Search Results: "spa"

14 May 2021

Jelmer Vernooij: Ognibuild

The Debian Janitor is an automated system that commits fixes for (minor) issues in Debian packages that can be fixed by software. It gradually started proposing merges in early December. The first set of changes sent out ran lintian-brush on sid packages maintained in Git. This post is part of a series about the progress of the Janitor. The FOSS world uses a wide variety of different build tools; given a git repository or tarball, it can be hard to figure out how to build and install a piece of software. Humans will generally know what build tool a project is using when they check out a project from git, or they can read the README. And even then, the answer may not always be straightforward to everybody. For automation, there is no obvious place to figure out how to build or install a project.

Debian For Debian packages, Debian maintainers generally will have determined that the appropriate tools to invoke are, and added appropriate invocations to debian/rules. This is really nice when rebuilding all of Debian - one can just invoke debian/rules - a consistent interface - and it will in turn invoke the right tools to build the package, meeting a long list of requirements. With newer versions of debhelper and most common build systems, debhelper can figure a lot of this out automatically - the maintainer just has to add the appropriate build and run time dependencies. However, debhelper needs to be consistent in its behaviour per compat level - otherwise builds might start failing with different versions of debhelper, when the autodetection logic is changed. debhelper can also only do the right thing if all the necessary dependencies are present. debhelper also only functions in the context of a Debian package.
Ognibuild Ognibuild is a new tool that figures out the build system in use by an upstream project, as well as the other dependencies it needs. This information can then be used to invoke said build system, or to e.g. add missing build dependencies to a Debian package. Ognibuild uses a variety of techniques to work out what the dependencies for an upstream package are:
  • Extracting dependencies and other requirements declared in build system metadata (e.g. setup.py)
  • Attempting builds and parsing build logs for missing dependencies (repeating until the build succeeds), calling out to buildlog-consultant
Once it is determined which dependencies are missing, they can be resolved in a variety of ways. Apt can be invoked to install missing dependencies on Debian systems (optionally in a chroot) or ecosystem-specific tools can be used to do so (e.g. pypi or cpan). Instead of installing packages, the tool can also simply inform the user about the missing packages and commands to install them, or update a Debian package appropriately (this is what deb-fix-build does). The target audience of ognibuild are people who need to (possibly from automation) build a variety of projects from different ecosystems or users who are looking to just install a project from source. Developers who are just hacking on e.g. a Python project are better off directly invoking the ecosystem-native tools rather than a wrapper like ognibuild.
Supported ecosystems (Partially) supported ecosystems currently include:
  • Combinations of make and autoconf, automake or CMake
  • Python, including fetching packages from pypi
  • Perl, including fetching packages from cpan
  • Haskell, including fetching from hackage
  • Ninja/Meson
  • Maven
  • Rust, including fetching packages from crates.io
  • PHP Pear
  • R, including fetching packages from CRAN and Bioconductor
For a full list, see the README.
Usage Ognibuild provides a couple of top-level subcommands that will seem familiar to anybody who has used a couple of other build systems:
  • ogni clean - remove build artifacts
  • ogni dist - create a dist tarball
  • ogni build - build the project in the current directory
  • ogni test - run the test suite
  • ogni install - install the project somewhere
  • ogni info - display project information including discovered build system and dependencies
  • ogni exec - run an arbitrary command but attempt to resolve issues like missing dependencies
These tools all take a couple of common options:
resolve=apt auto native Specifies how to resolve any missing dependencies:
  • apt: install the appropriate dependency using apt
  • native: install dependencies using native tools like pip or cpan
  • auto: invoke either apt or native package install, depending on whether the current user is allowed to invoke apt
schroot=name Run inside of a schroot.
explain do not make any changes but tell the user which native on apt packages they could install. There are also subcommand-specific options, e.g. to install to a specific directory on restrict which tests are run.
Examples
Creating a dist tarball 
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% git clone https://github.com/dulwich/dulwich
% cd dulwich
% ogni --schroot=unstable-amd64-sbuild dist
 
Writing dulwich-0.20.21/setup.cfg
creating dist
Creating tar archive
removing 'dulwich-0.20.21' (and everything under it)
Found new tarball dulwich-0.20.21.tar.gz in /var/run/schroot/mount/unstable-amd64-sbuild-974d32d7-6f10-4e77-8622-b6a091857e85/build/tmpucazj7j7/package/dist.
Installing ldb from source, resolving dependencies using apt 
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% wget https://download.samba.org/pub/ldb/ldb-2.3.0.tar.gz
% tar xvfz ldb-2.3.0.tar.gz
% cd ldb-2.3.0
% ogni install --prefix=/tmp/ldb
 
+ install /tmp/ldb/include/ldb.h (from include/ldb.h)
 
Waf: Leaving directory  /tmp/ldb-2.3.0/bin/default'
'install' finished successfully (11.395s)
Running all tests from XML::LibXML::LazyBuilder 
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% wget  https://cpan.metacpan.org/authors/id/T/TO/TORU/XML-LibXML-LazyBuilder-0.08.tar.gz _ <https://cpan.metacpan.org/authors/id/T/TO/TORU/XML-LibXML-LazyBuilder-0.08.tar.gz> _
% tar xvfz XML-LibXML-LazyBuilder-0.08.tar.gz
Cd XML-LibXML-LazyBuilder-0.08
% ogni test
Current Status ognibuild is still in its early stages, but works well enough that it can detect and invoke the build system for most of the upstream projects packaged in Debian. If there are buildsystems that it currently lacks support for or other issues, then I d welcome any bug reports.

13 May 2021

Shirish Agarwal: Population, Immigration, Vaccines and Mass-Surveilance.

The Population Issue and its many facets Another couple of weeks passed. A Lot of things happening, lots of anger and depression in folks due to handling in pandemic, but instead of blaming they are willing to blame everybody else including the population. Many of them want forced sterilization like what Sanjay Gandhi did during the Emergency (1975). I had to share So Long, My son . A very moving tale of two families of what happened to them during the one-child policy in China. I was so moved by it and couldn t believe that the Chinese censors allowed it to be produced, shot, edited, and then shared worldwide. It also won a couple of awards at the 69th Berlin Film Festival, silver bear for the best actor and the actress in that category. But more than the award, the theme, and the concept as well as the length of the movie which was astonishing. Over a 3 hr. something it paints a moving picture of love, loss, shame, relief, anger, and asking for forgiveness. All of which can be identified by any rational person with feelings worldwide.

Girl child What was also interesting though was what it couldn t or wasn t able to talk about and that is the Chinese leftover men. In fact, a similar situation exists here in India, only it has been suppressed. This has been more pronounced more in Asia than in other places. One big thing in this is human trafficking and mostly women trafficking. For the Chinese male, that was happening on a large scale from all neighboring countries including India. This has been shared in media and everybody knows about it and yet people are silent. But this is not limited to just the Chinese, even Indians have been doing it. Even yesteryear actress Rupa Ganguly was caught red-handed but then later let off after formal questioning as she is from the ruling party. So much for justice. What is and has been surprising at least for me is Rwanda which is in the top 10 of some of the best places in equal gender. It, along with other African countries have also been in news for putting quite a significant amount of percentage of GDP into public healthcare (between 20-10%), but that is a story for a bit later. People forget or want to forget that it was in Satara, a city in my own state where 220 girls changed their name from nakusha or unwanted to something else and that had become a piece of global news. One would think that after so many years, things would have changed, the only change that has happened is that now we have two ministries, The Ministry of Women and Child Development (MoWCD) and The Ministry of Health and Welfare (MoHFW). Sadly, in both cases, the ministries have been found wanting, Whether it was the high-profile Hathras case or even the routine cries of help which given by women on the twitter helpline. Sadly, neither of these ministries talks about POSH guidelines which came up after the 2012 gangrape case. For both these ministries, it should have been a pinned tweet. There is also the 1994 PCPNDT Act which although made in 1994, actually functioned in 2006, although what happens underground even today nobody knows . On the global stage, about a decade ago, Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt argued in their book Freakonomics how legalized abortion both made the coming population explosion as well as expected crime rates to be reduced. There was a huge pushback on the same from the conservatives and has become a matter of debate, perhaps something that the Conservatives wanted. Interestingly, it hasn t made them go back but go forward as can be seen from the Freakonomics site.

