Show https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/b4061a10fc29010a610ff2b5b20160d7335e69bf/drivers/hid/hid-samsung.c#L113-L118 to a friend. Oops 'eh? Yep, Linux has been backdoored. Well, or not. Konstantin Ryabitsev explains it nicely in a cgit mailing list email:

It is common for git hosting environments to configure all forks of the same repo to use an "object storage" repository. For example, this is what allows git.kernel.org's 600+ forks of linux.git to take up only 10GB on disk as opposed to 800GB. One of the side-effects of this setup is that any object in the shared repository can be accessed from any of the forks, which periodically confuses people into believing that something terrible has happened.

The hack was discussed on Github in Dec 2018 when it was discovered. I forgot about it again but Konstantin's mail brought the memory back and I think it deserves more attention. I'm sure putting some illegal content into a fork and sending a made up "blob" URL to law enforcement would go quite far. Good luck explaining the issue. "Yes this is my repo" but "no, no that's not my data" ... "yes, it is my repo but not my data" ... "no we don't want that data either, really" ... "but, but there is nothing we can do, we host on github...¹". Update 05.11.20 Nate Friedman (CEO of Github) promises

[..] we are going to make it much more obvious when you're viewing an orphaned commit.

For context: The source code of Github (the product) had been leaked as a commit to Github's own DMCA repository. The repository has turned into a playground since Github took down the hosting for youtube-dl as the result of a DMCA complaint. 14.11.20 Seems Github now adds a warning to commits that are not in a reachable branch

When we talk about the digital self, we are talking about the self as it exists within digital spaces. This holds differently for different people, as some of us prefer to live within an pseudonymous or anonymous identity online, divested from our physical selves, while others consider the digital a more holistic identity that extends from the physical. Your digital self is gestalt, in that it exists across whatever mediums, web sites, and services you use. These bits are pieces together to form a whole picture of what it means to be you, or some aspect of you. This may be carefully curated, or it may be an emergent property of who you are. The way your physical self has rights, so too does your digital self. Or, perhaps, it would be more accurate to say that your rights extend to your digital self. I do not personally consider that there is a separation between these selves when it comes to rights, as both are aspects of you and you have rights. I am explicitly not going to list what these rights are, because I have my own ideas about them and yours may differ. Instead, I will briefly talk about consent. I think it is essential that we genuinely consent to how others interact with us to maintain the sanctity of our selves. Consent is necessary to the protection and expression of our rights, as it ensures we are able to rely on our rights and creates a space where we are able to express our rights in comfort and safety. We may classically think of consent as it relates to sex and sexual consent: only we have the right to determine what happens to our bodies; no one else has the right to that determination. We are able to give sexual consent, and we are able to revoke it. Sexual consent, in order to be in good faith, must be requested and given from a place of openness and transparency. For this, we discuss with our partners the things about ourselves that may impact their decision to consent: we are sober; we are not ill; we are using (or not) protection as we agree is appropriate; we are making this decision because it is a thing we desire, rather than a thing we feel we ought to do or are being forced to do; as well as other topics. These things also all hold true for technology and the digital spaces in which we reside. Our digital autonomy is not the only thing at stake when we look at digital consent. The ways we interact in digital spaces impact our whole selves, and exploitation of our consent too impacts our whole selves. Private information appearing online can have material consequences it can directly lead to safety issues, like stalking or threats, and it can lead to a loss of psychic safety and have a chilling effect. These are in addition to the threats posed to digital safety and well being. Consent must be actively sought, what one is consenting to is transparent, and the potential consequences must be known and understood. In order to protect and empower the digital self, to treat everyone justly and with respect, we must hold the digital self be as sacrosanct as other aspects of the self and treat it accordingly.

Exactly one week after the previous release 0.6.26 of digest, a minor cleanup release 0.6.27 just arrived on CRAN and will go to Debian shortly. digest creates hash digests of arbitrary R objects (using the md5, sha-1, sha-256, sha-512, crc32, xxhash32, xxhash64, murmur32, spookyhash, and blake3 algorithms) permitting easy comparison of R language objects. It is a fairly widely-used package (currently listed at one million monthly downloads, 282 direct reverse dependencies and 8068 indirect reverse dependencies, or just under half of CRAN) as many tasks may involve caching of objects for which it provides convenient general-purpose hash key generation. Release 0.6.26 brought support for the (nice, even cryptographic) blake3 hash algorithm. In the interest of broader buildability we had already (with a sad face) disabled a few very hardware-specific implementation aspects using intrinsic ops. But to our chagrin, we left one #error define that raised its head on everybody s favourite CRAN build platform. Darn. So 0.6.27 cleans that up and also removes the check and #error as all the actual code was already commented out. If you read this and tears start running down your cheeks, then by all means come and help us bring blake3 to its full (hardware-accelerated) potential. This (probably) only needs a little bit of patient work with the build options and configurations. You know where to find us My CRANberries provides the usual summary of changes to the previous version. For questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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

For my work on Debian, i want to use my debian.org email address, while for my personal projects i want to use my gmail.com address.One way to change the user.email git config value is to git config --local in every repo, but that's tedious, error-prone and doesn't scale very well with many repositories (and the chances to forget to set the right one on a new repo are ~100%).The solution is to use the git-config ability to include extra configuration files, based on the repo path, by using includeIf: Content of ~/.gitconfig:

[user]
    name = Sandro Tosi
    email = <personal.address>@gmail.com

[includeIf "gitdir:~/deb/"]
    path = ~/.gitconfig-deb

Every time the git path is in ~/deb/ (which is where i have all Debian repos) the file ~/.gitconfig-deb will be included; its content:

[user]
    email = morph@debian.org

That results in my personal address being used on all repos not part of Debian, where i use my Debian email address. This approach can be extended to every other git configuration values.

In July I finished my Bachelor s Degree in IT Security at the University of Applied Sciences in St. Poelten. During the studies I did some elective courses, one of which was about Data Analysis using Python, Pandas and Jupyter Notebooks. I found it very interesting to do calculations on different data sets and to visualize them. Towards the end of the Bachelor I had to find a topic for my Bachelor Thesis and as a long time user of OpenPGP I thought it would be interesting to do an analysis of the collection of OpenPGP keys that are available on the keyservers of the SKS keyserver network. So in June 2019 I fetched a copy of one of the key dumps of the one of the keyservers (some keyserver publish these copies of their key database so people who want to join the SKS keyserver network can do an initial import). At that time the copy of the key database contained 5,499,675 keys and was around 12GB. Using the hockeypuck keyserver software I imported the keys into an PostgreSQL database. Hockeypuck uses a table called keys to store the keys and in there the column doc stores the OpenPGP keys in JSON format (always with a data field containing the original unparsed data). For the thesis I split the analysis in three parts, first looking at the Public Key packets, then analysing the User ID packets and finally studying the Signature Packets. To analyse the respective packets I used SQL to export the data to CSV files and then used the pandas read_csv method to create a dataframe of the values. In a couple of cases I did some parsing before converting to a DataFrame to make the analysis step faster. The parsing was done using the pgpdump python library. Together with my advisor I decided to submit the thesis for a journal, so we revised and compressed the whole paper and the outcome was now

