR have been arrested. In fact, just yesterday, there was an open letter which was published by livelaw. I have saved a copy on WordPress just in case something does go wrong. Other than the disgust we feel, can t say much as no action being taken by GOI and police.

IT Rules 2021 and Big Media After almost a year of sleeping when most activists were screaming hoarsely about how the new IT rules are dangerous for one and all, big media finally woke up a few weeks back and listed a writ petition in Madras High Court of the same. Although to be frank, the real writ petition was filed In February 2021, classical singer, performer T.M. Krishna in Madras High Court. Again, a copy of the writ petition, I have hosted on WordPress. On 23rd June 2021, a group of 13 media outlets and a journalist have challenged the IT Rules, 2021. The Contention came from Digital News Publishers Association which is made up of the following news companies: ABP Network Private Limited, Amar Ujala Limited, DB Corp Limited, Express Network Pvt Ltd, HT Digital Streams Limited, IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd, Jagran Prakashan Limited, Lokmat Media Private Limited, NDTV Convergence Limited, TV Today Network Limited, The Malayala Manorama Co (P) Ltd, Times Internet Limited, and Ushodaya Enterprises Private Limited. All the above are heavyweights in the markets where they operate. The reason being simple, when these media organizations came into being, the idea was to have self-regulation, which by and large has worked. Now, the present Govt. wants each news item to be okayed by them before publication. This is nothing but blatant misuse of power and an attempt at censorship. In fact, the Tamil Nadu BJP president himself made a promise of the same. And of course, what is true and what is a lie, only GOI knows and will decide for the rest of the country. If somebody remembers Joseph Goebbels at this stage, it is merely a coincidence. Anyways, 3 days ago Supreme Court on 14th July the Honorable Supreme Court asked the Madras High Court to transfer all the petitions to SC. This, the Madras High Court denied as cited/shared by Meera Emmanuel, a reporter who works with barandbench. The Court says nothing doing, let this happen and then the SC can entertain the motion of doing it that level. At the same time, they would have the benefit of Madras High Court opinion as well. It gave the center two weeks to file a reply. So, either of end-week of July or latest by August first week, we might be able to read the Center s reply on the same. The SC could do a forceful intervention, but it would lead to similar outrage as has been witnessed in the past when a judge commented that if the SC has to do it all, then why do we need the High Courts, district courts etc. let all the solutions come from SC itself. This was, admittedly, frustration on the part of the judge, but due in part to the needless intervention of SC time and time again. But the concerns had been felt around all the different courts in the country.

Sedition Law A couple of days ago, the Supreme Court under the guidance of Honorable CJI NV Ramanna, entertained the PIL filed by Maj Gen S G Vombatkere (Retd.) which asked simply that the sedition law which was used in the colonial times by the British to quell dissent by Mahatma Gandhi and Bal Gangadhar Tilak during the Indian freedom struggle. A good background filler article can be found on MSN which tells about some recent cases but more importantly how historically the sedition law was used to quell dissent during India s Independence. Another article on MSN actually elaborates on the PIL filed by Maj Gen S. G. Vombatkere. Another article on MSN tells how sedition law has been challenged and changed in 10 odd countries. I find it equally sad and equally hilarious that the Indian media whose job is to share news and opinion on this topic is being instead of being shared more by MSN. Although, I would be bereft of my duty if I did not share the editorial on the same topic by the Hindu and Deccan Chronicle. Also, an interesting question to ask is, are there only 10 countries in the world that have sedition laws? AFAIK, there are roughly 200 odd countries as recognized by WTO. If 190 odd countries do not have sedition laws, it also tells a lot about them and a lot about the remaining 10. Also, it came to light that police are still filing laws under sec66A which was declared null and void a few years ago. It was replaced with section 124A if memory serves right and it has more checks and balances.

Danish Siddiqui, Pulitzer award-winning and death in Afghanistan Before I start with Danish Siddiqui, let me share an anecdote that I think I have shared on the blog years ago about how photojournalists are. Again, those who know me and those who follow me know how much I am mad both about trains and planes (civil aviation). A few months back, I had shared a blog post about some of the biggest railway systems in the world which shows that privatization of Railways doesn t necessarily lead to up-gradation of services but definitely leads to an increase in tariff/fares. Just had a conversation couple of days ago on Twitter and realized that need to also put a blog post about civil aviation in India and the problems it faces, but I digress. This was about a gentleman who wanted to take a photo of a particular train coming out of a valley at a certain tunnel at two different heights, one from below and one from above the train. This was several years ago, and while I did share that award-winning photograph then, it probably would take me quite a bit of time and effort to again look it up on my blog and share. The logistics though were far more interesting and intricate than I had first even thought of. We came around a couple of days before the train was supposed to pass that tunnel and the valley. More than half a dozen or maybe more shots were taken throughout the day by the cameras. The idea was to see how much light was being captured by the cameras and how much exposure was to be given so that the picture isn t whitened out or is too black. Weather is the strangest of foes for a photojournalist or even photographers, and the more you are in nature, the more unpredictable it is and can be. We were also at a certain height, so care had to be taken in case light rainfall happens or dew falls, both not good for digital cameras. And dew is something which will happen regardless of what you want. So while the two days our gentleman cameraman fiddled with the settings to figure out correct exposure settings, we had one other gentleman who was supposed to take the train from an earlier station and apprise us if the train was late or not. The most ideal time would be at 0600 hrs. When the train would enter the tunnel and come out and the mixture of early morning sun rays, dew, the flowers in the valley, and the train would give a beautiful effect. We could stretch it to maybe 0700 hrs. Anything after that would just be useless, as it wouldn t have the same effect. And of all this depended on nature. If the skies were to remain too dark, nothing we could do about it, if the dewdrops didn t fall it would all be over. On the day of the shoot, we were told by our compatriot that the train was late by half an hour. We sank a little on hearing that news. Although Photoshop and others can do touch-ups, most professionals like to take as authentic a snap as possible. Everything had been set up to perfection. The wide-angle lenses on both the cameras with protections were set up. The tension you could cut with a knife. While we had a light breakfast, I took a bit more and went in the woods to shit and basically not be there. This was too tensed up for me. Returned an hour to find everybody in a good mood. Apparently, the shoot went well. One of the two captured it for good enough. Now, this is and was in a benign environment where the only foe was the environment. A bad shot would have meant another week in the valley, something which I was not looking forward to. Those who have lived with photographers and photojournalists know how self-involved they can be in their craft, while how grumpy they can be if they had a bad shoot. For those, who don t know, it is challenging to be friends with such people for a long time. I wish they would scream more at nature and let out the frustrations they have after a bad shoot. But again, this is in a very safe environment. Now let s cut to Danish Siddiqui and the kind of photojournalism he followed. He followed a much more riskier sort of photojournalism than the one described above. Krittivas Mukherjee in his Twitter thread shared how reporters in most advanced countries are trained in multiple areas, from risk assessment to how to behave in case you are kidnapped, are in riots, hostage situations, etc. They are also trained in all sorts of medical training from treating gunshot wounds, CPR, and other survival methods. They are supposed to carry medical equipment along with their photography equipment. Sadly, these concepts are unknown in India. And even then they get killed. Sadly, he attributes his death to the thrill of taking an exclusive photograph. And the gentleman s bio reads that he is a diplomat. Talk about tone-deafness On another completely different level was Karen Hao who was full of empathy as she shared the humility, grace, warmth and kinship she describes in her interaction with the photojournalist. His body of work can be seen via his ted talk in 2020 where he shared a brief collage of his works. Latest, though in a turnaround, the Taliban have claimed no involvement in the death of photojournalist Danish Siddiqui. This could be in part to show the Taliban in a more favorable light as they do and would want to be showcased as progressive, even though they are forcing that all women within a certain age become concubines or marry the fighters and killing the minority Hazaras or doing vile deeds with them. Meanwhile, statements made by Hillary Clinton almost a decade, 12 years ago have come back into circulation which stated how the U.S. itself created the Taliban to thwart the Soviet Union and once that job was finished, forgot all about it. And then in 2001, it landed back in Afghanistan while the real terrorists were Saudi. To date, not all documents of 9/11 are in the public domain. One can find more information of the same here. This is gonna take probably another few years before Saudi Arabia s whole role in the September 11 attacks will be known. Last but not the least, came to know about the Pegasus spyware and how many prominent people in some nations were targeted, including in mine India. Will not talk more as it s already a big blog post and Pegasus revelations need an article on its own.

