In my two most recent posts, I listed the fiction and classic fiction I enjoyed the most in 2022. I'll leave my roundup of general non-fiction until tomorrow, but today I'll be going over my favourite memoirs and biographies, in no particular order. Books that just missed the cut here include Roisin Kiberd's The Disconnect: A Personal Journey Through the Internet (2019), Steve Richards' The Prime Ministers (2019) which reflects on UK leadership from Harold Wilson to Boris Johnson, Robert Graves Great War memoir Goodbye to All That (1929) and David Mikics's portrait of Stanley Kubrick called American Filmmaker.

Afropean: Notes from Black Europe (2019) Johny Pitts Johny Pitts is a photographer and writer who lives in the north of England who set out to explore "black Europe from the street up" those districts within European cities that, although they were once 'white spaces' in the past, they are now occupied by Black people. Unhappy with the framing of the Black experience back home in post-industrial Sheffield, Pitts decided to become a nomad and goes abroad to seek out the sense of belonging he cannot find in post-Brexit Britain, and Afropean details his journey through Paris, Brussels, Lisbon, Berlin, Stockholm and Moscow. However, Pitts isn't just avoiding the polarisation and structural racism embedded in contemporary British life. Rather, he is seeking a kind of super-national community that transcends the reductive and limiting nationalisms of all European countries, most of which have based their national story on a self-serving mix of nostalgia and postcolonial fairy tales. Indeed, the term 'Afropean' is the key to understanding the goal of this captivating memoir. Pitts writes at the beginning of this book that the word wasn't driven only as a response to the crude nativisms of Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen, but that it:

encouraged me to think of myself as whole and unhyphenated. [ ] Here was a space where blackness was taking part in shaping European identity at large. It suggested the possibility of living in and with more than one idea: Africa and Europe, or, by extension, the Global South and the West, without being mixed-this, half-that or black-other. That being black in Europe didn t necessarily mean being an immigrant.

In search of this whole new theory of home, Pitts travels to the infamous banlieue of Clichy-sous-Bois just to the East of Paris, thence to Matong in Brussels, as well as a quick and abortive trip into Moscow and other parallel communities throughout the continent. In these disparate environs, Pitts strikes up countless conversations with regular folk in order to hear their quotidian stories of living, and ultimately to move away from the idea that Black history is defined exclusively by slavery. Indeed, to Pitts, the idea of race is one that ultimately restricts one's humanity; the concept "is often forced to embody and speak for certain ideas, despite the fact it can't ever hold in both hands the full spectrum of a human life and the cultural nuances it creates." It's difficult to do justice to the effectiveness of the conversations Pitts has throughout his travels, but his shrewd attention to demeanour, language, raiment and expression vividly brings alive the people he talks to. Of related interest to fellow Brits as well are the many astute observations and comparisons with Black and working-class British life. The tone shifts quite often throughout this book. There might be an amusing aside one minute, such as the portrait of an African American tourist in Paris to whom "the whole city was a film set, with even its homeless people appearing to him as something oddly picturesque." But the register abruptly changes when he visits Clichy-sous-Bois on an anniversary of important to the area, and an element of genuine danger is introduced when Johny briefly visits Moscow and barely gets out alive. What's especially remarkable about this book is there is a freshness to Pitt s treatment of many well-worn subjects. This can be seen in his account of Belgium under the reign of Leopold II, the history of Portuguese colonialism (actually mostly unknown to me), as well in the way Pitts' own attitude to contemporary anti-fascist movements changes throughout an Antifa march. This chapter was an especial delight, and not only because it underlined just how much of Johny's trip was an inner journey of an author willing have his mind changed. Although Johny travels alone throughout his journey, in the second half of the book, Pitts becomes increasingly accompanied by a number of Black intellectuals by the selective citing of Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin and Caryl Phillips. (Nevertheless, Jonny has also brought his camera for the journey as well, adding a personal touch to this already highly-intimate book.) I suspect that his increasing exercise of Black intellectual writing in the latter half of the book may be because Pitts' hopes about 'Afropean' existence ever becoming a reality are continually dashed and undercut. The unity among potential Afropeans appears more-and-more unrealisable as the narrative unfolds, the various reasons of which Johny explores both prosaically and poetically. Indeed, by the end of the book, it's unclear whether Johny has managed to find what he left the shores of England to find. But his mix of history, sociology and observation of other cultures right on my doorstep was something of a revelation to me.

Orwell's Roses (2021) Rebecca Solnit Orwell s Roses is an alternative journey through the life and afterlife of George Orwell, reimaging his life primarily through the lens of his attentiveness to nature. Yet this framing of the book as an 'alternative' history is only revisionist if we compare it to the usual view of Orwell as a bastion of 'free speech' and English 'common sense' the roses of the title of this book were very much planted by Orwell in his Hertfordshire garden in 1936, and his yearning of nature one was one of the many constants throughout his life. Indeed, Orwell wrote about wildlife and outdoor life whenever he could get away with it, taking pleasure in a blackbird's song and waxing nostalgically about the English countryside in his 1939 novel Coming Up for Air (reviewed yesterday).

By sheer chance, I actually visited this exact garden immediately to the publication of this book

Solnit has a particular ability to evince unexpected connections between Orwell and the things he was writing about: Joseph Stalin's obsession with forcing lemons to grow in ludicrously cold climates; Orwell s slave-owning ancestors in Jamaica; Jamaica Kincaid's critique of colonialism in the flower garden; and the exploitative rose industry in Colombia that supplies the American market. Solnit introduces all of these new correspondences in a voice that feels like a breath of fresh air after decades of stodgy Orwellania, and without lapsing into a kind of verbal soft-focus. Indeed, the book displays a marked indifference towards the usual (male-centric) Orwell fandom. Her book draws to a close with a rereading of the 'dystopian' Nineteen Eighty-Four that completes her touching portrait of a more optimistic and hopeful Orwell, as well as a reflection on beauty and a manifesto for experiencing joy as an act of resistance.

The Disaster Artist (2013) Greg Sestero & Tom Bissell For those not already in the know, The Room was a 2003 film by director-producer-writer-actor Tommy Wiseau, an inscrutable Polish immigr with an impenetrable background, an idiosyncratic choice of wardrobe and a mysterious large source of income. The film, which centres on a melodramatic love triangle, has since been described by several commentators and publications as one of the worst films ever made. Tommy's production completely bombed at the so-called 'box office' (the release was actually funded entirely by Wiseau personally), but the film slowly became a favourite at cult cinema screenings. Given Tommy's prominent and central role in the film, there was always an inherent cruelty involved in indulging in the spectacle of The Room the audience was laughing because the film was astonishingly bad, of course, but Wiseau infused his film with sincere earnestness that in a heartless twist of irony may be precisely why it is so terrible to begin with. Indeed, it should be stressed that The Room is not simply a 'bad' film, and therefore not worth paying any attention to: it is uncannily bad in a way that makes it eerily compelling to watch. It unintentionally subverts all the rules of filmmaking in a way that captivates the attention. Take this representative example:

This thirty-six-second scene showcases almost every problem in The Room: the acting, the lighting, the sound design, the pacing, the dialogue and that this unnecessary scene (which does not advance the plot) even exists in the first place. One problem that the above clip doesn't capture, however, is Tommy's vulnerable ego. (He would later make the potentially conflicting claims that The Room was both an ironic cult success and that he is okay with people interpreting it sincerely). Indeed, the filmmaker's central role as Johnny (along with his Willy-Wonka meets Dracula persona) doesn't strike viewers as yet another vanity project, it actually asks more questions than it answers. Why did Tommy even make this film? What is driving him psychologically? And why and how? is he so spellbinding? On the surface, then, 2013's The Disaster Artist is a book about the making of one the strangest films ever made, written by The Room's co-star Greg Sestero and journalist Tom Bissell. Naturally, you learn some jaw-dropping facts about the production and inspiration of the film, the seed of which was planted when Greg and Tommy went to see an early screening of The Talented Mr Ripley (1999). It turns out that Greg's character in The Room is based on Tommy's idiosyncratic misinterpretation of its plot, extending even to the character's name Mark who, in textbook Tommy style, was taken directly (or at least Tommy believed) from one of Ripley's movie stars: "Mark Damon" [sic]. Almost as absorbing as The Room itself, The Disaster Artist is partly a memoir about Thomas P. Wiseau and his cinematic masterpiece. But it could also be described as a biography about a dysfunctional male relationship and, almost certainly entirely unconsciously, a text about the limitations of hetronormativity. It is this latter element that struck me the most whilst reading this book: if you take a step back for a moment, there is something uniquely sad about Tommy's inability to connect with others, and then, when Wiseau poured his soul into his film people just laughed. Despite the stories about his atrocious behaviour both on and off the film set, there's something deeply tragic about the whole affair. Jean-Luc Godard, who passed away earlier this year, once observed that every fictional film is a documentary of its actors. The Disaster Artist shows that this well-worn aphorism doesn't begin to cover it.

Review: Sweep of the Heart, by Ilona Andrews

Series:	Innkeeper Chronicles #6
Publisher:	NYLA Publishing
Copyright:	2022
ISBN:	1-64197-239-4
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	440

Sweep of the Heart is the sixth book of the sci-fi urban fantasy, kitchen-sink-worldbuilding Innkeeper series by husband and wife writing pair Ilona Andrews, assuming one counts the novella Sweep with Me as a full entry (which I do). It's a direct sequel to One Fell Sweep, but also references the events of Sweep of the Blade and Sweep with Me enough to spoil them. Needless to say, don't start here. As always with this series, the book was originally published as a serial on Ilona Andrews's blog. I prefer to read my novels as novels, so I wait until the entries are collected and published, but you can read it on-line for free if you want. Sean and Dina's old friend Wilmos has been kidnapped by an enemy who looks familiar from One Fell Sweep. To get him back, they need to get to a world that is notoriously inaccessible. One player in galactic politics may be able to offer a portal, but it will come as a price. That price? Host a reality TV show. Specifically, a sci-fi version of The Bachelor, with aliens. And the bachelor is the ruler of a galactic empire, whose personal safety is now Dina's responsibility. There is a hand-waving explanation for why the Seven Star Dominion does spouse selection for their rulers this way, but let's be honest: it's a fairly transparent excuse to write a season of The Bachelor with strange aliens, political intrigue, inn-generated special effects and wallpaper-worthy backdrops, ulterior motives, and attempted murder. Oh, and competence porn, as Dina once again demonstrates just how good she's become at being an innkeeper. I'm not much of a reality TV fan, have never watched The Bachelor, and still thoroughly enjoyed this. It helps that the story is more about political intrigue than it is about superficial attraction or personal infighting, and the emperor at the center of the drama is calm, thoughtful, and juggling a large number of tricky problems (which Dina, somewhat improbably, becomes privy to). The contestants range from careful diplomats with hidden political goals to eye candy with the subtlety of a two by four, the latter sponsored by sentient murderous trees, so there's a delightful variety of tone and a ton of narrative momentum. A few of the twists and turns were obvious, but some of the cliches are less cliched than they initially look. This series always leans towards "play with every toy in the toy box at once!" rather than subtle and realistic. This entry is no exception, but the mish-mash of science fiction tropes with nigh-unlimited fantasy power is, as usual, done with so much verve and sheer creative joy that I can't help but love it. We do finally learn Caldenia's past, and... I kind of wish we hadn't? Or at least that her past had been a bit more complicated. I will avoid spoiling it by saying too much, but I thought it was an oddly flat and overdone trope that made Caldenia substantially less interesting than she was before this revelation. That was one mild disappointment. The other is that the opening of Sweep of the Heart teases some development of the overall series plot, but that remains mostly a tease. Wilmos's kidnapping and any relevance to deeper innkeeper problems is, at least in this entry, merely a framing story for the reality TV show that constitutes the bulk of the novel. There are a few small revelations in the conclusion, but only the type that raise more questions. Hopefully we'll get more series plot development in the next book, but even if we don't, I'm happily along for the ride. If you like this series, this is more of the thing you already like. If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend it (start with Clean Sweep). It's not great literature, and most of the trappings will be familiar from a dozen other novels and TV shows, but it's unabashed fun with loads of competence porn and a wild internal logic that grows on you over time. Also, it has one of the most emotionally satisfying sentient buildings in SF. There will, presumably, be more entries in the series, but they have not yet been announced. Rating: 8 out of 10

As a follow-up to yesterday's post detailing my favourite works of fiction from 2022, today I'll be listing my favourite fictional works that are typically filed under classics. Books that just missed the cut here include: E. M. Forster's A Room with a View (1908) and his later A Passage to India (1913), both gently nudged out by Forster's superb Howard's End (see below). Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard (1958) also just missed out on a write-up here, but I can definitely recommend it to anyone interested in reading a modern Italian classic.

War and Peace (1867) Leo Tolstoy It's strange to think that there is almost no point in reviewing this novel: who hasn't heard of War and Peace? What more could possibly be said about it now? Still, when I was growing up, War and Peace was always the stereotypical example of the 'impossible book', and even start it was, at best, a pointless task, and an act of hubris at worst. And so there surely exists a parallel universe in which I never have and will never will read the book... Nevertheless, let us try to set the scene. Book nine of the novel opens as follows:

On the twelfth of June, 1812, the forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian frontier and war began; that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, issues of false money, burglaries, incendiarisms and murders as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes. What produced this extraordinary occurrence? What were its causes? [ ] The more we try to explain such events in history reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible they become to us.

Set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars and Napoleon's invasion of Russia, War and Peace follows the lives and fates of three aristocratic families: The Rostovs, The Bolkonskys and the Bezukhov's. These characters find themselves situated athwart (or against) history, and all this time, Napoleon is marching ever closer to Moscow. Still, Napoleon himself is essentially just a kind of wallpaper for a diverse set of personal stories touching on love, jealousy, hatred, retribution, naivety, nationalism, stupidity and much much more. As Elif Batuman wrote earlier this year, "the whole premise of the book was that you couldn t explain war without recourse to domesticity and interpersonal relations." The result is that Tolstoy has woven an incredibly intricate web that connects the war, noble families and the everyday Russian people to a degree that is surprising for a book started in 1865. Tolstoy's characters are probably timeless (especially the picaresque adventures and constantly changing thoughts Pierre Bezukhov), and the reader who has any social experience will immediately recognise characters' thoughts and actions. Some of this is at a 'micro' interpersonal level: for instance, take this example from the elegant party that opens the novel:

Each visitor performed the ceremony of greeting this old aunt whom not one of them knew, not one of them wanted to know, and not one of them cared about. The aunt spoke to each of them in the same words, about their health and her own and the health of Her Majesty, who, thank God, was better today. And each visitor, though politeness prevented his showing impatience, left the old woman with a sense of relief at having performed a vexatious duty and did not return to her the whole evening.

But then, some of the focus of the observations are at the 'macro' level of the entire continent. This section about cities that feel themselves in danger might suffice as an example:

At the approach of danger, there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger, since it is not in man s power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes and to think about what is pleasant. In solitude, a man generally listens to the first voice, but in society to the second.

And finally, in his lengthy epilogues, Tolstoy offers us a dissertation on the behaviour of large organisations, much of it through engagingly witty analogies. These epilogues actually turn out to be an oblique and sarcastic commentary on the idiocy of governments and the madness of war in general. Indeed, the thorough dismantling of the 'great man' theory of history is a common theme throughout the book:

During the whole of that period [of 1812], Napoleon, who seems to us to have been the leader of all these movements as the figurehead of a ship may seem to a savage to guide the vessel acted like a child who, holding a couple of strings inside a carriage, thinks he is driving it. [ ] Why do [we] all speak of a military genius ? Is a man a genius who can order bread to be brought up at the right time and say who is to go to the right and who to the left? It is only because military men are invested with pomp and power and crowds of sychophants flatter power, attributing to it qualities of genius it does not possess.