PUBLISHED in the Journal of Wireless Mobile Networks, Ubiquitous Computing, and Dependable Applications (JoWUA). I think the work gives some valuable insight in the development of the use of OpenPGP in the last 30 years. Looking at the public key packets we were able to compare the different public key algorithms and for example visualize how DSA was the most used algorithm until around 2010 when it was replaced by RSA. When looking at the less used algorithms a trend towards ECC based crytography is visible. What we also noticed was an increase of RSA keys with algorithm ID 3 (RSA Sign-Only), which are deprecated. When we took a deeper look at those keys we realized that most of those keys used a specific User ID string in the User ID packets which allowed us to attribute those keys to two software projects both using the Bouncy Castle Java Cryptographic API (resp. the Spongy Castle version for Android). We also stumbled over a tutorial on how to create RSA keys with Bouncycastle which also describes how to create RSA keys with code that produces RSA Sign-Only keys. In one of those projects, this was then fixed. By looking at the User ID packets we did some statistics about the most used email providers used by OpenPGP users. One domain stood out, because it is not the domain of an email provider: tellfinder.com is a domain used in around 45,000 keys. Tellfinder is a Big Data analysis software and the UID of all but two of those keys is TellFinder Page Archiver- Signing Key <support@tellfinder.com>. We also looked at the comments used in OpenPGP User ID fields. In 2013 Daniel Kahn Gillmor published a blog post titled OpenPGP User ID Comments considered harmful in which he pointed out that most of the comments in the User ID field of OpenPGP keys are duplicating information that is already present somewhere in the User ID or the key itself. In our dataset 3,133 comments were exactly the same as the name, 3,346 were the same as the domain and 18,246 comments were similar to the local part of the email address Last but not least we looked at the signature subpackets and the development of some of the preferences (Preferred Symmetric Algorithm, Preferred Hash Algorithm) that are being published using signature packets. Analysing this huge dataset of cryptographic keys of the last 20 to 30 years was very interesting and I learned a lot about the history of PGP resp. OpenPGP and the evolution of cryptography overall. I think it would be interesting to look at even more properties of OpenPGP keys and I also think it would be valuable for the OpenPGP ecosystem if these kinds analysis could be done regularly. An approach like Tor Metrics could lead to interesting findings and could also help to back decisions regarding future developments of the OpenPGP standard.

Transparency is essential to trusting a technology. Through transparency we can understand what we re using and build trust. When we know what is actually going on, what processes are occurring and how it is made, we are able to decide whether interacting with it is something we actually want, and we re able to trust it and use it with confidence. This transparency could mean many things, though it most frequently refers to the technology itself: the code or, in the case of hardware, the designs. We could also apply it to the overall architecture of a system. We could think about the decision making, practices, and policies of whomever is designing and/or making the technology. These are all valuable in some of the same ways, including that they allow us to make a conscious choice about what we are supporting. When we choose to use a piece of technology, we are supporting those who produce it. This could be because we are directly paying for it, however our support is not limited to direct financial contributions. In some cases this is because of things hidden within a technology: tracking mechanisms or backdoors that could allow companies or governments access to what we re doing. When creating different types of files on a computer, these files can contain metadata that says what software was used to make it. This is an implicit endorsement, and you can also explicitly endorse a technology by talking about that or how you use it. In this, you have a right (not just a duty) to be aware of what you re supporting. This includes, for example, organizational practices and whether a given company relies on abusive labor policies, indentured servitude, or slave labor.
Endorsements inspire others to choose a piece of technology. Most of my technology is something I investigate purely for functionality, and the pieces I investigate are based on what people I know use. The people I trust in these cases are more inclined than most to do this kind of research, to perform technical interrogations, and to be aware of what producers of technology are up to. This is how technology spreads and becomes common or the standard choice. In one sense, we all have the responsibility (one I am shirking) to investigate our technologies before we choose them. However, we must acknowledge that not everyone has the resources for this the time, the skills, the knowledge, and therein endorsements become even more important to recognize. Those producing a technology have the responsibility of making all of these angles something one could investigate. Understanding cannot only be the realm of experts. It should not require an extensive background in research and investigative journalism to find out whether a company punishes employees who try to unionize or pay non-living wages. Instead, these must be easy activities to carry out. It should be standard for a company (or other technology producer) to be open and share with people using their technology what makes them function. It should be considered shameful and shady to not do so. Not only does this empower those making choices about what technologies to use, but it empowers others down the line, who rely on those choices. It also respects the people involved in the processes of making these technologies. By acknowledging their role in bringing our tools to life, we are respecting their labor. By holding companies accountable for their practices and policies, we are respecting their lives.

A new release, now at version 0.1.6, of RcppZiggurat is now on the CRAN network for R. The RcppZiggurat package updates the code for the Ziggurat generator by Marsaglia and other which provides very fast draws from a Normal distribution. The package provides a simple C++ wrapper class for the generator improving on the very basic macros, and permits comparison among several existing Ziggurat implementations. This can be seen in the figure where Ziggurat from this package dominates accessing the implementations from the GSL, QuantLib and Gretl all of which are still way faster than the default Normal generator in R (which is of course of higher code complexity). This release brings a corrected seed setter and getter which now correctly take care of all four state variables, and not just one. It also corrects a few typos in the vignette. Both were fixed quite a while back, but we somehow managed to not ship this to CRAN for two years. The NEWS file entry below lists all changes.

Changes in version 0.1.6 (2020-10-18)

• Several typos were corrected in the vignette (Blagoje Ivanovic in #9).
• New getters and setters for internal state were added to resume simulations (Dirk in #11 fixing #10).
• Minor updates to cleanup script and Travis CI setup (Dirk).

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report for this release. More information is on the RcppZiggurat page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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

