Anger Anger is a feeling that is mostly taboo in our society. People tend to think that anger and rage are the same thing and reject anger. We are taught to suppress it. But: The suppression of anger can cause a lot of trouble, giving rise to virulent progeny such as malice, passive aggression, hostility, rage, sabotage, hate, blame, guilt, controlling behavior, shame, self-blame, and self-destruction. (Quoted from: Anne Katherine, Where to draw the line ). When we talk about anger, we need to distinguish between acting out anger, and feeling anger. In general, when you hear me talking about anger, I m talking about the feeling named anger in English. Anger is a normal feeling with a super power: it gives us the energy to change a situation that we consider to be unsustainable. We can express the feeling of anger verbally by saying for example: That thing makes me really angry , I can t talk right now, I am very angry about what I just heard . Let s also note that there may be other feelings lying below anger, such as sadness, frustration, grief, fear, etc. This is a page from the wonderful Making Comics by Scott McCloud. (Yes, emotions are complex! See some more of Scott McCloud s pages about emotion in comics)

Bottling up feelings Most of the time, people don t get angry suddenly, even though it might seem like that from the outside. Instead, they ve been bottling up feelings for a while, and at some point, a small trigger is enough to make the bottle overflow. The reasons for bottling up feelings can be as diverse as people:

• Low self-esteem: not thinking one has the right and the capacity to express unpleasant feelings
• Not knowing how to express unpleasant feelings. For example not having learnt to say: I am not comfortable, I ll leave now, I ll get back to you once I know what s going on / if this is about me / if I feel like it.
• Not trusting one s own feelings, specifically common in people who have been victims of gaslighting
• Repressing emotions, specifically anger, sometimes to the point of not being able to feel one s own feelings anymore
• Not being able to express disagreement and instead applying the fawn response: trying to please the other in order to avoid further conflict. See: Fight, flight, freeze, or fawn
• Not being able to express boundaries: stop , this is enough , I don t accept this , etc.
• Not being in a situation or a space in which feelings can be expressed freely, for example a workplace or a hierarchical situation where this might be disadvantageous

These are just some examples I can come up with in 3 minutes, the list is non exhaustive. When someone s bottle overflows, their peers can be confused and not know how to react to what they perceive as a sudden outburst while what they are seeing might just be the other person s first time tentative of saying no or stop . Oftentimes, the responsibility for the situation is then put on the shoulders of the person who supposedly exploded : they have been behaving differently than usual or not within the expectations, right? Well, it s not that simple. Conflicts are relational. The other party might have ignored signs, requests, feelings, and needs of the angry person for a while. Maybe the relationship has been deteriorating since some time? Maybe there was a power imbalance, that has never been revisited, updated, questioned? Or maybe their bottle is being filled by something else in their life and getting too small to contain all the drops of suppressed emotions. People change, and relationships change. We cannot assume that because a person has accepted something for months or years, that they always will. I think that anger can be a sign of such change or need thereof.

A message has four sides and that creates misunderstandings Friedemann Schulz von Thun has created a theory, the four-sides model, that establishes four facets of a message:

• Fact: What is the message about?
• Self-disclosure: What does the speaker reveal about herself (with or without intention)?
• Relation: What is the speaker s relationship towards the receiver of the message?
• Appeal: What does the speaker want to obtain?

Let me adapt Schulz von Thun s example to a situation that happened to me once: I came to a friend s house and I smelled some unknown thing when I entered the apartment. I asked: what s that smell? I actually never bake, so I don t know anything about whatever it is people put into cakes. I wanted to say: I don t know what that smell is, tell me what it is? She replied: You never like anything I do, my furniture gets criticized, my cake s not right, and you criticize me all the time. We ended up in such a big misunderstanding that I left her house 5 minutes after I arrived. With Schulz von Thun s model we can understand what happened here: The speaker s question What s that smell in the kitchen? has four sides:

1. Factual: There is a smell.
2. Self-disclosure: I don t know what it is.
3. Relational: You know what it is.
4. Appeal: Tell me what it is!

The receiver can hear the question with 4 different ears:

1. Factual part: There is a smell.
2. Self-disclosure: I don t like the smell.
3. Relationship: You re not good at baking cake.
4. Appeal: Don t bake cake anymore.

At this point, the receiver will probably reply: Bake the cake yourself next time!

Behind the message Sometimes, we hear more strongly with one ear than with the other ears. For example, some people hear more on the relational side and they will always hear You re not good at . Other people hear more on the appeal side and will always try to guess into a message what the other person wants or expects of them.