Unlike some other readers, I especially enjoyed these diversions into the accounting and workings of history, as well as our narrow-minded way of trying to 'explain' things in a singular way:

When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it? Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in which all vital organic and elemental events occur. And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decays and so forth is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it.

Given all of these serious asides, I was also not expecting this book to be quite so funny. At the risk of boring the reader with citations, take this sarcastic remark about the ineptness of medicine men:

After his liberation, [Pierre] fell ill and was laid up for three months. He had what the doctors termed 'bilious fever.' But despite the fact that the doctors treated him, bled him and gave him medicines to drink he recovered.

There is actually a multitude of remarks that are not entirely complimentary towards Russian medical practice, but they are usually deployed with an eye to the human element involved rather than simply to the detriment of a doctor's reputation "How would the count have borne his dearly loved daughter s illness had he not known that it was costing him a thousand rubles?" Other elements of note include some stunning set literary pieces, such as when Prince Andrei encounters a gnarly oak tree under two different circumstances in his life, and when Nat sha's 'Russian' soul is awakened by the strains of a folk song on the balalaika. Still, despite all of these micro- and macro-level happenings, for a long time I felt that something else was going on in War and Peace. It was difficult to put into words precisely what it was until I came across this passage by E. M. Forster:

After one has read War and Peace for a bit, great chords begin to sound, and we cannot say exactly what struck them. They do not arise from the story [and] they do not come from the episodes nor yet from the characters. They come from the immense area of Russia, over which episodes and characters have been scattered, from the sum-total of bridges and frozen rivers, forests, roads, gardens and fields, which accumulate grandeur and sonority after we have passed them. Many novelists have the feeling for place, [but] very few have the sense of space, and the possession of it ranks high in Tolstoy s divine equipment. Space is the lord of War and Peace, not time.

'Space' indeed. Yes, potential readers should note the novel's great length, but the 365 chapters are actually remarkably short, so the sensation of reading it is not in the least overwhelming. And more importantly, once you become familiar with its large cast of characters, it is really not a difficult book to follow, especially when compared to the other Russian classics. My only regret is that it has taken me so long to read this magnificent novel and that I might find it hard to find time to re-read it within the next few years.

Coming Up for Air (1939) George Orwell It wouldn't be a roundup of mine without at least one entry from George Orwell, and, this year, that place is occupied by a book I hadn't haven't read in almost two decades Still, the George Bowling of Coming Up for Air is a middle-aged insurance salesman who lives in a distinctly average English suburban row house with his nuclear family. One day, after winning some money on a bet, he goes back to the village where he grew up in order to fish in a pool he remembers from thirty years before. Less important than the plot, however, is both the well-observed remarks and scathing criticisms that Bowling has of the town he has returned to, combined with an ominous sense of foreboding before the Second World War breaks out. At several times throughout the book, George's placid thoughts about his beloved carp pool are replaced by racing, anxious thoughts that overwhelm his inner peace:

War is coming. In 1941, they say. And there'll be plenty of broken crockery, and little houses ripped open like packing-cases, and the guts of the chartered accountant's clerk plastered over the piano that he's buying on the never-never. But what does that kind of thing matter, anyway? I'll tell you what my stay in Lower Binfield had taught me, and it was this. IT'S ALL GOING TO HAPPEN. All the things you've got at the back of your mind, the things you're terrified of, the things that you tell yourself are just a nightmare or only happen in foreign countries. The bombs, the food-queues, the rubber truncheons, the barbed wire, the coloured shirts, the slogans, the enormous faces, the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows. It's all going to happen. I know it - at any rate, I knew it then. There's no escape. Fight against it if you like, or look the other way and pretend not to notice, or grab your spanner and rush out to do a bit of face-smashing along with the others. But there's no way out. It's just something that's got to happen.

Already we can hear psychological madness that underpinned the Second World War. Indeed, there is no great story in Coming Up For Air, no wonderfully empathetic characters and no revelations or catharsis, so it is impressive that I was held by the descriptions, observations and nostalgic remembrances about life in modern Lower Binfield, its residents, and how it has changed over the years. It turns out, of course, that George's beloved pool has been filled in with rubbish, and the village has been perverted by modernity beyond recognition. And to cap it off, the principal event of George's holiday in Lower Binfield is an accidental bombing by the British Royal Air Force. Orwell is always good at descriptions of awful food, and this book is no exception:

The frankfurter had a rubber skin, of course, and my temporary teeth weren't much of a fit. I had to do a kind of sawing movement before I could get my teeth through the skin. And then suddenly pop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just couldn't believe it. Then I rolled my tongue around it again and had another try. It was fish! A sausage, a thing calling itself a frankfurter, filled with fish! I got up and walked straight out without touching my coffee. God knows what that might have tasted of.

Many other tell-tale elements of Orwell's fictional writing are in attendance in this book as well, albeit worked out somewhat less successfully than elsewhere in his oeuvre. For example, the idea of a physical ailment also serving as a metaphor is present in George's false teeth, embodying his constant preoccupation with his ageing. (Readers may recall Winston Smith's varicose ulcer representing his repressed humanity in Nineteen Eighty-Four). And, of course, we have a prematurely middle-aged protagonist who almost but not quite resembles Orwell himself. Given this and a few other niggles (such as almost all the women being of the typical Orwell 'nagging wife' type), it is not exactly Orwell's magnum opus. But it remains a fascinating historical snapshot of the feeling felt by a vast number of people just prior to the Second World War breaking out, as well as a captivating insight into how the process of nostalgia functions and operates.

Howards End (1910) E. M. Forster Howards End begins with the following sentence:

One may as well begin with Helen s letters to her sister.

In fact, "one may as well begin with" my own assumptions about this book instead. I was actually primed to consider Howards End a much more 'Victorian' book: I had just finished Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and had found her 1925 book at once rather 'modern' but also very much constrained by its time. I must have then unconsciously surmised that a book written 15 years before would be even more inscrutable, and, with its Victorian social mores added on as well, Howards End would probably not undress itself so readily in front of the reader. No doubt there were also the usual expectations about 'the classics' as well. So imagine my surprise when I realised just how inordinately affable and witty Howards End turned out to be. It doesn't have that Wildean shine of humour, of course, but it's a couple of fields over in the English countryside, perhaps abutting the more mordant social satires of the earlier George Orwell novels (see Coming Up for Air above). But now let us return to the story itself. Howards End explores class warfare, conflict and the English character through a tale of three quite different families at the beginning of the twentieth century: the rich Wilcoxes; the gentle & idealistic Schlegels; and the lower-middle class Basts. As the Bloomsbury Group Schlegel sisters desperately try to help the Basts and educate the rich but close-minded Wilcoxes, the three families are drawn ever closer and closer together. Although the whole story does, I suppose, revolve around the house in the title (which is based on the Forster's own childhood home), Howards End is perhaps best described as a comedy of manners or a novel that shows up the hypocrisy of people and society. In fact, it is surprising how little of the story actually takes place in the eponymous house, with the overwhelming majority of the first half of the book taking place in London. But it is perhaps more illuminating to remark that the Howards End of the book is a house that the Wilcoxes who own it at the start of the novel do not really need or want. What I particularly liked about Howards End is how the main character's ideals alter as they age, and subsequently how they find their lives changing in different ways. Some of them find themselves better off at the end, others worse. And whilst it is also surprisingly funny, it still manages to trade in heavier social topics as well. This is apparent in the fact that, although the characters themselves are primarily in charge of their own destinies, their choices are still constrained by the changing world and shifting sense of morality around them. This shouldn't be too surprising: after all, Forster's novel was published just four years before the Great War, a distinctly uncertain time. Not for nothing did Virginia Woolf herself later observe that "on or about December 1910, human character changed" and that "all human relations have shifted: those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children." This process can undoubtedly be seen rehearsed throughout Forster's Howards End, and it's a credit to the author to be able to capture it so early on, if not even before it was widespread throughout Western Europe. I was also particularly taken by Forster's fertile use of simile. An extremely apposite example can be found in the description Tibby Schlegel gives of his fellow Cambridge undergraduates. Here, Timmy doesn't want to besmirch his lofty idealisation of them with any banal specificities, and wishes that the idea of them remain as ideal Platonic forms instead. Or, as Forster puts it, to Timmy it is if they are "pictures that must not walk out of their frames." Wilde, at his most weakest, is 'just' style, but Forster often deploys his flair for a deeper effect. Indeed, when you get to the end of this section mentioning picture frames, you realise Forster has actually just smuggled into the story a failed attempt on Tibby's part to engineer an anonymous homosexual encounter with another undergraduate. It is a credit to Forster's sleight-of-hand that you don't quite notice what has just happened underneath you and that the books' reticence to honestly describe what has happened is thus structually analogus Tibby's reluctance to admit his desires to himself. Another layer to the character of Tibby (and the novel as a whole) is thereby introduced without the imposition of clumsy literary scaffolding. In a similar vein, I felt very clever noticing the arch reference to Debussy's Pr lude l'apr s-midi d'un faune until I realised I just fell into the trap Forster set for the reader in that I had become even more like Tibby in his pseudo-scholarly views on classical music. Finally, I enjoyed that each chapter commences with an ironic and self-conscious bon mot about society which is only slightly overblown for effect. Particularly amusing are the ironic asides on "women" that run through the book, ventriloquising the narrow-minded views of people like the Wilcoxes. The omniscient and amiable narrator of the book also recalls those ironically distant voiceovers from various French New Wave films at times, yet Forster's narrator seems to have bigger concerns in his mordant asides: Forster seems to encourage some sympathy for all of the characters even the more contemptible ones at their worst moments. Highly recommended, as are Forster's A Room with a View (1908) and his slightly later A Passage to India (1913).

The Good Soldier (1915) Ford Madox Ford The Good Soldier starts off fairly simply as the narrator's account of his and his wife's relationship with some old friends, including the eponymous 'Good Soldier' of the book's title. It's an experience to read the beginning of this novel, as, like any account of endless praise of someone you've never met or care about, the pages of approving remarks about them appear to be intended to wash over you. Yet as the chapters of The Good Soldier go by, the account of the other characters in the book gets darker and darker. Although the author himself is uncritical of others' actions, your own critical faculties are slowgrly brought into play, and you gradully begin to question the narrator's retelling of events. Our narrator is an unreliable narrator in the strict sense of the term, but with the caveat that he is at least is telling us everything we need to know to come to our own conclusions. As the book unfolds further, the narrator's compromised credibility seems to infuse every element of the novel even the 'Good' of the book's title starts to seem like a minor dishonesty, perhaps serving as the inspiration for the irony embedded in the title of The 'Great' Gatsby. Much more effectively, however, the narrator's fixations, distractions and manner of speaking feel very much part of his dissimulation. It sometimes feels like he is unconsciously skirting over the crucial elements in his tale, exactly like one does in real life when recounting a story containing incriminating ingredients. Indeed, just how much the narrator is conscious of his own concealment is just one part of what makes this such an interesting book: Ford Madox Ford has gifted us with enough ambiguity that it is also possible that even the narrator cannot find it within himself to understand the events of the story he is narrating. It was initially hard to believe that such a carefully crafted analysis of a small group of characters could have been written so long ago, and despite being fairly easy to read, The Good Soldier is an almost infinitely subtle book even the jokes are of the subtle kind and will likely get a re-read within the next few years.

Anna Karenina (1878) Leo Tolstoy There are many similar themes running through War and Peace (reviewed above) and Anna Karenina. Unrequited love; a young man struggling to find a purpose in life; a loving family; an overwhelming love of nature and countless fascinating observations about the minuti of Russian society. Indeed, rather than primarily being about the eponymous Anna, Anna Karenina provides a vast panorama of contemporary life in Russia and of humanity in general. Nevertheless, our Anna is a sophisticated woman who abandons her empty existence as the wife of government official Alexei Karenin, a colourless man who has little personality of his own, and she turns to a certain Count Vronsky in order to fulfil her passionate nature. Needless to say, this results in tragic consequences as their (admittedly somewhat qualified) desire to live together crashes against the rocks of reality and Russian society. Parallel to Anna's narrative, though, Konstantin Levin serves as the novel's alter-protagonist. In contrast to Anna, Levin is a socially awkward individual who straddles many schools of thought within Russia at the time: he is neither a free-thinker (nor heavy-drinker) like his brother Nikolai, and neither is he a bookish intellectual like his half-brother Serge. In short, Levin is his own man, and it is generally agreed by commentators that he is Tolstoy's surrogate within the novel. Levin tends to come to his own version of an idea, and he would rather find his own way than adopt any prefabricated view, even if confusion and muddle is the eventual result. In a roughly isomorphic fashion then, he resembles Anna in this particular sense, whose story is a counterpart to Levin's in their respective searches for happiness and self-actualisation. Whilst many of the passionate and exciting passages are told on Anna's side of the story (I'm thinking horse race in particular, as thrilling as anything in cinema ), many of the broader political thoughts about the nature of the working classes are expressed on Levin's side instead. These are stirring and engaging in their own way, though, such as when he joins his peasants to mow the field and seems to enter the nineteenth-century version of 'flow':

The longer Levin mowed, the more often he felt those moments of oblivion during which it was no longer his arms that swung the scythe, but the scythe itself that lent motion to his whole body, full of life and conscious of itself, and, as if by magic, without a thought of it, the work got rightly and neatly done on its own. These were the most blissful moments.

Overall, Tolstoy poses no didactic moral message towards any of the characters in Anna Karenina, and merely invites us to watch rather than judge. (Still, there is a hilarious section that is scathing of contemporary classical music, presaging many of the ideas found in Tolstoy's 1897 What is Art?). In addition, just like the earlier War and Peace, the novel is run through with a number of uncannily accurate observations about daily life:

Anna smiled, as one smiles at the weaknesses of people one loves, and, putting her arm under his, accompanied him to the door of the study.

... as well as the usual sprinkling of Tolstoy's sardonic humour ("No one is pleased with his fortune, but everyone is pleased with his wit."). Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the other titan of Russian literature, once described Anna Karenina as a "flawless work of art," and if you re only going to read one Tolstoy novel in your life, it should probably be this one.

Charles Stross wrote an informative summary of the problems with the UK monarchy [1], conveniently before the queen died. The blog post To The Next Mass Shooter, A Modest Proposal is a well written suggestion to potential mass murderers [2]. The New Yorker has an interesting and amusing article about the former CIA employee who released the Vault 7 collection of CIA attack software [3]. This exposes the ridiculously poor hiring practices of the CIA which involved far less background checks than the reporter writing the story did. Wired has an interesting 6 part series about the hunt for Alpha02 the admin of the Alphabay dark web marketplace [4]. The Atlantic has an interesting and informative article about Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the most horrible politicians in the world [5]. Anarcat wrote a long and detailed blog post about Matrix [6]. It s mostly about comparing Matrix to other services and analysing the overall environment of IM systms. I recommend using Matrix, it is quite good although having a server with SSD storage is required for the database. Edent wrote an interesting thought experiment on how one might try to regain access to all their digital data if a lightning strike destroyed everything in their home [7]. Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting article about the crapification of literary contracts [8]. A lot of this applies to most contracts between corporations and individuals. We need legislation to restrict corporations from such abuse. Jared A Brock wrote an insightful article about why AirBNB is horrible and how it will fail [9]. Habr has an interesting article on circumventing UEFI secure boot [10]. This doesn t make secure boot worthless but does expose some weaknesses in it. Matthew Garrett wrote an interesting blog post about stewartship of the UEFI boot ecosystem and how Microsoft has made some strange and possibly hypocritical decisions about it [11]. It also has a lot of background information on how UEFI can be used and misused. Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting article Let s Make Amazon Into a Dumb Pipe [12]. The idea is to use the Amazon search and reviews to find a product and then buy it elsewhere, a reverse of the showrooming practice where people look at products in stores and buy them online. There is already a browser plugin to search local libraries for Amazon books. Charles Stross wrote an interesting blog post about the UK Tory plan to destroy higher education [13]. There s a lot of similarities to what conservatives are doing in other countries. Antoine Beaupr wrote an insightful blog post How to nationalize the internet in Canada [14]. They cover the technical issues to be addressed as well as some social justice points that are often missed when discussing such issues. Internet is not a luxuary nowadays, it s an important part of daily life and the governments need to treat it the same way as roads and other national infrastructure.