The Reproducible Builds project depends on our many projects, supporters and sponsors. We rely on their financial support, but they are also valued ambassadors who spread the word about the Reproducible Builds project and the work that we do. This is the first installment in a series featuring the projects, companies and individuals who support the Reproducible Builds project. If you are a supporter of the Reproducible Builds project (of whatever size) and would like to be featured here, please let get in touch with us at contact@reproducible-builds.org. However, we are kicking off this series by featuring Urs Gleim and Yoshi Kobayashi of the Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) project.
Chris Lamb: Hi Urs and Yoshi, great to meet you. How might you relate the importance of the Civil Infrastructure Platform to a user who is non-technical? A: The Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) project is focused on establishing an open source base layer of industrial-grade software that acts as building blocks in civil infrastructure projects. End-users of this critical code include systems for electric power generation and energy distribution, oil and gas, water and wastewater, healthcare, communications, transportation, and community management. These systems deliver essential services, provide shelter, and support social interactions and economic development. They are society s lifelines, and CIP aims to contribute to and support these important pillars of modern society.
Chris: We have entered an age where our civilisations have become reliant on technology to keep us alive. Does the CIP believe that the software that underlies our own safety (and the safety of our loved ones) receives enough scrutiny today? A: For companies developing systems running our infrastructure and keeping our factories working, it is part of their business to ensure the availability, uptime, and security of these very systems. However, software complexity continues to increase, and the efforts spent on those systems is now exploding. What is missing is a common way of achieving this through refining the same tools, and cooperating on the hardening and maintenance of standard components such as the Linux operating system.
Chris: How does the Reproducible Builds effort help the Civil Infrastructure Platform achieve its goals? A: Reproducibility helps a great deal in software maintenance. We have a number of use-cases that should have long-term support of more than 10 years. During this period, we encounter issues that need to be fixed in the original source code. But before we make changes to the source code, we need to check whether it is actually the original source code or not. If we can reproduce exactly the same binary from the source code even after 10 years, we can start to invest time and energy into making these fixes.
Chris: Can you give us a brief history of the Civil Infrastructure Platform? Are there any specific success stories that the CIP is particularly proud of? A: The CIP Project formed in 2016 as a project hosted by Linux Foundation. It was launched out of necessity to establish an open source framework and the subsequent software foundation delivers services for civil infrastructure and economic development on a global scale. Some key milestones we have achieved as a project include our collaboration with Debian, where we are helping with the Debian Long Term Support (LTS) initiative, which aims to extend the lifetime of all Debian stable releases to at least 5 years. This is critical because most control systems for transportation, power plants, healthcare and telecommunications run on Debian-based embedded systems. In addition, CIP is focused on IEC 62443, a standards-based approach to counter security vulnerabilities in industrial automation and control systems. Our belief is that this work will help mitigate the risk of cyber attacks, but in order to deal with evolving attacks of this kind, all of the layers that make up these complex systems (such as system services and component functions, in addition to the countless operational layers) must be kept secure. For this reason, the IEC 62443 series is attracting attention as the de facto cyber-security standard.
Chris: The Civil Infrastructure Platform project comprises a number of project members from different industries, with stakeholders across multiple countries and continents. How does working together with a broad group of interests help in your effectiveness and efficiency? A: Although the members have different products, they share the requirements and issues when developing sustainable products. In the end, we are driven by common goals. For the project members, working internationally is simply daily business. We see this as an advantage over regional or efforts that focus on narrower domains or markets.
Chris: The Civil Infrastructure Platform supports a number of other existing projects and initiatives in the open source world too. How much do you feel being a part of the broader free software community helps you achieve your aims? A: Collaboration with other projects is an essential part of how CIP operates we want to enable commonly-used software components. It would not make sense to re-invent solutions that are already established and widely used in product development. To this end, we have an upstream first policy which means that, if existing projects need to be modified to our needs or are already working on issues that we also need, we work directly with them.
Chris: Open source software in desktop or user-facing contexts receives a significant amount of publicity in the media. However, how do you see the future of free software from an industrial-oriented context? A: Open source software has already become an essential part of the industry and civil infrastructure, and the importance of open source software there is still increasing. Without open source software, we cannot achieve, run and maintain future complex systems, such as smart cities and other key pieces of civil infrastructure.
Chris: If someone wanted to know more about the Civil Infrastructure Platform (or even to get involved) where should they go to look? A: We have many avenues to participate and learn more! We have a website, a wiki and you can even follow us on Twitter.

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For more about the Reproducible Builds project, please see our website at reproducible-builds.org. If you are interested in ensuring the ongoing security of the software that underpins our civilisation and wish to sponsor the Reproducible Builds project, please reach out to the project by emailing contact@reproducible-builds.org.

Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 786 other packages on CRAN. A little while ago, Conrad released version 10.1.0 of Armadillo, a a new major release. As before, given his initial heads-up we ran two full reverse-depends checks, and as a consequence contacted four packages authors (two by email, two via PR) about a miniscule required change (as Armadillo now defaults to C++11, an old existing setting of avoiding C++11 lead to an error). Our thanks to those who promptly update their packages truly appreciated. As it turns out, Conrad also softened the error by the time the release ran around. But despite our best efforts, the release was delayed considerably by CRAN. We had made several Windows test builds but luck had it that on the uploaded package CRAN got itself a (completely spurious segfault which can happen on a busy machine building machine things at once). Sadly it took three or four days for CRAN to reply our email. After which it took another number of days for them to ponder the behaviour of a few new deprecated messaged tickled by at the most ten or so (out of 786) packages. Oh well. So here we are, eleven days after I emailed the rcpp-devel list about the new package being on CRAN but possibly delayed (due to that seg.fault). But during all that time the package was of course available via the Rcpp drat. The changes in this release are summarized below as usual and are mostly upstream along with an improved Travis CI setup due to the aforementioned use of the bspm package for binaries at Travis.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.10.1.0.0 (2020-10-09)

• Upgraded to Armadillo release 10.1.0 (Orchid Ambush)
  • C++11 is now the minimum required C++ standard
  • faster handling of compound expressions by trimatu() and trimatl()
  • faster sparse matrix addition, subtraction and element-wise multiplication
  • expanded sparse submatrix views to handle the non-contiguous form of X.cols(vector_of_column_indices)
  • expanded eigs_sym() and eigs_gen() with optional fine-grained parameters (subspace dimension, number of iterations, eigenvalues closest to specified value)
  • deprecated form of reshape() removed from Cube and SpMat classes
  • ignore and warn on use of the ARMA_DONT_USE_CXX11 macro
• Switch Travis CI testing to focal and BSPM

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the RcppArmadillo page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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

Although I still read a lot, during my college sophomore years my reading habits shifted from novels to more academic works. Indeed, reading dry textbooks and economic papers for classes often kept me from reading anything else substantial. Nowadays, I tend to binge read novels: I won't touch a book for months on end, and suddenly, I'll read 10 novels back to back¹. At the start of a novel binge, I always follow the same ritual: I take out my e-reader from its storage box, marvel at the fact the battery is still pretty full, turn on the WiFi and check if there are OS updates. And I have to admit, Kobo Inc. (now Rakuten Kobo) has done a stellar job of keeping my e-reader up to date. I've owned this model (a Kobo Aura 1^st generation) for 7 years now and I'm still running the latest version of Kobo's Linux-based OS. Having recently had trouble updating my Nexus 5 (also manufactured 7 years ago) to Android 10², I asked myself:

Why is my e-reader still getting regular OS updates, while Google stopped issuing security patches for my smartphone four years ago?

To try to answer this, let us turn to economic incentives theory. Although not the be-all and end-all some think it is³, incentives theory is not a bad tool to analyse this particular problem. Executives at Google most likely followed a very business-centric logic when they decided to drop support for the Nexus 5. Likewise, Rakuten Kobo's decision to continue updating older devices certainly had very little to do with ethics or loyalty to their user base. So, what are the incentives that keep Kobo updating devices and why are they different than smartphone manufacturers'? A portrait of the current long-term software support offerings for smartphones and e-readers Before delving deeper in economic theory, let's talk data. I'll be focusing on 2 brands of e-readers, Amazon's Kindle and Rakuten's Kobo. Although the e-reader market is highly segmented and differs a lot based on geography, Amazon was in 2015 the clear worldwide leader with 53% of the worldwide e-reader sales, followed by Rakuten Kobo at 13%⁴. On the smartphone side, I'll be differentiating between Apple's iPhones and Android devices, taking Google as the barometer for that ecosystem. As mentioned below, Google is sadly the leader in long-term Android software support. Rakuten Kobo According to their website and to this Wikipedia table, the only e-readers Kobo has deprecated are the original Kobo eReader and the Kobo WiFi N289, both released in 2010. This makes their oldest still supported device the Kobo Touch, released in 2011. In my book, that's a pretty good track record. Long-term software support does not seem to be advertised or to be a clear selling point in their marketing. Amazon According to their website, Amazon has dropped support for all 8 devices produced before the Kindle Paperwhite 2^nd generation, first sold in 2013. To put things in perspective, the first Kindle came out in 2007, 3 years before Kobo started selling devices. Like Rakuten Kobo, Amazon does not make promises of long-term software support as part of their marketing. Apple Apple has a very clear software support policy for all their devices:

Owners of iPhone, iPad, iPod or Mac products may obtain a service and parts from Apple or Apple service providers for five years after the product is no longer sold or longer, where required by law.