Form and contents of a message Getting back to anger, I think that it s often not the contents i.e. the factual facet of a message that triggers our bottle to overflow, but the (perceived) intention of the speaker, i.e. the appeal facet. For example, a speaker might have an intention to silence us by using gaslighting, or tone policing. Or a speaker wants to explicitly hurt us because that s how they learnt to deal with their own feelings of hurt. The actual relation between speaker and receiver also seems to play a role in how anger can get triggered, when we hear with the relational ear. There are many nonverbal underlying layers to our communication:

• The position of both speaker and receiver to each other: are they equals or is there any kind of power imbalance between them? A power imbalance can be a (perceived) dependency: For example, one person in a friendship has a kid and the other one regularly helps them so that the parent has some time to advance their work or career: this can create a feeling of not being good enough by oneself and having to rely on others. Or there is indeed a dependency in which the speaker is a team lead and the receiver a subordinate.
• The needs of each person: a need to solve problems quickly for one person might conflict with the need to be involved in decision making of the other person. (See Taibi Kahler s drivers)
• The inner beliefs of each person: in childhood we might have constructed the inner belief: You re okay, I m not okay , or Nobody cares about what I want , or I have to be nice (friendly, hardworking, strong, etc.) all the time otherwise nobody loves me - as some examples.

So, suppose person A offers to help person B, and what person B hears instead is their overprotective mother instead of their friend. Person A might be surprised to see B overreact or disappear for a while to get back their feelings of autonomy and integrity as an adult. Or person C expresses she d like to handle problem X like this while person D might well not hear this as a proposal to handle a problem, but as a decision made without involving her. Which might propel D back to her childhood in which she could also not take decisions autonomously. Then D might react like she would react as a child, slamming a door, shout, run away, freeze, or fawn.

Communication is complex! So, whenever we hear a message, not only do we hear the message with four ears, but also, we hear it with our position, our needs, and our inner beliefs. And sometimes, our bottle is already full, and then it overflows. At that point, I find it important that both sides reflect on the situation and stay in contact. Using empathy and compassion, we can try to better understand what s going on, where we might have hurt the other person, for example, or what was being misunderstood. Did we hear only one side of the message? Do our respective strategies conflict with each other? If we cannot hear each other anymore or always hear only one side of the message, we can try to do a mediation. Obviously, if at that point one side does not actually want to solve the problem, or thinks it s not their problem, then there s not much we can do, and mediation would not help. The examples above might sound familiar to you. I chose them because I ve seen them happen around me often, and I understand them as shared patterns. While all beings on this planets are unique, we share a common humanity, for example through such patterns and common experiences.

• Nodes announce a variety of information essential to the DHT s function including their unique node identifiers (PeerIDs) and the CIDs of data that they re providing and because of this, information about which nodes are retrieving and/or reproviding which CIDs is publicly available.
• those DHT queries happen in public. Because of this, it s possible that third parties could be monitoring this traffic to determine what CIDs are being requested, when, and by whom.
• nodes unique identifiers are themselves public your PeerID is still a long-lived, unique identifier for your node. Keep in mind that it s possible to do a DHT lookup on your PeerID and, particularly if your node is regularly running from the same location (like your home), find your IP address Additionally, longer-term monitoring of the public IPFS network could yield information about what CIDs your node is requesting and/or reproviding and when.

• Synapse, the only currently viable Matrix server, is not ready. My Matrix instance hosts ONE person, me. Synapse uses many GB of RAM and 10+GB of disk space. Despite extensive tuning, nothing helped much. It s caused OOMs more than once. It can t be hosted on a Raspberry Pi or even one of the cheaper VPSs.
• Now then, how about choosing a Matrix instance? Well, you could just tell a person to use matrix.org. But then it spent a good portion of last year unable to federate with other popular nodes due to Synapse limitations. Or you could pick a random node, but will it be up when someone needs to say my car broke down? Some are run from a dorm computer, some by a team in a datacenter, some by one person with EC2, and you can t really know. Will your homeserver be stable and long-lived? Hard to say.
• Voice and video calling are not there yet in Matrix. Matrix has two incompatible video calling methods (Jitsi and built-in), neither work consistently well, both are hard to manage, and both have NAT challenges.
• Matrix is so hard to set up on a server that there is matrix-docker-ansible-deploy. This makes it much better, but it is STILL terribly hard to deploy, and very simple things like how do I delete a user or let me shrink down this 30GB database are barely there yet, if at all.
• Encryption isn t mandatory in Matrix. E2EE has been getting dramatically better in the last few releases, but it is still optional, especially for what people would call group chats (rooms). Signal is ALWAYS encrypted. Always. (Unless, I guess, you set it as your SMS provider on Android). You ve got to take the responsibility off the user to verify encryption status, and instead make it the one and only way to use the ecosystem.