Climate Change Another topic that came up for discussion was repeatedly climate change, but when I share Shell s own 1998 Confidential report titled Greenhouse effect all become strangely silent. The silence here is of two parts, there probably is a large swathe of Indians who haven t read the report and there may be a minority who have read it and know what already has been shared with U.S. Congress. The Conservative s argument has been for it is jobs and a weak we need to research more . There was a partial debunk of it on the TBD podcast by Matt Farell and his brother Sean Farell as to how quickly the energy companies are taking to the coming change.

Health Budget Before going to Covid stories. I first wanted to talk about Health Budgets. From the last 7 years the Center s allocation for health has been between 0.34 to 0.8% per year. That amount barely covers the salaries to the staff, let alone any money for equipment or anything else. And here by allocation I mean, what is actually spent, not the one that is shared by GOI as part of budget proposal. In fact, an article on Wire gives a good breakdown of the numbers. Even those who are on the path of free markets describe India s health business model as a flawed one. See the Bloomberg Quint story on that. Now let me come to Rwanda. Why did I chose Rwanda, I could have chosen South Africa where I went for Debconf 2016, I chose because Rwanda s story is that much more inspiring. In many ways much more inspiring than that South Africa in many ways. Here is a country which for decades had one war or the other, culminating into the Rwanda Civil War which ended in 1994. And coincidentally, they gained independence on a similar timeline as South Africa ending Apartheid in 1994. What does the country do, when it gains its independence, it first puts most of its resources in the healthcare sector. The first few years at 20% of GDP, later than at 10% of GDP till everybody has universal medical coverage. Coming back to the Bloomberg article I shared, the story does not go into the depth of beyond-expiry date medicines, spurious medicines and whatnot. Sadly, most media in India does not cover the deaths happening in rural areas and this I am talking about normal times. Today what is happening in rural areas is just pure madness. For last couple of days have been talking with people who are and have been covering rural areas. In many of those communities, there is vaccine hesitancy and why, because there have been whatsapp forwards sharing that if you go to a hospital you will die and your kidney or some other part of the body will be taken by the doctor. This does two things, it scares people into not going and getting vaccinated, at the same time they are prejudiced against science. This is politics of the lowest kind. And they do it so that they will be forced to go to temples or babas and what not and ask for solutions. And whether they work or not is immaterial, they get fixed and property and money is seized. Sadly, there are not many Indian movies of North which have tried to show it except for oh my god but even here it doesn t go the distance. A much more honest approach was done in Trance . I have never understood how the South Indian movies are able to do a more honest job of story-telling than what is done in Bollywood even though they do in 1/10th the budget that is needed in Bollywood. Although, have to say with OTT, some baggage has been shed but with the whole film certification rearing its ugly head through MEITY orders, it seems two steps backward instead of forward. The idea being simply to infantilize the citizens even more. That is a whole different ball-game which probably will require its own space.

Vaccine issues One good news though is that Vaccination has started. But it has been a long story full of greed by none other than GOI (Government of India) or the ruling party BJP. Where should I start with. I probably should start with this excellent article done by Priyanka Pulla. It is interesting and fascinating to know how vaccines are made, at least one way which she shared. She also shared about the Cutter Incident which happened in the late 50 s. The response was on expected lines, character assassination of her and the newspaper they published but could not critique any of the points made by her. Not a single point that she didn t think about x or y. Interestingly enough, in January 2021 Bharati Biotech was supposed to be share phase 3 trial data but hasn t been put up in public domain till May 2021. In fact, there have been a few threads raised by both well-meaning Indians as well as others globally especially on twitter to which GOI/ICMR (Indian Council of Medical Research) is silent. Another interesting point to note is that Russia did say in its press release that it is possible that their vaccine may not be standard (read inactivation on their vaccines and another way is possible but would take time, again Brazil has objected, but India hasn t till date.) What also has been interesting is the homegrown B.1.617 lineage or known as double mutant . This was first discovered from my own state, Maharashtra and then transported around the world. There is also B.1.618 which was found in West Bengal and is same or supposed to be similar to the one found in South Africa. This one is known as Triple mutant . About B.1.618 we don t know much other than knowing that it is much more easily transferable, much more infectious. Most countries have banned flights from India and I cannot fault them anyway. Hell, when even our diplomats do not care for procedures to be followed during the pandemic then how a common man is supposed to do. Of course, now for next month, Mr. Modi was supposed to go and now will not attend the G7 meeting. Whether, it is because he would have to face the press (the only Prime Minister and the only Indian Prime Minister who never has faced free press.) or because the Indian delegation has been disinvited, we would never know.

A good article which shares lots of lows with how things have been done in India has been an article by Arundhati Roy. And while the article in itself is excellent and shares a bit of the bitter truth but is still incomplete as so much has been happening. The problem is that the issue manifests in so many ways, it is difficult to hold on. As Arundhati shared, should we just look at figures and numbers and hold on, or should we look at individual ones, for e.g. the one shared in Outlook India. Or the one shared by Dr. Dipshika Ghosh who works in Covid ICU in some hospital
Dr. Dipika Ghosh sharing an incident in Covid Ward

Interestingly as well, while in the vaccine issue, Brazil Anvisa doesn t know what they are doing or the regulator just isn t knowledgeable etc. (statements by various people in GOI, when it comes to testing kits, the same is an approver.)

ICMR/DGCI approving internationally validated kits, Press release.

Twitter In the midst of all this, one thing that many people have forgotten and seem to have forgotten that Twitter and other tools are used by only the elite. The reason why the whole thing has become serious now than in the first phase is because the elite of India have also fallen sick and dying which was not the case so much in the first phase. The population on Twitter is estimated to be around 30-34 million and people who are everyday around 20 odd million or so, which is what 2% of the Indian population which is estimated to be around 1.34 billion. The other 98% don t even know that there is something like twitter on which you can ask help. Twitter itself is exclusionary in many ways, with both the emoticons, the language and all sorts of things. There is a small subset who does use Twitter in regional languages, but they are too small to write anything about. The main language is English which does become a hindrance to lot of people.

Censorship Censorship of Indians critical of Govt. mishandling has been non-stop. Even U.S. which usually doesn t interfere into India s internal politics was forced to make an exception. But of course, this has been on deaf ears. There is and was a good thread on Twitter by Gaurav Sabnis, a friend, fellow Puneite now settled in U.S. as a professor.
Gaurav on Trump-Biden on vaccination of their own citizens
Now just to surmise what has been happened in India and what has been happening in most of the countries around the world. Most of the countries have done centralization purchasing of the vaccine and then is distributed by the States, this is what we understand as co-operative federalism. While last year, GOI took a lot of money under the shady PM Cares fund for vaccine purchase, donations from well-meaning Indians as well as Industries and trade bodies. Then later, GOI said it would leave the states hanging and it is they who would have to buy vaccines from the manufacturers. This is again cheap politics. The idea behind it is simple, GOI knows that almost all the states are strapped for cash. This is not new news, this I have shared a couple of months back. The problem has been that for the last 6-8 months no GST meeting has taken place as shared by Punjab s Finance Minister Amarinder Singh. What will happen is that all the states will fight in-between themselves for the vaccine and most of them are now non-BJP Governments. The idea is let the states fight and somehow be on top. So, the pandemic, instead of being a public health issue has become something of on which politics has to played. The news on whatsapp by RW media is it s ok even if a million or two also die, as it is India is heavily populated. Although that argument vanishes for those who lose their dear and near ones. But that just isn t the issue, the issue goes much more deeper than that Oxygen:12%
Remedisivir:12%
Sanitiser:12%
Ventilator:12%
PPE:18%
Ambulances 28% Now all the products above are essential medical equipment and should be declared as essential medical equipment and should have price controls on which GST is levied. In times of pandemic, should the center be profiting on those. States want to let go and even want the center to let go so that some relief is there to the public, while at the same time make them as essential medical equipment with price controls. But GOI doesn t want to. Leaders of opposition parties wrote open letters but no effect. What is sad to me is how Ambulances are being taxed at 28%. Are they luxury items or sin goods ? This also reminds of the recent discovery shared by Mr. Pappu Yadav in Bihar. You can see the color of ambulances as shared by Mr. Yadav, and the same news being shared by India TV news showing other ambulances. Also, the weak argument being made of not having enough drivers. Ideally, you should have 2-3 people, both 9-1-1 and Chicago Fire show 2 people in ambulance but a few times they have also shown to be flipped over. European seems to have three people in ambulance, also they are also much more disciplined as drivers, at least an opinion shared by an American expat.
Pappu Yadav, President Jan Adhikar Party, Bihar May 11, 2021
What is also interesting to note is GOI plays this game of Health is State subject and health is Central subject depending on its convenience. Last year, when it invoked the Epidemic and DMA Act it was a Central subject, now when bodies are flowing down the Ganges and pyres being lit everywhere, it becomes a State subject. But when and where money is involved, it again becomes a Central subject. The States are also understanding it, but they are fighting on too many fronts.
Snippets from Karnataka High Court hearing today, 13th March 2021
One of the good things is most of the High Courts have woken up. Many of the people on the RW think that the Courts are doing Judicial activism . And while there may be an iota of truth in it, the bitter truth is that many judges or relatives or their helpers have diagnosed and some have even died due to Covid. In face of the inevitable, what can they do. They are hauling up local Governments to make sure they are accountable while at the same time making sure that they get access to medical facilities. And I as a citizen don t see any wrong in that even if they are doing it for selfish reasons. Because, even if justice is being done for selfish reasons, if it does improve medical delivery systems for the masses, it is cool. If it means that the poor and everybody else are able to get vaccinations, oxygen and whatever they need, it is cool. Of course, we are still seeing reports of patients spending in the region of INR 50k and more for each day spent in hospital. But as there are no price controls, judges cannot do anything unless they want to make an enemy of the medical lobby in the country. A good story on medicines and what happens in rural areas, see no further than Laakhon mein ek.
Allahabad High Court hauling Uttar Pradesh Govt. for lack of Oxygen is equal to genocide, May 11, 2021
The censorship is not just related to takedown requests on twitter but nowadays also any articles which are critical of the GOI s handling. I have been seeing many articles which have shared facts and have been critical of GOI being taken down. Previously, we used to see 404 errors happen 7-10 years down the line and that was reasonable. Now we see that happen, days weeks or months. India seems to be turning more into China and North Korea and become more anti-science day-by-day