This means in the worst-case scenario of buying an iPhone model just as it is discontinued, one would get a minimum of 5 years of software support. Android Google's policy for their Android devices is to provide software support for 3 years after the launch date. If you buy a Pixel device just before the new one launches, you could theoretically only get 2 years of support. In 2018, Google decided OEMs would have to provide security updates for at least 2 years after launch, threatening not to license Google Apps and the Play Store if they didn't comply. A question of cost structure From the previous section, we can conclude that in general, e-readers seem to be supported longer than smartphones, and that Apple does a better job than Android OEMs, providing support for about twice as long. Even Fairphone, who's entire business is to build phones designed to last and to be repaired was not able to keep the Fairphone 1 (2013) updated for more than a couple years and seems to be struggling to keep the Fairphone 2 (2015) running an up to date version of Android. Anyone who has ever worked in IT will tell you: maintaining software over time is hard work and hard work by specialised workers is expensive. Most commercial electronic devices are sold and developed by for-profit enterprises and software support all comes down to a question of cost structure. If companies like Google or Fairphone are to be expected to provide long-term support for the devices they manufacture, they have to be able to fund their work somehow. In a perfect world, people would be paying for the cost of said long-term support, as it would likely be cheaper then buying new devices every few years and would certainly be better for the planet. Problem is, manufacturers aren't making them pay for it. Economists call this type of problem externalities: things that should be part of the cost of a good, but aren't for one a reason or another. A classic example of an externality is pollution. Clearly pollution is bad and leads to horrendous consequences, like climate change. Sane people agree we should drastically cut our greenhouse gas emissions, and yet, we aren't. Neo-classical economic theory argues the way to fix externalities like pollution is to internalise these costs, in other words, to make people pay for the "real price" of the goods they buy. In the case of climate change and pollution, neo-classical economic theory is plain wrong (spoiler alert: it often is), but this is where band-aids like the carbon tax comes from. Still, coming back to long-term software support, let's see what would happen if we were to try to internalise software maintenance costs. We can do this multiple ways. 1 - Include the price of software maintenance in the cost of the device This is the choice Fairphone makes. This might somewhat work out for them since they are a very small company, but it cannot scale for the following reasons:

1. This strategy relies on you giving your money to an enterprise now, and trusting them to "Do the right thing" years later. As the years go by, they will eventually look at their books, see how much ongoing maintenance is costing them, drop support for the device, apologise and move on. That is to say, enterprises have a clear economic incentive to promise long-term support and not deliver. One could argue a company's reputation would suffer from this kind of behaviour. Maybe sometime it does, but most often people forget. Political promises are a great example of this.
2. Enterprises go bankrupt all the time. Even if company X promises 15 years of software support for their devices, if they cease to exist, your device will stop getting updates. The internet is full of stories of IoT devices getting bricked when the parent company goes bankrupt and their servers disappear. This is related to point number 1: to some degree, you have a disincentive to pay for long-term support in advance, as the future is uncertain and there are chances you won't get the support you paid for.
3. Selling your devices at a higher price to cover maintenance costs does not necessarily mean you will make more money overall raising more money to fund maintenance costs being the goal here. To a certain point, smartphone models are substitute goods and prices higher than market prices will tend to drive consumers to buy cheaper ones. There is thus a disincentive to include the price of software maintenance in the cost of the device.
4. People tend to be bad at rationalising the total cost of ownership over a long period of time. Economists call this phenomenon hyperbolic discounting. In our case, it means people are far more likely to buy a 500$ phone each 3 years than a 1000$ phone each 10 years. Again, this means OEMs have a clear disincentive to include the price of long-term software maintenance in their devices.

Clearly, life is more complex than how I portrayed it: enterprises are not perfect rational agents, altruism exists, not all enterprises aim solely for profit maximisation, etc. Still, in a capitalist economy, enterprises wanting to charge for software maintenance upfront have to overcome these hurdles one way or another if they want to avoid failing. 2 - The subscription model Another way companies can try to internalise support costs is to rely on a subscription-based revenue model. This has multiple advantages over the previous option, mainly:

1. It does not affect the initial purchase price of the device, making it easier to sell them at a competitive price.
2. It provides a stable source of income, something that is very valuable to enterprises, as it reduces overall risks. This in return creates an incentive to continue providing software support as long as people are paying.

If this model is so interesting from an economic incentives point of view, why isn't any smartphone manufacturer offering that kind of program? The answer is, they are, but not explicitly⁵. Apple and Google can fund part of their smartphone software support via the 30% cut they take out of their respective app stores. A report from Sensor Tower shows that in 2019, Apple made an estimated US$ 16 billion from the App Store, while Google raked in US$ 9 billion from the Google Play Store. Although the Fortune 500 ranking tells us this respectively is "only" 5.6% and 6.5% of their gross annual revenue for 2019, the profit margins in this category are certainly higher than any of their other products. This means Google and Apple have an important incentive to keep your device updated for some time: if your device works well and is updated, you are more likely to keep buying apps from their store. When software support for a device stops, there is a risk paying customers will buy a competitor device and leave their ecosystem. This also explains why OEMs who don't own app stores tend not to provide software support for very long periods of time. Most of them only make money when you buy a new phone. Providing long-term software support thus becomes a disincentive, as it directly reduces their sale revenues. Same goes for Kindles and Kobos: the longer your device works, the more money they make with their electronic book stores. In my opinion, it's likely Amazon and Rakuten Kobo produce quarterly cost-benefit reports to decide when to drop support for older devices, based on ongoing support costs and the recurring revenues these devices bring in. Rakuten Kobo is also in a more precarious situation than Amazon is: considering Amazon's very important market share, if your device stops getting new updates, there is a greater chance people will replace their old Kobo with a Kindle. Again, they have an important economic incentive to keep devices running as long as they are profitable. Can Free Software fix this? Yes and no. Free Software certainly isn't a magic wand one can wave to make everything better, but does provide major advantages in terms of security, user freedom and sometimes costs. The last piece of the puzzle explaining why Rakuten Kobo's software support is better than Google's is technological choices. Smartphones are incredibly complex devices and have become the main computing platform of many. Similar to the web, there is a race for features and complexity that tends to create bloat and make older devices slow and painful to use. On the other hand, e-readers are simpler devices built for a single task: display electronic books. Control over the platform is also a key aspect of the cost structure of providing software updates. Whereas Apple controls both the software and hardware side of iPhones, Android is a sad mess of drivers and SoCs, all providing different levels of support over time⁶. If you take a look at the platforms the Kindle and Kobo are built on, you'll quickly see they both use Freescale I.MX SoCs. These processors are well known for their excellent upstream support in the Linux kernel and their relative longevity, chips being produced for either 10 or 15 years. This in turn makes updates much easier and less expensive to provide. So clearly, open architectures, free drivers and open hardware helps tremendously, but aren't enough on their own. One of the lessons we must learn from the (amazing) LineageOS project is how lack of funding hurts everyone. If there is no one to do the volunteer work required to maintain a version of LOS for your device, it won't be supported. Worse, when purchasing a new device, users cannot know in advance how many years of LOS support they will get. This makes buying new devices a frustrating hit-and-miss experience. If you are lucky, you will get many years of support. Otherwise, you risk your device becoming an expensive insecure paperweight. So how do we fix this? Anyone with a brain understands throwing away perfectly good devices each 2 years is not sustainable. Government regulations enforcing a minimum support life would be a step in the right direction, but at the end of the day, Capitalism is to blame. Like the aforementioned carbon tax, band-aid solutions can make things somewhat better, but won't fix our current economic system's underlying problems. For now though, I'll leave fixing the problem of Capitalism to someone else.

after reading this post I figured I might as well bite the bullet and improve on my CDPATH-related setup, especially because it does not work with Emacs. so i looked around for autojump-related alternatives that do.