• Dead-simple setup
• Store-and-forward delivery (devices need not be online simultaneously)
• Encrypted everything, including voice and video calls, and the ability to send photos and video encrypted

• Signal forces you to use the Google Play store and Google Services: This isn't true any more. You can download the apk directly on a phone without any Google services and it works great. The app will alert you to new versions. Don't get me wrong: the Signal network still depends on Google services. And, we should be avoiding corporate technology and building our own infrastructure. However, in practice, Signal is an alternative to Whatsapp and Telegram - which not only use the same corporate services but are proprietary technology that is fully owned by powerful tech giants. Signal is still a non-profit organization with a vastly different mission.
• Signal's approach to privacy isn't perfect (the most common variation on this theme is that a state actor could monitor your outgoing communications and the incoming communications of the person you are communicating with and prove that you are communicating with each other). This criticism missed what makes Signal so important. The beauty of Signal is that it addresses the "woops!" moment most privacy activists had when Snowden's data trove become public: it provides mass privacy to stop mass surveillance. Prior to 2013, most tech/privacy activists were focused on the "targeted" individual approach to privacy, working hard to make sure our tools were as absolutely perfect as possible for the tiny percentage of people who know they are under surveillance. Very little effort went into getting them adopted on a mass scale. Criticizing Signal for not providing perfect privacy misses that fact that these things often are trade offs. This trade-off also applies to the first point - dependency on Google services makes installation far easier for suporting millions of people.

• Signal is a centralized app: this criticism often includes examples of Moxie (Signal's founder) refusing and actively discouraging attempts by others to write software that interacts with Signal. Signal is free software, which is a major improvement over most corporate technology. But since it's entirely controlled by one entity, it can be shutdown in a heart beat. And, if Signal changes direction, we cannot easily take the work we have all invested in learning signal and create our own version that reflects our values. This problem is in contrast to federated systems like email - where anyone can run their own email server and apply their own policies. If one email serveer is shutdown, you can move to another. I agree with this critique, but I think it's nuanced because of the trade offs. Having full control over the entire network and all the software provides a level of reliability and consistency that would not be possible with a federated protocol. And, we already have three different, fully viable federated chat protocols (see above). I'd rather have Signal be Signal and invest our energy on a federated chat system via the existing, well-developed alternatives. This opinion is tactical - and could change at any moment. I think there will come a time when we are going to tell the world to move from Signal to the best available federated protocol. But I'm not convinced we have a robust enough federated chat infrastructure to support that move.
• Signal forces you to use your phone number as an identifier: You can't get a Signal account without a phone number. And you generally can't get a phone number without revealing some aspect of your identity. That makes staying anoymous very difficult. There are reports of a new Signal feature making it possible to avoid revealing your phone number when communicating with others, but you would still need a phone number to get an account because a SMS or phone call confirmation is required.
• Signal isn't getting ahead of the curve on abuse: There's an interesting piece informed by former Signal staff people about the management's resistance to getting ahead of the curve when it comes to abuse. How would signal respond to reports of harrassment? What would signal do if it recognized facsists movements organizing on its platform? Any mass platform that is not planning for abuse is going to be in big trouble very soon.

• Added support for systemd notifications and socket activation. Use of more features provided by systemd, including more notifications, will come in future releases. Thanks to Marco d'Itri for this first systemd integration into INN.
• nnrpd now adapts the length of the DH parameter used during a DHE key exchange so as to comply with the security level OpenSSL 1.1.0 or later expects. Thanks to Michael Baeuerle for the bug report.
• cnfsstat now also returns information about retired CNFS buffers: buffers mentioned in cycbuff.conf as a cycbuff but not declared in a metacycbuff.
• Switch default innreport behaviour to the common practice of externalizing CSS into a separate file. Its name can be configured with the html_css_url parameter in innreport.conf. If this parameter is unset, the default innreport.css file name will be used and innreport will generate this CSS file for you. Previously generated reports are kept untouched, though, and will still contain inline CSS if you had not already set the html_css_url parameter in previous INN versions. Thanks to Richard Kettlewell for the patch.
• sm can now read and store any number of articles given in wire format on its standard input when both -s and -R are used. Only native format was previously possible. Thanks to Bo Lindbergh for the patch.
• Added new -a flag to B<rnews> to disallow, if needed, the use of additional unpackers from the rnews.libexec sub-directory of pathbin (as set in inn.conf); only rnews and cunbatch will then be recognized as valid batch commands.
• Added new -b flag to rnews to save rejected articles in the bad subdirectory of pathincoming (as set in inn.conf). Otherwise, rnews just logs and discards any articles that are rejected or cannot be parsed for some reason.
• Added new -d flag to rnews to log via syslog the message-ID and the Path header value of each article rejected as a duplicate.
• Added new --enable-hardening-flags configure-time option, enabled by default, to use hardening build flags like -fPIE and -fstack-protector-strong. This option can easily be disabled if the compiler or the platform does not support them well. More hardening build flags will eventually be added in future releases.

How our for-profit company became a nonprofit, to better tackle the digital divide. Originally posted on the Endless OS Foundation blog.