Github recently announced Copilot, a machine learning system that makes suggestions for you when you're writing code. It's apparently trained on all public code hosted on Github, which means there's a lot of free software in its training set. Github assert that the output of Copilot belongs to the user, although they admit that it may occasionally produce output that is identical to content from the training set.

Unsurprisingly, this has led to a number of questions along the lines of "If Copilot embeds code that is identical to GPLed training data, is my code now GPLed?". This is extremely understandable, but the underlying issue is actually more general than that. Even code under permissive licenses like BSD requires retention of copyright notices and disclaimers, and failing to include them is just as much a copyright violation as incorporating GPLed code into a work and not abiding by the terms of the GPL is.

But free software licenses only have power to the extent that copyright permits them to. If your code isn't a derived work of GPLed material, you have no obligation to follow the terms of the GPL. Github clearly believe that Copilot's output doesn't count as a derived work as far as US copyright law goes, and as a result the licenses on the training data don't apply to the output. Some people have interpreted this as an attack on free software - Copilot may insert code that's either identical or extremely similar to GPLed code, and claim that there are no license obligations created as a result, effectively allowing the laundering of GPLed code into proprietary software.

I'm completely unqualified to hold a strong opinion on whether Github's legal position is justifiable or not, and right now I'm also not interested in thinking about it too much. What I think is more interesting is what the impact of either position has on free software. Do we benefit more from a future where the output of Copilot (or similar projects) is considered a derived work of the training data, or one where it isn't? Having been involved in a bunch of GPL enforcement activities, it's very easy to think of this as something that weakens the GPL and, as a result, weakens free software. That was my initial reaction, but that's shifted over the past few days.

Let's look at the GNU manifesto, specifically this section:

The fact that the easiest way to copy a program is from one neighbor to another, the fact that a program has both source code and object code which are distinct, and the fact that a program is used rather than read and enjoyed, combine to create a situation in which a person who enforces a copyright is harming society as a whole both materially and spiritually; in which a person should not do so regardless of whether the law enables him to.

The GPL makes use of copyright law to ensure that GPLed work can't be taken from the commons. Anyone who produces a derived work of GPLed code is obliged to provide that work under the same terms. If software weren't copyrightable, the GPL would have no power. But this is the outcome Stallman wanted! The GPL doesn't exist because copyright is good, it exists because software being copyrightable is what enables the concept of proprietary software in the first place.

The powers that the GPL uses to enforce sharing of code are used by the authors of proprietary software to reduce that sharing. They attempt to forbid us from examining their code to determine how it works - they argue that anyone who does so is tainted, unable to contribute similar code to free software projects in case they produce a derived work of the original. Broadly speaking, the further the definition of a derived work reaches, the greater the power of proprietary software authors. If Oracle's argument that APIs are copyrightable had prevailed, it would have been disastrous for free software. If the Apple look and feel suit had established that Microsoft infringed Apple's copyright, we might be living in a future where we had no free software desktop environments.

When we argue for an interpretation of copyright law that enhances the power of the GPL, we're also enhancing the power of giant corporations with a lot of lawyers on hand. So let's look at this another way. If Github's interpretation of copyright law holds, we can train a model on proprietary code and extract concepts without having to worry about being tainted. The proprietary code itself won't enter the commons, but the ideas it embodies will. No more worries about whether you're literally copying the code that implements an algorithm you want to duplicate - simply start typing and let the model remove the risk for you.

There's a reasonable counter argument about equality here. How much GPL-influenced code is going to end up in proprietary projects when compared to the reverse? It's not an easy question to answer, but we should bear in mind that the majority of public repositories on Github aren't under an open source license. Copilot is already claiming to give us access to the concepts embodied in those repositories. Do these provide more value than is given up? I honestly don't know how to measure that. But what I do know is that free software was founded in a belief that software shouldn't be constrained by copyright, and our default stance shouldn't be to argue against the idea that copyright is weaker than we imagined.

(Edit: this post by Julia Reda makes some of the same arguments, but spends some more time focusing on a legal analysis of why having copyright cover the output of Copilot would be a problem)

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This is not only the Year of the Ox, but also the year of Debian 11, code-named bullseye. The release lies ahead, full freeze starts this week. A good opportunity to take a look at what is new in bullseye. In this post new programs and new software versions related to XMPP, also known as Jabber are presented. XMPP exists since 1999, and has a diverse and active developers community. It is a universal communication protocol, used for instant messaging, IoT, WebRTC, and social applications. You probably will encounter some oxen in this post.

• biboumi, XMPP gateway to connect to IRC servers: 8.3 9.0
  The biggest change for users is SASL support: A new field in the Configure ad-hoc command lets you set a password that will be used to authenticate to the nick service, instead of using the cumbersome NickServ method.
  Many more changes are listed in the changelog.
• Dino, modern XMPP client: 0.0.git20181129 0.2.0
  Dino in Debian 10 was practically a technology preview. In Debian 11 it is already a fully usable client, supporting OMEMO encryption, file upload, image preview, message correction and many more features in a clean and beautiful user interface.
• ejabberd, the extensible realtime platform: 18.12.1 21.01.
  Probably the most important improvement for end-users is XEP-0215 support to facilitate modern WebRTC-style audio/video calls. ejabberd also integrates more nicely with systemd (e.g., the watchdog feature if supported, now). Apart from that, a new configuration validator was introduced, which brings a more flexible (but mostly backwards-compatible) syntax. Also, error reporting in case of misconfiguration should be way more helpful, now. As a new authentication backend, JSON Web Tokens (JWT) can be used. In addition to the XMPP and SIP support, ejabberd now includes a full-blown MQTT server. A large number of smaller features has been added, performance was improved in many ways, and several bugs were fixed. See the long list of changes.
• Gajim, a GTK+-based Jabber client: 1.1.2 1.3.1
  The new Debian release brings many improvements. Gajim s network code has been completely rewritten, which leads to faster connections, better recovery from network loss, and less network related hiccups. Customizing Gajim is now easier than ever. Thanks to the new settings backend and a completely reworked Preferences window, you can adapt Gajim to your needs in just a few seconds.
  Good for newcomers: account creation is now a lot easier with Gajim s new assistant. The new Profile window gives you many options to tell people more about yourself. You can now easily crop your own profile picture before updating it.
  Group chats actions have been reorganized. It s now easier to send invitations or change your nickname for example. Gajim also received support for chat markers, which enables you to see how far your contact followed the conversation. But this is by far not everything the new release brings. There are many new and helpful features, such as pasting images from your clipboard directly into the chat or playing voice messages directly from the chat window.
  Read more about the new Gajim release in Debian 11 here.
  Furthermore, three more Gajim plugins are now in Debian: gajim-lengthnotifier, gajim-openpgp for OX (XEP-0373: OpenPGP for XMPP) and gajim-syntaxhighlight.
• NEW Kaidan Simple and user-friendly Jabber/XMPP client 0.7.0
  Kaidan is a simple, user-friendly and modern XMPP chat client. The user interface makes use of Kirigami and QtQuick, while the back-end of Kaidan is entirely written in C++ using Qt and the Qt-based XMPP library QXmpp. Kaidan runs on mobile and desktop systems including Linux, Windows, macOS, Android, Plasma Mobile and Ubuntu Touch.
• mcabber, small Jabber (XMPP) console client: 1.1.0 1.1.2
  A theme for 256 color terminals is now included, the handling of carbon message copies has been improved, and various minor issues have been fixed.
• Poezio, Console-based XMPP client: 0.12.1 0.13.1
  This new release brings many improvements, such as Message Archive (XEP-0313) support, initial support for OMEMO (XEP-0384) through a plugin, HTTP File Upload support, Consitent Color Generation (XEP-0392), and plenty of internal changes and bug fixes. Not all changes in 0.13 and 0.13.1 can be listed, see the CHANGELOG for a more extensive summary.
• Profanity, the console based XMPP client: 0.6.0 0.10.0
  We can not list all changes which have been done, but here are some highlights.
  Support of OMEMO Encryption (XEP-0384). Consistent Color Generation (XEP-0392), be aware of the changes in the command to standardize the names of commands. A clipboard feature has been added. Highlight unread messages with a different color in /wins. Keyboard switch to select the next window with unread messages with alt + a. Support for Last Message Correction (XEP-0308), Allow UTF-8 symbols as OMEMO/OTR/PGP indicator char. Add option to open avatars directly (XEP-0084). Add option to define a theme at startup and some changes to improve themes. Add possibility to easily open URLs. Add experimental OX (XEP-0373, XEP-0374) support. Add OMEMO media sharing support, ...
  There is also a Profanity light package in Debian now, the best option for systems with tight limits on resources.
• Prosody, the lightweight extensible XMPP server: 0.11.2 0.11.9
  Upgrading to the latest stable release of Prosody brings a whole load of improvements in the stability, usability and performance departments. It especially improves the performance of websockets, and PEP performance for users with many contacts. It includes interoperability improvements for a range of clients.
• prosody-modules, community modules and extensions for Prosody: 0.0~hg20190203 0.0~hg20210130
  The ever-growing collection of goodies to plug into Prosody has a number of exciting additions, including a suite of modules to handle invite-based account registration, and others for moderating messages in group chats (e.g. for removal of spam/abuse), server-to-server federation over Tor and client authentication using certificates. Many existing community modules received updates as well.
• Psi, Qt-based XMPP client: 1.3 1.5
  The new version contains important bug fixes.
• salutatoi, multi-frontends, multi-purposes communication tool: 0.7.0a4 0.8.0~hg3453
  This version is now fully running on Python 3, and has full OMEMO support (one2one, groups and files). The CLI frontend (jp) has among new commands a "jp file get" one which is comparable to wget with OMEMO support. A file sharing component is included, with HTTP Upload and Jingle support. For a list of other improvements, please consult the changelog.
  Note, that the upstream project has been renamed to "Libervia".
• NEW sms4you, Personal gateway connecting SMS to XMPP or email 0.0.7
  It runs with a GSM device over ModemManager and uses a lightweight XMPP server or a single email account to handle communication in both directions.
• NEW xmppc, XMPP Command Line Client 0.1.0
  xmppc is a new command line tool for XMPP. It supports some basic features of XMPP (request your roster, bookmarks, OMEMO Devices and fingerprints). You can send messages with both legacy PGP (XEP-0027) and the new OX (XEP-0373: OpenPGP for XMPP).