What I use now I currently have this in my .shenv (sourced by .bashrc):

export CDPATH=".:~:~/src:~/dist:~/wikis:~/go/src:~/src/tor"

This allows me to quickly jump into projects from my home dir, or the "source code" (~/src), "work" (src/tor), or wiki checkouts (~/wikis) directories. It works well from the shell, but unfortunately it's very static: if I want a new directory, I need to edit my config file, restart shells, etc. It also doesn't work from my text editor.

Shell jumpers Those are commandline tools that can be used from a shell, generally with built-in shell integration so that a shell alias will find the right directory magically, usually by keeping track of the directories visited with cd. Some of those may or may not have integration in Emacs.

autojump

• home page
• not in emacs, but works in eshell
• this might work though

fasd

• home page
• upstream packaged in Debian
• emacs extensions, not in Debian:
  • helm integration (not in melpa?)
  • more direct

z

• home page
• ungooglable
• not in Debian
• helm integration
• eshell integration

fzf

• home page
• the original "fuzzer". uses find by default, so no notion of frequency.
• emacs integration
• similar projects
• rust implementation

Emacs plugins not integrated with the shell Those projects can be used to track files inside a project or find files around directories, but do not offer the equivalent functionality in the shell.

projectile

• home page
• supports ido, ivy, or helm.

elpy

• home page
• elpy has a notion of projects, so, by default, will find files in the current "project" with C-c C-f which is useful

bookmarks.el

• built-in
• home page
• "Bookmarks record locations so you can return to them later"

recentf

• built-in
• home page
• "builds a list of recently opened files. This list is is automatically saved across sessions on exiting Emacs - you can then access this list through a command or the menu"

references https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/LocateFilesAnywhere

And a new version of digest is now on CRAN will go to Debian shortly. digest creates hash digests of arbitrary R objects (using the md5, sha-1, sha-256, sha-512, crc32, xxhash32, xxhash64, murmur32, spookyhash, and blake3 algorithms) permitting easy comparison of R language objects. It is a fairly widely-used package (currently listed at 896k monthly downloads, 279 direct reverse dependencies and 8057 indirect reverse dependencies, or just under half of CRAN) as many tasks may involve caching of objects for which it provides convenient general-purpose hash key generation. This release brings two nice contributed updates. Dirk Schumacher added support for blake3 (though we could probably push this a little harder for performance, help welcome). Winston Chang benchmarked and tuned some of the key base R parts of the package. Last but not least I flipped the vignette to the lovely minidown, updated the Travis CI setup using bspm (as previously blogged about in r⁴ #30), and added a package website using Matertial for MkDocs. My CRANberries provides the usual summary of changes to the previous version. For questions or comments use the issue tracker off the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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

Troubleshooting your audio input. When doing video conferencing sometimes I hear the remote end not doing very well. Especially when your friend tells you he bought a new mic and it didn't sound well, they might be using the wrong configuration on the OS and using the other mic, or they might have a constant noise source in the room that affects the video conferencing noise cancelling algorithms. Yes, noise cancelling algorithms aren't perfect because detecting what is noise is heuristic and better to have low level of noise. Here is the app. I have a video to demonstrate.

Over the last year or so I have worked on a research linux distribution in my spare time. It s not a distribution for researchers (like Scientific Linux), but my personal playground project to research linux distribution development, i.e. try out fresh ideas. This article focuses on the package format and its advantages, but there is more to distri, which I will cover in upcoming blog posts.

Motivation I was a Debian Developer for the 7 years from 2012 to 2019, but using the distribution often left me frustrated, ultimately resulting in me winding down my Debian work. Frequently, I was noticing a large gap between the actual speed of an operation (e.g. doing an update) and the possible speed based on back of the envelope calculations. I wrote more about this in my blog post Package managers are slow . To me, this observation means that either there is potential to optimize the package manager itself (e.g. apt), or what the system does is just too complex. While I remember seeing some low-hanging fruit , through my work on distri, I wanted to explore whether all the complexity we currently have in Linux distributions such as Debian or Fedora is inherent to the problem space. I have completed enough of the experiment to conclude that the complexity is not inherent: I can build a Linux distribution for general-enough purposes which is much less complex than existing ones. Those were low-hanging fruit from a user perspective. I m not saying that fixing them is easy in the technical sense; I know too little about apt s code base to make such a statement.

Key idea: packages are images, not archives One key idea is to switch from using archives to using images for package contents. Common package managers such as dpkg(1) use tar(1) archives with various compression algorithms. distri uses SquashFS images, a comparatively simple file system image format that I happen to be familiar with from my work on the gokrazy Raspberry Pi 3 Go platform. This idea is not novel: AppImage and snappy also use images, but only for individual, self-contained applications. distri however uses images for distribution packages with dependencies. In particular, there is no duplication of shared libraries in distri. A nice side effect of using read-only image files is that applications are immutable and can hence not be broken by accidental (or malicious!) modification.

Key idea: separate hierarchies Package contents are made available under a fully-qualified path. E.g., all files provided by package zsh-amd64-5.6.2-3 are available under /ro/zsh-amd64-5.6.2-3. The mountpoint /ro stands for read-only, which is short yet descriptive. Perhaps surprisingly, building software with custom prefix values of e.g. /ro/zsh-amd64-5.6.2-3 is widely supported, thanks to:

1. Linux distributions, which build software with prefix set to /usr, whereas FreeBSD (and the autotools default), which build with prefix set to /usr/local.
2. Enthusiast users in corporate or research environments, who install software into their home directories.

Because using a custom prefix is a common scenario, upstream awareness for prefix-correctness is generally high, and the rarely required patch will be quickly accepted.

Key idea: exchange directories Software packages often exchange data by placing or locating files in well-known directories. Here are just a few examples:

• gcc(1) locates the libusb(3) headers via /usr/include
• man(1) locates the nginx(1) manpage via /usr/share/man.
• zsh(1) locates executable programs via PATH components such as /bin

In distri, these locations are called exchange directories and are provided via FUSE in /ro. Exchange directories come in two different flavors:

1. global. The exchange directory, e.g. /ro/share, provides the union of the share sub directory of all packages in the package store.
   Global exchange directories are largely used for compatibility, see below.
2. per-package. Useful for tight coupling: e.g. irssi(1) does not provide any ABI guarantees, so plugins such as irssi-robustirc can declare that they want e.g. /ro/irssi-amd64-1.1.1-1/out/lib/irssi/modules to be a per-package exchange directory and contain files from their lib/irssi/modules.