An 8-year journey to a nonprofit On the 1st of April 2020, our for-profit Endless Mobile officially became a nonprofit as the Endless OS Foundation. Our launch as a nonprofit just as the global pandemic took hold was, predictably, hardly noticed, but for us the timing was incredible: as the world collectively asked What can we do to help others in need? , we framed our mission statement and launched our .org with the same very important question in mind. Endless always had a social impact mission at its heart, and the challenges related to students, families, and communities falling further into the digital divide during COVID-19 brought new urgency and purpose to our team s decision to officially step in the social welfare space.

On April 1st 2020, our for-profit Endless Mobile officially became a nonprofit as the Endless OS Foundation, focused on the #DigitalDivide.

Our updated status was a long time coming: we began our transformation to a nonprofit organization in late 2019 with the realization that the true charter and passions of our team would be greatly accelerated without the constraints of for-profit goals, investors and sales strategies standing in the way of our mission of digital access and equity for all. But for 8 years we made a go of it commercially, headquartered in Silicon Valley and framing ourselves as a tech startup with access to the venture capital and partnerships on our doorstep. We believed that a successful commercial channel would be the most efficient way to scale the impact of bringing computer devices and access to communities in need. We still believe this we ve just learned through our experience that we don t have the funding to enter the computer and OS marketplace head-on. With the social impact goal first, and the hope of any revenue a secondary goal, we have had many successes in those 8 years bridging the digital divide throughout the world, from Brazil, to Kenya, and the USA. We ve learned a huge amount which will go on to inform our strategy as a nonprofit.

Endless always had a social impact mission at its heart. COVID-19 brought new urgency and purpose to our team s decision to officially step in the social welfare space.

Our unique perspective One thing we learned as a for-profit is that the OS and technology we ve built has some unique properties which are hugely impactful as a working solution to digital equity barriers. And our experience deploying in the field around the world for 8 years has left us uniquely informed via many iterations and incremental improvements.

With this knowledge in-hand, we ve been refining our strategy throughout 2020 and now starting to focus on what it really means to become an effective nonprofit and make that impact. In many ways it is liberating to abandon the goals and constraints of being a for-profit entity, and in other ways it s been a challenging journey for me and the team to adjust our way of thinking and let these for-profit notions and models go. Previously we exclusively built and sold a product that defined our success; and any impact we achieved was a secondary consequence of that success and seen through that lens. Now our success is defined purely in terms of social impact, and through our actions, those positive impacts can be made with or without our product . That means that we may develop and introduce technology to solve a problem, but it is equally as valid to find another organization s existing offering and design a way to increase that positive impact and scale.

We develop technology to solve access equity issues, but it s equally as valid to find another organization s offering and partner in a way that increases their positive impact.

The analogy to Free and Open Source Software is very strong while Endless has always used and contributed to a wide variety of FOSS projects, we ve also had a tension where we ve been trying to hold some pieces back and capture value such as our own application or content ecosystem, our own hardware platform necessarily making us competitors to other organisations even though they were hoping to achieve the same things as us. As a nonprofit we can let these ideas go and just pick the best partners and technologies to help the people we re trying to reach.

Digital equity 4 barriers we need to overcome In future, our decisions around which projects to build or engage with will revolve around 4 barriers to digital equity, and how our Endless OS, Endless projects, or our partners offerings can help to solve them. We define these 4 equity barriers as: barriers to devices, barriers to connectivity, barriers to literacy in terms of your ability to use the technology, and barriers to engagement in terms of whether using the system is rewarding and worthwhile.

We define the 4 digital equity barriers we exist to impact as:
1. barriers to devices
2. barriers to connectivity
3. barriers to literacy
4. barriers to engagement

It doesn t matter who makes the solutions that break these barriers; what matters is how we assist in enabling people to use technology to gain access to the education and opportunities these barriers block. Our goal therefore is to simply ensure that solutions exist building them ourselves and with partners such as the FOSS community and other nonprofits proving them with real-world deployments, and sharing our results as widely as possible to allow for better adoption globally. If we define our goal purely in terms of whether people are using Endless OS, we are effectively restricting the reach and scale of our solutions to the audience we can reach directly with Endless OS downloads, installs and propagation. Conversely, partnerships that scale impact are a win-win-win for us, our partners, and the communities we all serve. Engineering impact Our Endless engineering roots and capabilities feed our unique ability to build and deploy all of our solutions, and the practical experience of deploying them gives us evidence and credibility as we advocate for their use. Either activity would be weaker without the other.

Our engineering roots and capabilities feed our unique ability to build and deploy digital divide solutions.

Our partners in various engineering communities will have already seen our change in approach. Particularly, with GNOME we are working hard to invest in upstream and reconcile the long-standing differences between our experience and GNOME. If successful, many more people can benefit from our work than just users of Endless OS. We re working with Learning Equality on Kolibri to build a better app experience for Linux desktop users and bring content publishers into our ecosystem for the first time, and we ve also taken our very own Hack, the immersive and fun destination for kids learning to code, released it for non-Endless systems on Flathub, and made it fully open-source.