That's all for now. Enjoy Debian 11 bullseye and Happy Chatting!

How are you meant to write about an unfinished emancipation? Bodies of Light is a 2014 book by Glasgow-born Sarah Moss on the stirrings of women's suffrage in an arty clique in nineteenth-century England. Set in the intellectually smoggy cities of Manchester and London, we follow the studious and intelligent Alethia 'Ally' Moberly, who is struggling to gain the acceptance of herself, her mother and the General Medical Council. 'Alethia' may be the Greek goddess of truth, but our Ally is really searching for wisdom. Her strengths are her patience and bookish learning, and she acquires Latin as soon as she learns male doctors will use it to keep women away from the operating theatre. In fact, Ally's acquisition of language becomes a recurring leitmotif: replaying a suggestive dream involving a love interest, for instance, Ally thinks of 'dark, tumbling dreams for which she has a perfectly adequate vocabulary'. There are very few moments of sensuality in the book, and pairing it with Ally's understated wit achieves a wonderful effect. The amount we learn about a character is adapted for effect as well. There are few psychological insights about Ally's sister, for example, and she thus becomes a fey, mysterious and almost Pre-Raphaelite figure below the surface of a lake to match the artistic movement being portrayed. By contrast, we get almost the complete origin story of Ally's mother, Elizabeth, who also constitutes of those rare birds in literature: an entirely plausible Christian religious zealot. Nothing Ally does is ever enough for her, but unlike most modern portrayals of this dynamic, neither of them are aware of what is going, and it is conveyed in a way that is chillingly... benevolent. This was brought home in the annual 'birthday letters' that Elizabeth writes to her daughter:

Last year's letter said that Ally was nervous, emotional and easily swayed, and that she should not allow her behaviour to be guided by feeling but remember always to assert her reason. Mamma would help her with early hours, plain food and plenty of exercise. Ally looks at the letter, plump in its cream envelope. She hopes Mamma wrote it before scolding her yesterday.

The book makes the implicit argument that it is a far more robust argument against pervasive oppression to portray a character in, say, 'a comfortable house, a kind husband and a healthy child', yet they are nonetheless still deeply miserable, for reasons they can't quite put their finger on. And when we see Elizabeth perpetuating some generational trauma with her own children, it is telling that is pattern is not short-circuited by an improvement in their material conditions. Rather, it is arrested only by a kind of political consciousness in Ally's case, the education in a school. In fact, if there is a real hero in Bodies of Light, it is the very concept of female education. There's genuine shading to the book's ideological villains, despite finding their apotheosis in the jibes about 'plump Tories'. These remarks first stuck out to me as cheap thrills by the author; easy and inexpensive potshots that are unbecoming of the pages around them. But they soon prove themselves to be moments of much-needed humour. Indeed, when passages like this are read in their proper context, the proclamations made by sundry Victorian worthies start to serve as deadpan satire:

We have much evidence that the great majority of your male colleagues regard you as an aberration against nature, a disgusting, unsexed creature and a danger to the public.

Funny as these remarks might be, however, these moments have a subtler and more profound purpose as well. Historical biography always has the risk of allowing readers to believe that the 'issue' has already been solved hence, perhaps, the enduring appeal of science fiction. But Moss providing these snippets from newspapers 150 years ago should make a clear connection to a near-identical moral panic today. On the other hand, setting your morality tale in the past has the advantage that you can show that progress is possible. And it can also demonstrate how that progress might come about as well. This book makes the argument for collective action and generally repudiates individualisation through ever-fallible martyrs. Ally always needs 'allies' not only does she rarely work alone, but she is helped in some way by almost everyone around her. This even includes her rather problematic mother, forestalling any simplistic proportioning of blame. (It might be ironic that Bodies of Light came out in 2014, the very same year that Sophia Amoruso popularised the term 'girl boss'.) Early on, Ally's schoolteacher is coded as the primary positive influence on her, but Ally's aunt later inherits this decisive role, continuing Ally's education on cultural issues and what appears to be the Victorian version of 'self-care'. Both the aunt and the schoolteacher are, of course, surrogate mother figures. After Ally arrives in the cut-throat capital, you often get the impression you are being shown discussions where each of the characters embodies a different school of thought within first-wave feminism. This can often be a fairly tedious device in fiction, the sort of thing you would find in a Sally Rooney novel, Pilgrim's Progress or some other ponderously polemical tract. Yet when Ally appears to 'win' an argument, it is only in the sense that the narrator continues to follow her, implicitly and lightly endorsing her point. Perhaps if I knew my history better, I might be able to associate names with the book's positions, but perhaps it is better (at least for the fiction-reading experience...) that I don't, as the baggage of real-world personalities can often get in the way. I'm reminded here of Regina King's One Night in Miami... (2020), where caricatures of Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke awkwardly replay various arguments within an analogous emancipatory struggle. Yet none of the above will be the first thing a reader will notice. Each chapter begins with a description of an imaginary painting, providing a title and a date alongside a brief critical exegesis. The artworks serve a different purpose in each chapter: a puzzle to be unlocked, a fear to be confirmed, an unsolved enigma. The inclusion of (artificial) provenances is interesting as well, not simply because they add colour and detail to the chapter to come, but because their very inclusion feels reflective of how we see art today.

Orphelia (1852) by Sir John Everett Millais.

To continue the question this piece began, how should an author conclude a story about an as-yet-unfinished struggle for emancipation? How can they? Moss' approach dares you to believe the ending is saccharine or formulaic, but what else was she meant to turn in yet another tale of struggle and suffering? After all, Thomas Hardy has already written Tess of the d'Urbervilles. All the same, it still feels slightly unsatisfying to end merely with Ally's muted, uncelebrated success. Nevertheless, I suspect many readers will dislike the introduction of a husband in the final pages, taking it as a betrayal of the preceding chapters. Yet Moss denies us from seeing the resolution as a Disney-style happy ending. True, Ally's husband turns out to be a rather dashing lighthouse builder, but isn't it Ally herself who is lighting the way in their relationship, warning other women away from running aground on the rocks of mental illness? And Tom feels more of a reflection of Ally's newly acquired self-acceptance instead of that missing piece she needed all along. We learn at one point that Tom's 'importance to her is frightening' this is hardly something a Disney princess would say. In fact, it is easy to argue that a heroic ending for Ally might have been an even more egregious betrayal. The evil of saints is that you can never live up to them, for the concept of a 'saint' embodies an unreachable ideal that no human can begin to copy. By being taken as unimpeachable and uncorrectable as well, saints preclude novel political action, and are therefore undoubtedly agents of reaction. Appreciating historical figures as the (flawed) people that they really were is the first step if you wish to continue or adapt their political ideas. I had acquired Bodies of Light after enjoying Moss' Summerwater (2020), which had the dubious honour of being touted as the 'first lockdown novel', despite it being finished before Covid-19. There are countless ways one might contrast the two, so I will limit myself to the sole observation that the strengths of one are perhaps the weaknesses of the other. It's not that Bodies of Light ends with a whimper, of course, as it quietly succeeds in concert with Ally. But by contrast, the tighter arc of Summerwater (which is set during a single day, switches protagonist between chapters, features a closed-off community, etc.) can reach a higher high with its handful of narrative artifices. Summerwater is perhaps like Phil Collins' solo career: 'more satisfying, in a narrower way.'