Fake websites Before going into fake websites, let me start with a fake newspaper which was started by none other than the Gujarat CM Mr. Modi in 2005 .
Gujarat Satya Samachar 2005 launched by Mr. Modi.
And if this wasn t enough than on Feb 8, 2005, he had invoked Official Secrets Act
Mr. Modi invoking Official Secrets Act, Feb 8 2005 Gujarat Samachar
The headlines were In Modi s regime press freedom is in peril-Down with Modi s dictatorship. So this was a tried and tested technique. The above information was shared by Mr. Urvish Kothari, who incidentally also has his own youtube channel. Now cut to 2021, and we have a slew of fake websites being done by the same party. In fact, it seems they started this right from 2011. A good article on BBC itself tells the story. Hell, Disinfo.eu which basically combats disinformation in EU has a whole pdf chronicling how BJP has been doing it. Some of the sites it shared are

Times of New York
Manchester Times
Times of Los Angeles
Manhattan Post
Washington Herald
and many more. The idea being take any site name which sounds similar to a brand name recognized by Indians and make fool of them. Of course, those of who use whois and other such tools can easily know what is happening. Two more were added to the list yesterday, Daily Guardian and Australia Today. There are of course, many features which tell them apart from genuine websites. Most of these are on shared hosting rather than dedicated hosting, most of these are bought either from Godaddy and Bluehost. While Bluehost used to be a class act once upon a time, both the above will do anything as long as they get money. Don t care whether it s a fake website or true. Capitalism at its finest or worst depending upon how you look at it. But most of these details are lost on people who do not know web servers, at all and instead think see it is from an exotic site, a foreign site and it chooses to have same ideas as me. Those who are corrupt or see politics as a tool to win at any cost will not see it as evil. And as a gentleman Raghav shared with me, it is so easy to fool us. An example he shared which I had forgotten. Peter England which used to be an Irish brand was bought by Aditya Birla group way back in 2000. But even today, when you go for Peter England, the way the packaging is done, the way the prices are, more often than not, people believe they are buying the Irish brand. While sharing this, there is so much of Naom Chomsky which comes to my mind again and again

Caste Issues I had written about caste issues a few times on this blog. This again came to the fore as news came that a Hindu sect used forced labor from Dalit community to make a temple. This was also shared by the hill. In both, Mr. Joshi doesn t tell that if they were volunteers then why their passports have been taken forcibly, also I looked at both minimum wage prevailing in New Jersey as a state as well as wage given to those who are in the construction Industry. Even in minimum wage, they were giving $1 when the prevailing minimum wage for unskilled work is $12.00 and as Mr. Joshi shared that they are specialized artisans, then they should be paid between $23 $30 per hour. If this isn t exploitation, then I don t know what is. And this is not the first instance, the first instance was perhaps the case against Cisco which was done by John Doe. While I had been busy with other things, it seems Cisco had put up both a demurrer petition and a petition to strike which the Court stayed. This seemed to all over again a type of apartheid practice, only this time applied to caste. The good thing is that the court stayed the petition. Dr. Ambedkar s statement if Hindus migrate to other regions on earth, Indian caste would become a world problem given at Columbia University in 1916, seems to be proven right in today s time and sadly has aged well. But this is not just something which is there only in U.S. this is there in India even today, just couple of days back, a popular actress Munmun Dutta used a casteist slur and then later apologized giving the excuse that she didn t know Hindi. And this is patently false as she has been in the Bollywood industry for almost now 16-17 years. This again, was not an isolated incident. Seema Singh, a lecturer in IIT-Kharagpur abused students from SC, ST backgrounds and was later suspended. There is an SC/ST Atrocities Act but that has been diluted by this Govt. A bit on the background of Dr. Ambedkar can be found at a blog on Columbia website. As I have shared and asked before, how do we think, for what reason the Age of Englightenment or the Age of Reason happened. If I were a fat monk or a priest who was privileges, would I have let Age of Enlightenment happen. It broke religion or rather Church which was most powerful to not so powerful and that power was more distributed among all sort of thinkers, philosophers, tinkers, inventors and so on and so forth.

Situation going forward I believe things are going to be far more complex and deadly before they get better. I had to share another term called Comorbidities which fortunately or unfortunately has also become part of twitter lexicon. While I have shared what it means, it simply means when you have an existing ailment or condition and then Coronavirus attacks you. The Virus will weaken you. The Vaccine in the best case just stops the damage, but the damage already done can t be reversed. There are people who advise and people who are taking steroids but that again has its own side-effects. And this is now, when we are in summer. I am afraid for those who have recovered, what will happen to them during the Monsoons. We know that the Virus attacks most the lungs and their quality of life will be affected. Even the immune system may have issues. We also know about the inflammation. And the grant that has been given to University of Dundee also has signs of worry, both for people like me (obese) as well as those who have heart issues already. In other news, my city which has been under partial lockdown since a month, has been extended for another couple of weeks. There are rumors that the same may continue till the year-end even if it means economics goes out of the window.There is possibility that in the next few months something like 2 million odd Indians could die
The above is a conversation between Karan Thapar and an Oxford Mathematician Dr. Murad Banaji who has shared that the under-counting of cases in India is huge. Even BBC shared an article on the scope of under-counting. Of course, those on the RW call of the evidence including the deaths and obituaries in newspapers as a narrative . And when asked that when deaths used to be in the 20 s or 30 s which has jumped to 200-300 deaths and this is just the middle class and above. The poor don t have the money to get wood and that is the reason you are seeing the bodies in Ganges whether in Buxar Bihar or Gajipur, Uttar Pradesh. The sights and visuals makes for sorry reading
Pandit Ranjan Mishra son on his father s death due to unavailability of oxygen, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, 11th May 2021.
For those who don t know Pandit Ranjan Mishra was a renowned classical singer. More importantly, he was the first person to suggest Mr. Modi s name as a Prime Ministerial Candidate. If they couldn t fulfil his oxygen needs, then what can be expected for the normal public.