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/2gatbh3g
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/2je74ywp
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/26qhberp
• [4] https://tinyurl.com/2b92lwha
• [5] https://tinyurl.com/2nqd3jb7
• [6] https://anarc.at/blog/2022-06-17-matrix-notes/
• [7] https://tinyurl.com/2yx4du3b
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/2gfjkrw5
• [9] https://tinyurl.com/2ewylxv3
• [10] https://habr.com/en/post/446238/
• [11] https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/60248.html
• [12] https://doctorow.medium.com/view-a-sku-32721d623aee
• [13] https://tinyurl.com/2qmkbwjc
• [14] https://anarc.at/blog/2022-08-26-nationalize-internet/

ITP crosvm. I wanted to package the virtual machine monitor thing that I've been working on for my day job. ITP bug 1026126. Lurked around in debian-rust for a few days and poked around different git repositories. Looked at cargo debstatus and it seems like there's some missing dependencies. remain is the most prolific in the code base. There's argh which seems to be not packaged yet in Debian. enumn and document-features seems to be also not available. For others, there's versioned dependency that is not satisfied but will need to check if that is necessary or old.

This post marks the beginning my yearly roundups of the favourite books and movies that I read and watched in 2022 that I plan to publish over the next few days. Just as I did for 2020 and 2021, I won't reveal precisely how many books I read in the last year. I didn't get through as many books as I did in 2021, though, but that's partly due to reading a significant number of long nineteenth-century novels in particular, a fair number of those books that American writer Henry James once referred to as "large, loose, baggy monsters." However, in today's post I'll be looking at my favourite books that are typically filed under fiction, with 'classic' fiction following tomorrow. Works that just missed the cut here include John O'Brien's Leaving Las Vegas, Colson Whitehead's Sag Harbor and possibly The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, or Elif Batuman's The Idiot. I also feel obliged to mention (or is that show off?) that I also read the 1,079-page Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, but I can't say it was a favourite, let alone recommend others unless they are in the market for a good-quality under-monitor stand.

Mona (2021) Pola Oloixarac Mona is the story of a young woman who has just been nominated for the 'most important literary award in Europe'. Mona sees the nomination as a chance to escape her substance abuse on a Californian campus and so speedily decamps to the small village in the depths of Sweden where the nominees must convene for a week before the overall winner is announced. Mona didn't disappear merely to avoid pharmacological misadventures, though, but also to avoid the growing realisation that she is being treated as something of an anthropological curiosity at her university: a female writer of colour treasured for her flourish of exotic diversity that reflects well upon her department. But Mona is now stuck in the company of her literary competitors who all have now gathered from around the world in order to do what writers do: harbour private resentments, exchange empty flattery, embody the selfsame racialised stereotypes that Mona left the United States to avoid, stab rivals in the back, drink too much, and, of course, go to bed together. But as I read Mona, I slowly started to realise that something else is going on. Why does Mona keep finding traces of violence on her body, the origins of which she cannot or refuses to remember? There is something eerily defensive about her behaviour and sardonic demeanour in general as well. A genre-bending and mind-expanding novel unfolded itself, and, without getting into spoiler territory, Mona concludes with such a surprising ending that, according to Adam Thirlwell:

Perhaps we need to rethink what is meant by a gimmick. If a gimmick is anything that we want to reject as extra or excessive or ill-fitting, then it may be important to ask what inhibitions or arbitrary conventions have made it seem like excess, and to revel in the exorbitant fictional constructions it produces. [...]

Mona is a savage satire of the literary world, but it's also a very disturbing exploration of trauma and violence. The success of the book comes in equal measure from the author's commitment to both ideas, but also from the way the psychological damage component creeps up on you. And, as implied above, the last ten pages are quite literally out of this world.

My Brilliant Friend (2011)
The Story of a New Name (2012)
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2013)
The Story of the Lost Child (2014) Elena Ferrante Elena Ferrante's Neopolitan Quartet follows two girls, both brilliant in their own way. Our protagonist-narrator is Elena, a studious girl from the lower rungs of the middle class of Naples who is inspired to be more by her childhood friend, Lila. Lila is, in turn, far more restricted by her poverty and class, but can transcend it at times through her fiery nature, which also brands her as somewhat unique within their inward-looking community. The four books follow the two girls from the perspective of Elena as they grow up together in post-war Italy, where they drift in-and-out of each other's lives due to the vicissitudes of change and the consequences of choice. All the time this is unfolding, however, the narrative is very always slightly charged by the background knowledge revealed on the very first page that Lila will, many years later, disappear from Elena's life. Whilst the quartet has the formal properties of a bildungsroman, its subject and conception are almost entirely different. In particular, the books are driven far more by character and incident than spectacular adventures in picturesque Italy. In fact, quite the opposite takes place: these are four books where ordinary-seeming occurrences take on an unexpected radiance against a background of poverty, ignorance, violence and other threats, often bringing to mind the films of the Italian neorealism movement. Brilliantly rendered from beginning to end, Ferrante has a seemingly studious eye for interpreting interactions and the psychology of adolescence and friendship. Some utterances indeed, perhaps even some glances are dissected at length over multiple pages, something that Vittorio De Sica's classic Bicycle Thieves (1948) could never do. Potential readers should not take any notice of the saccharine cover illustrations on most editions of the books. The quartet could even win an award for the most misleading artwork, potentially rivalling even Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it is revealed that the drippy illustrations and syrupy blurbs ("a rich, intense and generous-hearted story ") turn out to be part of a larger metatextual game that Ferrante is playing with her readers. This idiosyncratic view of mine is partially supported by the fact that each of the four books has been given a misleading title, the true ambiguity of which often only becomes clear as each of the four books comes into sharper focus. Readers of the quartet often fall into debating which is the best of the four. I've heard from more than one reader that one has 'too much Italian politics' and another doesn't have enough 'classic' Lina moments. The first book then possesses the twin advantages of both establishing the environs and finishing with a breathtaking ending that is both satisfying and a cliffhanger as well but does this make it 'the best'? I prefer to liken the quartet more like the different seasons of The Wire (2002-2008) where, personal favourites and preferences aside, although each season is undoubtedly unique, it would take a certain kind of narrow-minded view of art to make the claim that, say, series one of The Wire is 'the best' or that the season that focuses on the Baltimore docks 'is boring'. Not to sound like a neo-Wagnerian, but each of them adds to final result in its own. That is to say, both The Wire and the Neopolitan Quartet achieve the rare feat of making the magisterial simultaneously intimate.

Out There: Stories (2022) Kate Folk Out There is a riveting collection of disturbing short stories by first-time author Kate Fork. The title story first appeared in the New Yorker in early 2020 imagines a near-future setting where a group of uncannily handsome artificial men called 'blots' have arrived on the San Francisco dating scene with the secret mission of sleeping with women, before stealing their personal data from their laptops and phones and then (quite literally) evaporating into thin air. Folk's satirical style is not at all didactic, so it rarely feels like she is making her points in a pedantic manner. But it's clear that the narrator of Out There is recounting her frustration with online dating. in a way that will resonate with anyone who s spent time with dating apps or indeed the contemporary hyper-centralised platform-based internet in general. Part social satire, part ghost story and part comic tales, the blurring of the lines between these factors is only one of the things that makes these stories so compelling. But whilst Folk constructs crazy scenarios and intentionally strange worlds, she also manages to also populate them with characters that feel real and genuinely sympathetic. Indeed, I challenge you not to feel some empathy for the 'blot' in the companion story Big Sur which concludes the collection, and it complicates any primary-coloured view of the dating world of consisting entirely of predatory men. And all of this is leavened with a few stories that are just plain surreal. I don't know what the deal is with Dating a Somnambulist (available online on Hobart Pulp), but I know that I like it.

Solaris (1961) Stanislaw Lem When Kelvin arrives at the planet Solaris to study the strange ocean that covers its surface, instead of finding an entirely physical scientific phenomenon, he soon discovers a previously unconscious memory embodied in the physical manifestation of a long-dead lover. The other scientists on the space station slowly reveal that they are also plagued with their own repressed corporeal memories. Many theories are put forward as to why all this is occuring, including the idea that Solaris is a massive brain that creates these incarnate memories. Yet if that is the case, the planet's purpose in doing so is entirely unknown, forcing the scientists to shift focus and wonder whether they can truly understand the universe without first understanding what lies within their own minds and in their desires. This would be an interesting outline for any good science fiction book, but one of the great strengths of Solaris is not only that it withholds from the reader why the planet is doing anything it does, but the book is so forcefully didactic in its dislike of the hubris, destructiveness and colonial thinking that can accompany scientific exploration. In one of its most vitriolic passages, Lem's own anger might be reaching out to the reader:

We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don t want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don t know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can t accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilisation superior to our own, but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primaeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us that we don t like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains since we don t leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned, and that reality is revealed to us that part of our reality that we would prefer to pass over in silence then we don t like it anymore.

An overwhelming preoccupation with this idea infuses Solaris, and it turns out to be a common theme in a lot of Lem's work of this period, such as in his 1959 'anti-police procedural' The Investigation. Perhaps it not a dislike of exploration in general or the modern scientific method in particular, but rather a savage critique of the arrogance and self-assuredness that accompanies most forms of scientific positivism, or at least pursuits that cloak themselves under the guise of being a laudatory 'scientific' pursuit:

Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.

I doubt I need to cite specific instances of contemporary scientific pursuits that might meet Lem's punishing eye today, and the fact that his critique works both in 2022 and 1961 perhaps tells us more about the human condition than we'd care to know. Another striking thing about Solaris isn't just the specific Star Trek and Stargate SG-1 episodes that I retrospectively realised were purloined from the book, but that almost the entire register of Star Trek: The Next Generation in particular seems to be rehearsed here. That is to say, TNG presents itself as hard and fact-based 'sci-fi' on the surface, but, at its core, there are often human, existential and sometimes quite enormously emotionally devastating human themes being discussed such as memory, loss and grief. To take one example from many, the painful memories that the planet Solaris physically materialises in effect asks us to seriously consider what it actually is taking place when we 'love' another person: is it merely another 'mirror' of ourselves? (And, if that is the case, is that... bad?) It would be ahistorical to claim that all popular science fiction today can be found rehearsed in Solaris, but perhaps it isn't too much of a stretch:

[Solaris] renders unnecessary any more alien stories. Nothing further can be said on this topic ...] Possibly, it can be said that when one feels the urge for such a thing, one should simply reread Solaris and learn its lessons again. Kim Stanley Robinson [...]

I could go on praising this book for quite some time; perhaps by discussing the extreme framing devices used within the book at one point, the book diverges into a lengthy bibliography of fictional books-within-the-book, each encapsulating a different theory about what the mechanics and/or function of Solaris is, thereby demonstrating that 'Solaris studies' as it is called within the world of the book has been going on for years with no tangible results, which actually leads to extreme embarrassment and then a deliberate and willful blindness to the 'Solaris problem' on the part of the book's scientific community. But I'll leave it all here before this review gets too long... Highly recommended, and a likely reread in 2023.

Brokeback Mountain (1997) Annie Proulx Brokeback Mountain began as a short story by American author Annie Proulx which appeared in the New Yorker in 1997, although it is now more famous for the 2005 film adaptation directed by Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee. Both versions follow two young men who are hired for the summer to look after sheep at a range under the 'Brokeback' mountain in Wyoming. Unexpectedly, however, they form an intense emotional and sexual attachment, yet life intervenes and demands they part ways at the end of the summer. Over the next twenty years, though, as their individual lives play out with marriages, children and jobs, they continue reuniting for brief albeit secret liaisons on camping trips in remote settings. There's no feigned shyness or self-importance in Brokeback Mountain, just a close, compassionate and brutally honest observation of a doomed relationship and a bone-deep feeling for the hardscrabble life in the post-War West. To my mind, very few books have captured so acutely the desolation of a frustrated and repressed passion, as well as the particular flavour of undirected anger that can accompany this kind of yearning. That the original novella does all this in such a beautiful way (and without the crutch of the Wyoming landscape to look at ) is a tribute to Proulx's skills as a writer. Indeed, even without the devasting emotional undertones, Proulx's descriptions of the mountains and scree of the West is likely worth the read alone.

Luster (2020) Raven Leilani Edie is a young Black woman living in New York whose life seems to be spiralling out of control. She isn't good at making friends, her career is going nowhere, and she has no close family to speak of as well. She is, thus, your typical NYC millennial today, albeit seen through a lens of Blackness that complicates any reductive view of her privilege or minority status. A representative paragraph might communicate the simmering tone:

Before I start work, I browse through some photos of friends who are doing better than me, then an article on a black teenager who was killed on 115th for holding a weapon later identified as a showerhead, then an article on a black woman who was killed on the Grand Concourse for holding a weapon later identified as a cell phone, then I drown myself in the comments section and do some online shopping, by which I mean I put four dresses in my cart as a strictly theoretical exercise and then let the page expire.

She starts a sort-of affair with an older white man who has an affluent lifestyle in nearby New Jersey. Eric or so he claims has agreed upon an 'open relationship' with his wife, but Edie is far too inappropriate and disinhibited to respect any boundaries that Eric sets for her, and so Edie soon becomes deeply entangled in Eric's family life. It soon turns out that Eric and his wife have a twelve-year-old adopted daughter, Akila, who is also wait for it Black. Akila has been with Eric's family for two years now and they aren t exactly coping well together. They don t even know how to help her to manage her own hair, let alone deal with structural racism. Yet despite how dark the book's general demeanour is, there are faint glimmers of redemption here and there. Realistic almost to the end, Edie might finally realise what s important in her life, but it would be a stretch to say that she achieves them by the final page. Although the book is full of acerbic remarks on almost any topic (Dogs: "We made them needy and physically unfit. They used to be wolves, now they are pugs with asthma."), it is the comments on contemporary race relations that are most critically insightful. Indeed, unsentimental, incisive and funny, Luster had much of what I like in Colson Whitehead's books at times, but I can't remember a book so frantically fast-paced as this since the Booker-prize winning The Sellout by Paul Beatty or Sam Tallent's Running the Light.

This year had a lot of things happen in it, world-wide, as is always the case. Being more selfish here are the things I remember, in brief unless there are comments/questions:

• I learned more Finnish.
• Lots of things with our child.
  • I helped teach him to swim.
  • He learned to tell the time with an analog clock/watch.
  • I took him to a circus for the first (only) time ever.
  • He cut his hair for the first time in six years.
  • He spent his a birthday with my parents, in the UK - His languages skills were on top-form, understanding the various UK accents.
  • And another with family here in Finland - Where he watched me roll, naked, in the snow after sauna, and then he asked "Daddy why you did that?"

On the topic of Finnish I'm getting pretty damn good at understanding, albeit less good in speaking. Finnish is all about the suffixes, so:

• A car
  • auto
• My car
  • autoni
• In a car
  • autossa
• In my car
  • autossani
• With my car
  • autoll ni
• From a car
  • autosta
• Car-less
  • autoton

Most of this is regular, so you can be childless via the "ton" suffix - lapsiton is "lapsi" (child) "ton" (less). The hard part in communication is thus twofold:

• Knowing the word you want to use, be it car, cake, spoon, or smile.
• Getting the appropriate suffix for the use you want.