A quick note to self to remind how I do backups of my Android device with rsync (and adb). I have followed this guide: How to use rsync over USB on Android with adb My personal notes:

• I have Lineage so I have rsync in my Android device already installed
• I run Debian stable (buster, for now) on my laptop, with adb installed
• My /sdcard/rsyncd.conf file:

address = 127.0.0.1
port = 1873
uid = 0
gid = 0
[root]
path = /
use chroot = false
read only = false'

• The command:

adb shell /data/local/tmp/rsync --daemon --no-detach --config=/sdcard/rsyncd.conf --log-file=/proc/self/fd/2 didn't work, produced this message: "@ERROR: protocol startup error" so I ended up doing: adb shell
rsync --daemon --no-detach --config=/sdcard/rsyncd.conf --log-file=/sdcard/rsync.log and opened another tab to perform the rsync commands from my laptop: rsync -av --progress --stats rsync://localhost:6010/root/storage .
rsync -av --progress --stats rsync://localhost:6010/root/data . Then I saw that rsync was copying the symlinks instead of their contents: /storage/self/primary was a broken link to /mnt/user/0/primary So I ran again the commands with -LK: rsync -av --progress --stats -LK rsync://localhost:6010/root/storage .
rsync -av --progress --stats -LK rsync://localhost:6010/root/data . and now I have a copy of all the files I'm interested. In addition to this, I run an adb backup of the system: adb backup -f ./adb_backup_apk_shared_all_system.ad -apk -shared -all -system and I think that's all that I need for the case I want to remove stuff from my phone or some disaster happens.

Tonight I m provisioning a new virtual machine at Hetzner and I wanted to share how Consfigurator is helping with that. Hetzner have a Debian buster image you can start with, as you d expect, but it comes with things like cloud-init, preconfiguration to use Hetzner s apt mirror which doesn t serve source packages(!), and perhaps other things I haven t discovered. It s a fine place to begin, but I want all the configuration for this server to be explicit in my Consfigurator consfig, so it is good to start with pristine upstream Debian. I could boot one of Hetzner s installation ISOs but that s slow and manual. Consfigurator can replace the OS in the VM s root filesystem and reboot for me, and we re ready to go. Here s the configuration:

(defhost foo.silentflame.com (:deploy ((:ssh :user "root") :sbcl))
  (os:debian-stable "buster" :amd64)
  ;; Hetzner's Debian 10 image comes with a three-partition layout and boots
  ;; with traditional BIOS.
  (disk:has-volumes
   (physical-disk
    :device-file "/dev/sda" :boots-with '(grub:grub :target "i386-pc")))
  (on-change (installer:cleanly-installed-once
              nil
              ;; This is a specification of the OS Hetzner's image has, so
              ;; Consfigurator knows how to install SBCL and debootstrap(8).
              ;; In this case it's the same Debian release as the replacement.
              '(os:debian-stable "buster" :amd64))
    ;; Clear out the old OS's EFI system partition contents, in case we can
    ;; switch to booting with EFI at some point (if we wanted we could specify
    ;; an additional x86_64-efi target above, and grub-install would get run
    ;; to repopulate /boot/efi, but I don't think Hetzner can boot from it yet).
    (file:directory-does-not-exist "/boot/efi/EFI")
    (apt:installed "linux-image-amd64")
    (installer:bootloaders-installed)
    (fstab:entries-for-volumes
     (disk:volumes
       (mounted-ext4-filesystem :mount-point "/")
       (partition
        (mounted-fat32-filesystem
         :mount-options '("umask=0077") :mount-point "/boot/efi"))))
    (file:lacks-lines "/etc/fstab" "# UNCONFIGURED FSTAB FOR BASE SYSTEM")
    (file:is-copy-of "/etc/resolv.conf" "/old-os/etc/resolv.conf")
    (mount:unmounted-below-and-removed "/old-os"))
  (apt:mirror "http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian")
  (apt:no-pdiffs)
  (apt:standard-sources.list)
  (sshd:installed)
  (as "root" (ssh:authorized-keys +spwsshkey+))
  (sshd:no-passwords)
  (timezone:configured "Etc/UTC")
  (swap:has-swap-file "2G")
  (network:clean-/etc/network/interfaces)
  (network:static "enp1s0" "xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" "xxx.xxx.1.1" "255.255.255.255"))

and to use it you evaluate this at the REPL:

CONSFIG> (deploy ((:ssh :user "root" :hop "xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx") :sbcl) foo.silentflame.com)

Here the :HOP parameter specifies the IP address of the new machine, as DNS hasn t been updated yet. Consfigurator installs SBCL and debootstrap(8), prepares a minimal system, replaces the contents of /, gets to work applying the other properties, and then reboots. This gets us a properly populated fstab:

UUID=...            /           ext4    relatime    0   1
PARTUUID=...        /boot/efi   vfat    umask=0077  0   2
/var/lib/swapfile   swap        swap    defaults    0   0

(slightly doctored for more readable alignment) There s ordering logic so that the swapfile will end up after whatever filesystem contains it; a UUID is used for ext4 filesystems, but for fat32 filesystems, to be safe, a PARTUUID is used. The application of (INSTALLER:BOOTLOADERS-INSTALLED) handles calling both update-grub(8) and grub-install(8), relying on the metadata specified about /dev/sda. Next time we execute Consfigurator against the machine, it ll ignore all the property applications attached to the application of (INSTALLER:CLEANLY-INSTALLED-ONCE) with ON-CHANGE, and just apply everything following that block. There are a few things I don t have good solutions for. When you boot Hetzner s image the primary network interface is eth0, but then for a freshly debootstrapped Debian you get enp1s0, and I haven t got a good way of knowing what it ll be (if you know it ll have the same name, you can use (NETWORK:PRESERVE-STATIC-ONCE) to create a file in /etc/network/interfaces.d based on the current default route and corresponding interface). Another tricky thing is SSH host keys. It s easy to use Consfigurator to add host keys to your laptop s ~/.ssh/known_hosts, but in this case the host key changes back and forth from whatever the Hetzner image has and the newly generated key you get afterwards. One option might be to copy the old host keys out of /old-os before it gets deleted, like how /etc/resolv.conf is copied. This work is based on Propellor s equivalent functionality. I think my approach to handling /etc/fstab and bootloader installation is an improvement on what Joey does.

For the past years, most of the development has happened behind the scene in a private repository, and the code has appeared in the public repository only a couple of months before the release, in the release branch. I have now decided to publish the current code of QSoas in the github repository (in the public branch). This way, you can follow and use all the good things that were developed since the last release, and also verify whether any bug you have is still present in the currently developed version !

Upcoming features
This is the occasion to write a bit about the some of the features that have been added since the publication of the 3.0 release. Not all of them are polished nor documented yet, but here are a few teasers. The current version in github has:

• a comprehensive handling of column/row names, which makes it much easier to work with files with named columns (like the output files QSoas produces !);
• better handling of lists of meta-data, when there is one value of the meta for each segment or each Y column;
• handling of complex numbers in apply-formula;
• defining fits using external python code;
• a command for linear least squares (which has the huge advantage of being exact and not needing any initial parameters);
• commands to pause in a script or sort datasets in the stack;
• improvements over previous commands, in particular with eval;
• ... and more...

Check out the github repository if you want to know more about the new features !

As of now, no official date is planned for the 3.1 release, but this could happen during fall.

About QSoas
QSoas is a powerful open source data analysis program that focuses on flexibility and powerful fitting capacities. It is released under the GNU General Public License. It is described in Fourmond, Anal. Chem., 2016, 88 (10), pp 5050 5052. Current version is 3.0. You can download its source code there (or clone from the GitHub repository) and compile it yourself, or buy precompiled versions for MacOS and Windows there.