Conclusion Sadly, this time I have no humorous piece to share, I can however share a documentary which was shared on Feluda . I have shared about Feluda or Prodosh Chandra Mitter a few times on this blog. He has been the answer of James Bond from India. I have shared previously about The Golden Fortress . An amazing piece of art by Satyajit Ray. I watched that documentary two-three times. I thought, mistakenly that I am the only fool or fan of Feluda in Pune to find out that there are people who are even more than me. There were so many facets both about Feluda and master craftsman Satyajit Ray that I was unaware about. I was just simply amazed. I even shared few of the tidbits with mum as well, although now she has been truly hooked to Korean dramas. The only solace from all the surrounding madness. So, if you have nothing to do, you can look up his books, read them and then see the movies. And my first recommendation would be the Golden Fortress. The only thing I would say, do not have high hopes. The movie is beautiful. It starts slow and then picks up speed, just like a train. So, till later. Update The Mass surveillance part I could not do justice do hence removed it at the last moment. It actually needs its whole space, article. There is so much that the Govt. is doing under the guise of the pandemic that it is difficult to share it all in one article. As it is, the article is big

10 May 2021

Russell Coker: Minikube and Debian

I just started looking at the Kubernetes documentation and interactive tutorial [1], which incidentally is really good. Everyone who is developing a complex system should look at this to get some ideas for online training. Here are some notes on setting it up on Debian. Add Kubernetes Apt Repository 
deb https://apt.kubernetes.io/ kubernetes-xenial main
First add the above to your apt sources configuration (/etc/apt/sources.list or some file under /etc/apt/sources.list.d) for the kubectl package. Ubuntu Xenial is near enough to Debian/Buster and Debian/Unstable that it should work well for both of them. Then install the GPG key 6A030B21BA07F4FB for use by apt: 
gpg --recv-key 6A030B21BA07F4FB
gpg --list-sigs 6A030B21BA07F4FB
gpg --export 6A030B21BA07F4FB   apt-key add -
The Google key in question is not signed. Install Packages for the Tutorial The online training is based on minikube which uses libvirt to setup a KVM virtual machine to do stuff. To get this running you need to have a system that is capable of running KVM (IE the BIOS is set to allow hardware virtualisation). It MIGHT work on QEMU software emulation without KVM support (technically it s possible but it would be slow and require some code to handle that), I didn t test if it does. Run the following command to install libvirt, kvm, and dnsmasq (which minikube requires) and kubectl on Debian/Buster: 
apt install libvirt-clients libvirt-daemon-system qemu-kvm dnsmasq kubectl
For Debian/Unstable run the following command: 
apt install libvirt-clients libvirt-daemon-system qemu-system-x86 dnsmasq kubectl
To run libvirt as non-root without needing a password for everything you need to add the user in question to the libvirt group. I recommend running things as non-root whenever possible. In this case entering a password for everything will probably be more pain than you want. The Debian Wiki page about KVM [2] is worth reading. Install Minikube Test Environment Here is the documentation for installing Minikube [3]. Basically just download a single executable from the net, put it in your $PATH, and run it. Best to use non-root for that. Also you need at least 3G of temporary storage space in the home directory of the user that runs it. After installing minikube run minikube start which will download container image data and start it up. Then you can run commands like the following to see what it has done. 
# get overview of virsh commands
virsh help
# list domains
virsh --connect qemu:///system list
# list block devices a domain uses
virsh --connect qemu:///system domblklist minikube
# show stats on block device usage
virsh --connect qemu:///system domblkstat minikube hda
# list virtual networks
virsh --connect qemu:///system net-list
# list dhcp leases on a virtual network
virsh --connect qemu:///system net-dhcp-leases minikube-net
# list network filters
virsh --connect qemu:///system nwfilter-list
# list real network interfaces
virsh --connect qemu:///system iface-list
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Russell Coker: Echo Chambers vs Epistemic Bubbles

C Thi Nguyen wrote an interesting article about the difficulty of escaping from Echo Chambers and also mentions Epistemic Bubbles [1]. An Echo Chamber is a group of people who reinforce the same ideas and who often preemptively strike against opposing ideas (for example the right wing denigrating mainstream media to prevent their followers from straying from their approved message). An Epistemic Bubble is a group of people who just happen to not have contact with certain different ideas. When reading that article I wondered about what bubbles I and the people I associate with may be in. One obvious issue is that I have little communication with people who don t write in English and also little communication with people who are poor. So people who are poor and who can t write in English (which means significant portions of the population of India and Africa) are out of communication range for me. There are many situations that are claimed to be bubbles such as white people who are claimed to be innocent of racial issues because they only associate with other white people and men in the IT industry who are claimed to be innocent of sexism because they don t associate with women in the IT industry. But I think they are more of an echo chamber issue, if a white American doesn t access any of the variety of English language media produced by Afro Americans and realise that there s a racial problem it s because they don t want to see it and deliberately avoid looking at evidence. If a man in the IT industry doesn t access any of the media produced by women in tech and realise there are problems with sexism then it s because they don t want to see it. When is it OK to Reject a Group? The Ad Hominem Wikipedia page has a good analysis of different types of Ad Hominem arguments [2]. But the criteria for refuting a point in a debate are very different to the criteria used to determine which sources you should trust when learning about a topic. For example it s theoretically possible for someone to be good at computer science while also thinking the world is flat. In a debate about some aspect of computer programming it would be a fallacious Ad Hominem argument to say you think the Earth is flat therefore you can t program a computer . But if you do a Google search for information on computer programming and one of the results is from earthisflat.com then it would probably save time to skip reading that one. If only one person supports an idea then it s quite likely to be wrong. Good ideas tend to be supported by multiple people and for any good idea you will find a supporter who doesn t appear to have any ideas that are obviously wrong. One of the problems we have as a society now is determining the quality of data (ideas, claims about facts, opinions, communication/spam, etc). When humans have to do that it takes time and energy. Shortcuts can make things easier. Some shortcuts I use are that mainstream media articles are usually more reliable than social media posts (even posts by my friends) and that certain media outlets are untrustworthy (like Breitbart). The next step is that anyone who cites a bad site like Breitbart as factual (rather than just an indication of what some extremists believe) is unreliable. For most questions that you might search for on the Internet there is a virtually endless supply of answers, the challenge is not finding an answer but finding a correct answer. So eliminating answers that are unlikely to be correct is an important part of the search. If someone is citing references to support their argument and they can only cite fringe or extremist sites then I won t be convinced. Now someone could turn that argument around and claim that a site I reference such as the New York Times is wrong. If I find that my ideas were based on a claim that can only be found on the NYT then I will reconsider the issue. While I think that the NYT is generally accurate they are capable of making mistakes and if they are the sole source for claims that go against other claims then I will be hesitant to accept such claims. Newspapers often have exclusive articles based on their own research, but such articles always inspire investigation from other newspapers so other articles appear either supporting or questioning the claims in the exclusive. Saving Time When Interacting With Members of Echo Chambers Convincing a member of a cult or echo chamber of anything is not likely. When in discussions with them the focus should be on the audience and on avoiding wasting much time while also not giving them the impression that you agree with them. A common thing that members of echo chambers say is I don t have time to read about that when you ask if they have read a research paper or a news article. I don t have time to listen to people who can t or won t learn before speaking, there just isn t any value in that. Also if someone has a list of memes that takes more than 15 minutes to recite then they have obviously got time for reading things, just not reading outside their echo chamber. Conversations with members of echo chambers seem to be state free. They make a claim and you reject it, but regardless of the logical flaws you point out or the counter evidence you cite they make the same claim again the next time you speak to them. This seems to be evidence supporting the claim that evangelism is not about converting other people but alienating cult members from the wider society [3] (the original Quora text seems unavailable so I ve linked to a Reddit copy). Pointing out that they had made a claim previously and didn t address the issues you had with it seems effective, such discussions seem to be more about performance so you want to perform your part quickly and efficiently. Be aware of false claims about etiquette. It s generally regarded as polite not to disagree much with someone who invites you to your home or who has done some favour for you, but that is no reason for tolerating an unwanted lecture about their echo chamber. Anyone who tries to create a situation where it seems rude of you not to listen to them saying things that they know will offend you is being rude, much ruder than telling them you are sick of it. Look for specific claims that can be disproven easily. The claim that the Roman Salute is different from the Hitler Salute is one example that is easy to disprove. Then they have to deal with the issue of their echo chamber being wrong about something.
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9 May 2021

Norbert Preining: bash: passing around arguments with quotes

Update: I just learned on IRC that checking with shellcheck would have told me everything, including the usage of arrays, and the linked page even mentions ffmpeg how stupid to reinvent the wheel again and again Thanks to pabs for telling me! It has hit me several times, and searching the internet gives lots of suggestions: How to pass and argument containing quotes to another program from a bash program. My case was a script that automatized video processing using ffmpeg, and I needed to call ffmpeg with arguments like 
ffmpeg ... --filter_complex "some arg with spaces" ...
My first (failed) shot at doing this in the shell script was: 
filterarg='--filter_complex "some arg with spaces"'
...
ffmpeg $someargs $filterarg ...
which, as most bash gurus will know, will fail. Solutions are using eval that are complicated. Recently I realized a much simpler method using bash arrays: Assume the program show_arguments just prints the arguments passed in, maybe something like (again in bash): 
#!/bin/bash
for i in "$@" ; do
  echo "=== $i"
done
The program under consideration would be in the broken version: 
#!/bin/bash
# Variant 1 - NOT WORKING
myargs='-filter_complex "arg with space"'
show_arguments $myargs
This would give 
=== -filter_complex
=== "arg
=== with
=== space"
which is not what we want. The solution is to stuff the arguments into an array, and expand that as arguments. 
#!/bin/bash
# Variant 2 - WORKING
declare -a myargs
myargs=(-filter_complex "arg with space")
show_arguments "$ myargs[@] "
which, correctly, would give 
=== -filter_complex
=== arg with space
Now I only need to remember that trick for the next time it bites me!