Our child turned six recently, and most of the year was spent doing things with him, for him, and to him. He's on the verge of learning to read (English and Finnish), he's interested in maths and completes little puzzles freely and happily. He likes to help with Sodoku, for example and not just the child-versions. In the past couple of weeks I let him play Super Mario & Super Mario Bros 3, on a NES Classic, and he dies constantly, with a smile on his face. But he does love to tell me what to do when he watches me play! He's learned to ice-skate, and ski, and almost learned to swim. (I'll say he can swim 3m inside a pool, without aid, but then he starts to sink.) We've got a couple of regular rituals with each other - including going to sauna every week or two, and other similar things. He's gotten more interested in helping me cook, and his mother too. (My wife and I live in separate houses..) I guess the next big milestone will be him walking to school by himself, which will start next year. As things stand I wake up early, go over to his house, and do all the morning-things, before I take him there. I expect I'll still want to go there, give him his breakfast, his medicine, and help him get dressed. After that I guess I kick him out, and he makes his own way there. Happily the walk to school is a few hundred meters, and doesn't involve crossing any roads. But of course it does bring other complications: if he's not collected, and walks home himself, then he needs a key to one/other house, and there's the potential need for a phone to say "I'm late", "I'm lost", or us to say "Where are you?". Anyway .. interesting year .. good year. Despite everything else.

I use GnuPG to compute cryptographic signatures for my emails, git commits/tags, and software release artifacts (tarballs). Part of GnuPG is gpg-agent which talks to OpenSSH, which I login to remote servers and to clone git repositories. I dislike storing cryptographic keys on general-purpose machines, and have used hardware-backed OpenPGP keys since around 2006 when I got a FSFE Fellowship Card. GnuPG via gpg-agent handles this well, and the private key never leaves the hardware. The ZeitControl cards were (to my knowledge) proprietary hardware running some non-free operating system and OpenPGP implementation. By late 2012 the YubiKey NEO supported OpenPGP, and while the hardware and operating system on it was not free, at least it ran a free software OpenPGP implementation and eventually I setup my primary RSA key on it. This worked well for a couple of years, and when I in 2019 wished to migrate to a new key, the FST-01G device with open hardware running free software that supported Ed25519 had become available. I created a key and have been using the FST-01G on my main laptop since then. This little device has been working, the signature counter on it is around 14501 which means around 10 signatures/day since then! Currently I am in the process of migrating towards a new laptop, and moving the FST-01G device between them is cumbersome, especially if I want to use both laptops in parallel. That s why I need to setup a new hardware device to hold my OpenPGP key, which can go with my new laptop. This is a good time to re-visit alternatives. I quickly decided that I did not want to create a new key, only to import my current one to keep everything working. My requirements on the device to chose hasn t changed since 2019, see my summary at the end of the earlier blog post. Unfortunately the FST-01G is out of stock and the newer FST-01SZ has also out of stock. While Tillitis looks promising (and I have one to play with), it does not support OpenPGP (yet). What to do? Fortunately, I found some FST-01SZ device in my drawer, and decided to use it pending a more satisfactory answer. Hopefully once I get around to generate a new OpenPGP key in a year or so, I will do a better survey of options that are available on the market then. What are your (freedom-respecting) OpenPGP hardware recommendations?

FST-01SZ circuit board

Similar to setting up the FST-01G, the FST-01SZ needs to be setup before use. I m doing the following from Trisquel 11 but any GNU/Linux system would work. When the device is inserted at first time, some kernel messages are shown (see /var/log/syslog or use the dmesg command):

usb 3-3: new full-speed USB device number 39 using xhci_hcd
usb 3-3: New USB device found, idVendor=234b, idProduct=0004, bcdDevice= 2.00
usb 3-3: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
usb 3-3: Product: Fraucheky
usb 3-3: Manufacturer: Free Software Initiative of Japan
usb 3-3: SerialNumber: FSIJ-0.0
usb-storage 3-3:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
scsi host1: usb-storage 3-3:1.0
scsi 1:0:0:0: Direct-Access     FSIJ     Fraucheky        1.0  PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
sd 1:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
sd 1:0:0:0: [sdc] 128 512-byte logical blocks: (65.5 kB/64.0 KiB)
sd 1:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off
sd 1:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
sd 1:0:0:0: [sdc] No Caching mode page found
sd 1:0:0:0: [sdc] Assuming drive cache: write through
 sdc:
sd 1:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI removable disk

Interestingly, the NeuG software installed on the device I got appears to be version 1.0.9:

jas@kaka:~$ head /media/jas/Fraucheky/README
NeuG - a true random number generator implementation
						  Version 1.0.9
						     2018-11-20
					           Niibe Yutaka
			      Free Software Initiative of Japan
What's NeuG?
============
jas@kaka:~$ 

I could not find version 1.0.9 published anywhere, but the device came with a SD-card that contain a copy of the source, so I uploaded it until a more canonical place is located. Putting the device in the serial mode can be done using a sudo eject /dev/sdc command which results in the following syslog output.

usb 3-3: reset full-speed USB device number 39 using xhci_hcd
usb 3-3: device firmware changed
usb 3-3: USB disconnect, device number 39
sdc: detected capacity change from 128 to 0
usb 3-3: new full-speed USB device number 40 using xhci_hcd
usb 3-3: New USB device found, idVendor=234b, idProduct=0001, bcdDevice= 2.00
usb 3-3: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
usb 3-3: Product: NeuG True RNG
usb 3-3: Manufacturer: Free Software Initiative of Japan
usb 3-3: SerialNumber: FSIJ-1.0.9-42315277
cdc_acm 3-3:1.0: ttyACM0: USB ACM device

Now download Gnuk, verify its integrity and build it. You may need some additional packages installed, try apt-get install gcc-arm-none-eabi openocd python3-usb. As you can see, I m using the stable 1.2 branch of Gnuk, currently on version 1.2.20. The ./configure parameters deserve some explanation. The kdf_do=required sets up the device to require KDF usage. The --enable-factory-reset allows me to use the command factory-reset (with admin PIN) inside gpg --card-edit to completely wipe the card. Some may consider that too dangerous, but my view is that if someone has your admin PIN it is game over anyway. The --vidpid=234b:0000 is specifies the USB VID/PID to use, and --target=FST_01SZ is critical to set the platform (you ll may brick the device if you pick the wrong --target setting).

jas@kaka:~/src$ rm -rf gnuk neug
jas@kaka:~/src$ git clone https://gitlab.com/jas/neug.git
Cloning into 'neug'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 2034, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (2034/2034), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (603/603), done.
remote: Total 2034 (delta 1405), reused 2013 (delta 1405), pack-reused 0
Receiving objects: 100% (2034/2034), 910.34 KiB   3.50 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (1405/1405), done.
jas@kaka:~/src$ git clone https://salsa.debian.org/gnuk-team/gnuk/gnuk.git
Cloning into 'gnuk'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 13765, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (959/959), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (337/337), done.
remote: Total 13765 (delta 629), reused 907 (delta 599), pack-reused 12806
Receiving objects: 100% (13765/13765), 12.59 MiB   3.05 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (10077/10077), done.
jas@kaka:~/src$ cd neug
jas@kaka:~/src/neug$ git describe 
release/1.0.9
jas@kaka:~/src/neug$ git tag -v  git describe 
object 5d51022a97a5b7358d0ea62bbbc00628c6cec06a
type commit
tag release/1.0.9
tagger NIIBE Yutaka <gniibe@fsij.org> 1542701768 +0900
Version 1.0.9.
gpg: Signature made Tue Nov 20 09:16:08 2018 CET
gpg:                using EDDSA key 249CB3771750745D5CDD323CE267B052364F028D
gpg:                issuer "gniibe@fsij.org"
gpg: Good signature from "NIIBE Yutaka <gniibe@fsij.org>" [unknown]
gpg:                 aka "NIIBE Yutaka <gniibe@debian.org>" [unknown]
gpg: WARNING: This key is not certified with a trusted signature!
gpg:          There is no indication that the signature belongs to the owner.
Primary key fingerprint: 249C B377 1750 745D 5CDD  323C E267 B052 364F 028D
jas@kaka:~/src/neug$ cd ../gnuk/
jas@kaka:~/src/gnuk$ git checkout STABLE-BRANCH-1-2 
Branch 'STABLE-BRANCH-1-2' set up to track remote branch 'STABLE-BRANCH-1-2' from 'origin'.
Switched to a new branch 'STABLE-BRANCH-1-2'
jas@kaka:~/src/gnuk$ git describe
release/1.2.20
jas@kaka:~/src/gnuk$ git tag -v  git describe 
object 9d3c08bd2beb73ce942b016d4328f0a596096c02
type commit
tag release/1.2.20
tagger NIIBE Yutaka <gniibe@fsij.org> 1650594032 +0900
Gnuk: Version 1.2.20
gpg: Signature made Fri Apr 22 04:20:32 2022 CEST
gpg:                using EDDSA key 249CB3771750745D5CDD323CE267B052364F028D
gpg: Good signature from "NIIBE Yutaka <gniibe@fsij.org>" [unknown]
gpg:                 aka "NIIBE Yutaka <gniibe@debian.org>" [unknown]
gpg: WARNING: This key is not certified with a trusted signature!
gpg:          There is no indication that the signature belongs to the owner.
Primary key fingerprint: 249C B377 1750 745D 5CDD  323C E267 B052 364F 028D
jas@kaka:~/src/gnuk/src$ git submodule update --init
Submodule 'chopstx' (https://salsa.debian.org/gnuk-team/chopstx/chopstx.git) registered for path '../chopstx'
Cloning into '/home/jas/src/gnuk/chopstx'...
Submodule path '../chopstx': checked out 'e12a7e0bb3f004c7bca41cfdb24c8b66daf3db89'
jas@kaka:~/src/gnuk$ cd chopstx
jas@kaka:~/src/gnuk/chopstx$ git describe
release/1.21
jas@kaka:~/src/gnuk/chopstx$ git tag -v  git describe 
object e12a7e0bb3f004c7bca41cfdb24c8b66daf3db89
type commit
tag release/1.21
tagger NIIBE Yutaka <gniibe@fsij.org> 1650593697 +0900
Chopstx: Version 1.21
gpg: Signature made Fri Apr 22 04:14:57 2022 CEST
gpg:                using EDDSA key 249CB3771750745D5CDD323CE267B052364F028D
gpg: Good signature from "NIIBE Yutaka <gniibe@fsij.org>" [unknown]
gpg:                 aka "NIIBE Yutaka <gniibe@debian.org>" [unknown]
gpg: WARNING: This key is not certified with a trusted signature!
gpg:          There is no indication that the signature belongs to the owner.
Primary key fingerprint: 249C B377 1750 745D 5CDD  323C E267 B052 364F 028D
jas@kaka:~/src/gnuk/chopstx$ cd ../src
jas@kaka:~/src/gnuk/src$ kdf_do=required ./configure --enable-factory-reset --vidpid=234b:0000 --target=FST_01SZ
Header file is: board-fst-01sz.h
Debug option disabled
Configured for bare system (no-DFU)
PIN pad option disabled
CERT.3 Data Object is NOT supported
Card insert/removal by HID device is NOT supported
Life cycle management is supported
Acknowledge button is supported
KDF DO is required before key import/generation
jas@kaka:~/src/gnuk/src$ make   less
jas@kaka:~/src/gnuk/src$ cd ../regnual/
jas@kaka:~/src/gnuk/regnual$ make   less
jas@kaka:~/src/gnuk/regnual$ cd ../../
jas@kaka:~/src$ sudo python3 neug/tool/neug_upgrade.py -f gnuk/regnual/regnual.bin gnuk/src/build/gnuk.bin
gnuk/regnual/regnual.bin: 4608
gnuk/src/build/gnuk.bin: 109568
CRC32: b93ca829
Device: 
Configuration: 1
Interface: 1
20000e00:20005000
Downloading flash upgrade program...
start 20000e00
end   20002000
# 20002000: 32 : 4
Run flash upgrade program...
Wait 1 second...
Wait 1 second...
Device: 
08001000:08020000
Downloading the program
start 08001000
end   0801ac00
jas@kaka:~/src$ 

The kernel log will contain the following, and the card is ready to use as an OpenPGP card. You may unplug it and re-insert it as you wish.

usb 3-3: reset full-speed USB device number 41 using xhci_hcd
usb 3-3: device firmware changed
usb 3-3: USB disconnect, device number 41
usb 3-3: new full-speed USB device number 42 using xhci_hcd
usb 3-3: New USB device found, idVendor=234b, idProduct=0000, bcdDevice= 2.00
usb 3-3: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
usb 3-3: Product: Gnuk Token
usb 3-3: Manufacturer: Free Software Initiative of Japan
usb 3-3: SerialNumber: FSIJ-1.2.20-42315277

Setting up the card is the next step, and there are many tutorials around for this, eventually I settled with the following sequence. Let s start with setting the admin PIN. First make sure that pcscd nor scdaemon is running, which is good hygien since those processes cache some information and with a stale connection this easily leads to confusion. Cache invalidation sigh.

jas@kaka:~$ gpg-connect-agent "SCD KILLSCD" "SCD BYE" /bye
jas@kaka:~$ ps auxww grep -e pcsc -e scd
jas        30221  0.0  0.0   3468  1692 pts/3    R+   11:49   0:00 grep --color=auto -e pcsc -e scd
jas@kaka:~$ gpg --card-edit
Reader ...........: 234B:0000:FSIJ-1.2.20-42315277:0
Application ID ...: D276000124010200FFFE423152770000
Application type .: OpenPGP
Version ..........: 2.0
Manufacturer .....: unmanaged S/N range
Serial number ....: 42315277
Name of cardholder: [not set]
Language prefs ...: [not set]
Salutation .......: 
URL of public key : [not set]
Login data .......: [not set]
Signature PIN ....: forced
Key attributes ...: rsa2048 rsa2048 rsa2048
Max. PIN lengths .: 127 127 127
PIN retry counter : 3 3 3
Signature counter : 0
KDF setting ......: off
Signature key ....: [none]
Encryption key....: [none]
Authentication key: [none]
General key info..: [none]
gpg/card> admin
Admin commands are allowed
gpg/card> kdf-setup
gpg/card> passwd
gpg: OpenPGP card no. D276000124010200FFFE423152770000 detected
1 - change PIN
2 - unblock PIN
3 - change Admin PIN
4 - set the Reset Code
Q - quit
Your selection? 3
PIN changed.
1 - change PIN
2 - unblock PIN
3 - change Admin PIN
4 - set the Reset Code
Q - quit
Your selection? 

Now it would be natural to setup the PIN and reset code. However the Gnuk software is configured to not allow this until the keys are imported. You would get the following somewhat cryptical error messages if you try. This took me a while to understand, since this is device-specific, and some other OpenPGP implementations allows you to configure a PIN and reset code before key import.