Search paths sometimes need to be fixed Programs which use exchange directories sometimes use search paths to access multiple exchange directories. In fact, the examples above were taken from gcc(1) s INCLUDEPATH, man(1) s MANPATH and zsh(1) s PATH. These are prominent ones, but more examples are easy to find: zsh(1) loads completion functions from its FPATH. Some search path values are derived from --datadir=/ro/share and require no further attention, but others might derive from e.g. --prefix=/ro/zsh-amd64-5.6.2-3/out and need to be pointed to an exchange directory via a specific command line flag.

FHS compatibility Global exchange directories are used to make distri provide enough of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) that third-party software largely just works. This includes a C development environment. I successfully ran a few programs from their binary packages such as Google Chrome, Spotify, or Microsoft s Visual Studio Code.

Fast package manager I previously wrote about how Linux distribution package managers are too slow. distri s package manager is extremely fast. Its main bottleneck is typically the network link, even at high speed links (I tested with a 100 Gbps link). Its speed comes largely from an architecture which allows the package manager to do less work. Specifically:

1. Package images can be added atomically to the package store, so we can safely skip fsync(2) . Corruption will be cleaned up automatically, and durability is not important: if an interactive installation is interrupted, the user can just repeat it, as it will be fresh on their mind.
2. Because all packages are co-installable thanks to separate hierarchies, there are no conflicts at the package store level, and no dependency resolution (an optimization problem requiring SAT solving) is required at all.
   In exchange directories, we resolve conflicts by selecting the package with the highest monotonically increasing distri revision number.
3. distri proves that we can build a useful Linux distribution entirely without hooks and triggers. Not having to serialize hook execution allows us to download packages into the package store with maximum concurrency.
4. Because we are using images instead of archives, we do not need to unpack anything. This means installing a package is really just writing its package image and metadata to the package store. Sequential writes are typically the fastest kind of storage usage pattern.

Fast installation also make other use-cases more bearable, such as creating disk images, be it for testing them in qemu(1) , booting them on real hardware from a USB drive, or for cloud providers such as Google Cloud.

Fast package builder Contrary to how distribution package builders are usually implemented, the distri package builder does not actually install any packages into the build environment. Instead, distri makes available a filtered view of the package store (only declared dependencies are available) at /ro in the build environment. This means that even for large dependency trees, setting up a build environment happens in a fraction of a second! Such a low latency really makes a difference in how comfortable it is to iterate on distribution packages.

Package stores In distri, package images are installed from a remote package store into the local system package store /roimg, which backs the /ro mount. A package store is implemented as a directory of package images and their associated metadata files. You can easily make available a package store by using distri export. To provide a mirror for your local network, you can periodically distri update from the package store you want to mirror, and then distri export your local copy. Special tooling (e.g. debmirror in Debian) is not required because distri install is atomic (and update uses install). Producing derivatives is easy: just add your own packages to a copy of the package store. The package store is intentionally kept simple to manage and distribute. Its files could be exchanged via peer-to-peer file systems, or synchronized from an offline medium.

distri s first release distri works well enough to demonstrate the ideas explained above. I have branched this state into branch jackherer, distri s first release code name. This way, I can keep experimenting in the distri repository without breaking your installation. From the branch contents, our autobuilder creates:

1. disk images, which
   • can be tested on real hardware
   • can be tested in qemu
   • can be tested in virtualbox
   • can be tested in docker
   • can be tested on Google Cloud
2. a package repository. Installations can pick up new packages with distri update.
3. documentation for the release.
   • Definitely check out the Cool things to try README section.

The project website can be found at https://distr1.org. The website is just the README for now, but we can improve that later. The repository can be found at https://github.com/distr1/distri

Project outlook Right now, distri is mainly a vehicle for my spare-time Linux distribution research. I don t recommend anyone use distri for anything but research, and there are no medium-term plans of that changing. At the very least, please contact me before basing anything serious on distri so that we can talk about limitations and expectations. I expect the distri project to live for as long as I have blog posts to publish, and we ll see what happens afterwards. Note that this is a hobby for me: I will continue to explore, at my own pace, parts that I find interesting. My hope is that established distributions might get a useful idea or two from distri.

There s more to come: subscribe to the distri feed I don t want to make this post too long, but there is much more! Please subscribe to the following URL in your feed reader to get all posts about distri: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/tags/distri/feed.xml Next in my queue are articles about hermetic packages and good package maintainer experience (including declarative packaging).

Feedback or questions? I d love to discuss these ideas in case you re interested! Please send feedback to the distri mailing list so that everyone can participate!

One of the most awesome helpers I carry around in my ~/bin since the early '00s is the sanity.pl script written by Andreas Gohr. It just recently came back to use when I started to archive some awesome Corona enforced live session music with youtube-dl. Update: Francois Marier pointed out that Debian contains the detox package, which has a similar functionality.

Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report (+ the first week in October) that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you re interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you. Debian Games

• I spent most of the time this month to tackle remaining GCC 10 bugs in packages like nettoe, pcsxr, slimevolley (patch by Reiner Herrmann), openal-soft, slashem and alien-arena. I also investigated a build failure in gfpoken (#957271) and springlobby and finally uploaded a new revision of warzone2100 to address another FTBFS while building the PDF documentation.
• I packaged new upstream versions of blockattack and hitori.
• and sponsored a new release of mgba for Ryan Tandy.

Debian Java

• The focus was on two major packages this month, PDFsam, a tool to manipulate PDF files and Netbeans, one of the three well known Java IDEs. I basically updated every PDFsam related sejda dependency and packaged a new library libsejda-common-java, which is currently waiting in the NEW queue. As soon as this one has been approved, we should be able to see the latest release in Debian soon.
• Unfortunately I came to the conclusion that maintaining Netbeans in Debian is no longer a viable solution. I have been the sole maintainer for the past five years and managed to package the basic Java IDE in Stretch. I also had a 98% ready package for Buster but there were some bugs that made it unfit for a stable release in my opinion. The truth is, it takes a lot of time to patch Netbeans, just to make the build system DFSG compliant and to build the IDE from source. We have never managed to provide more functionality than the basic Java IDE features too. Still, we had to maintain dozens of build-dependencies and there was a constant struggle to make everything work with just a single version of a library. While the Debian way works great for most common projects, it doesn t scale very well for very complex ones like Java IDEs. Neither Eclipse nor Netbeans are really fully maintainable in Debian since they consist of hundreds of different jar files, even if the toolchain was perfect, it would require too much time to maintain all those Debian packages.
• I voiced that sentiment on our debian-java mailinglist while also discussing the situation of complex server packages like Apache Solr. Similar to Netbeans it requires hundreds of jar files to get running. I believe our users are better served in those cases by using tools like flatpak for desktop packages or jdeb for server packages. The idea is to provide a Debian toolchain which would download a source package from upstream and then use jdeb to create a Debian package. Thus we could provide packages for very complex Java software again, although only via the Debian contrib distribution. The pros are: software is available as Debian packages and integrates well with your system and considerably less time is needed to maintain such packages: Cons: not available in Debian main, no security support, not checked for DFSG compliance.
• Should we do that for all of our packages? No. This should really be limited to packages that otherwise would not be in Debian at all and are too complex to maintain, when even a whole team of normal contributors would struggle.
• Finally the consequences were: the Netbeans IDE has been removed from Debian main but the Netbeans platform package, libnb-platform18-java, is up-to-date again just like visualvm, which depends on it.
• New upstream releases were packaged for jboss-xnio, activemq, httpcomponents-client, jasypt and undertow to address several security vulnerabilities.
• I also packaged a new version of sweethome3d, an Interior 2D design application .