As part of my GSoC project, my first task includes that user could login into their account on debci using their Debian Salsa account (collaborative development server for Debian based on the GitLab software). The task is officially completed using OmniAuth library and while implementing it, I found that the documentation of OmniAuth is quite a mix-match and more focused on using it with Rails app and this gives me a idea to write a tutorial for people looking to integrate OmniAuth with Sinatra application. So here it is. Now, depending on the provider, Omniauth requires specific strategy which are generally released individually as RubyGems. For this tutorial, I would be using omniauth-gitlab which I used for Debian Salsa in my project, omniauth-twitter and a developer strategy which could be used for project in development mode and comes with omniauth gem itself. For simplicity purposes, I have included all routes and OmniAuth configurations in a single file app.rb. Let s start.

Register your application This can be easily done just head over to provider (Twitter, Salsa) website and find the option to create a new application and fill in the form. In the callback URL field, you need to append /auth/:provider/callback to whichever URL you used in the website field. The client-id and client-secret is obtained from the console which is used in further step to set up OmniAuth.

Gems At the top of the file, we require the necessary gems of for our project

require 'sinatra'
require 'omniauth'
require 'omniauth-gitlab'
require 'omniauth-twitter'

Enable sessions In order for OmniAuth to work and to store the logged in user across requests, sessions need to be activated and if activated, you have one session hash per user session.

configure do
    set :sessions, true
end

Set up OmniAuth configurations OmniAuth::Builder Rack middleware build up your list of OmniAuth strategies for use in your application:

use OmniAuth::Builder do
    if development?
      provider :developer,
               fields: [:name],
               uid_field: :name
    end
    provider :gitlab, #client-id , #client-secret,
             scope: "read_user",
             client_options:  
               site: 'https://salsa.debian.org/api/v4/'
              
    provider :twitter, #client-id , #client-secret,
end

Here, few things to note could be the extra options used with providers, as
In developer:
fields : to specify the form fields for login in developer mode and by default it has name and email.
uid_field: to specify that which field s value could be obtained as uid and by default it is email.
In gitlab:
scope: to limit the scope of application, by default, the api scope is requested and must be allowed in GitLab s application configuration.
client_options: to specify the server being used as client based on Gitlab software.
Note: In case you want to have a different callback url other than the default /auth/:provider/callback, it can be specified using redirect_url option in case of gitlab provider and accordingly update it in your Application Configuration at provider s console.

Extra configurations To redirect to auth/failure route in case of failure even in developer mode, following could be added:

OmniAuth.config.on_failure = proc do  env 
    OmniAuth::FailureEndpoint.new(env).redirect_to_failure
end

By default, OmniAuth will log to STDOUT but you can configure this. If you don t want OmniAuth to log to STDOUT, following could be used:

OmniAuth.config.logger.level = Logger::UNKNOWN

Setting up routes

Login route Starting with GET /login route, where you can specify the options available to login:

get '/login' do
    <<~HTML
    <form method='post' action='/auth/gitlab'>
    <input type="hidden" name="authenticity_token" value='# request.env["rack.session"]["csrf"] '>
    <button type='submit'>Login with Salsa</button>
    </form>
    <form method='post' action='/auth/twitter'>
    <input type="hidden" name="authenticity_token" value='# request.env["rack.session"]["csrf"] '>
    <button type='submit'>Login with Twitter</button>
    </form>
    <form method='post' action='/auth/developer'>
    <input type="hidden" name="authenticity_token" value='# request.env["rack.session"]["csrf"] '>
    <button type='submit'>Login with Developer</button>
    </form>
  HTML
end

The auth/:provider path is created and configured automatically by OmniAuth, so you just need to send the request to that paths and auth process will start.
As per the OmniAuth version 2.0, OmniAuth now defaults to only POST as allowed request_phase methods and authenticity_token is required to validate your requests so make sure to take care of this.

Callback routes: On success from authentication, Omniauth will return the hash of information to the auth/:provider/callback in the Rack environment under the key omniauth.auth so this is what you can use in your desired way like creating a entry to your database and storing the current user in session params.

get '/auth/:provider/callback' do
    erb "
    <h1>Hello # request.env['omniauth.auth']['info']['name'] </h1>"
end
post '/auth/developer/callback' do
    erb "
    <h1>Hello # request.env['omniauth.auth']['info']['name'] </h1>"
end

Here, POST request method is used for developer strategy and GET request method for twitter and gitlab as that is how their working is defined in their respective strategies.

Failure route: If user authentication fails on the provider side, OmniAuth will catch the response and then redirect the request to the path /auth/failure, passing a corresponding error message in a parameter named message.

get '/auth/failure' do
    halt(403, erb("<h2>Authentication Failed</h2><h4>Reason: </h4><pre># params[:message] </pre>"))
end

Final result That s it, our application is all set to be tested. And this is how it will be working. Here, I have already logged into my respective accounts so page for entring credentials does not show up but if the user has not logged into his account, he would be first asked to log in. For complete code, you can check out: OmniAuth with Sinatra Tutorial So this completes the tutorial. I hope it helps others who are looking to integrate their Ruby Applications with OmniAuth. If you have any feedback, feel free to let me know. See you next time!

I built my current desktop PC in 2014. A second SSD was added in 2015. The motherboard and the power supply were replaced after a fault¹ in 2016. The memory was upgraded in 2018. A discrete AMD GPU was installed in 2019 to drive two 4K screens. An NVMe disk was added earlier this year to further increase storage performance. This is a testament to the durability of a desktop PC compared to a laptop: it s evolutive and you can keep it a long time. While fine for most usage, the CPU started to become a bottleneck during video conferences.² So, it was set for an upgrade. The table below summarizes the change. This update cost me about 800 . According to some benchmark, the new CPU should be 4 faster when all cores are used and 1.5 faster for a single-threaded workload. Compiling an arbitrary³ kernel provides a 3 speedup. Before: After: Here we go for another seven years!

MIT Technology Review has an interesting article about Google Project Zero shutting down a western intelligence operation [1]. There s an Internet trend of people eating rotten meat they call high meat (rotten meat) [2]. This is up there with people setting themselves on fire and nut shot videos. A young female who was making popular Twitter posts about motorbikes turned out to be a 50yo man using deep fake technology [3]. He has long hair IRL and just needed to replace his face. After coming out of the closet he has continued making such videos and remains popular. FYHTECH has an informative blog post about using sgdisk to backup and restore GPT partition tables [4]. This is in the Debian package gdisk along with several other tools for managing partition tables. One interesting thing to note is that you can backup a partition table and restore to a smaller device (with a bunch of warnings that you can ignore if you know what you are doing). This is the only way I ve discovered to cleanly truncate a GPT partitioned disk, which is sometimes necessary when running VMs. Insightful blog post about PCIe bifurcation and how PCIe lanes are assigned to sockets [5]. This explains why many motherboards have sockets with unused PCIe lanes, EG *8 sockets that are wired for *4. The PCIe slots all go back to the CPU which has a limited number of *16 PCIe connections that are bifurcated to make the larger number of PCIe slots on the motherboard. New Republic has an interesting article on the infamous transphobe Jordan Peterson s battle with tranquiliser dependency [6]. Wired has an interesting article about the hack of RSA infrastructure related to the SecureID keys 10 years ago [7]. Apparently some 10 year NDAs had delayed it. There are many posts about the situation with Freenode, I think that this one best captures the problems in the shortest amount of text [8]. You could spend a few hours reading about it as I have just done, but just reading this gives you the basics that you need to know to avoid Freenode. That blog post has links to articles about Andrew Lee s involvement with Mt Gox and claims to be the heir to the throne of Korea (which is not a monarchy). Nicholas Wade wrote an insightful and informative article about the origin of Covid19, which leads to the conclusion that it was made in a Chinese laboratory [9]. I first saw this in David Brin s Facebook feed. I would be hesitant to share this sort of thing if it wasn t reviewed by a reliable source, I think David Brin has the skill to analyse this sort of article and the contacts to allow him to seek verification of any scientific issues that are outside his field. I believe that this article is reliable and it s conclusion is most likely to be correct. Interesting Wired article about an art project using display computers at Apple stores to photograph people [10]. Ends with a visit from the FBI.