Your selection? 4
Error setting the Reset Code: Card error
1 - change PIN
2 - unblock PIN
3 - change Admin PIN
4 - set the Reset Code
Q - quit
Your selection? 1
Error changing the PIN: Conditions of use not satisfied
1 - change PIN
2 - unblock PIN
3 - change Admin PIN
4 - set the Reset Code
Q - quit
Your selection? q

Continue to configure the card and make it ready for key import. Some settings deserve comments. The lang field may be used to setup the language, but I have rarely seen it use, and I set it to sv (Swedish) mostly to be able to experiment if any software adhears to it. The URL is important to point to somewhere where your public key is stored, the fetch command of gpg --card-edit downloads it and sets up GnuPG with it when you are on a clean new laptop. The forcesig command changes the default so that a PIN code is not required for every digital signature operation, remember that I averaged 10 signatures per day for the past 2-3 years? Think of the wasted energy typing those PIN codes every time! Changing the cryptographic key type is required when I import 25519-based keys.

gpg/card> name
Cardholder's surname: Josefsson
Cardholder's given name: Simon
gpg/card> lang
Language preferences: sv
gpg/card> sex
Salutation (M = Mr., F = Ms., or space): m
gpg/card> login
Login data (account name): jas
gpg/card> url
URL to retrieve public key: https://josefsson.org/key-20190320.txt
gpg/card> forcesig
gpg/card> key-attr
Changing card key attribute for: Signature key
Please select what kind of key you want:
   (1) RSA
   (2) ECC
Your selection? 2
Please select which elliptic curve you want:
   (1) Curve 25519
   (4) NIST P-384
Your selection? 1
The card will now be re-configured to generate a key of type: ed25519
Note: There is no guarantee that the card supports the requested size.
      If the key generation does not succeed, please check the
      documentation of your card to see what sizes are allowed.
Changing card key attribute for: Encryption key
Please select what kind of key you want:
   (1) RSA
   (2) ECC
Your selection? 2
Please select which elliptic curve you want:
   (1) Curve 25519
   (4) NIST P-384
Your selection? 1
The card will now be re-configured to generate a key of type: cv25519
Changing card key attribute for: Authentication key
Please select what kind of key you want:
   (1) RSA
   (2) ECC
Your selection? 2
Please select which elliptic curve you want:
   (1) Curve 25519
   (4) NIST P-384
Your selection? 1
The card will now be re-configured to generate a key of type: ed25519
gpg/card> 
Reader ...........: 234B:0000:FSIJ-1.2.20-42315277:0
Application ID ...: D276000124010200FFFE423152770000
Application type .: OpenPGP
Version ..........: 2.0
Manufacturer .....: unmanaged S/N range
Serial number ....: 42315277
Name of cardholder: Simon Josefsson
Language prefs ...: sv
Salutation .......: Mr.
URL of public key : https://josefsson.org/key-20190320.txt
Login data .......: jas
Signature PIN ....: not forced
Key attributes ...: ed25519 cv25519 ed25519
Max. PIN lengths .: 127 127 127
PIN retry counter : 3 3 3
Signature counter : 0
KDF setting ......: on
Signature key ....: [none]
Encryption key....: [none]
Authentication key: [none]
General key info..: [none]
gpg/card> 

The device is now ready for key import! Bring out your offline laptop and boot it and use the keytocard command on the subkeys to import them. This assumes you saved a copy of the GnuPG home directory after generating the master and subkeys before, which I did in my own previous tutorial when I generated the keys. This may be a bit unusual, and there are simpler ways to do this (e.g., import a copy of the secret keys into a fresh GnuPG home directory).

$ cp -a gnupghome-backup-mastersubkeys gnupghome-import-fst01sz-42315277-2022-12-24
$ ps auxww grep -e pcsc -e scd
$ gpg --homedir $PWD/gnupghome-import-fst01sz-42315277-2022-12-24 --edit-key B1D2BD1375BECB784CF4F8C4D73CF638C53C06BE
...
Secret key is available.
gpg: checking the trustdb
gpg: marginals needed: 3  completes needed: 1  trust model: pgp
gpg: depth: 0  valid:   1  signed:   0  trust: 0-, 0q, 0n, 0m, 0f, 1u
sec  ed25519/D73CF638C53C06BE
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: SC  
     trust: ultimate      validity: expired
ssb  cv25519/02923D7EE76EBD60
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: E   
ssb  ed25519/80260EE8A9B92B2B
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: A   
ssb  ed25519/51722B08FE4745A2
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: S   
[ expired] (1). Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>
gpg> key 1
sec  ed25519/D73CF638C53C06BE
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: SC  
     trust: ultimate      validity: expired
ssb* cv25519/02923D7EE76EBD60
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: E   
ssb  ed25519/80260EE8A9B92B2B
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: A   
ssb  ed25519/51722B08FE4745A2
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: S   
[ expired] (1). Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>
gpg> keytocard
Please select where to store the key:
   (2) Encryption key
Your selection? 2
sec  ed25519/D73CF638C53C06BE
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: SC  
     trust: ultimate      validity: expired
ssb* cv25519/02923D7EE76EBD60
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: E   
ssb  ed25519/80260EE8A9B92B2B
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: A   
ssb  ed25519/51722B08FE4745A2
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: S   
[ expired] (1). Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>
gpg> key 1
sec  ed25519/D73CF638C53C06BE
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: SC  
     trust: ultimate      validity: expired
ssb  cv25519/02923D7EE76EBD60
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: E   
ssb  ed25519/80260EE8A9B92B2B
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: A   
ssb  ed25519/51722B08FE4745A2
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: S   
[ expired] (1). Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>
gpg> key 2

sec  ed25519/D73CF638C53C06BE
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: SC  
     trust: ultimate      validity: expired
ssb  cv25519/02923D7EE76EBD60
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: E   
ssb* ed25519/80260EE8A9B92B2B
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: A   
ssb  ed25519/51722B08FE4745A2
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: S   
[ expired] (1). Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>
gpg> keytocard
Please select where to store the key:
   (3) Authentication key
Your selection? 3
sec  ed25519/D73CF638C53C06BE
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: SC  
     trust: ultimate      validity: expired
ssb  cv25519/02923D7EE76EBD60
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: E   
ssb* ed25519/80260EE8A9B92B2B
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: A   
ssb  ed25519/51722B08FE4745A2
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: S   
[ expired] (1). Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>
gpg> key 2
sec  ed25519/D73CF638C53C06BE
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: SC  
     trust: ultimate      validity: expired
ssb  cv25519/02923D7EE76EBD60
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: E   
ssb  ed25519/80260EE8A9B92B2B
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: A   
ssb  ed25519/51722B08FE4745A2
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: S   
[ expired] (1). Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>
gpg> key 3
sec  ed25519/D73CF638C53C06BE
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: SC  
     trust: ultimate      validity: expired
ssb  cv25519/02923D7EE76EBD60
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: E   
ssb  ed25519/80260EE8A9B92B2B
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: A   
ssb* ed25519/51722B08FE4745A2
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: S   
[ expired] (1). Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>
gpg> keytocard
Please select where to store the key:
   (1) Signature key
   (3) Authentication key
Your selection? 1
sec  ed25519/D73CF638C53C06BE
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: SC  
     trust: ultimate      validity: expired
ssb  cv25519/02923D7EE76EBD60
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: E   
ssb  ed25519/80260EE8A9B92B2B
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: A   
ssb* ed25519/51722B08FE4745A2
     created: 2019-03-20  expired: 2019-10-22  usage: S   
[ expired] (1). Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>
gpg> quit
Save changes? (y/N) y
$ 

Now insert it into your daily laptop and have GnuPG and learn about the new private keys and forget about any earlier locally available card bindings this usually manifests itself by GnuPG asking you to insert a OpenPGP card with another serial number. Earlier I did rm -rf ~/.gnupg/private-keys-v1.d/ but the scd serialno followed by learn --force is nicer. I also sets up trust setting for my own key.

jas@kaka:~$ gpg-connect-agent "scd serialno" "learn --force" /bye
...
jas@kaka:~$ echo "B1D2BD1375BECB784CF4F8C4D73CF638C53C06BE:6:"   gpg --import-ownertrust
jas@kaka:~$ gpg --card-status
Reader ...........: 234B:0000:FSIJ-1.2.20-42315277:0
Application ID ...: D276000124010200FFFE423152770000
Application type .: OpenPGP
Version ..........: 2.0
Manufacturer .....: unmanaged S/N range
Serial number ....: 42315277
Name of cardholder: Simon Josefsson
Language prefs ...: sv
Salutation .......: Mr.
URL of public key : https://josefsson.org/key-20190320.txt
Login data .......: jas
Signature PIN ....: not forced
Key attributes ...: ed25519 cv25519 ed25519
Max. PIN lengths .: 127 127 127
PIN retry counter : 5 5 5
Signature counter : 3
KDF setting ......: on
Signature key ....: A3CC 9C87 0B9D 310A BAD4  CF2F 5172 2B08 FE47 45A2
      created ....: 2019-03-20 23:40:49
Encryption key....: A9EC 8F4D 7F1E 50ED 3DEF  49A9 0292 3D7E E76E BD60
      created ....: 2019-03-20 23:40:26
Authentication key: CA7E 3716 4342 DF31 33DF  3497 8026 0EE8 A9B9 2B2B
      created ....: 2019-03-20 23:40:37
General key info..: sub  ed25519/51722B08FE4745A2 2019-03-20 Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>
sec#  ed25519/D73CF638C53C06BE  created: 2019-03-20  expires: 2023-09-19
ssb>  ed25519/80260EE8A9B92B2B  created: 2019-03-20  expires: 2023-09-19
                                card-no: FFFE 42315277
ssb>  ed25519/51722B08FE4745A2  created: 2019-03-20  expires: 2023-09-19
                                card-no: FFFE 42315277
ssb>  cv25519/02923D7EE76EBD60  created: 2019-03-20  expires: 2023-09-19
                                card-no: FFFE 42315277
jas@kaka:~$ 

Verify that you can digitally sign and authenticate using the key and you are done!

jas@kaka:~$ echo foo gpg -a --sign gpg --verify
gpg: Signature made Sat Dec 24 13:49:59 2022 CET
gpg:                using EDDSA key A3CC9C870B9D310ABAD4CF2F51722B08FE4745A2
gpg: Good signature from "Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>" [ultimate]
jas@kaka:~$ ssh-add -L
ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAILzCFcHHrKzVSPDDarZPYqn89H5TPaxwcORgRg+4DagE cardno:FFFE42315277
jas@kaka:~$ 

So time to relax and celebrate christmas? Hold on not so fast! Astute readers will have noticed that the output said PIN retry counter: 5 5 5 . That s not the default PIN retry counter for Gnuk! How did that happen? Indeed, good catch and great question, my dear reader. I wanted to include how you can modify the Gnuk source code, re-build it and re-flash the Gnuk as well. This method is different than flashing Gnuk onto a device that is running NeuG so the commands I used to flash the firmware in the start of this blog post no longer works in a device running Gnuk. Fortunately modern Gnuk supports updating firmware by specifying the Admin PIN code only, and provides a simple script to achieve this as well. The PIN retry counter setting is hard coded in the openpgp-do.c file, and we run a a perl command to modify the file, rebuild Gnuk and upgrade the FST-01SZ. This of course wipes all your settings, so you will have the opportunity to practice all the commands earlier in this post once again!

jas@kaka:~/src/gnuk/src$ perl -pi -e 's/PASSWORD_ERRORS_MAX 3/PASSWORD_ERRORS_MAX 5/' openpgp-do.c
jas@kaka:~/src/gnuk/src$ make   less
jas@kaka:~/src/gnuk/src$ cd ../tool/
jas@kaka:~/src/gnuk/tool$ ./upgrade_by_passwd.py 
Admin password: 
Device: 
Configuration: 1
Interface: 0
../regnual/regnual.bin: 4608
../src/build/gnuk.bin: 110592
CRC32: b93ca829
Device: 
Configuration: 1
Interface: 0
20002a00:20005000
Downloading flash upgrade program...
start 20002a00
end   20003c00
Run flash upgrade program...
Waiting for device to appear:
  Wait 1 second...
  Wait 1 second...
Device: 
08001000:08020000
Downloading the program
start 08001000
end   0801b000
Protecting device
Finish flashing
Resetting device
Update procedure finished
jas@kaka:~/src/gnuk/tool$

Now finally, I wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy Hacking!

Merry Christmas to you all. Here is a small gift to all those with IP cameras following the ONVIF specification. There is finally a nice command line and GUI tool in Debian to manage ONVIF IP cameras. After working with upstream for a few months and sponsoring the upload, I am very happy to report that the libonvif package entered Debian Sid last night. The package provide a C library to communicate with such cameras, a command line tool to locate and update settings of (like password) the cameras and a GUI tool to configure and control the units as well as preview the video from the camera. Libonvif is available on Both Linux and Windows and the GUI tool uses the Qt library. The main competitors are non-free software, while libonvif is GNU GPL licensed. I am very glad Debian users in the future can control their cameras using a free software system provided by Debian. But the ONVIF world is full of slightly broken firmware, where the cameras pretend to follow the ONVIF specification but fail to set some configuration values or refuse to provide video to more than one recipient at the time, and the onvif project is quite young and might take a while before it completely work with your camera. Upstream seem eager to improve the library, so handling any broken camera might be just a bug report away. The package just cleared NEW, and need a new source only upload before it can enter testing. This will happen in the next few days. As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

I have been quite busy! I have been working on several projects so my cover image is a lovely sunset where I live. Debian: I have updated and uploaded several packages and working on more.

• Umbrello
• Squashfuse with the help of Scott Moser ( Thanks! )
• libappimage
• plasma-bigscreen WIP

KDE Snaps: I have reworked the CI to now do Core22 snaps! They will publish to the beta channel until we get them tested. First snap completed is the ever important KDE Frameworks / QT content snap + SDK! Applications will start after I tackle the kde-neon extention in snapcraft. GUI-Testing: I have begun learning/writing some GUI tests using python and https://invent.kde.org/sdk/selenium-webdriver-at-spi/, inspired by one of my favorite people, Harald. See https://apachelog.wordpress.com/2022/12/14/selenium-at-spi-gui-testing/ for more info and I hope to get these in repos near you soon! In closing, I am still seeking employment/sponsor amidst this terrible layoff season. If anyone knows of anyone with my diverse skill set please let me know. In the meantime if you can spare anything to keep the lights on I would be ever so grateful. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sgmoore Cash App: $ScarlettMoore0903 Stripe: https://buy.stripe.com/28o16y3PHcISfaE8ww Thank you, I want to wish everyone a very merry < insert your holiday here > !!!

Review: Tess of the Road, by Rachel Hartman

Series:	Tess of the Road #1
Publisher:	Random House
Copyright:	2018
Printing:	2022
ISBN:	1-101-93130-2
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	536