Misc

• The usual suspects: I updated binaryen and ublock-origin.
• I eventually filed a RFA for privacybadger. As I mentioned in my last post, the upstream maintainer would like to see regular updates in Debian stable but I don t want to regularly contribute time for this task. If someone is ready for the job, let me know.
• I did a NMU for xjig to fix Debian bug. (#932742)

Debian LTS This was my 55. month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 31,75 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Rapha l Hertzog. In that time I did the following:

• Investigated and fixed a regression in squid3 when using the icap server. (#965012)
• DLA-2394-1. Issued a security update for squid3 fixing 4 CVE.
• DLA-2400-1. Issued a security update for activemq fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-2403-1. Issued a security update for rails fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-2404-1. Issued a security update for eclipse-wtp fixing 1 CVE.
• DLA-2405-1. Issued a security update for httpcomponents-client fixing 1 CVE.
• Triaged open CVE for guacamole-server and guacamole-client and prepared patches for CVE-2020-9498 and CVE-2020-9497.
• Prepared patches for 7 CVE in libonig.

ELTS Extended Long Term Support (ELTS) is a project led by Freexian to further extend the lifetime of Debian releases. It is not an official Debian project but all Debian users benefit from it without cost. The current ELTS release is Debian 8 Jessie . This was my 28. month and I have been paid to work 15 hours on ELTS.

• ELA-291-1. Issued a security update for libproxy fixing 1 CVE.
• ELA-294-1. Issued a security update for squid3 fixing 4 CVE.
• ELA-295-1. Issued a security update for rails fixing 2 CVE.
• ELA-296-1. Issued a security update for httpcomponents-client fixing 1 CVE.

Thanks for reading and see you next time.

I wanted to share Type design issue I hit recently with Striot. Within StrIoT you define a stream-processing program, which is a series of inter-connected operators, in terms of a trio of graph types:

• The outer-most type is a higher-order type provided by the Graph library we use: Graph a. This layer deals with all the topology concerns: what is connected to what.
• The next type we define in StrIoT: StreamVertex, which is used to replace a in the above and make the concrete type Graph StreamVertex. Here we define all the properties of the operators. For example: the parameters supplied to the operator, and a unique vertexID integer that is unfortunately necessary. We also define which operator type each node represents, with an instance of the third type,
• StreamOperator, a simple enumeration-style type: StreamOperator = Map Filter Scan

For some recent work I needed to define some additional properties for the operators: properties that would be used in a M/M/1 model (Jackson network) to represent the program do some cost modelling with. Initially we supplied this additional information in completely separate instances of types: e.g. lists of tuples, the first of a pair representing a vertexID, etc. This was mostly fine for totally novel code, but where I had existing code paths that operated in terms of Graph StreamVertex and now needed access to these parameters, it would have meant refactoring a lot of code. So instead, I added these properties directly to the types above. Some properties are appropriate for all node types, e.g. mean average service time. In that case, I added the parameter to the StreamVertex type:

data StreamVertex = StreamVertex
      vertexId   :: Int
     
    , serviceTime:: Double
     

Other parameters were only applicable to certain node types. Mean average arrival rate, for example., is only valid for Source node types; selectivity is appropriate only for filter types. So, I added these to the StreamOperator type:

data StreamOperator = Map
                      Filter Double -- selectivity
                     
                      Source Double -- arrival rate
                     

This works pretty well, and most of the code paths that already exist did not need to be updated in order for the model parameters to pass through to where they are needed. But it was not a perfect solution, because I now had to modify some other, unrelated code to account for the type changes. Mostly this was test code: where I'd defined instances of Graph StreamVertex to test something unrelated to the modelling work, I now had to add filter selectivities and source arrival rates. This was tedious but mostly solved with automatically with some editor macros. One area though, that was a problem, was equality checks and pattern matching. Before this change, I had a few areas of code like this

if Source == operator (head (vertexList sg))
 
if a /= b then  -- where a and b are instances of StreamOperator

I had to replace them with little helper routines like

cmpOps :: StreamOperator -> StreamOperator -> Bool
cmpOps (Filter _) (Filter _) = True
cmpOps (FilterAcc _) (FilterAcc _) = True
cmpOps x y = x == y

A similar problem was where I needed to synthesize a Filter, and I didn't care about the selectivity, indeed, it was meaningless for the way I was using the type. I have a higher-level function that handles "hoisting" an Operator through a Merge: So, before, you have some operator occurring after a merge operation, and afterwards, you have several instances of the operator on all of the input streams prior to the Merge. Invoking it now looks like this

filterMerge = pushOp (Filter 0)

It works, the "0" is completely ignored, but the fact I have to provide it, and it's unneeded, and there is no sensible value for it, is a bit annoying. I think there's some interesting things to consider here about Type design, especially when you have some aspects of a "thing" which are relevant only in some contexts and not others.

Review: Hand to Mouth, by Linda Tirado

Publisher:	G.P. Putnam's Sons
Copyright:	October 2014
ISBN:	0-698-17528-X
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	194

The first time Linda Tirado came to the viral attention of the Internet was in 2013 when she responded to a forum question: "Why do poor people do things that seem so self-destructive?" Here are some excerpts from her virally popular five-page response, which is included in the first chapter:

I know how to cook. I had to take Home Ec. to graduate high school. Most people on my level didn't. Broccoli is intimidating. You have to have a working stove, and pots, and spices, and you'll have to do the dishes no matter how tired you are or they'll attract bugs. It is a huge new skill for a lot of people. That's not great, but it's true. And if you fuck it up, you could make your family sick. We have learned not to try too hard to be middle class. It never works out well and always makes you feel worse for having tried and failed yet again. Better not to try. It makes more sense to get food that you know will be palatable and cheap and that keeps well. Junk food is a pleasure that we are allowed to have; why would we give that up? We have very few of them.

and

I smoke. It's expensive. It's also the best option. You see, I am always, always exhausted. It's a stimulant. When I am too tired to walk one more step, I can smoke and go for another hour. When I am enraged and beaten down and incapable of accomplishing one more thing, I can smoke and I feel a little better, just for a minute. It is the only relaxation I am allowed. It is not a good decision, but it is the only one that I have access to. It is the only thing I have found that keeps me from collapsing or exploding.

This book is an expansion on that essay. It's an entry in a growing genre of examinations of what it means to be poor in the United States in the 21st century. Unlike most of those examinations, it isn't written by an outsider performing essentially anthropological field work. It's one of the rare books written by someone who is herself poor and had the combination of skill and viral fame required to get an opportunity to talk about it in her own words.

I haven't had it worse than anyone else, and actually, that's kind of the point. This is just what life is for roughly a third of the country. We all handle it in our own ways, but we all work in the same jobs, live in the same places, feel the same sense of never quite catching up. We're not any happier about the exploding welfare rolls than anyone else is, believe me. It's not like everyone grows up and dreams of working two essentially meaningless part-time jobs while collecting food stamps. It's just that there aren't many other options for a lot of people.