6 May 2021

Matthew Garrett: More doorbell adventures

Back in my last post on this topic, I'd got shell on my doorbell but hadn't figured out why the HTTP callbacks weren't always firing. I still haven't, but I have learned some more things.

Doorbird sell a chime, a network connected device that is signalled by the doorbell when someone pushes a button. It costs about $150, which seems excessive, but would solve my problem (ie, that if someone pushes the doorbell and I'm not paying attention to my phone, I miss it entirely). But given a shell on the doorbell, how hard could it be to figure out how to mimic the behaviour of one?

Configuration for the doorbell is all stored under /mnt/flash, and there's a bunch of files prefixed 1000eyes that contain config (1000eyes is the German company that seems to be behind Doorbird). One of these was called 1000eyes.peripherals, which seemed like a good starting point. The initial contents were "Peripherals":[] , so it seemed likely that it was intended to be JSON. Unfortunately, since I had no access to any of the peripherals, I had no idea what the format was. I threw the main application into Ghidra and found a function that had debug statements referencing "initPeripherals and read a bunch of JSON keys out of the file, so I could simply look at the keys it referenced and write out a file based on that. I did so, and it didn't work - the app stubbornly refused to believe that there were any defined peripherals. The check that was failing was pcVar4 = strstr(local_50[0],PTR_s_"type":"_0007c980);, which made no sense, since I very definitely had a type key in there. And then I read it more closely. strstr() wasn't being asked to look for "type":, it was being asked to look for "type":". I'd left a space between the : and the opening " in the value, which meant it wasn't matching. The rest of the function seems to call an actual JSON parser, so I have no idea why it doesn't just use that for this part as well, but deleting the space and restarting the service meant it now believed I had a peripheral attached.

The mobile app that's used for configuring the doorbell now showed a device in the peripherals tab, but it had a weird corrupted name. Tapping it resulted in an error telling me that the device was unavailable, and on the doorbell itself generated a log message showing it was trying to reach a device with the hostname bha-04f0212c5cca and (unsurprisingly) failing. The hostname was being generated from the MAC address field in the peripherals file and was presumably supposed to be resolved using mDNS, but for now I just threw a static entry in /etc/hosts pointing at my Home Assistant device. That was enough to show that when I opened the app the doorbell was trying to call a CGI script called peripherals.cgi on my fake chime. When that failed, it called out to the cloud API to ask it to ask the chime[1] instead. Since the cloud was completely unaware of my fake device, this didn't work either. I hacked together a simple server using Python's HTTPServer and was able to return data (another block of JSON). This got me to the point where the app would now let me get to the chime config, but would then immediately exit. adb logcat showed a traceback in the app caused by a failed assertion due to a missing key in the JSON, so I ran the app through jadx, found the assertion and from there figured out what keys I needed. Once that was done, the app opened the config page just fine.

Unfortunately, though, I couldn't edit the config. Whenever I hit "save" the app would tell me that the peripheral wasn't responding. This was strange, since the doorbell wasn't even trying to hit my fake chime. It turned out that the app was making a CGI call to the doorbell, and the thread handling that call was segfaulting just after reading the peripheral config file. This suggested that the format of my JSON was probably wrong and that the doorbell was not handling that gracefully, but trying to figure out what the format should actually be didn't seem easy and none of my attempts improved things.

So, new approach. Rather than writing the config myself, why not let the doorbell do it? I should be able to use the genuine pairing process if I could mimic the chime sufficiently well. Hitting the "add" button in the app asked me for the username and password for the chime, so I typed in something random in the expected format (six characters followed by four zeroes) and a sufficiently long password and hit ok. A few seconds later it told me it couldn't find the device, which wasn't unexpected. What was a little more unexpected was that the log on the doorbell was showing it trying to hit another bha-prefixed hostname (and, obviously, failing). The hostname contains the MAC address, but I hadn't told the doorbell the MAC address of the chime, just its username. Some more digging showed that the doorbell was calling out to the cloud API, giving it the 6 character prefix from the username and getting a MAC address back. Doing the same myself revealed that there was a straightforward mapping from the prefix to the mac address - changing the final character from "a" to "b" incremented the MAC by one. It's actually just a base 26 encoding of the MAC, with aaaaaa translating to 00408C000000.

That explained how the hostname was being generated, and in return I was able to work backwards to figure out which username I should use to generate the hostname I was already using. Attempting to add it now resulted in the doorbell making another CGI call to my fake chime in order to query its feature set, and by mocking that up as well I was able to send back a file containing X-Intercom-Type, X-Intercom-TypeId and X-Intercom-Class fields that made the doorbell happy. I now had a valid JSON file, which cleared up a couple of mysteries. The corrupt name was because the name field isn't supposed to be ASCII - it's base64 encoded UTF16-BE. And the reason I hadn't been able to figure out the JSON format correctly was because it looked something like this:

"Peripherals":[] "prefix": "type":"DoorChime","name":"AEQAbwBvAHIAYwBoAGkAbQBlACAAVABlAHMAdA==","mac":"04f0212c5cca","user":"username","password":"password" ]

Note that there's a total of one [ in this file, but two ]s? Awesome. Anyway, I could now modify the config in the app and hit save, and the doorbell would then call out to my fake chime to push config to it. Weirdly, the association between the chime and a specific button on the doorbell is only stored on the chime, not on the doorbell. Further, hitting the doorbell didn't result in any more HTTP traffic to my fake chime. However, it did result in some broadcast UDP traffic being generated. Searching for the port number led me to the Doorbird LAN API and a complete description of the format and encryption mechanism in use. Argon2I is used to turn the first five characters of the chime's password (which is also stored on the doorbell itself) into a 256-bit key, and this is used with ChaCha20 to decrypt the payload. The payload then contains a six character field describing the device sending the event, and then another field describing the event itself. Some more scrappy Python and I could pick up these packets and decrypt them, which showed that they were being sent whenever any event occurred on the doorbell. This explained why there was no storage of the button/chime association on the doorbell itself - the doorbell sends packets for all events, and the chime is responsible for deciding whether to act on them or not.

On closer examination, it turns out that these packets aren't just sent if there's a configured chime. One is sent for each configured user, avoiding the need for a cloud round trip if your phone is on the same network as the doorbell at the time. There was literally no need for me to mimic the chime at all, suitable events were already being sent.

Still. There's a fair amount of WTFery here, ranging from the strstr() based JSON parsing, the invalid JSON, the symmetric encryption that uses device passwords as the key (requiring the doorbell to be aware of the chime's password) and the use of only the first five characters of the password as input to the KDF. It doesn't give me a great deal of confidence in the rest of the device's security, so I'm going to keep playing.