Tess of the Road is the first book of a YA fantasy duology set in the same universe as Seraphina and Shadow Scale. It's hard to decide what to say about reading order (and I now appreciate the ambiguous answers I got). Tess of the Road is a sequel to Seraphina and Shadow Scale in the sense that there are numerous references to the previous duology, but it has a different protagonist and different concerns. You don't need to read the other duology first, but Tess of the Road will significantly spoil the resolution of the romance plot in Seraphina, and it will be obvious that you've skipped over background material. That said, Shadow Scale is not a very good book, and this is a much better book. I guess the summary is this: if you're going to read the first duology, read it first, but don't feel obligated to do so. Tess was always a curious, adventurous, and some would say unmanageable girl, nothing like her twin. Jeanne is modest, obedient, virtuous, and practically perfect in every way. Tess is not; after a teenage love affair resulting in an out-of-wedlock child and a boy who disappeared rather than marry her, their mother sees no alternative but to lie about which of the twins is older. If Jeanne can get a good match among the nobility, the family finances may be salvaged. Tess's only remaining use is to help her sister find a match, and then she can be shuffled off to a convent. Tess throws herself into court politics and does exactly what she's supposed to. She engineers not only a match, but someone Jeanne sincerely likes. Tess has never lacked competence. But this changes nothing about her mother's view of her, and Tess is depressed, worn, and desperately miserable in Jeanne's moment of triumph. Jeanne wants Tess to stay and become the governess of her eventual children, retaining their twin bond of the two of them against the world. Their older sister Seraphina, more perceptively, tries to help her join an explorer's expedition. Tess, in a drunken spiral of misery, insults everyone and runs away, with only a new pair of boots and a pack of food. This is going to be one of those reviews where the things I didn't like are exactly the things other readers liked. I see why people loved this book, and I wish I had loved it too. Instead, I liked parts of it a great deal and found other parts frustrating or a bit too off-putting. Mostly this is a preference problem rather than a book problem. My most objective complaint is the pacing, which was also my primary complaint about Shadow Scale. It was not hard to see where Hartman was going with the story, I like that story, I was on board with going there, but getting there took for-EV-er. This is a 536 page book that I would have edited to less than 300 pages. It takes nearly a hundred pages to get Tess on the road, and while some of that setup is necessary, I did not want to wallow in Tess's misery and appalling home life for quite that long. A closely related problem is that Hartman continues to love flashbacks. Even after Tess has made her escape, we get the entire history of her awful teenage years slowly dribbled out over most of the book. Sometimes this is revelatory; mostly it's depressing. I had guessed the outlines of what had happened early in the book (it's not hard), and that was more than enough motivation for me, but Hartman was determined to make the reader watch every crisis and awful moment in detail. This is exactly what some readers want, and sometimes it's even what I want, but not here. I found the middle of the book, where the story is mostly flashbacks and flailing, to be an emotional slog. Part of the problem is that Tess has an abusive mother and goes through the standard abuse victim process of being sure that she's the one who's wrong and that her mother is justified in her criticism. This is certainly realistic, and it eventually lead to some satisfying catharsis as Tess lets go of her negative self-image. But Tess's mother is a narcissistic religious fanatic with a persecution complex and not a single redeeming quality whatsoever, and I loathed reading about her, let alone reading Tess tiptoeing around making excuses for her. The point of this in the story is for Tess to rebuild her self-image, and I get it, and I'm sure this will work for some readers, but I wanted Tess's mother (and the rest of her family except her sisters) to be eaten by dragons. I do not like the emotional experience of hating a character in a book this much. Where Tess of the Road is on firmer ground is when Tess has an opportunity to show her best qualities, such as befriending a quigutl in childhood and, in the sort of impulsive decision that shows her at her best, learning their language. (For those who haven't read the previous books, quigutls are a dog-sized subspecies of dragon that everyone usually treats like intelligent animals, although they're clearly more than that.) Her childhood quigutl friend Pathka becomes her companion on the road, which both gives her wanderings some direction and adds some useful character interaction. Pathka comes with a plot that is another one of those elements that I think will work for some readers but didn't work for me. He's in search of a Great Serpent, a part of quigutl mythology that neither humans or dragons pay attention to. That becomes the major plot of the novel apart from Tess's emotional growth. Pathka also has a fraught relationship with his own family, which I think was supposed to parallel Tess's relationships but never clicked for me. I liked Tess's side of this relationship, but Pathka is weirdly incomprehensible and apparently fickle in ways that I found unsatisfying. I think Hartman was going for an alien tone that didn't quite work for me. This is a book that gets considerably better as it goes along, and the last third of the book was great. I didn't like being dragged through the setup, but I loved the character Tess became. Once she reaches the road crew, this was a book full of things that I love reading about. The contrast between her at the start of the book and the end is satisfying and rewarding. Tess's relationship with her twin Jeanne deserves special mention; their interaction late in the book is note-perfect and much better than I had expected. Unfortunately, Tess of the Road doesn't have a real resolution. It's only the first half of Tess's story, which comes back to that pacing problem. Ah well. I enjoyed this but I didn't love it. The destination was mostly worth the journey, but I thought the journey was much too long and I had to spend too much time in the company of people I hated far more intensely than was comfortable. I also thought the middle of the book sagged, a problem I have now had with two out of three of Hartman's books. But I can see why other readers with slightly different preferences loved it. I'm probably invested enough to read the sequel, although I'm a bit grumbly that the sequel is necessary. Followed by In the Serpent's Wake. Rating: 7 out of 10

Foreword Freexian has been using Tryton for a few years to handle its invoicing and accounting. We have thus also been using the Debian packages maintained by Mathias Behrle and we have been funding some of his work because maintaining an ERP with more than 50 source packages was too much for him to handle alone on his free time. When Mathias discovered our Project Funding initiative, it was quite natural for him to consider applying to be able to bring some much needed improvements to Tryton s Debian packaging. He s running his own consulting company (MBSolutions) so it s easy for him to invoice Freexian to get the money for the funded projects. What follows is Mathias Behrle s description of the projects that he submitted and of the work that he achieved. If you want to contact him, you can reach out to mathiasb@m9s.biz or mbehrle@debian.org. You can also follow him on Mastodon.

Report In January 2022 I applied for two projects in the Freexian Project Funding Initiative.

• Tryton Project 1
  • The starting point of this project was Debian Bug #998319: tryton-server should provide a ready-to-use production-grade server config. To address this problem instead of only providing configuration snippets the idea was to provide a full featured guided setup of a Tryton production environment, thus eliminating the risks of trial and error for the system administrator.
• Tryton Project 2
  • The goal of this project was to complete the available Tryton modules in Debian main with the latest set available from tryton.org and to automate the task of creating new Debian packages from Tryton modules as much as possible.

Accomplishments As the result of Task 1, several new packages emerged:

• tryton-server-postgresql provides the guided setup of a PostgreSQL database backend.
• tryton-server-uwsgi provides the installation and configuration of a robust WSGI server on top of tryton-server.
• tryton-server-nginx provides the configuration of a scalable web frontend to the uwsgi server, including the optional setup of secure access by Letsencrypt certificates.
• tryton-server-all-in-one puts it all together to provide a fully functional Tryton production environment, including a database filled with basic static data. With the installation of this package a robust and secure production grade setup is possible from scratch, all configuration leg work is done in the background.

The work was thoroughly reviewed by Neil Williams. Thanks go to him for his detailed feedback providing very valuable information from the view of a fresh Tryton user getting in first contact with the software. A cordial thank you as well goes to the translation teams providing initial reviews and translations for the configuration questions. The efforts of Task 1 were completed with Task 2:

• A Tryton specific version of PyPi2deb was created to help in the preparation of new Debian packages for new Tryton modules.
• All missing Tryton modules for the current series were packaged for Debian.

On top of those two planned projects, I completed an additional task: the packaging of the Tryton Web Client. The Web Client is a quite important feature to access a Tryton server with the browser and even a crucial requirement for some companies. Unfortunately the packaging of the Web Client for Debian was problematic from the beginning. tryton-sao requires exact versions of JavaScript libraries that are almost never guaranteed to be available in the different targeted Debian releases. Therefore a package with vendored libraries has been created and will hopefully soon hit the Debian main archive. The package is already available from the Tryton Backport Mirror for the usually supported Debian releases.

Summary I am very pleased that the Tryton suite in Debian has gained full coverage of Tryton modules and a user-friendly installation. The completion of the project represents a huge step forward in the state-of-the-art deployment of a production grade Tryton environment. Without the monetary support of Freexian s project funding the realization of this project wouldn t have been possible in this way and to this extent.

tl;dr: Ok-wrapping as needed in today s Rust is a significant distraction, because there are multiple ways to do it. They are all slightly awkward in different ways, so are least-bad in different situations. You must choose a way for every fallible function, and sometimes change a function from one pattern to another. Rust really needs #[throws] as a first-class language feature. Code using #[throws] is simpler and clearer. Please try out withoutboats s fehler. I think you will like it. Contents

• A recent personal experience in coding style
• What is Ok wrapping? Intro to Rust error handling
• A minor inconvenience, or a significant distraction?
  • Idioms for Ok-wrapping - a bestiary
• What is to be done, then?
  • Limitations of fehler
  • Please can we have #[throws] in the Rust language
  • Explicitness
• Appendix - examples showning code with Ok wrapping is worse than code using #[throws]

A recent personal experience in coding style Ever since I read withoutboats s 2020 article about fehler, I have been using it in most of my personal projects. For Reasons I recently had a go at eliminating the dependency on fehler from Hippotat. So, I made a branch, deleted the dependency and imports, and started on the whack-a-mole with the compiler errors. After about a half hour of this, I was starting to feel queasy. After an hour I had decided that basically everything I was doing was making the code worse. And, bizarrely, I kept having to make individual decisons about what idiom to use in each place. I couldn t face it any more. After sleeping on the question I decided that Hippotat would be in Debian with fehler, or not at all. Happily the Debian Rust Team generously helped me out, so the answer is that fehler is now in Debian, so it s fine. For me this experience, of trying to convert Rust-with-#[throws] to Rust-without-#[throws] brought the Ok wrapping problem into sharp focus. What is Ok wrapping? Intro to Rust error handling (You can skip this section if you re already a seasoned Rust programer.) In Rust, fallibility is represented by functions that return Result<SuccessValue, Error>: this is a generic type, representing either whatever SuccessValue is (in the Ok variant of the data-bearing enum) or some Error (in the Err variant). For example, std::fs::read_to_string, which takes a filename and returns the contents of the named file, returns Result<String, std::io::Error>. This is a nice and typesafe formulation of, and generalisation of, the traditional C practice, where a function indicates in its return value whether it succeeded, and errors are indicated with an error code. Result is part of the standard library and there are convenient facilities for checking for errors, extracting successful results, and so on. In particular, Rust has the postfix ? operator, which, when applied to a Result, does one of two things: if the Result was Ok, it yields the inner successful value; if the Result was Err, it returns early from the current function, returning an Err in turn to the caller. This means you can write things like this:

    let input_data = std::fs::read_to_string(input_file)?;

and the error handling is pretty automatic. You get a compiler warning, or a type error, if you forget the ?, so you can t accidentally ignore errors. But, there is a downside. When you are returning a successful outcome from your function, you must convert it into a Result. After all, your fallible function has return type Result<SuccessValue, Error>, which is a different type to SuccessValue. So, for example, inside std::fs::read_to_string, we see this:

        let mut string = String::new();
        file.read_to_string(&mut string)?;
        Ok(string)
     

string has type String; fs::read_to_string must return Result<String, ..>, so at the end of the function we must return Ok(string). This applies to return statements, too: if you want an early successful return from a fallible function, you must write return Ok(whatever). This is particularly annoying for functions that don t actually return a nontrivial value. Normally, when you write a function that doesn t return a value you don t write the return type. The compiler interprets this as syntactic sugar for -> (), ie, that the function returns (), the empty tuple, used in Rust as a dummy value in these kind of situations. A block ( ... ) whose last statement ends in a ; has type (). So, when you fall off the end of a function, the return value is (), without you having to write it. So you simply leave out the stuff in your program about the return value, and your function doesn t have one (i.e. it returns ()). But, a function which either fails with an error, or completes successfuly without returning anything, has return type Result<(), Error>. At the end of such a function, you must explicitly provide the success value. After all, if you just fall off the end of a block, it means the block has value (), which is not of type Result<(), Error>. So the fallible function must end with Ok(()), as we see in the example for std::fs::read_to_string. A minor inconvenience, or a significant distraction? I think the need for Ok-wrapping on all success paths from fallible functions is generally regarded as just a minor inconvenience. Certainly the experienced Rust programmer gets very used to it. However, while trying to remove fehler s #[throws] from Hippotat, I noticed something that is evident in codebases using vanilla Rust (without fehler) but which goes un-remarked. There are multiple ways to write the Ok-wrapping, and the different ways are appropriate in different situations. See the following examples, all taken from a real codebase. (And it s not just me: I do all of these in different places, - when I don t have fehler available - but all these examples are from code written by others.) Idioms for Ok-wrapping - a bestiary Wrap just a returned variable binding If you have the return value in a variable, you can write Ok(reval) at the end of the function, instead of retval.

    pub fn take_until(&mut self, term: u8) -> Result<&'a [u8]>  
        // several lines of code
        Ok(result)
     

If the returned value is not already bound to variable, making a function fallible might mean choosing to bind it to a variable. Wrap a nontrivial return expression Even if it s not just a variable, you can wrap the expression which computes the returned value. This is often done if the returned value is a struct literal:

    fn take_from(r: &mut Reader<'_>) -> Result<Self>  
        // several lines of code
        Ok(AuthChallenge   challenge, methods  )
     

Introduce Ok(()) at the end For functions returning Result<()>, you can write Ok(()). This is usual, but not ubiquitous, since sometimes you can omit it. Wrap the whole body If you don t have the return value in a variable, you can wrap the whole body of the function in Ok( ). Whether this is a good idea depends on how big and complex the body is.

    fn from_str(s: &str) -> std::result::Result<Self, Self::Err>  
        Ok(match s  
            "Authority" => RelayFlags::AUTHORITY,
            // many other branches
            _ => RelayFlags::empty(),
         )
     

Omit the wrap when calling fallible sub-functions If your function wraps another function call of the same return and error type, you don t need to write the Ok at all. Instead, you can simply call the function and not apply ?. You can do this even if your function selects between a number of different sub-functions to call:

    fn fmt(&self, f: &mut std::fmt::Formatter<'_>) -> std::fmt::Result  
        if flags::unsafe_logging_enabled()  
            std::fmt::Display::fmt(&self.0, f)
          else  
            self.0.display_redacted(f)
         
     

But this doesn t work if the returned error type isn t the same, but needs the autoconversion implied by the ? operator. Convert a fallible sub-function error with Ok( ... ?) If the final thing a function does is chain to another fallible function, but with a different error type, the error must be converted somehow. This can be done with ?.

     fn try_from(v: i32) -> Result<Self, Error>  
         Ok(Percentage::new(v.try_into()?))
      

Convert a fallible sub-function error with .map_err Or, rarely, people solve the same problem by converting explicitly with .map_err:

     pub fn create_unbootstrapped(self) -> Result<TorClient<R>>  
         // several lines of code
         TorClient::create_inner(
             // several parameters
         )
         .map_err(ErrorDetail::into)
      

What is to be done, then? The fehler library is in excellent taste and has the answer. With fehler:

• Whether a function is fallible, and what it s error type is, is specified in one place. It is not entangled with the main return value type, nor with the success return paths.
• So the success paths out of a function are not specially marked with error handling boilerplate. The end of function return value, and the expression after return, are automatically wrapped up in Ok. So the body of a fallible function is just like the body of an infallible one, except for places where error handling is actually involved.
• Error returns occur through ? error chaining, and with a new explicit syntax for error return.
• We usually talk about the error we are possibly returning, and avoid talking about Result unless we need to.

fehler provides:

• An attribute macro #[throws(ErrorType)] to make a function fallible in this way.
• A macro throws!(error) for explicitly failing.

This is precisely correct. It is very ergonomic. Consequences include:

• One does not need to decide where to put the Ok-wrapping, since it s automatic rather than explicitly written out.
• Specifically, what idiom to adopt in the body (for example write!(...)?; vs write!(...) in a formatter) does not depend on whether the error needs converting, how complex the body is, and whether the final expression in the function is itself fallible.
• Making an infallible function fallible involves only adding #[throws] to its definition, and ? to its call sites. One does not need to edit the body, or the return type.
• Changing the error returned by a function to a suitably compatible different error type does not involve changing the function body.
• There is no need for a local Result alias shadowing std::result::Result, which means that when one needs to speak of Result explciitly, the code is clearer.

Limitations of fehler But, fehler is a Rust procedural macro, so it cannot get everything right. Sadly there are some wrinkles.

• You can t write #[throws] on a closure.
• Sometimes you can get quite poor error messages if you have a sufficiently broken function body.
• Code inside a macro call isn t properly visible to fehler so sometimes return statements inside macro calls are untreated. This will lead to a type error, so isn t a correctness hazard, but it can be nuisance if you like other syntax extensions eg if_chain.
• #[must_use] #[throws(Error)] fn obtain() -> Thing; ought to mean that Thing must be used, not the Result<Thing, Error>.