What s next for our OS? What then is in store for the future of Endless OS, the place where we have invested so much time and planning through years of iterations? For the immediate future, we need the capacity to deploy everything we ve built all at once, to our partners. We built an OS that we feel is very unique and valuable, containing a number of world-firsts: first production OS shipped with OSTree, first Flatpak-only desktop, built-in support for updating OS and apps from USBs, while still providing a great deal of reliability and convenience for deployments in offline and educational-safe environments with great apps and content loaded on every system. However, we need to find a way to deliver this Linux-based experience in a more efficient way, and we d love to talk if you have ideas about how we can do this, perhaps as partners. Can the idea of Endless OS evolve to become a spec that is provided by different platforms in the future, maybe remixes of Debian, Fedora, openSUSE or Ubuntu? Build, Validate, Advocate Beyond the OS, the Endless OS Foundation has identified multiple programs to help underserved communities, and in each case we are adopting our build, validate, advocate strategy. This approach underpins all of our projects: can we build the technology (or assist in the making), will a community in-need validate it by adoption, and can we inspire others by telling the story and advocating for its wider use?

We are adopting a build, validate, advocate strategy.
1. build the technology (or assist in the making)
2. validate by community adoption
3. advocate for its wider use

As examples, we have just launched the Endless Key (link) as an offline solution for students during the COVID-19 at-home distance learning challenges. This project is also establishing a first-ever partnership of well-known online educational brands to reach an underserved offline audience with valuable learning resources. We are developing a pay-as-you-go platform and new partnerships that will allow families to own laptops via micro-payments that are built directly into the operating system, even if they cannot qualify for standard retail financing. And during the pandemic, we ve partnered with Teach For America to focus on very practical digital equity needs in the USA s urban and rural communities. One part of the world-wide digital divide solution We are one solution provider for the complex matrix of issues known collectively as the #DigitalDivide, and these issues will not disappear after the pandemic. Digital equity was an issue long before COVID-19, and we are not so naive to think it can be solved by any single institution, or by the time the pandemic recedes. It will take time and a coalition of partnerships to win. We are in for the long-haul and we are always looking for partners, especially now as we are finding our feet in the nonprofit world. We d love to hear from you, so please feel free to reach out to me I m ramcq on IRC, RocketChat, Twitter, LinkedIn or rob@endlessos.org.

usage: nspawn-runner [-h] [-v] [--debug]
                      chroot-create,chroot-login,prepare,run,cleanup,gitlab-config,toml 
                     ...
Manage systemd-nspawn machines for CI runs.
positional arguments:
   chroot-create,chroot-login,prepare,run,cleanup,gitlab-config,toml 
                        sub-command help
    chroot-create       create a chroot that serves as a base for ephemeral
                        machines
    chroot-login        enter the chroot to perform maintenance
    prepare             start an ephemeral system for a CI run
    run                 run a command inside a CI machine
    cleanup             cleanup a CI machine after it's run
    gitlab-config       configuration step for gitlab-runner
    toml                output the toml configuration for the custom runner
optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -v, --verbose         verbose output
  --debug               verbose output

$ ./nspawn-runner toml buster
[[runners]]
  name="buster"
  url="TODO"
  token="TODO"
  executor = "custom"
  builds_dir = "/var/lib/nspawn-runner/.build"
  cache_dir = "/var/lib/nspawn-runner/.cache"
  [runners.custom_build_dir]
  [runners.cache]
    [runners.cache.s3]
    [runners.cache.gcs]
    [runners.cache.azure]
  [runners.custom]
    config_exec = "/home/enrico/ /nspawn-runner/nspawn-runner"
    config_args = ["gitlab-config"]
    config_exec_timeout = 200
    prepare_exec = "/home/enrico/ /nspawn-runner/nspawn-runner"
    prepare_args = ["prepare", "buster"]
    prepare_exec_timeout = 200
    run_exec = "/home/enrico/dev/nspawn-runner/nspawn-runner"
    run_args = ["run"]
    cleanup_exec = "/home/enrico/ /nspawn-runner/nspawn-runner"
    cleanup_args = ["cleanup"]
    cleanup_exec_timeout = 200
    graceful_kill_timeout = 200
    force_kill_timeout = 200

• updating the master chroot would disturb the running CI jobs that use it. Using nspawn's btrfs-specfic features would prevent this problem, and possibly simplify the implementation even more.
• New step! trivially implementing support for multiple OS images

• Abhijith PA did 7.0h (out of 14h assigned), thus carrying over 7h to January.
• Ben Hutchings did 16.5h (out of 16h assigned and 9h from November), thus carrying over 8.5h to January.
• Brian May did 10h (out of 10h assigned).
• Chris Lamb did 18h (out of 18h assigned), thus carrying over h to January.
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 16.5h (out of 26h assigned), thus carrying over 9.5h to January.
• Holger Levsen did 3.5h coordinating/managing the LTS team.
• Markus Koschany did 26h (out of 26h assigned and 10.75h from November), thus carrying over 10.75 h to January.
• Ola Lundqvist did 9.5h (out of 12h assigned and 11h from November), thus carrying over 11.5h to January.
• Roberto C. S nchez did 18.5h (out of 26h assigned and 2.25h from November) and gave back the remaining 9.75h.
• Sylvain Beucler did 26h (out of 26h assigned).
• Thorsten Alteholz did 26h (out of 26h assigned).
• Utkarsh Gupta did 26h (out of 26h assigned).