[1] This seems to be to handle the case where the chime isn't on the same network as the doorbell

comment count unavailable comments

4 May 2021

Erich Schubert: Machine Learning Lecture Recordings

I have uploaded most of my Machine Learning lecture to YouTube. The slides are in English, but the audio is in German. Some very basic contents (e.g., a demo of standard k-means clustering) were left out from this advanced class, and instead only a link to recordings from an earlier class were given. In this class, I wanted to focus on the improved (accelerated) algorithms instead. These are not included here (yet). I believe there are some contents covered in this class you will find nowhere else (yet). The first unit is pretty long (I did not split it further yet). The later units are shorter recordings. ML F1: Principles in Machine Learning ML F2/F3: Correlation does not Imply Causation & Multiple Testing Problem ML F4: Overfitting beranpassung ML F5: Fluch der Dimensionalit t Curse of Dimensionality ML F6: Intrinsische Dimensionalit t Intrinsic Dimensionality ML F7: Distanzfunktionen und hnlichkeitsfunktionen ML L1: Einf hrung in die Klassifikation ML L2: Evaluation und Wahl von Klassifikatoren ML L3: Bayes-Klassifikatoren ML L4: N chste-Nachbarn Klassifikation ML L5: N chste Nachbarn und Kerndichtesch tzung ML L6: Lernen von Entscheidungsb umen ML L7: Splitkriterien bei Entscheidungsb umen ML L8: Ensembles und Meta-Learning: Random Forests und Gradient Boosting ML L9: Support Vector Machinen - Motivation ML L10: Affine Hyperebenen und Skalarprodukte Geometrie f r SVMs ML L11: Maximum Margin Hyperplane die breitest m gliche Stra e ML L12: Training Support Vector Machines ML L13: Non-linear SVM and the Kernel Trick ML L14: SVM Extensions and Conclusions ML L15: Motivation of Neural Networks ML L16: Threshold Logic Units ML L17: General Artificial Neural Networks ML L18: Learning Neural Networks with Backpropagation ML L19: Deep Neural Networks ML L20: Convolutional Neural Networks ML L21: Recurrent Neural Networks and LSTM ML L22: Conclusion Classification ML U1: Einleitung Clusteranalyse ML U2: Hierarchisches Clustering ML U3: Accelerating HAC mit Anderberg s Algorithmus ML U4: k-Means Clustering ML U5: Accelerating k-Means Clustering ML U6: Limitations of k-Means Clustering ML U7: Extensions of k-Means Clustering ML U8: Partitioning Around Medoids (k-Medoids) ML U9: Gaussian Mixture Modeling (EM Clustering) ML U10: Gaussian Mixture Modeling Demo ML U11: BIRCH and BETULA Clustering ML U12: Motivation Density-Based Clustering (DBSCAN) ML U13: Density-reachable and density-connected (DBSCAN Clustering) ML U14: DBSCAN Clustering ML U15: Parameterization of DBSCAN ML U16: Extensions and Variations of DBSCAN Clustering ML U17: OPTICS Clustering ML U18: Cluster Extraction from OPTICS Plots ML U19: Understanding the OPTICS Cluster Order ML U20: Spectral Clustering ML U21: Biclustering and Subspace Clustering ML U22: Further Clustering Approaches

3 May 2021

Russ Allbery: Review: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Review: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by C.S. Lewis
Illustrator: Pauline Baynes
Series: Chronicles of Narnia #3
Publisher: Collier Books
Copyright: 1952
Printing: 1978
ISBN: 0-02-044260-2
Format: Mass market
Pages: 216
There was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb and he almost deserved it.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the third Narnia book in original publication order (see my review of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for more about reading order). You could arguably start reading here; there are a lot of references to the previous books, but mostly as background material, and I don't think any of it is vital. If you wanted to sample a single Narnia book to see if you'd get along with the series, this is the one I'd recommend. Since I was a kid, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader has held the spot of my favorite of the series. I'm happy to report that it still holds up. Apart from one bit that didn't age well (more on that below), this is the book where the story and the world-building come together, in part because Lewis picks a plot shape that works with what he wants to write about. The younger two Pevensie children, Edmund and Lucy, are spending the summer with Uncle Harold and Aunt Alberta because their parents are in America. That means spending the summer with their cousin Eustace. C.S. Lewis had strong opinions about child-raising that crop up here and there in his books, and Harold and Alberta are his example of everything he dislikes: caricatured progressive, "scientific" parents who don't believe in fiction or mess or vices. Eustace therefore starts the book as a terror, a whiny bully who has only read boring practical books and is constantly scoffing at the Pevensies and making fun of their stories of Narnia. He is therefore entirely unprepared when the painting of a ship in the guest bedroom turns into a portal to the Narnia and dumps the three children into the middle of the ocean. Thankfully, they're in the middle of the ocean near the ship in the painting. That ship is the Dawn Treader, and onboard is Caspian from the previous book, now king of Narnia. He has (improbably) sorted things out in his kingdom and is now on a sea voyage to find seven honorable Telmarine lords who left Narnia while his uncle was usurping the throne. They're already days away from land, headed towards the Lone Islands and, beyond that, into uncharted seas. MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW. Obviously, Eustace gets a redemption arc, which is roughly the first half of this book. It's not a bad arc, but I am always happy when it's over. Lewis tries so hard to make Eustace insufferable that it becomes tedious. As an indoor kid who would not consider being dumped on a primitive sailing ship to be a grand adventure, I wanted to have more sympathy for him than the book would allow. The other problem with Eustace's initial character is that Lewis wants it to stem from "modern" parenting and not reading the right sort of books, but I don't buy it. I've known kids whose parents didn't believe in fiction, and they didn't act anything like this (and kids pick up a lot more via osmosis regardless of parenting than Lewis seems to realize). What Eustace acts like instead is an entitled, arrogant rich kid who is used to the world revolving around him, and it's fascinating to me how Lewis ignores class to focus on educational philosophy. The best part of Eustace's story is Reepicheep, which is just setup for Reepicheep becoming the best part of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Reepicheep, the leader of Narnia's talking mice, first appears in Prince Caspian, but there he's mostly played for laughs: the absurdly brave and dashing mouse who rushes into every fight he sees. In this book, he comes into his own as the courage and occasionally the moral conscience of the party. Caspian wants to explore and to find the lords of his past, the Pevensie kids want to have a sea adventure, and Eustace is in this book to have a redemption arc, but Reepicheep is the driving force at the heart of the voyage. He's going to Aslan's country beyond the sea, armed with a nursemaid's song about his destiny and a determination to be his best and most honorable self every step of the way, and nothing is going to stop him. Eustace, of course, takes an immediate dislike to a talking rodent. Reepicheep, in return, is the least interested of anyone on the ship in tolerating Eustace's obnoxious behavior and would be quite happy to duel him. But when Eustace is turned into a dragon, Reepicheep is the one who spends hours with him, telling him stories and ensuring he's not alone. It's beautifully handled, and my only complaint is that Lewis doesn't do enough with the Eustace and Reepicheep friendship (or indeed with Eustace at all) for the rest of the book. After Eustace's restoration and a few other relatively short incidents comes the second long section of the book and the part that didn't age well: the island of the Dufflepuds. It's a shame because the setup is wonderful: a cultivated island in the middle of nowhere with no one in sight, mysterious pounding sounds and voices, the fun of trying to figure out just what these invisible creatures could possibly be, and of course Lucy's foray into the second floor of a house, braving the lair of a magician to find and read one of the best books of magic in fantasy. Everything about how Lewis sets this scene is so well done. The kids are coming from an encounter with a sea serpent and a horrifically dangerous magic island and land on this scene of eerily normal domesticity. The most dangerous excursion is Lucy going upstairs in a brightly lit house with soft carpet in the middle of the day. And yet it's incredibly tense because Lewis knows exactly how to put you in Lucy's head, right down to having to stand with her back to an open door to read the book. And that book! The pages only turn forward, the spells are beautifully illustrated, and the sense of temptation is palpable. Lucy reading the eavesdropping spell is one of the more memorable bits in this series, at least for me, and makes a surprisingly subtle moral point about the practical reasons why invading other people's privacy is unwise and can just make you miserable. And then, when Lucy reads the visibility spell that was her goal, there's this exchange, which is pure C.S. Lewis:
"Oh Aslan," said she, "it was kind of you to come." "I have been here all the time," said he, "but you have just made me visible." "Aslan!" said Lucy almost a little reproachfully. "Don't make fun of me. As if anything I could do would make you visible!" "It did," said Aslan. "Did you think I wouldn't obey my own rules?"
I love the subtlety of what's happening here: the way that Lucy is much more powerful than she thinks she is, but only because Aslan decided to make the rules that way and chooses to follow his own rules, making himself vulnerable in a fascinating way. The best part is that Lewis never belabors points like this; the characters immediately move on to talk about other things, and no one feels obligated to explain. But, unfortunately, along with the explanation of the thumping and the magician, we learn that the Dufflepuds are (remarkably dim-witted) dwarfs, the magician is their guardian (put there by Aslan, no less!), he transformed them into rather absurd shapes that they hate, and all of this is played for laughs. Once you notice that these are sentient creatures being treated essentially like pets (and physically transformed against their will), the level of paternalistic colonialism going on here is very off-putting. It's even worse that the Dufflepuds are memorably funny (washing dishes before dinner to save time afterwards!) and are arguably too dim to manage on their own, because Lewis made the authorial choice to write them that way. The "white man's burden" feeling is very strong. And Lewis could have made other choices! Coriakin the magician is a fascinating and somewhat morally ambiguous character. We learn later in the book that he's a star and his presence on the island is a punishment of sorts, leading to one of my other favorite bits of theology in this book:
"My son," said Ramandu, "it is not for you, a son of Adam, to know what faults a star can commit."
Lewis could have kept most of the setup, kept the delightfully silly things the Dufflepuds believe, changed who was responsible for their transformation, and given Coriakin a less authoritarian role, and the story would have been so much stronger for it. After this, the story gets stranger and wilder, and it's in the last part that I think the true magic of this book lies. The entirety of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is a progression from a relatively mundane sea voyage to something more awe-inspiring. The last few chapters are a tour de force of wonder: rejuvenating stars, sunbirds, the Witch's stone knife, undersea kingdoms, a sea of lilies, a wall of water, the cliffs of Aslan's country, and the literal end of the world. Lewis does it without much conflict, with sparse description in a very few pages, and with beautifully memorable touches like the quality of the light and the hush that falls over the ship. This is the part of Narnia that I point to and wonder why I don't see more emulation (although I should note that it is arguably an immram). Tolkien-style fantasy, with dwarfs and elves and magic rings and great battles, is everywhere, but I can't think of many examples of this sense of awe and discovery without great battles and detailed explanations. Or of characters like Reepicheep, who gets one of the best lines of the series:
"My own plans are made. While I can, I sail east in the Dawn Treader. When she fails me, I paddle east in my coracle. When she sinks, I shall swim east with my four paws. And when I can swim no longer, if I have not reached Aslan's country, or shot over the edge of the world in some vast cataract, I shall sink with my nose to the sunrise and Peepiceek shall be the head of the talking mice in Narnia."
The last section of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is one of my favorite endings of any book precisely because it's so different than the typical ending of a novel. The final return to England is always a bit disappointing in this series, but it's very short and is preceded by so much wonder that I don't mind. Aslan does appear to the kids as a lamb at the very end of the world, making Lewis's intended Christian context a bit more obvious, but even that isn't belabored, just left there for those who recognize the symbolism to notice. I was curious during this re-read to understand why The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is so much better than the first two books in the series. I think it's primarily due to two things: pacing, and a story structure that's better aligned with what Lewis wants to write about. For pacing, both The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian have surprisingly long setups for short books. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by contrast, it takes only 35 pages to get the kids in Narnia, introduce all the characters, tour the ship, learn why Caspian is off on a sea voyage, establish where this book fits in the Narnian timeline, and have the kids be captured by slavers. None of the Narnia books are exactly slow, but Dawn Treader is the first book of the series that feels like it knows exactly where it's going and isn't wasting time getting there. The other structural success of this book is that it's a semi-episodic adventure, which means Lewis can stop trying to write about battles and political changes whose details he's clearly not interested in and instead focus wholeheartedly on sense-of-wonder exploration. The island-hopping structure lets Lewis play with ideas and drop them before they wear out their welcome. And the lack of major historical events also means that Aslan doesn't have to come in to resolve everything and instead can play the role of guardian angel. I think The Voyage of the Dawn Treader has the most compelling portrayal of Aslan in the series. He doesn't make decisions for the kids or tell them directly what to do the way he did in the previous two books. Instead, he shows up whenever they're about to make a dreadful mistake and does just enough to get them to make a better decision. Some readers may find this takes too much of the tension out of the book, but I have always appreciated it. It lets nervous child readers enjoy the adventures while knowing that Aslan will keep anything too bad from happening. He plays the role of a protective but non-interfering parent in a genre that usually doesn't have parents because they would intervene to prevent adventures. I enjoyed this book just as much as I remembered enjoying it during my childhood re-reads. Still the best book of the series. This, as with both The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian, was originally intended to be the last book of the series. That, of course, turned out to not be the case, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is followed (in both chronological and original publication order) by The Silver Chair. Rating: 9 out of 10