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/yhoxy6lf
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/ydtssdtx
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/ygwwyrww
• [4] https://tech.feedyourhead.at/content/copy-partition-table-one-disk-another
• [5] https://tinyurl.com/yzf2kw4y
• [6] https://newrepublic.com/article/156829/happened-jordan-peterson
• [7] https://tinyurl.com/yfydxb9r
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/ydl9lajf
• [9] https://tinyurl.com/ygfhdjj9
• [10] https://www.wired.com/2012/07/people-staring-at-computers/

This is part of a series of posts on ideas for an ansible-like provisioning system, implemented in Transilience. Unit testing some parts of Transilience, like the apt and systemd actions, or remote Mitogen connections, can really use a containerized system for testing. To have that, I reused my work on nspawn-runner. to build a simple and very fast system of ephemeral containers, with minimal dependencies, based on systemd-nspawn and btrfs snapshots: Setup To be able to use systemd-nspawn --ephemeral, the chroots needs to be btrfs subvolumes. If you are not running on a btrfs filesystem, you can create one to run the tests, even on a file: I created a script to setup the test environment, here is an extract: CACHEDIR.TAG is a nice trick to tell backup software not to bother backing up the contents of this directory, since it can be easily regenerated. eatmydata is optional, and it speeds up debootstrap quite a bit. Running unittest with sudo Here's a simple helper to drop root as soon as possible, and regain it only when needed. Note that it needs $SUDO_UID and $SUDO_GID, that are set by sudo, to know which user to drop into: As soon as this module is loaded, root privileges are dropped, and can be regained for as little as possible using a handy context manager: Using the chroot from test cases The infrastructure to setup and spin down ephemeral machine is relatively simple, once one has worked out the nspawn incantations: And here's a TestCase mixin that starts a containerized systems and opens a Mitogen connection to it: Running tests Once the tests are set up, everything goes on as normal, except one needs to run nose2 with sudo: Spin up time for containers is pretty fast, and the tests drop root as soon as possible, and only regain it for as little as needed. Also, dependencies for all this are minimal and available on most systems, and the setup instructions seem pretty straightforward

In the last few months I presented several talks. Topics ranged from a round table on free software, to sharing some of my work as SRE in the Cloud Services team at the Wikimedia Foundation. For some of them the videos are now published, so I would like to write a reference here, mostly as a way to collect such events for my own record. Isn t that what a blog is all about, after all? Before you continue reading, let me mention that the two talks I ll reference were given in my native Spanish. The videos are hosted on YouTube and autogenerated subtitles should be available, with doubtful quality though. Also, there was at least one additional private talk that I m not allowed to comment on here today. I was invited to participate in a Docker community event called Kroquecon, which was aimed at pushing the spanish-speaking Kubernetes community around the world. The event name is a word play with Kubernetes , conference and croqueta , typical Spanish food. The talk happened on 2021-04-29, and I was part of a round table about free software, communities and how to join and participate in such projects. I commented on my experience in both the Debian project, Netfilter and my several years in Google Summer of Code (3 as student, 2 as mentor). Video of the event:
The other event was the CNCF-supported Kubernetes Community Days Spain (KCD Spain). During Kroquecon I was encouraged to submit a talk proposal for this event, to talk about something related to our use of Kubernetes in the Wikimedia Cloud Services team at the Wikimedia Foundation. The proposal was originally rejected. Then, a couple of weeks before the event itself, I was contacted by the organizers with a greenlight to give it because the other speaker couldn t make it. My coworker David Caro joined me in the presentation. It was titled Conoce Wikimedia Toolforge, plataforma basada en Kubernetes (or Meet Wikimedia Toolforge, Kubernetes-based platform ). We explained what Wikimedia Cloud Services is, focusing on Toolforge, and in particular how we use Kubernetes to enable the platform s most interesting use cases. We covered several interesting topics, including how we handle multi-tenancy, or the problems we had with the etcd & ceph combo. The slides we used are available. Video of the event:
EOF

I had been meaning to write on the above topic for almost a couple of months now but just kept procrastinating about it. That push came to a shove when Sucheta Dalal and Debasis Basu shared their understanding, wisdom, and all in the new book called Absolute Power Inside story of the National Stock Exchange s amazing success, leading to hubris, regulatory capture and algo scam . Now while I will go into the details of the new book as currently, I have not bought it but even if I had bought it and shared some of the revelations from it, it wouldn t have done justice to either the book or what is sharing before knowing some of the background before it.

Before I jump ahead, I would suggest people to read my sort of introductory blog post on banking history so they know where I m coming from. I m going to deviate a bit from Banking as this is about trade and capital markets, although Banking would come in later on. And I will also be sharing some cultural insights along with history so people are aware of why things happened the way they did. Calicut, Calcutta, Kolkata, one-time major depot around the world Now, one cannot start any topic about trade without talking about Kolkata. While today, it seems like a bastion of communism, at one time it was one of the major trade depots around the world. Both William Dalrymple and the Chinese have many times mentioned Kolkata as being one of the major centers of trade. This was between the 13th and the late 19th century. A cursory look throws up this article which talks about Kolkata or Calicut as it was known as a major trade depot. There are of course many, many articles and even books which do tell about how Kolkata was a major trade depot. Now between the 13th and 19th century, a lot of changes happened which made Kolkata poorer and shifted trade to Mumbai/Bombay which in those times was nothing but just a port city like many others.

The Rise of the Zamindar Around the 15th century when Babur Invaded Hindustan, he realized that Hindustan is too big a country to be governed alone. And Hindustan was much broader than independent India today. So he created the title of Zamindars. Interestingly, if you look at the Mughal period, they were much more in tune with Hindustani practices than the British who came later. They used the caste divisions and hierarchy wisely making sure that the status quo was maintained as far as castes/creed were concerned. While in-fighting with various rulers continued, it was more or less about land and power other than anything else. When the Britishers came they co-opted the same arrangement with a minor adjustment. While in the before system, the zamindars didn t have powers to be landowners. The Britishers gave them land ownerships. A huge percentage of thess zamindars especially in Bengal were from my own caste Banias or Baniyas. The problem and the solution for the Britishers had been this was a large land to control and exploit and the number of British officers and nobles were very less. So they gave virtually a lot of powers to the Banias. The only thing the British insisted on were very high rents from the newly minted Zamindars. The Zamindar in turn used the powers of personal fiefdom to give loans at very high interest rates when the poor were unable to pay the interest rate, they would take the land while at the same time slavery was forced on both men and women, many a time rapes and affairs. While there have been many records shedding light on it, don t think it could be any more powerful as enacted and shared by Shabana Azmi in Ankur:the Seedling. Another prominent grouping was formed around the same time was the Bhadralok. Now as shared Bhadralok while having all the amenities of belonging to the community, turned a blind eye to the excesses being done by the Zamindars. How much they played a hand in the decimation of Bengal has been a matter of debate, but they did have a hand, that much is not contested.

The Rise of Stock Exchanges Sadly and interestingly, many people believe and continue to believe that stock exchanges is recent phenomena. The first stock exchange though was the Calcutta Stock Exchange rather than the Bombay Stock Exchange. How valuable was Calcutta to the Britishers in its early years can be gauged from the fact that at one time it was made the capital of India in 1772 . In fact, after the Grand Trunk Road (on which there had been even Train names in both countries) x number of books have been written of the trade between Calcutta and Peshawar (Now in Pakistan). And it was not just limited to trade but also cultural give-and-take between the two centers. Even today, if you look at YT (Youtube) and look up some interviews of old people, you find many interesting anecdotes of people sharing both culture and trade.

The problem of the 60 s and rise of BSE
After India became independent and the Constitutional debates happened, the new elites understood that there cannot be two power centers that could govern India. On one hand, were the politicians who had come to power on the back of the popular vote, the other was the Zamindars, who more often than not had abused their powers which resulted in widespread poverty. The Britishers are to blame, but so do the middlemen as they became willing enablers to the same system of oppression. Hence, you had the 1951 amendment to the Constitution and the 1956 Zamindari Abolition Act. In fact, you can find much more of an in-depth article both about Zamindars and their final abolition here. Now once Zamindari was gone, there was nothing to replace it with. The Zamindars ousted of their old roles turned and tried to become Industrialists. The problem was that the poor and the downtrodden had already had experiences with the Zamindars. Also, some Industrialists from North and West also came to Bengal but they had no understanding of either the language or the cultural understanding of what had happened in Bengal. And notice that I have not talked about both the famines and the floods that wrecked Bengal since time immemorial and some of the ones which got etched on soul of Bengal and has marks even today The psyche of the Bengali and the Bhadralok has gone through enormous shifts. I have met quite a few and do see the guilt they feel. If one wonders as to how socialist parties are able to hold power in Bengal, look no further than Tarikh which tells and shares with you that even today how many Bengalis still feel somewhat lost.