• Platinum sponsors:
• TOSHIBA (for 64 months)
• GitHub (for 54 months)
• Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 32 months)
• Gold sponsors:
• Blablacar (for 79 months)
• Roche Diagnostics International AG (for 75 months)
• Linode (for 69 months)
• Babiel GmbH (for 58 months)
• Plat Home (for 57 months)
• University of Oxford (for 14 months)
• Deveryware
• Silver sponsors:
• The Positive Internet Company (for 80 months)
• Domeneshop AS (for 79 months)
• Nantes M tropole (for 73 months)
• Univention GmbH (for 65 months)
• Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 65 months)
• Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 59 months)
• Exonet B.V. (for 48 months)
• Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 42 months)
• CINECA (for 32 months)
• Minist re de l Europe et des Affaires trang res (for 26 months)
• Cloudways Ltd (for 15 months)
• Dinahosting SL (for 13 months)
• Platform.sh (for 8 months)
• Bauer Xcel Media Deutschland KG (for 7 months)
• Moxa Intelligence Co., Ltd.
• Bronze sponsors:
• Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 80 months)
• Evolix (for 79 months)
• Linuxhotel GmbH (for 77 months)
• Intevation GmbH (for 76 months)
• Daevel SARL (for 75 months)
• Bitfolk LTD (for 74 months)
• Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 74 months)
• Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 73 months)
• NUMLOG (for 73 months)
• WinGo AG (for 72 months)
• Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 69 months)
• Entr ouvert (for 64 months)
• Adfinis AG (for 61 months)
• Laboratoire LEGI UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 56 months)
• Tesorion (for 56 months)
• GNI MEDIA (for 55 months)
• Bearstech (for 47 months)
• LiHAS (for 47 months)
• People Doc (for 43 months)
• Catalyst IT Ltd (for 41 months)
• Supagro (for 37 months)
• Demarcq SAS (for 35 months)
• Universit Grenoble Alpes (for 22 months)
• TouchWeb SAS (for 14 months)
• SPiN AG (for 10 months)
• CoreFiling (for 6 months)
• Institut des sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod

• Internet-using messengers leak certain metadata (eg, that a person is using it, or perhaps a sophisticated adversary could use timing analysis to determine that two people are talking using it)
• Cell signal outages due to natural disaster, large influx of people (protests, unusual sporting events, festivals, etc), or other factors
• Locations where cell signals are not available (rural areas, camping locations, wilderness areas, etc.)
• Devices that don t have cell data capability (many tablets, phones that have had service expire, etc.)

• Over the Internet, via Tor onion services
• Via Bluetooth to nearby devices
• Via Wifi, to other devices connected to the same access point, even if Internet isn t wokring on that AP

• Basic 1-to-1 private messaging
• Private groups , in which one particular person invites people to the chat group, and can dissolve it at any time
• Forums , similar to private groups, but any existing member can invite more people to them, and they continue to exist until the last member leaves (founder isn t special)
• Blogs , messages that are automatically shared with all your contacts

Changes in Rcpp patch release version 1.0.6 (2021-01-14)

• Changes in Rcpp API:
  • Replace remaining few uses of EXTPTR_PTR with R_ExternalPtrAddr (Kevin in #1098 fixing #1097).
  • Add push_back and push_front for DataFrame (Walter Somerville in #1099 fixing #1094).
  • Remove a misleading-to-wrong comment (Mattias Ellert in #1109 cleaning up after #1049).
  • Address a sanitizer report by initializing two private bool variables (Benjamin Christoffersen in #1113).
  • External pointer finalizer toggle default values were corrected to true (Dirk in #1115).
• Changes in Rcpp Documentation:
  • Several URLs were updated to https and/or new addresses (Dirk).
• Changes in Rcpp Deployment:
  • Added GitHub Actions CI using the same container-based setup used previously, and also carried code coverage over (Dirk in #1128).
• Changes in Rcpp support functions:
  • Rcpp.package.skeleton() avoids warning from R. (Dirk)