But, Rust-with-#[throws] is so much nicer a language than Rust-with-mandatory-Ok-wrapping, that these are minor inconveniences. Please can we have #[throws] in the Rust language This ought to be part of the language, not a macro library. In the compiler, it would be possible to get the all the corner cases right. It would make the feature available to everyone, and it would quickly become idiomatic Rust throughout the community. It is evident from reading writings from the time, particularly those from withoutboats, that there were significant objections to automatic Ok-wrapping. It seems to have become quite political, and some folks burned out on the topic. Perhaps, now, a couple of years later, we can revisit this area and solve this problem in the language itself ? Explicitness An argument I have seen made against automatic Ok-wrapping, and, in general, against any kind of useful language affordance, is that it makes things less explicit. But this argument is fundamentally wrong for Ok-wrapping. Explicitness is not an unalloyed good. We humans have only limited attention. We need to focus that attention where it is actually needed. So explicitness is good in situtions where what is going on is unusual; or would otherwise be hard to read; or is tricky or error-prone. Generally: explicitness is good for things where we need to direct humans attention. But Ok-wrapping is ubiquitous in fallible Rust code. The compiler mechanisms and type systems almost completely defend against mistakes. All but the most novice programmer knows what s going on, and the very novice programmer doesn t need to. Rust s error handling arrangments are designed specifically so that we can avoid worrying about fallibility unless necessary except for the Ok-wrapping. Explicitness about Ok-wrapping directs our attention away from whatever other things the code is doing: it is a distraction. So, explicitness about Ok-wrapping is a bad thing. Appendix - examples showning code with Ok wrapping is worse than code using #[throws] Observe these diffs, from my abandoned attempt to remove the fehler dependency from Hippotat. I have a type alias AE for the usual error type (AE stands for anyhow::Error). In the non-#[throws] code, I end up with a type alias AR<T> for Result<T, AE>, which I think is more opaque but at least that avoids typing out -> Result< , AE> a thousand times. Some people like to have a local Result alias, but that means that the standard Result has to be referred to as StdResult or std::result::Result.

With fehler and #[throws]	Vanilla Rust, Result<>, mandatory Ok-wrapping
Return value clearer, error return less wordy:
impl Parseable for Secret	impl Parseable for Secret
#[throws(AE)]
fn parse(s: Option<&str>) -> Self	fn parse(s: Option<&str>) -> AR<Self>
let s = s.value()?;	let s = s.value()?;
if s.is_empty() throw!(anyhow!( secret value cannot be empty ))	if s.is_empty() return Err(anyhow!( secret value cannot be empty ))
Secret(s.into())	Ok(Secret(s.into()))
No need to wrap whole match statement in Ok( ):
#[throws(AE)]
pub fn client<T>(&self, key: & static str, skl: SKL) -> T	pub fn client<T>(&self, key: & static str, skl: SKL) -> AR<T>
where T: Parseable + Default	where T: Parseable + Default
match self.end	Ok(match self.end
LinkEnd::Client => self.ordinary(key, skl)?,	LinkEnd::Client => self.ordinary(key, skl)?,
LinkEnd::Server => default(),	LinkEnd::Server => default(),
	)
Return value and Ok(()) entirely replaced by #[throws]:
impl Display for Loc	impl Display for Loc
#[throws(fmt::Error)]
fn fmt(&self, f: &mut fmt::Formatter)	fn fmt(&self, f: &mut fmt::Formatter) -> fmt::Result
write!(f, :? : , &self.file, self.lno)?;	write!(f, :? : , &self.file, self.lno)?;
if let Some(s) = &self.section	if let Some(s) = &self.section
write!(f, )?;	write!(f, )?;
	Ok(())
Call to write! now looks the same as in more complex case shown above:
impl Debug for Secret	impl Debug for Secret
#[throws(fmt::Error)]
fn fmt(&self, f: &mut fmt::Formatter)	fn fmt(&self, f: &mut fmt::Formatter)-> fmt::Result
write!(f, "Secret(***)")?;	write!(f, "Secret(***)")
Much tiresome return Ok() noise removed:
impl FromStr for SectionName	impl FromStr for SectionName
type Err = AE;	type Err = AE;
#[throws(AE)]
fn from_str(s: &str) -> Self	fn from_str(s: &str) ->AR< Self>
match s	match s
COMMON => return SN::Common,	COMMON => return Ok(SN::Common),
LIMIT => return SN::GlobalLimit,	LIMIT => return Ok(SN::GlobalLimit),
_ =>	_ =>
;	;
if let Ok(n@ ServerName(_)) = s.parse() return SN::Server(n)	if let Ok(n@ ServerName(_)) = s.parse() return Ok(SN::Server(n))
if let Ok(n@ ClientName(_)) = s.parse() return SN::Client(n)	if let Ok(n@ ClientName(_)) = s.parse() return Ok(SN::Client(n))
if client == LIMIT return SN::ServerLimit(server)	if client == LIMIT return Ok(SN::ServerLimit(server))
let client = client.parse().context( client name in link section name )?;	let client = client.parse().context( client name in link section name )?;
SN::Link(LinkName server, client )	Ok(SN::Link(LinkName server, client ))

edited 2022-12-18 19:58 UTC to improve, and 2022-12-18 23:28 to fix, formatting

comments

Every year or so, I revisit the current best practices for Python packaging. This was my summary for 2021 here s the update for 2022. PyPA PyPA is still the place to go for information, best practices and tutorials for packaging Python projects. My only criticism from last year, namely that PyPA was heavily biased towards their own tooling (e.g. pipenv), has been addressed: the tool recommendations section lists now several tools for the same purpose with their own ones not necessarily being the first anymore. setup.py, setup.cfg, requirements.txt, Pipfile, pyproject.toml oh my! This is the reason why I m revisiting the documentation every year, to see what s the current way to go. Good progress has been made since last year: Bye setup.py and setup.cfg hello pyproject.toml pyproject.toml finally got mature enough to replace setup.py and setup.cfg in most cases. Recent versions of setuptools and pip now fully support pyproject.toml and even PyPA s packaging tutorial completely switched their example project from away setup.py towards pyproject.toml, making it an official recommendation. So, now you can replace your setup.py with pyproject.toml. If you had already some kind of declarative configuration in setup.cfg you can move that as well into pyproject.toml. Most tools, like pypy or pytest also support configuration in pyproject.toml (flake8 being a notable exception ) so there s no reason to keep setup.cfg around anymore. Actually, if you migrate to pyproject.toml it is best to do it properly and remove setup.py and setup.cfg as setuptools behaves a bit buggy when building a package that has either of them and the pyproject.toml. requirements.txt requirements.txt are still needed if you develop a deployable application (vs. a library) and want to provide pinned dependencies, i.e. with the specific versions that you ve tested your application with. Usually, the list of requirements in requirements.txt is the same as defined in pyproject.toml, but with pinned versions. Pipfile + Pipfile.lock I still do completely ignore Pipfile and Pipfile.lock as they are only supported by pipenv and not backed by any standard. Summary The major change this year was the proper support of pyproject.toml. I am slowly replacing all setup.py and setup.cfg in my projects with pyproject.toml and haven t discovered any issues yet. Even packaging those packages as Debian packages is well-supported by Debian s tooling. I m still running a quite boring stack based on pyproject.toml and requirements.txt, ignoring more advanced tools like poetry or such for dependency management. My build-system defined in pyproject.toml requires setuptools and I m using build for building and twine for uploading. Since PyPA changed the packaging tutorial towards pyproject.toml and away from setup.py, I think we will slowly see setup.py and setup.cfg go away over the years. Speaking of PyPA, I m happy that they changed their attitude towards a more unbiased recommendation of tooling.

I m currently reading the second book of the TriSolar Sci-Fi series by Cixin Liu, I ve only just started it so this post can t have spoilers for it and I will also only have minimal spoilers for the first book (nothing more than you will get from pop culture references to it). In the second book there are people called Wall Facers who have broad powers to shape the course of the Human response to an alien invasion in 400+ years time. The idea is that as the aliens have an ability to see everything that can be seen on Earth any ideas that leave the brain of one person can be snooped on, so if some people act independently without communicating their plans they can take the aliens by surprise. While that is probably going to work out well in the books history in general seems to show that people who act independently without any useful feedback from others tend to perform poorly, every king and dictator seems to demonstrate this. Efficient Work I ve been thinking about what I would do if I had significant powers to guide the response to an alien threat in some hundreds of years. The first thing to do would be to get all people working as efficiently as possible. Without the imminent threat of alien invasion we can have debates about how much time to spend working vs leisure time. Should we make 24 hours per week the new normal work week? But if the threat of annihilation is looming then the discussion should be about how to get as many people as possible working as much as possible. Currently 1/4 of the world population lack access to safe drinking water [1], there s a plan to achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all by 2030 . But 2030 isn t soon enough, another 8 years where 1/4 of children born won t reach their potential due to poor water is unacceptable. Currently 13% of the world population don t have access to electricity and 40% don t have access to clean fuels for cooking [2]. Lack of energy access reduces health and opportunities for education. Healthcare is another major obstacle to human development and therefore economic development. Even some allegedly first-world countries like the US lack universal affordable healthcare. I think we could reasonably get safe water to 99% of the world population before 2025 if we tried hard (IE applied a small fraction of the resources of a single war to it). Getting electricity to 95% of the world population and clean cooking fuels to 90% of the world population are probably achievable goals for 2025 as well. Healthcare is a slightly harder problem as we need to train more nurses and doctors. A registered nurse apparently needs 3 years of training after completing high school. We may have to improve high schools to get more students up to the standard of nursing degrees. If it takes 3 years to improve schools in year 9+ and then 3 years to get more high school graduates that would mean that it would take about 9 years to get an increase in nurses. Doing this would require increasing the capacity of universities and making university almost free (as it was for decades). So in about 2031 we could start sending a significant number of nurses from developed countries to help out developing countries. Becoming a doctor apparently requires 8 years of study plus a minimum of 3 years residency . So if doctors were entirely trained in first world countries then we wouldn t be able to send many doctors to developing countries until 2039. If the residency was performed in other countries then it could be as early as 2036. According to the WHO currently only half the world s population have adequate healthcare [3]. To get adequate healthcare to the world we need to more than double the number of doctors because currently we don t have enough in countries with decent healthcare systems such as Australia. It would probably take to at least 2060 to get enough doctors trained. The end goal of course would be to have every country able to train enough of it s citizens to provide all medical services, but countries that have serious widespread healthcare problems that reduce the number of people who can pursue higher education will have difficulty in that until some of the healthcare problems are alleviated. Education Obviously education is important to all achievements. Currently education seems very poorly run, it is possible to create a school system that teaches children effectively without the bullying that is common in Australia and without the sort of pressure that South Korea is infamous for. One of the main issues to resolve with the school system is the idea that everyone should learn at the same speed, that goal can only be achieved by making the majority of the students learn slowly. Students should be able to freely skip ahead as their skill permits and finish school at any age. Also high school isn t for everyone, the tech schools that teach trades need to be brought back. Deceiving Aliens A plot point in the TriSolar series is that the aliens can see each other s thoughts, the local communication (their equivalent to talking) is based on reading each other s thoughts without the possibility of deception. While deceptive written communication is potentially possible for them they haven t developed skills in that area. As a first step towards exploiting this humans could focus more on linguistic development that increases language complexity, such as the way the English language adopts words from other languages and gives them slightly different meanings for example the difference between driver and chauffeur and the difference between dog and hound is not obvious to many Europeans who otherwise speak English fluently. When involved in conversation it s possible to convey meaning without directly stating things, this is used extensively by people who are interested in security. My observations of this are based on conversations with people who do government work, but I imagine that criminal organisations also do similar things for similar reasons. An increased focus on poetry in schools might be helpful in developing skills for conveying ideas to people who think in human ways where the message is unclear to non-humans who have no experience of deception. I wonder whether the ability to understand human poetry would make aliens less hostile to humans, if they can think like us then they would be less likely to want to exterminate us. Poker is a game that depends on the ability to deceive others, I ve never been any good at it. I wonder if making it part of the school curriculum would help improve the overall human ability to deceive aliens. I don t think that such schools would become dens of sociopathy as depicted in Kakegurui, but it might have some negative results. Spreading education to a larger portion of the world s population requires more use of electronic education. Anything learned via text can be more easily assimilated by aliens than things that are learned directly from other people. For high school and the basics of a university degree this is fine. But for more advanced education it seems that having a large face to face component might help keep the value away from the aliens. More Ideas? What do you think I missed on this list? I wasn t trying to list every possibility, just the more important ones. Also for any goals other than increasing inequality for it s own sake we should improve health and education for the world.

• [1] https://ourworldindata.org/water-access
• [2] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-access
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/y7gyrjwu

Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering.

Debian LTS contributors In November, 15 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available:

• Abhijith PA did 0.0h (out of 14.0h assigned), thus carrying over 14.0h to the next month.
• Anton Gladky did 6.0h (out of 15.0h assigned), thus carrying over 9.0h to the next month.
• Ben Hutchings did 9.0h (out of 24.0h assigned), thus carrying over 15.0h to the next month.
• Chris Lamb did 18.0h (out of 18.0h assigned).
• Dominik George did 10.0h (out of 0h assigned and 24.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 14.0h to the next month.
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did 0.0h (out of 38.0h assigned and 19.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 57.5h to the next month.
• Enrico Zini did 0.0h (out of 0h assigned and 8.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.0h to the next month.
• Helmut Grohne did 17.5h (out of 20.0h assigned).
• Markus Koschany did 40.0h (out of 40.0h assigned).
• Ola Lundqvist did 7.5h (out of 11.0h assigned and 5.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 8.5h to the next month.
• Roberto C. S nchez did 20.25h (out of 0.75h assigned and 31.25h from previous period), thus carrying over 11.75h to the next month.
• Stefano Rivera did 2.5h (out of 0h assigned and 17.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 14.5h to the next month.
• Sylvain Beucler did 35.5h (out of 23.0h assigned and 34.5h from previous period), thus carrying over 22.0h to the next month.
• Thorsten Alteholz did 14.0h (out of 14.0h assigned).
• Utkarsh Gupta did 41.0h (out of 32.5h assigned and 25.0h from previous period), thus carrying over 16.5h to the next month.

Evolution of the situation In November, we released 43 DLAs, fixing 183 CVEs. We currently have 63 packages in dla-needed.txt that are waiting for updates, which is 19 fewer than the previous month. We re excited to announce that two Debian Developers Tobias Frost and Guilhem Moulin, have completed the on-boarding process and will begin contributing to LTS as of December 2022. Welcome aboard!

Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

• Platinum sponsors:
  • TOSHIBA (for 87 months)
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  • Linode (for 92 months)
  • Babiel GmbH (for 81 months)
  • Plat Home (for 81 months)
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• Bronze sponsors:
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  • GNI MEDIA (for 79 months)
  • Laboratoire LEGI - UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 79 months)
  • Tesorion (for 79 months)
  • Bearstech (for 70 months)
  • LiHAS (for 70 months)
  • Catalyst IT Ltd (for 65 months)
  • Supagro (for 60 months)
  • Demarcq SAS (for 59 months)
  • Universit Grenoble Alpes (for 45 months)
  • TouchWeb SAS (for 37 months)
  • SPiN AG (for 34 months)
  • CoreFiling (for 29 months)
  • Institut des sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod (for 24 months)
  • Observatoire des Sciences de l Univers de Grenoble (for 21 months)
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  • Alter Way (for 7 months)

On the shortlist of things to try on my new laptop has been Guix. I have been using Guix on my rsnapshot-based backup server since 2018, and experimented using it on a second laptop but never on my primary daily work machine. The main difference with Guix for me, compared to Debian (or Trisquel), is that Guix follows a rolling release model, even though they prepare stable versioned installation images once in a while. It seems the trend for operating system software releases is to either following a Long-Term-Support approach or adopt a rolling approach. Historically I have found that the rolling release approach, such as following Debian testing, has lead to unreliable systems, since little focus was given to system integration stability. This probably changed in the last 10 years or so, and today add-on systems like Homebrew on macOS gives me access to modern releases of free software easily. While I am likely to stay with LTS releases of GNU/Linux on many systems, the experience with rolling Guix (with unattended-upgrades from a cron job to pull in new code continously) on my backup servers has been smooth: no need for re-installation or debugging of installations for over four years! I tried the Guix 1.4 rc2 installation image on top of my previous Trisquel 11 installation; following the guided Guix installation menus was simple. I installed using wired network, since the WiFi dongle I had did not automatically become available. I put the Guix system on a separate partition, that I left empty when I installed Trisquel, and mounted the same /home that I used for Trisquel. Everything booted fine, and while I had some issues doing guix pull followed by guix system reconfigure /etc/config.scm I eventually got it working by using --allow-downgrade once. I believe this was a symptom of using a release candidate installation image. Guix did not auto-detect Trisquel or set up a Grub boot menu for it, and I have been unable to come up with the right Guix bootloader magic to add a Trisquel boot item again. Fortunately, the EFI boot choser allows me to boot Trisquel again. Guix 1.4 uses Linux-libre 6.0 which is newer than Trisquel 11 s Linux-libre 5.15. The WiFi dongle worked automatically once the system was installed. I will continue to tweak the default system configuration that was generated, it seems a standard GNOME installation does not include Evolution on Guix. Everything else I have tested works fine, including closing the lid and suspend and then resume, however the builtin webcam has a distorted image which does not happen on Trisquel. All in all, it seems the resulting system would be usable enough for me. I will be switching between Trisquel and Guix, but expect to spend most of time for daily work within Trisquel because it gives me the stable Debian-like environment that I ve been used to for ~20 years. Sharing the same /home between Trisquel and Guix may have been a mistake: GNOME handles this badly, and the dock will only contain the lowest-common-denominator of available applications, with the rest removed permanently.