The Rise of BSE Now, while Kolkata Stock Exchange had been going down, for multiple reasons other than listed above. From the 1950s onwards Jawaharlal Nehru had this idea of 5-year plans, borrowed from socialist countries such as Russia, China etc. His vision and ambition for the newly minted Indian state were huge, while at the same time he understood we were poor. The loot by East India Company and the Britishers and on top of that the division of wealth with Pakistan even though the majority of Muslims chose and remained with India. Travel on Indian Railways was a risky affair. My grandfather had shared numerous tales where he used to fill money in socks and put the socks on in boots when going between either Delhi Kolkata or Pune Kolkata. Also, as the Capital became Delhi, it unofficially was for many years, the transparency from Kolkata-based firms became less. So many Kolkata firms either mismanaged and shut down while Maharashtra, my own state, saw a huge boon in Industrialization as well as farming. From the 1960s to the 1990s there were many booms and busts in the stock exchanges but most were manageable.

While the 60s began on a good note as Goa was finally freed from the Portuguese army and influence, the 1962 war with the Chinese made many a soul question where we went wrong. Jawaharlal Nehru went all over the world to ask for help but had to return home empty-handed. Bollywood showed a world of bell-bottoms and cars and whatnot, while the majority were still trying to figure out how to put two square meals on the table. India suffered one of the worst famines in those times. People had to ration food. Families made do with either one meal or just roti (flatbread) rather than rice. In Bengal, things were much more severe. There were huge milk shortages, so Bengalis were told to cut down on sweets. This enraged the Bangalis as nothing else could. Note If one wants to read how bad Indians felt at that time, all one has to read is V.S. Naipaul s An Area of darkness . This was also the time when quite a few Indians took their first step out of India. While Air India had just started, the fares were prohibitive. Those who were not well off, either worked on ships or went via passenger or cargo ships to Dubai/Qatar middle-east. Some went to Russia and some even to States. While today s migr s want to settle in the west forever and have their children and grandchildren grow up in the West, in the 1960s and 70s the idea was far different. The main purpose for a vast majority was to get jobs and whatnot, save maximum money and send it back to India as a remittance. The idea was to make enough money in 3-5-10 years, come back to India, and then lead a comfortable life. Sadly, there has hardly been any academic work done in India, at least to my knowledge to document the sacrifices done by Indians in search of jobs, life, purpose, etc. in the 1960s and 1970s. The 1970s was also when alternative cinema started its journey with people like Smita Patil, Naseeruddin Shah who portrayed people s struggles on-screen. Most of them didn t have commercial success because the movies and the stories were bleak. While the acting was superb, most Indians loved to be captured by fights, car-chases, and whatnot rather than the deary existence which they had. And the alt cinema forced them to look into the mirror, which was frowned upon both by the masses and the classes. So cinema which could have been a wake-up call for a lot of Indians failed. One of the most notable works of that decade, at least to me, was Manthan. 1961 was also marked by the launch of Economic Times and Financial Express which tells that there was some appetite for financial news and understanding. The 1970s was also a very turbulent time in the corporate sector and stock exchanges. Again, the companies which were listed were run by the very well-off and many of them had been abroad. At the same time, you had fly-by-night operators. One of the happenings which started in this decade is you had corporate wars and hostile takeovers, quite a few of them of which could well have a Web series or two of their own. This was also a decade marked by huge labor unrest, which again changed the face of Bombay/Mumbai. From the 1950s till the 1970s, Bombay was known for its mills. So large migrant communities from all over India came to Bombay to become the next Bollywood star and if that didn t happen, they would get jobs in the mills. Bombay/Mumbai has/had this unique feature that somehow you will make money to make ends meet. Of course, with the pandemic, even that has gone for a toss. Labor unrest was a defining character of that decade. Three movies, Kaala Patthar, Kalyug, and Ankush give a broad outlook of what happened in that decade. One thing which is present and omnipresent then and now is how time and time again we lost our demographic dividend. Again there was an exodus of young people who ventured out to seek fortunes elsewhere. The 1970s and 80s were also famous for the license Raj which they bought in. Just like the Soviets, there were waiting periods for everything. A telephone line meant waiting for things anywhere from 4 to 8 years. In 1987, when we applied and got a phone within 2-3 months, most of my relatives both from my mother and father s side could not believe we paid 0 to get a telephone line. We did pay the telephone guy INR 10/- which was a somewhat princely sum when he was installing it, even then they could not believe it as in Northern India, you couldn t get a phone line even if your number had come. You had to pay anywhere from INR 500/1000 or more to get a line. This was BSNL and to reiterate there were no alternatives at that time.

The 1990s and the Harshad Mehta Scam The 90s was when I was a teenager. You do all the stupid things for love, lust, whatever. That is also the time you are introduced really to the world of money. During my time, there were only three choices, Sciences, Commerce, and Arts. If History were your favorite subject then you would take Arts and if it was not, and you were not studious, then you would up commerce. This is how careers were chosen. So I enrolled in Commerce. Due to my grandfather and family on my mother s side interested in stocks both as a saving and compounding tool, I was able to see Pune Stock Exchange in action one day. The only thing I remember that day is people shouting loudly with various chits. I had no idea that deals of maybe thousands or even lakhs. The Pune Stock Exchange had been newly minted. I also participated in a couple of mock stock exchanges and came to understand that one has to be aggressive in order to win. You had to be really loud to be heard over others, you could not afford to be shy. Also, spread your risks. Sadly, nothing about the stock markets was there in the syllabus. 1991 was also when we saw the Iraq war, the balance of payments crisis in India, and didn t know that the Harshad Mehta scam was around the corner. Most of the scams in India have been caught because the person who was doing it was flashy. And this was the reason that even he was caught as Ms. Sucheta Dalal, a young beat reporter from Indian Express who had been covering Indian stock market. Many of her articles were thought-provoking. Now, a brief understanding is required to know before we actually get to the scam. Because of the 1991 balance of payments crisis, IMF rescued India on the condition that India throws its market open. In the 1980s itself, Rajeev Gandhi had wanted to partially make India open but both politicians and Industrialists advised him not to do the same, we are/were not ready. On 21st May 1991, Rajeev Gandhi was assassinated by the LTTE. A month later, due to the sympathy vote, the Narsimha Rao Govt. took power. While for most new Governments there is usually a honeymoon period lasting 6 months or so till they get settled in their roles before people start asking tough questions. It was not to be for this Govt. Immediately, The problem had been building for a few years. Although, in many ways, our economy was better than it is today. The only thing India didn t do well at that time was managing foreign exchange. As only a few Indians had both the money and the opportunity to go abroad and need for electronics was limited. One of the biggest imports of the time then and still today is Energy, Oil. While today it is Oil/Gas and electronics, at that time it was only OIl. The Oil import bill was ballooning while exports were more or less stagnant and mostly comprised of raw materials rather than finished products. Even today, it is largely this, one of the biggest Industrialists in India Ambani exports gas/oil while Adani exports coal. Anyways, the deficit was large enough to trigger a payment crisis. And Narsimha Rao had to throw open the Indian market almost overnight. Some changes became quickly apparent, while others took a long time to come.

Satellite Television and Entry of Foreign Banks Almost overnight, from 1 channel we became multi-channel. Star TV (Rupert Murdoch) bought us Bold and Beautiful, while CNN broadcasted the Iraq War. It was unbelievable for us that we were getting reports of what had happened 24-48 hours earlier. Fortunately or unfortunately, I was still very much a teenager to understand the import of what was happening. Even in my college, except for one or two-person, it wasn t a topic for debate or talk or even the economy. We were basically somehow cocooned in our own little world. But this was not the case for the rest of India and especially banks. The entry of foreign banks was a rude shock to Indian banks. The foreign banks were bringing both technology and sophistication in their offerings, and Indian Banks needed and wanted fast money to show hefty profits. Demand for credit wasn t much, at least nowhere the level it today is. At the same time, default on credit was nowhere high as today is. But that will require its own space and article. To quench the thirst for hefty profits by banks, Enter Harshad Mehta. At that point in time, banks were not permitted at all to invest in the securities/share market. They could only buy Government securities or bonds which had a coupon rate of say 8-10% which was nowhere enough to satisfy the need for hefty profits as desired by Indian banks. On top of it, that cash was blocked for a long time. Most of these Government bonds had anywhere between 10-20 year maturity date and some even longer. Now, one loophole in that was that the banks themselves could not buy these securities. They had to approach a registered broker of the share market who will do these transactions on their behalf. Here is where Mr. Mehta played his game. He shared both legal and illegal ways in which both the bank and he would prosper. While banking at one time was thought to be conservative and somewhat cautious, either because they were too afraid that Western private banks will take that pie or whatever their reasons might be, they agreed to his antics. To play the game, Harshad Mehta needed lots of cash, which the banks provided him in the guise of buying securities that were never bought, but the amounts were transferred to his account. He actively traded stocks, at the same time made a group, and also made the rumor mill work to his benefit. The share market is largely a reactionary market. It operates on patience, news, and rumor-mill. The effect of his shenanigans was that the price of a stock that was trending at say INR 200 reached the stratospheric height of INR 9000/- without any change in the fundamentals or outlook of the stock. His thirst didn t remain restricted to stocks but also ventured into the unglamorous world of Govt. securities where he started trading even in them in large quantities. In order to attract new clients, he coveted a fancy lifestyle. The fancy lifestyle was what caught the eye of Sucheta Dalal, and she started investigating the deals he was doing. Being a reporter, she had the advantage of getting many doors to open and get information that otherwise would be under lock and key. On 23rd April 1992, Sucheta Dalal broke the scam.