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

• Work on DEB package qtmir.
• Revisit upstream status of lomiri-ui-toolkit (and remind upstream on open issues to be resolved).
• Debug googletest / cmake-extras build failures in qtmir DEB package.
• Prepare MR!2 f r cmake-extras upstream, upload cmake-extras 1.5-3 to Debian unstable.
• Upload qtmir to unstable/NEW, submit patches upstream.
• Upload to unstable as NEW: ayatana-indicator-bluetooth.
• Upload to unstable: qtmir 0.6.1-2.
• Upload to unstable: cmake-extras 1.5-5.
• More debugging on googletest / cmake-extras.
• Qt5.15 transition in Debian, various uploads.
• Upload unstable: cmake-extras 1.5-6.
• Debug and fix libqtdbustest / libqtdbusmock failures in Debian.
• Get in touch with RAOF (on IRC, from the Mir Team) on possible fixes of Mir FTBFS in Debian (after a Mesa upload).
• Upload to unstable: mir 1.8.0+dfsg1-11 (fix FTBFS).
• Fix dbus-cpp autopkgtests.
• Fix Mir FTBFS after Boost 1.74 transition.
• Fix FTBFS in unit tests in lomiri-url-dispatcher.
• Drop autopilot dependency from DEB package qtmir.
• Heads-Up Meeting with Marius Gripsgard (discussion next steps).

Problems in fairy land My fairphone2, even if it is less than two years old, is having major problems:

• from time to time, the screen flickers and loses "touch" until I squeeze it back together
• the camera similarly disconnects regularly
• even when it works, the camera is... pretty bad: low light is basically unusable, it's slow and grainy
• the battery can barely keep up for one day
• the cellular coverage is very poor, in Canada: I lose signal at the grocery store and in the middle of my house...

Some of those problems are known: the Fairphone 2 is old now. It was probably old even when I got it. But I can't help but feel a little sad to let it go: the entire point of that device was to make it easy to fix. But alas, because it's sold only in Europe, local stores don't carry replacement parts. To be fair, Fairphone did offer to fix the device, but with a 2 weeks turnaround, I had to get another phone anyways. I did actually try to buy a fairphone3, from Clove. But they did some crazy validation routine. By email, they asked me to provide a photo copy of a driver's license and the credit card, arguing they need to do this to combat fraud. I found that totally unacceptable and asked them to cancel my order. And because I'm not sure the FP3 will fix the coverage issues, I decided to just give up on Fairphone until they officially ship to the Americas.

Do no evil, do not pass go, do not collect 200$ So I got a Google phone, specifically a Pixel 4a. It's a nice device, all small and shiny, but it's "plasticky" - I would have prefered metal, but it seems you need to pay much, much more to get that (in the Pixel 5). In any case, it's certainly a better form factor than the Fairphone 2: even though the screen is bigger, the device itself is actually smaller and thinner, which feels great. The OLED screen is beautiful, awesome contrast and everything, and preliminary tests show that the camera is much better than the one on the Fairphone 2. (The be fair, again, that is another thing the FP3 improved significantly. And that is with the stock Camera app from CalyxOS/AOSP, so not as good as the Google Camera app, which does AI stuff.)

CalyxOS: success The Pixel 4a not not supported by LineageOS: it seems every time I pick a device in that list, I manage to miss the right device by one (I bought a Samsung S9 before, which is also unsupported, even though the S8 is). But thankfully, it is supported by CalyxOS. That install was a breeze: I was hesitant in playing again with installing a custom Android firmware on a phone after fighting with this quite a bit in the past (e.g. htc-one-s, lg-g3-d852). But it turns out their install instructions, mostly using a AOSP alliance device-flasher works absolutely great. It assumes you know about the commandline, and it does require to basically curl sudo (because you need to download their binary and run it as root), but it Just. Works. It reminded me of how great it was to get the Fairphone with TWRP preinstalled... Oh, and kudos to the people in #calyxos on Freenode: awesome tech support, super nice folks. An amazing improvement over the ambiance in #lineageos!

Migrating data Unfortunately, migrating the data was the usual pain in the back. This should improve the next time I do this: CalyxOS ships with seedvault, a secure backup system for Android 10 (or 9?) and later which backs up everything (including settings!) with encryption. Apparently it works great, and CalyxOS is also working on a migration system to switch phones. But, obviously, I couldn't use that on the Fairphone 2 running Android 7... So I had to, again, improvised. The first step was to install Syncthing, to have an easy way to copy data around. That's easily done through F-Droid, already bundled with CalyxOS (including the privileged extension!). Pair the devices and boom, a magic portal to copy stuff over. The other early step I took was to copy apps over using the F-Droid "find nearby" functionality. It's a bit quirky, but really helps in copying a bunch of APKs over. Then I setup a temporary keepassxc password vault on the Syncthing share so that I could easily copy-paste passwords into apps. I used to do this in a text file in Syncthing, but copy-pasting in the text file is much harder than in KeePassDX. (I just picked one, maybe KeePassDroid is better? I don't know.) Do keep a copy of the URL of the service to reduce typing as well. Then the following apps required special tweaks:

• AntennaPod has an import/export feature: export on one end, into the Syncthing share, then import on the other. then go to the queue and select all episodes and download
• the Signal "chat backup" does copy the secret key around, so you don't get the "security number change" warning (even if it prompts you to re-register) - external devices need to be relinked though
• AnkiDroid, DSub, Nextcloud, and Wallabag required copy-pasting passwords

I tried to sync contacts with DAVx5 but that didn't work so well: the account was setup correctly, but contacts didn't show up. There's probably just this one thing I need to do to fix this, but since I don't really need sync'd contact, it was easier to export a VCF file to Syncthing and import again.