The Reproducible Builds project relies on several projects, supporters and sponsors for financial support, but they are also valued as ambassadors who spread the word about our project and the work that we do. This is the sixth instalment in a series featuring the projects, companies and individuals who support the Reproducible Builds project. We started this series by featuring the Civil Infrastructure Platform project and followed this up with a post about the Ford Foundation as well as a recent ones about ARDC, the Google Open Source Security Team (GOSST), Jan Nieuwenhuizen on Bootstrappable Builds, GNU Mes and GNU Guix and Hans-Christoph Steiner of the F-Droid project. Today, however, we will be talking with David A. Wheeler, the Director of Open Source Supply Chain Security at the Linux Foundation.

Holger Levsen: Welcome, David, thanks for taking the time to talk with us today. First, could you briefly tell me about yourself? David: Sure! I m David A. Wheeler and I work for the Linux Foundation as the Director of Open Source Supply Chain Security. That just means that my job is to help open source software projects improve their security, including its development, build, distribution, and incorporation in larger works, all the way out to its eventual use by end-users. In my copious free time I also teach at George Mason University (GMU); in particular, I teach a graduate course on how to design and implement secure software. My background is technical. I have a Bachelor s in Electronics Engineering, a Master s in Computer Science and a PhD in Information Technology. My PhD dissertation is connected to reproducible builds. My PhD dissertation was on countering the Trusting Trust attack, an attack that subverts fundamental build system tools such as compilers. The attack was discovered by Karger & Schell in the 1970s, and later demonstrated & popularized by Ken Thompson. In my dissertation on trusting trust I showed that a process called Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC) could detect trusting trust attacks. That process is a specialized kind of reproducible build specifically designed to detect trusting trust style attacks. In addition, countering the trusting trust attack primarily becomes more important only when reproducible builds become more common. Reproducible builds enable detection of build-time subversions. Most attackers wouldn t bother with a trusting trust attack if they could just directly use a build-time subversion of the software they actually want to subvert.
Holger: Thanks for taking the time to introduce yourself to us. What do you think are the biggest challenges today in computing? There are many big challenges in computing today. For example:

• Lack of resilience & capacity in chip fabrication. Fabs are extraordinarily expensive, and at the high end continue to have technological advancement. As a result, supply is failing to meet demand, and geopolitical issues raise further concerns. We ve seen cars, gaming consoles and many other devices unable to be delivered due to chip shortages. More fabs are being built, and some politicians are raising concerns, but it s unclear that current efforts will be enough.
• Lack of enough developers able to develop the software that people & organizations need. Computers are far faster, and open source software has made software reuse incredibly easy. However, organizations still struggle to automate many tasks. The bottleneck is the lack of enough talented developers able to convert ideas into working software. Low-code and no-code approaches help in specialized areas, just like all previous automate the programmer efforts of the last 60 years, but there s no reason to believe they will help enough.
• Large scale of software. Small systems are easier to develop & maintain, but today s systems increasingly get bigger to meet users needs & are much harder to manage. Even small embedded systems are often supported by huge back-end systems.
• Ending tail of Moore s law & rise of smartphones. Historically people would just wait a few years for their software to speed up, but Moore s law is petering out, and smartphones are necessarily limited by power & size limits. As a result, software developers can t wait for the hardware to save their slow systems; they must redesign. Switching to faster languages, or using multiple processors, is much more difficult than waiting for performance problems to disappear.
• Continuous change in interfaces. Developers continuously find reasons to change component interfaces: perhaps they re too inflexible, too hard to use, and so on. But now that developers are reusing hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of components, managing the continuous change of the reused components is challenging. Package managers make updating easy but don t automatically handle interface changes. I think this is mostly a self-inflicted problem most components could support old interfaces (like the Linux kernel does) but because it s often not acknowledged as a problem, it s often not addressed.
• Security & privacy. Decades ago there were fewer computers and most computers weren t connected to a network. Today things are different. Criminals have found many ways to attack computer systems to make money, and nation-states have found many ways to attack computer systems for their own reasons. Attackers now have very strong motivations to perform attacks. Yet many developers aren t told how to develop software that resists attacks, nor how to protect their supply chains. Operations try to monitor and recover from attacks, but their job is difficult due to inadequately secure software that doesn t support those monitoring & recovery efforts well either. The results are terrible security.

Holger: Do you think reproducible builds are an important part in secure computing today already? David: Yes, but first let s put things in context. Today, when attackers exploit software vulnerabilities, they re primarily exploiting unintentional vulnerabilities that were created by the software developers. There are a lot of efforts to counter this:

• Train & education developers in how to develop secure software. The OpenSSF provides a free course on how to do that (full disclosure: I m the author). Take that course or something like it!
• Add tools to your CI pipeline to detect potential vulnerabilities. Yes, they have false positives and false negatives, so you have to also use your brain but that just means you need to be smart about using tools, instead of not using them.
• Get projects & organizations to update the components they use, since often the vulnerabilities are well-known publicly (e.g., Equifax in 2017). Add some tools to your development process to warn you about components with known vulnerabilities! GitHub & GitLab both provide tools to do this, and there are many other tools.
• When starting new projects, try to use memory-safe languages. On average 70% of the vulnerabilities in Chrome and in Microsoft are from memory safety problems; using a memory-safe language eliminates most of them.

We re just starting to get better at this, which is good. However, attackers always try to attack the easiest target. As our deployed software has started to be hardened against attack, attackers have dramatically increased their attacks on the software supply chain (Sonatype found in 2022 that there s been a 742% increase year-over-year). The software supply chain hasn t historically gotten much attention, making it the easy target. There are simple supply chain attacks with simple solutions:

• In almost every year the top attack has been typosquatting. In typo squatting, an attacker creates packages with almost the right name. This is an easy attack to counter developers just need to double-check the name of a package before adding it. But we aren t warning developers enough about it! For more information, see papers such as the Backstabber s Knife Collection.
• Last year the top software supply chain attack was dependency confusion convincing projects to use the wrong repo for a given package. There are simple solutions to this, such as specifying the package source and/or requiring a cryptographic hash to match.
• Some attacks involve takeovers of developer accounts. In almost all cases, these are caused by stolen passwords. Using a multi-factor authentication (MFA) token eliminates stolen password attacks, which is why several repositories are starting to require MFA tokens in some cases.

Unfortunately, attackers know there are other lines of attack. One of the most dangerous is subverted build systems, as demonstrated by the subversion of SolarWinds Orion system. In a subverted build system, developers can review the software source code all day and see no problem, because there is no problem there. Instead, the process to convert source code into the code people run, called the build system , is subverted by an attacker. One solution for countering subverted build systems is to make the build systems harder to attack. That s a good thing to do, but you can never be confident that it was good enough . How can you be sure it s not subverted, if there s no way to know? A stronger defense against subverted build systems is the idea of verified reproducible builds. A build is reproducible if given the same source code, build environment and build instructions, any party can recreate bit-by-bit identical copies of all specified artifacts. A build is verified if multiple different parties verify that they get the same result for that situation. When you have a verified reproducible build, either all the parties colluded (and you could always double-check it yourself), or the build process isn t subverted. There is one last turtle: What if the build system tools or machines are subverted themselves? This is not a common attack today, but it s important to know if we can address them when the time comes. The good news is that we can address this. For some situations reproducible builds can also counter such attacks. If there s a loop (that is, a compiler is used to generate itself), that s called the trusting trust attack, and that is more challenging. Thankfully, the trusting trust attack has been known about for decades and there are known solutions. The diverse double-compiling (DDC) process that I explained in my PhD dissertation, as well as the bootstrappable builds process, can both counter trusting trust attacks in the software space. So there is no reason to lose hope: there is a bottom turtle , as it were.
Holger: Thankfully, this has all slowly started to change and supply chain issues are now widely discussed, as evident by efforts like Securing the Software Supply Chain: Recommended Practices Guide for Developers which you shared on our mailing list. In there, Reproducible Builds are mentioned as recommended advanced practice, which is both pretty cool (we ve come a long way!), but to me it also sounds like this will take another decade until it s become standard normal procedure. Do you agree on that timeline? David: I don t think there will be any particular timeframe. Different projects and ecosystems will move at different speeds. I wouldn t be surprised if it took a decade or so for them to become relatively common there are good reasons for that. Today the most common kinds of attacks based on software vulnerabilities still involve unintentional vulnerabilities in operational systems. Attackers are starting to apply supply chain attacks, but the top such attacks today are typosquatting (creating packages with similar names) and dependency confusion) (convincing projects to download packages from the wrong repositories). Reproducible builds don t counter those kinds of attacks, they counter subverted builds. It s important to eventually have verified reproducible builds, but understandably other issues are currently getting prioritized first. That said, reproducible builds are important long term. Many people are working on countering unintentional vulnerabilities and the most common kinds of supply chain attacks. As these other threats are countered, attackers will increasingly target build systems. Attackers always go for the weakest link. We will eventually need verified reproducible builds in many situations, and it ll take a while to get build systems able to widely perform reproducible builds, so we need to start that work now. That s true for anything where you know you ll need it but it will take a long time to get ready you need to start now.
Holger: What are your suggestions to accelerate adoption? David: Reproducible builds need to be:

• Easy (ideally automatic). Tools need to be modified so that reproducible builds are the default or at least easier to do.
• Transparent to projects & potential users. Many projects have no idea that their results aren t reproducible, and many potential users of the project don t know either. That information needs to be obvious. I ve proposed that the OpenSSF Dashboard SIG try to reproduce builds, for at least some packages, to make it more obvious to everyone when a project isn t reproducible. I don t know if that will happen in that particular case, but the point is to help people learn that information as soon as possible.
• Deployed. Experiments are great, but experiments showing that a project could be reproducible are inadequate. We need the projects that people use to be reproducible.

I think there s a snowball effect. Once many projects packages are reproducible, it will be easier to convince other projects to make their packages reproducible. I also think there should be some prioritization. If a package is in wide use (e.g., part of minimum set of packages for a widely-used Linux distribution or framework), its reproducibility should be a special focus. If a package is vital for supporting some societally important critical infrastructure (e.g., running dams), it should also be considered important. You can then work on the ones that are less important over time.
Holger: How is the Best Practices Badge going? How many projects are participating and how many are missing? David: It s going very well. You can see some automatically-generated statistics, showing we have over 5,000 projects, adding more than 1/day on average. We have more than 900 projects that have earned at least the passing badge level.
Holger: How many of the projects participating in the Best Practices badge engaging with reproducible builds? David: As of this writing there are 168 projects that report meeting the reproducible builds criterion. That s a relatively small percentage of projects. However, note that this criterion (labelled build_reproducible) is only required for the gold badge. It s not required for the passing or silver level badge. Currently we ve been strategically focused on getting projects to at least earn a passing badge, and less on earning silver or gold badges. We would love for all projects to get earn a silver or gold badge, of course, but our theory is that projects that can t even earn a passing badge present the most risk to their users. That said, there are some projects we especially want to see implementing higher badge levels. Those include projects that are very widely used, so that vulnerabilities in them can impact many systems. Examples of such projects include the Linux kernel and curl. In addition, some projects are used within systems where it s important to society that they not have serious security vulnerabilities. Examples include projects used by chemical manufacturers, financial systems and weapons. We definitely encourage any of those kinds of projects to earn higher badge levels.
Holger: Many thanks for this interview, David, and for all of your work at the Linux Foundation and elsewhere!

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I have just bought a Pixel 6A [1] for my wife. It s one of the latest Google phones that was released almost at the same time as the Pixel 7 series, so if you want to spend a lot of money on a phone that s the latest and greatest then the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro are the options, but if you want to save some money and don t need something really high end then the Pixel 6A is a good option. The one I bought cost $550 when I bought it from Google which seemed like a good deal when it was advertised as being discounted from $750. Later I discovered that other retailers were selling it for $500 or for $550 when bundled with a Chromecast. Also one of the other retailers was a company that I could get discount gift cards for. So this is the type of item you should really shop around for. It doesn t come with a charger so you don t have the gray-market disadvantage of getting yet another charger that doesn t fit the sockets in your country. The main new feature of this phone is a fingerprint scanner built in to the screen. I don t think this is a good thing, sure it s neat technology to both display pictures and read fingerprints through the same piece of glass but there are benefits to using a different location. Huawei phones with a fingerprint reader at the rear of the phone allow the user to answer calls, drag down the notifications list, and scroll sideways via touching the fingerprint reader. So the Pixel 6A clearly gives less functionality than some Huawei phones in this regard. One major annoyance with the phone is a combination of the phone hardware and Android 13 which gives no back arrow (swipe sideways) and no button to get the task list (swipe upwards at the correct speed from the bottom of the screen). The Android 12 way of swiping up from the bottom of the screen to get buttons for back, task-list, and home-screen is much better IMHO. Hopefully they will release a software update to make this a configuration option. Generally this is a nice phone, but the lack of buttons for back and task-list is annoying. Maybe the lack of buttons is something you can get used to after using it for a while. But millions of people just taking whatever companies like Google offer isn t what I imagined when I first hoped for a large portion of the world using Linux. On PCs we have a choice between KDE, GNOME, and other UIs. It would be nice if we had similar choices on phones.

• [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_6a

Couple of weeks back I installed PostmarketOS on my idle phone Leeco Le 1s , which was paper weight for some time now. It all started with a roadtrip to Pondicherry (I will soon write about this trip). As I was sitting on the front seat where Praveen s Librem 5 kept charing on the car dashboard. And we had a small discussion about PostmarketOS and how much new ports are available now. My idle phone came to my mind. After reaching home I started setting up porting pmOS to this device. Going through pmOS website, to my surprise there is already a port for this device. The OEM unlock is quite easy even though a little hiccup at begin (I suspect it is solely of my cable). The Xiaomi users knows the pain of unlocking bootloader. With the pmOS community preferred practice of using pmbootstrap, I built image for my device, flashed it. And phone boot stopped with pmOS logo. I thought I went to bootloop. I tried sxmo, xfce4, everything same nothing happening after boot logo splash. The pmOS troubleshooting wiki is quite good. They have documented most issues. Though screen is stuck I can still ssh to the phone. From wiki I came to know its a screen refresh problem. I installed msm-fb-refresher package and ran it as a daemon. Voila, I have a mate desktop. Mate desktop is not at all touch friendly even though I tried to scaled up to read and tap things on the screen. Wiki suggest xfce4 is little more touch friendly. I started moving to xfce. Then again same problem, stuck at boot loop. This time it was with lightdm, I turned off CanGraphical issue warning and now I have xfce desktop. pmos xfce seems great comparing with mate. Nothing works as of now from a Mobile phone point of view. The phone maintainer says the battery is working, but I couldn t get it working. Its always in battery mode and 50% status. I thought the hardware buttons will never work. But with xev, I can see the hardware key event triggering.