The Impact The impact was almost like a shock to the markets. Even today, it can be counted as one of the biggest scams in the Indian market if you adjust it for inflation. I haven t revealed much of the scam and what happened, simply because Sucheta Dalal and Debasis Basu wrote The Scam for that purpose. How do I shorten a story and experience which has been roughly written in 300 odd pages in one or two paragraphs, it is simply impossible. The impact though was severe. The Indian stock market became a bear market for two years. Sucheta Dalal was kicked out/made to resign out of Indian Express. The thing is simple, all newspapers survive on readership and advertisements with advertisements. Companies who were having a golden run, whether justified or not, on the bourses/Stock Exchange. For many companies, having a good number on the stock exchange was better than the company fundamentals. There was supposed to be a speedy fast-track court setup for Financial crimes, but it worked only for the Harshad Mehta case and still took over 5 years. It led to the creation of NSE (National Stock Exchange). It also led to the creation of SEBI, perhaps one of the most powerful regulators, giving it a wide range of powers and remit but on the ground more often that proved to be no more than a glorified postman. And the few times it used, it used on the wrong people and people had to go to courts to get justice. But then this is not about SEBI nor is this blog post about NSE. I have anyways shared about Absolute power above, so will not repeat the link here. The Anecdotal impact was widespread. Our own family broker took the extreme step. For my grandfather on the mother s side, he was like the second son. The news of his suicide devastated my grandfather quite a bit, which we realized much later when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer s. Our family stockbroker had been punting, taking lots of cash from the market at very high rates, betting on stocks wildly as the stock market was reaching for the stars when the market crashed, he was insolvent. How the family survived is a tale in itself. They had just got married just a few years ago and had a cute boy and girl soon after. While today, both are grown-up, at that time what the wife faced only she knows. There were also quite a few shareholders who also took the extreme step. The stock markets in those days were largely based on trust and even today is unless you are into day-trading. So there was always some money left on the table for the share/stockbroker which would be squared off in the next deal/transaction where again you will leave something. My grandfather once thought of going over and meeting them, and we went to the lane where their house is, seeing the line of people who had come for recovery of loans, we turned back with a heavy heart. There was another taboo that kinda got broken that day. The taboo was that the stock market is open to scams. From 1992 to 2021 has been a cycle of scams. Even now, today, the stock market is at unnatural highs. We know for sure that a lot of hot money is rolling around, a lot of American pension funds etc. Till it will work, it will work, some news something and that money will be moved out. Who will be left handing the can, the Indian investors? A Few days back, Ambani writes about Adani. Now while the facts shared are correct, is Adani the only one, the only company to have a small free float in the market. There probably are more than 1/4th or 1/3rd of well-respected companies who may have a similar configuration, the only problem is it is difficult to know who the proxies are. Now if I were to reflect and compare this either with the 1960s or even the 1990s I don t find much difference apart from the fact that the proxy is sitting in Mauritius. At the same time, today you can speculate on almost anything. Whether it is stocks, commodities, derivatives, foreign exchange, cricket matches etc. the list is endless. Since 2014, the rise in speculation rather than investment has been dramatic, almost stratospheric. Sadly, there are no studies or even attempts made to document this. How much official and unofficial speculation is there in the market nobody knows. Money markets have become both fluid and non-transparent. In theory, you have all sorts of regulators, but it is still very much like the Wild West. One thing to note that even Income tax had to change and bring it provisions to account for speculative income.So, starting from being totally illegitimate, it has become kind of legal and is part of Income Tax. And if speculation is not wrong, why not make Indian cricket officially a speculative event, that will be honest and GOI will get part of the proceeds.

Conclusion I wish there was some positive conclusion I could drive, but sadly there is not. Just today read two articles about the ongoing environmental issues in Himachal Pradesh. As I had shared even earlier, the last time I visited those places in 2011, and even at that time I was devastated to see the kind of construction going on. Jogiwara Road which they showed used to be flat single ground/first floor dwellings, most of which were restaurants and whatnot. I had seen the water issues both in Himachal and UT (Uttarakhand) back then and this is when they made huge dams. In U.S. they are removing dams and here we want more dams

I have just updated the Debian Continuous Integration platform with debci 3.1. This update brings a few database performance improvements, courtesy of adding indexes to very important columns that were missing them. And boy, querying a table with 13 million rows without the proper indexes is bad! :-) Now, the most user visible change in this update is the change from Debian SSO to Salsa Logins, which is part of Pavit Kaur's GSoC work. She has been working with me and Paul Gevers for a few weeks, and this was the first official task in the internship. For users, this means that you now can only log in via Salsa. If you have an existing session where you logged in with an SSO certificate, it will still be valid. When you log in with Salsa, your username will be changed to match the one in Salsa. This means that if your account on salsa gets renamed, it will automatically be renamed on Debian CI when you log in the next time. Unfortunately we don't have a logout feature yet, but in the meantime you can use the developer toolbar to delete any existing cookies you might have for ci.debian.net. Migrating to Salsa logins was in my TODO list for a while. I had the impression that it could do it pretty quick to do by using pre-existing libraries that provide gitlab authentication integration for Rack (Ruby's de facto standard web application interface, like uwsgi for Python). But in reality, the devil was in the details. We went through several rounds of reviews to get it right. During the entire process, Pavit demonstrated an excelent capacity for responding to feedback, and overall I'm very happy with her performance in the internship so far. While we were discussing the Salsa logins, we noted a limitation in the existing database structure, where we stored usernames directly as the test requestor field, and decided it was better to normalize that relationship with a proper foreign key to the users table, which she also worked on. This update also include the very first (and non-user visible) step of her next task, which is adding support for having private tests. Those will be useful for implementing testing for embargoed security updates, and other use cases. This was broken up into 7 or 8 seperate steps, so there is still some work to do there. I'm looking forward to the continuation of this work.

This is part of a series of posts on ideas for an ansible-like provisioning system, implemented in Transilience. I thought a lot of what I managed to do so far with Transilience would be impossible, but then here I am. How about Ansible conditionals? Those must be impossible, right? Let's give it a try. A quick recon of Ansible sources Looking into Ansible's sources, when expressions are lists of strings AND-ed together. The expressions are Jinja2 expressions that Ansible pastes into a mini-template, renders, and checks the string that comes out. A quick recon of Jinja2 Jinja2 has a convenient function (jinja2.Environment.compile_expression) that compiles a template snippet into a Python function. It can also parse a template into an AST that can be inspected in various ways. Evaluating Ansible conditionals in Python Environment.compile_expression seems to really do precisely what we need for this, straight out of the box. There is an issue with the concept of "defined": for Ansible it seems to mean "the variable is present in the template context". In Transilience instead, all variables are fields in the Role dataclass, and can be None when not set. This means that we need to remove variables that are set to None before passing the parameters to the compiled Jinjae expression: Generating Python code Transilience does not only support running Ansible roles, but also converting them to Python code. I can keep this up by traversing the Jinja2 AST generating Python expressions. The code is straightforward enough that I can throw in a bit of pattern matching to make some expressions more idiomatic for Python: Scanning for variables Lastly, I can implement scanning conditionals for variable references to add as fields to the Role dataclass: The result in action Take this simple Ansible task: Run it through ./provision --ansible-to-python test and you get: Besides one harmless set of parentheses too much, what I wasn't sure would be possible is there, right there, staring at me with a mischievous grin. Next: Building a Transilience playbook in a zipapp.