Known problems One problem with CalyxOS I found is that the fragile little microg tweaks didn't seem to work well enough for Signal. That was unexpected so they encouraged me to file that as a bug. The other "issue" is that the bootloader is locked, which makes it impossible to have "root" on the device. That's rather unfortunate: I often need root to debug things on Android. In particular, it made it difficult to restore data from OSMand (see below). But I guess that most things just work out of the box now, so I don't really need it and appreciate the extra security. Locking the bootloader means full cryptographic verification of the phone, so that's a good feature to have! OSMand still doesn't have a good import/export story. I ended up sharing the Android/data/net.osmand.plus/files directory and importing waypoints, favorites and tracks by hand. Even though maps are actually in there, it's not possible for Syncthing to write directly to the same directory on the new phone, "thanks" to the new permission system in Android which forbids this kind of inter-app messing around. Tracks are particularly a problem: my older OSMand setup had all those folders neatly sorting those tracks by month. This makes it really annoying to track every file manually and copy it over. I have mostly given up on that for now, unfortunately. And I'll still need to reconfigure profiles and maps and everything by hand. Sigh. I guess that's a good clearinghouse for my old tracks I never use... Update: turns out setting storage to "shared" fixed the issue, see comments below!

Conclusion Overall, CalyxOS seems like a good Android firmware. The install is smooth and the resulting install seems solid. The above problems are mostly annoyances and I'm very happy with the experience so far, although I've only been using it for a few hours so this is very preliminary.

• creating a column with the sum of Y values;
• extending values that are present only in a few lines;
• renaming datasets using a pattern.

Summing the values in a column When using commands that take formulas (Ruby code), like apply-formula, the code is run for every single point, for which all the values are updated. In particulier, the state of the previous point is not known. However, it is possible to store values in what is called global variables, whose name start with an $ sign. Using this, we can keep track of the previous values. For instance, to create a new column with the sum of the y values, one can use the following approach:

QSoas> eval $sum=0
QSoas> apply-formula /extra-columns=1 $sum+=y;y2=$sum

The first line initializes the variable to 0, before we start summing, and the code in the second line is run for each dataset row, in order. For the first row, for instance, $sum is initially 0 (from the eval line); after the execution of the code, it is now the first value of y. After the second row, the second value of y is added, and so on. The image below shows the resulting y2 when used on:

QSoas> generate-dataset -1 1 x

Extending values in a column Another use of the global variables is to add "missing" data. For instance, let's imagine that a files given the variation of current over time as the potential is changed, but the potential is only changed stepwise and only indicated when it changes:

## time	current	potential
0	0.1	0.5
1	0.2
2	0.3
3	0.2
4	1.2	0.6
5	1.3
...

If you need to have the values everywhere, for instance if you need to split on their values, you could also use a global variable, taking advantage of the fact that missing values are represented by QSoas using "Not A Number" values, which can be detected using the Ruby function nan?:

QSoas> apply-formula "if y2.nan?; then y2=$value; else $value=y2;end"

Note the need of quotes because there are spaces in the ruby code. If the value of y2 is NaN, that is it is missing, then it is taken from the global variable $value else $value is set the current value of y2. Hence, the values are propagated down:

## time	current	potential
0	0.1	0.5
1	0.2	0.5
2	0.3	0.5
3	0.2	0.5
4	1.2	0.6
5	1.3	0.6
...

Of course, this doesn't work if the first value of y2 is missing.

Renaming using a pattern The command save-datasets can be used to save a whole series of datasets to the disk. It can also rename them on the fly, and, using the /mode=rename option, does only the renaming part, without saving. You can make full use of meta-data (see also a first post here)for renaming. The full power is unlocked using the /expression= option. For instance, for renaming the last 5 datasets (so numbers 0 to 4) using a scheme based on the value of their pH meta-data, you can use the following code:

QSoas> save-datasets /mode=rename /expression='"dataset-# $meta.pH "' 0..4

The double quotes are cumbersome but necessary, since the outer quotes (') prevent the inner ones (") to be removed and the inner quotes are here to indicate to Ruby that we are dealing with text. The bit inside # ... is interpreted by Ruby as Ruby code; here it is $meta.pH, the value of the "pH" meta-data. Finally the 0..4 specifies the datasets to work with. So theses datasets will change name to become dataset-7 for pH 7, etc...

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.