I didn't find this book back in 2014 when it was published. I found it in 2020 during Tirado's second round of Internet fame: when the police shot out her eye with "non-lethal" rounds while she was covering the George Floyd protests as a photojournalist. In characteristic fashion, she subsequently reached out to the other people who had been blinded by the police, used her temporary fame to organize crowdfunded support for others, and is planning on having "try again" tattooed over the scar. That will give you a feel for the style of this book. Tirado is blunt, opinionated, honest, and full speed ahead. It feels weird to call this book delightful since it's fundamentally about the degree to which the United States is failing a huge group of its citizens and making their lives miserable, but there is something so refreshing and clear-headed about Tirado's willingness to tell you the straight truth about her life. It's empathy delivered with the subtlety of a brick, but also with about as much self-pity as a brick. Tirado is not interested in making you feel sorry for her; she's interested in you paying attention.

I don't get much of my own time, and I am vicious about protecting it. For the most part, I am paid to pretend that I am inhuman, paid to cater to both the reasonable and unreasonable demands of the general public. So when I'm off work, feel free to go fuck yourself. The times that I am off work, awake, and not taking care of life's details are few and far between. It's the only time I have any autonomy. I do not choose to waste that precious time worrying about how you feel. Worrying about you is something they pay me for; I don't work for free.

If you've read other books on this topic (Emily Guendelsberger's On the Clock is still the best of those I've read), you probably won't get many new facts from Hand to Mouth. I think this book is less important for the policy specifics than it is for who is writing it (someone who is living that life and can be honest about it) and the depth of emotional specifics that Tirado brings to the description. If you have never been poor, you will learn the details of what life is like, but more significantly you'll get a feel for how Tirado feels about it, and while this is one individual perspective (as Tirado stresses, including the fact that, as a white person, there are other aspects of poverty she's not experienced), I think that perspective is incredibly valuable. That said, Hand to Mouth provides even more reinforcement of the importance of universal medical care, the absurdity of not including dental care in even some of the more progressive policy proposals, and the difficulties in the way of universal medical care even if we solve the basic coverage problem. Tirado has significant dental problems due to unrepaired damage from a car accident, and her account reinforces my belief that we woefully underestimate how important good dental care is to quality of life. But providing universal insurance or access is only the start of the problem.

There is a price point for good health in America, and I have rarely been able to meet it. I choose not to pursue treatment if it will cost me more than it will gain me, and my cost-benefit is done in more than dollars. I have to think of whether I can afford any potential treatment emotionally, financially, and timewise. I have to sort out whether I can afford to change my life enough to make any treatment worth it I've been told by more than one therapist that I'd be fine if I simply reduced the amount of stress in my life. It's true, albeit unhelpful. Doctors are fans of telling you to sleep and eat properly, as though that were a thing one can simply do.

That excerpt also illustrates one of the best qualities of this book. So much writing about "the poor" treats them as an abstract problem that the implicitly not-poor audience needs to solve, and this leads rather directly to the endless moralizing as "we" attempt to solve that problem by telling poor people what they need to do. Tirado is unremitting in fighting for her own agency. She has a shitty set of options, but within those options she makes her own decisions. She wants better options and more space in which to choose them, which I think is a much more productive way to frame the moral argument than the endless hand-wringing over how to help "those poor people." This is so much of why I support universal basic income. Just give people money. It's not all of the solution UBI doesn't solve the problem of universal medical care, and we desperately need to find a way to make work less awful but it's the most effective thing we can do immediately. Poor people are, if anything, much better at making consequential financial decisions than rich people because they have so much more practice. Bad decisions are less often due to bad decision-making than bad options and the balancing of objectives that those of us who are not poor don't understand. Hand to Mouth is short, clear, refreshing, bracing, and, as you might have noticed, very quotable. I think there are other books in this genre that offer more breadth or policy insight, but none that have the same feel of someone cutting through the bullshit of lazy beliefs and laying down some truth. If any of the above excerpts sound like the sort of book you would enjoy reading, pick this one up. Rating: 8 out of 10

This month for our book club Daniel, Lars, Vince and I read Hardcoded secrets, unverified tokens, and other common JWT mistakes which wasn t quite what we d thought when it was picked. We had been expecting an analysis of JSON web tokens themselves as several us had been working in the area and had noticed various talk about problems with the standard but instead the article is more a discussion of the use of semgrep to find and fix common issues, using issues with JWT as examples. We therefore started off with a bit of a discussion of JWT, concluding that the underlying specification was basically fine given the problem to be solved but that as with any security related technology there were plenty of potential pitfalls in implementation and that sadly many of the libraries implementing the specification make it far too easy to make mistakes such as those covered by the article through their interface design and defaults. For example interfaces that allow interchangable use of public keys and shared keys are error prone, as is is making it easy to access unauthenticated data from tokens without clearly flagging that it is unauthenticated. We agreed that the wide range of JWT implementations available and successfully interoperating with each other is a sign that JWT is getting something right in providing a specification that is clear and implementable. Moving on to semgrep we were all very enthusiastic about the technology, language independent semantic matching with a good set of rules for a range of languages available. Those of us who work on the Linux kernel were familiar with semantic matching and patching as implemented by Coccinelle which has been used quite successfully for years to both avoiding bad patterns in code and making tree wide changes, as demonstrated by the article it is a powerful technique. We were impressed by the multi-language support and approachability of semgrep, with tools like their web editor seeming particularly helpful for people getting started with the tool, especially in conjunction with the wide range of examples available. This was a good discussion (including the tangential discussions of quality problems we had all faced dealing with software over the years, depressing though those can be) and semgrep was a great tool to learn about, I know I m going to be using it for some of my projects.

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Benjy: The best-laid plans of mice... Arthur: And men. Frankie: What? Arthur: Best-laid plans of mice and men. Benjy: What have men got to do with it? -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy TV series

Last year, my intent had been to post monthy updates with details of the F/LOSS contributions I had made during the previous month. I wanted to do this as a way to summarize and reflect on what I had done, and also to hopefully motivate me to do more. Fast forward, and it's been over a year since my last blog post. So much for those plans. I won't go into specific detail about the F/LOSS contributions I've made in the past year. This isn't meant to be a "catch-up" post, per se. It's more of an acknowledgement that I didn't do what I set out to do, as well as something of a reset to enable me to continue blogging (or not) as I see fit. So, to summarize those contributions:

• As expected, most of my contributions were to projects that I regularly contribute to, like Debian, Apache Axis2/C, or PasswordSafe.
• There were also some one-off contributions to projects that I use but am not actively involved in, such as log4cxx or PyKAN.
• There was also a third category of contributions that are a bit of a special case. I made some pseudonymous contributions to a F/LOSS project that I did not want to tie to my public identity. I hope to write more about that situation in a future post.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with the contributions I've made in the past year. Historically, my F/LOSS activity had been somewhat sporadic, sometimes with months passing in between contributions. But looking through my notes from the past year, it appears that I made contributions every single month, with no skipped months. Of course, I would have liked to have done more, but I consider the improvement in consistency to be a solid win. As for the blog, well... Judging by the most recent year-long gap (as well as the gaps before that), I'm not likely to start regularly writing posts anytime soon. But then again, if sporadic F/LOSS contribtutions can turn into regular F/LOSS contributions, then maybe sporadic blog posts can turn into regular blog posts, too. Time will tell.