1 May 2021

Utkarsh Gupta: FOSS Activites in April 2021

Here s my (nineteenth) monthly update about the activities I ve done in the F/L/OSS world.

Debian
This was my 28th month of actively contributing to Debian. I became a DM in late March 2019 and a DD on Christmas 19! \o/ Crazy month, as always. Lots of things happening and lots of moving parts.
Now that I am working on Ubuntu-full time, I barely get much time to do any extra stuff. Then the massive COVID wave that has plunged India had made this month further crazier. More on that later, maybe. IDK. Anyway, I did some Debian stuff, thanks to Salzburg BSP (more down below). I worked on the following stuff:

Uploads and bug fixes:

Other $things:
  • Mentoring for newcomers and assisting people in BSP.
  • Moderation of -project mailing list.

Salzburg BSP 2021 This was my first virtual BSP and the first BSP in Salzburg and it was absolutely amazing!
Many kudos to Bernd Zeimetz for organizing it so smoothly and wonderfully, for real! \o/ We had a bunch of amazing sessions, besides hacking, of course, like:
  • yoga,
  • sports,
  • games, and
  • datacenter tour -> which was super!
We also had lots of things happening at #debian-bsp-2021-szg and did a lot of work.
Whilst everything we did is available on the pad, I work on the following things:
  • [deki/utkarsh]: CVE-2021-28421/fluidsynth (sid); cf: #987168/#987471.
  • [deki/utkarsh]: CVE-2021-28421/fluidsynth (buster); cf: #987168/#987494.
  • [utkarsh]: 18 CVEs for jackson-databind (buster); cf: #987489.
  • [utkarsh]: fix for ruby-librarian/#987113 (unblock request: #987501).
  • [utkarsh]: 17 CVEs for jackson-databind (stretch); LTS upload.
  • [utkarsh]: CVE-2020-12460/opendmarc (stretch); LTS upload.
  • [utkarsh]: CVE-2020-12460/opendmarc (buster); cf: #987531.
  • [deki/utkarsh]: libpam-alreadyloggedin, broken autopkgtest; #958224
  • [deki/utkarsh]: libpam-alreadyloggedin, installed in wrong directory; #986247
  • [deki/utkarsh]: libpam-alreadyloggedin, FTCBFS; #969122
  • [donfede/utkarsh] 10 CVEs for salt (buster)
  • [donfede/utkarsh] 10 CVEs for salt (bullseye)
And finally, we clicked a picture! \o/

Debian (E)LTS
Debian Long Term Support (LTS) is a project to extend the lifetime of all Debian stable releases to (at least) 5 years. Debian LTS is not handled by the Debian security team, but by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success. And Debian Extended LTS (ELTS) is its sister project, extending support to the Jessie release (+2 years after LTS support). This was my nineteenth month as a Debian LTS and tenth month as a Debian ELTS paid contributor.
I was assigned 60.00 hours for LTS and 60.00 hours for ELTS and worked on the following things:

LTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:

ELTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:

Other (E)LTS Work:
  • Front-desk duty from 29-03 until 04-04 and then from 26-04 until 02-05 for both LTS and ELTS.
  • Triaged spamassassin, codemirror-js, jackson-databind, wordpress, gstreamer, underscore, python-bleach, plinth, libpano13, salt, dojo, ruby2.7, firefox-esr, clamav, composter, courier-authlib, opendmarc, openexr, libimage-exiftool-perl, tomcat7, libjs-handlebars, libnet-netmask-perl, network-manager, and curl.
  • Mark CVE-2021-20297/network-manager as not-affected for jessie.
  • Mark CVE-2021-22890/curl as not-affected for jessie and stretch.
  • Mark CVE-2020-7760/codemirror-js as not-affected for jessie.
  • Mark CVE-2021-25122/tomcat8 as not-affected for jessie.
  • Mark CVE-2021-XXXX/plinth as no-dsa for stretch.
  • Mark CVE-2021-29424/libnet-netmask-perl as no-dsa for stretch.
  • Mark CVE-2021-28374/courier-authlib as fixed in 0.58-3.1 for jessie.
  • Mark CVE-2021-1252/clamav as not-affected for jessie.
  • Mark CVE-2021-1404/clamav as not-affected for jessie.
  • Mark CVE-2020-4051/dojo as no-dsa for jessie.
  • Mark CVE-2021-29447/wordpress as not-affected for jessie.
  • Mark CVE-2021-29450/wordpress as not-affected for jessie.
  • Mark CVE-2019-20920/libjs-handlebars as ignored for stretch and jessie.
  • Mark CVE-2021-23369/libjs-handlebars as ignored for stretch and jessie.
  • Mark CVE-2020-4051/dojo as fixed in 1.15.4+dfsg1-1 for sid and bullseye.
  • Mark CVE-2021-28965/ruby2.7 fixed in 2.7.3-1 for sid.
  • Mark CVE-2020-12272/opendmarc as postponed for jessie.
  • Mark CVE-2021-20296, CVE-2021-3475, CVE-2021-3476, CVE-2021-3477, CVE-2021-3478, and CVE-2021-3479, affecting openexr, as no-dsa for jessie and stretch.
  • Suggest proposed fixes for CVE-2021-22876/curl on LTS public list.
  • Publish the missing DLA update for the website on behalf of the community contribution. Thread here.
  • Help suggest and unblock work if FD is missing or something. Thread here.
  • Suggest marking CVE-2021-23369/ node,libjs -handlebars as no-dsa/ignored for all suites. Thread here.
  • Help unblock Anton with the failed python2.7 build on i386 by coordinating with the sec team. Thread here.
  • Private ELTS-related discussion on the ELTS list (+ w/ Raphael).
  • Auto EOL ed webkit2gtk, python-bleach, tika, linux, ircii, spice-vdagent, libspring-security-2.0-java, file-roller, rustc, python-django-registration, gsoap, thunderbird, mosquitto, ruby-sidekiq, gnuchess, libpodofo, unbound, drupal7, 389-ds-base, and scrollz for jessie.
  • Answered questions (& discussions) on IRC (#debian-lts and #debian-elts).
  • General and other discussions on LTS private and public mailing list.
Until next time.
:wq for today.

30 April 2021

Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities April 2021

Focus This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.

Changes

Issues

Review

Administration
  • Debian: restart service killed by OOM killer, revert mirror redirection
  • Debian wiki: unblock IP addresses, approve accounts

Communication

Sponsors The flower/sptag work was sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

Chris Lamb: Free software activities in April 2021

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world during April 2021 (previous month): Reproducible Builds One of the original promises of open source software is that distributed peer review and transparency of process results in enhanced end-user security. However, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free and open source software for malicious flaws, almost all software today is distributed as pre-compiled binaries. This allows nefarious third-parties to compromise systems by injecting malicious code into ostensibly secure software during the various compilation and distribution processes. The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised. The project is proud to be a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy. Conservancy acts as a corporate umbrella allowing projects to operate as non-profit initiatives without managing their own corporate structure. If you like the work of the Conservancy or the Reproducible Builds project, please consider becoming an official supporter. This month, I:
Debian
Debian Long Term Support (LTS) This month I have worked 18 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and 12 hours on its sister Extended LTS project: You can find out more about the project via the following video:

Bastian Venthur: Getting the Function keys of a Keychron working on Linux

Having destroyed the third Cherry Stream keyboard in 4 years, I wanted to try a more substantial keyboard for a change. After some research I decided that I want a mechanical, wired, tenkeyless keyboard without any fancy LEDs. At the end I settled for a Keychron C1 with red switches. It meets all requirements, looks very nice and the price is reasonable. Surprise! After the keyboard was delivered, I connected it to my Debian machine and was unpleasantly surprised to notice that the Function-keys did not work at all. The keyboard shares the Multimedia keys with the F-keys and you have an fn key that supposedly switches between the two modes, like you re used to on a laptop. On Linux, however you cannot access the F-keys at all: pressing fn + F1 or F1 makes no difference, you ll always get the Multimedia key. Switching the keyboard between Windows and Mac mode makes no difference either, in both modes the F-keys are not accessible. Apparently Keychron is aware of the problem, because the quick start manual tells you:
We have a Linux user group on facebook. Please search Keychron Linux Group on facebook. So you can better experience with our keyboard.
Customer support at its finest! So at this point you should probably just send the keyboard back, get the refund and buy a proper one with functioning F-keys. The fix Test if this command fixes the issue and enables the Fn + F-key-combos: 
# as root:
echo 2 > /sys/module/hid_apple/parameters/fnmode
Depending on the mode the keyboard is in, you should now be able to use the F-keys by simply pressing them, and the Multimedia keys by pressing fn + F-key (or the other way round). To switch the default mode of the F-keys to Function- or Multimedia-mode, press and hold fn + X + L for 4 seconds. If everything works as expected, you can make the change permanent by creating the file /etc/modprobe.d/hid_apple.conf and adding the line: 
options hid_apple fnmode=2
This works regardless if the keyboard is in Windows- or Mac-mode, and that might hint at the problem: in both cases the Linux thinks you re connecting a Mac keyboard. The rant Although the fix was not very hard to find and apply, this experience still leaves a foul taste. I naively assumed the problem of having a properly functioning keyboard that simply works when you plug it in, has been thoroughly solved by 2021. To make it worse, I assume Keychron must be aware of the problem because the other Keychron models have the same issue! But instead of fixing it on their end, they forward you to a facebook community and expect you to somehow fix it yourself. So dear Keychron, you do make really beautiful keyboards! But before you release your next model with the same bug, maybe invest a bit on fixing the basics? I see that your keyboards support firmware updates for Windows and Mac maybe you can talk to the folks over at the Linux Vendor Firmware Service and support Linux as well? Maybe you can even fix this annoying bug for the keyboards you ve already sold? I found it really cute that you sent different keycaps for Windows and Mac setups a few disappointed Linux users might accept an apology in form of a Linux cap

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, March 2021

A Debian LTS logo
Like each month, have a look at the work funded by Freexian s Debian LTS offering. Debian project funding In March, we put aside 3225 EUR to fund Debian projects but sadly nobody picked up anything, so this one of the many reasons Raphael posted as series of blog posts titled Challenging times for Freexian , posted in 4 parts on the last two days of March and the first two of April. [Part one, two, three and four] So we re still looking forward to receive more projects from various Debian teams! Learn more about the rationale behind this initiative in this article! Debian LTS contributors In March, 11 contributors have been paid to work on Debian LTS, their reports are available: Evolution of the situation In March we released 28 DLAs and held our second LTS team meeting for 2021 on IRC, with the next public IRC meeting coming up at the end of May. At that meeting Holger announced that after 2.5 years he wanted to step back from his role helping Rapha l in coordinating/managing the LTS team. We would like to thank Holger for his continuous work on Debian LTS (which goes back to 2014) and are happy to report that we already found a successor which we will introduce in the upcoming April report from Freexian. Finally, we would like to remark once again that we are constantly looking for new contributors. For a last time, please contact Holger if you are interested! The security tracker currently lists 42 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file has 28 packages needing an update. We are also pleased to report that we got 4 new sponsors over the last 2 months : thanks to sipgate GmbH, OVH US LLC, Tilburg University and Observatoire des Sciences de l Univers de Grenoble ! Thanks to our sponsors Sponsors that joined recently are in bold.

22 April 2021

Shirish Agarwal: The Great Train Robbery

I had a twitter fight few days back with a gentleman and the article is a result of that fight. Sadly, I do not know the name of the gentleman as he goes via a psuedo name and then again I ve not taken permission from him to quote him in either way. So I will just state the observations I was able to make from the conversations we had. As people who read this blog regularly would know, I am and have been against Railway Privatization which is happening in India. And will be sharing some of the case studies from other countries as to how it panned out for them.

UK Railways
How Privatization Fails : Railways
The Above video is by a gentleman called Shaun who basically shared that privatization as far as UK is concerned is nothing but monopolies and while there are complex reasons for the same, the design of the Railways is such that it will always be a monopoly structure. At the most what you can do is have several monopolies but that is all that can happen. The idea of competition just cannot happen. Even the idea that subsidies will be less or/and trains will run on time is far from fact. Both of these facts have been checked and found to be truthful by fullfact.org. It is and argued that UK is small and perhaps it doesn t have the right conditions. It is probably true but still we do deserve to have a glance at the UK railway map.
UK railway map with operatorsUK railway map with operators
The above map is copyrighted to Map Marketing where you could see it today . As can be seen above most companies had their own specified areas. Now if you had looked at the facts then you would have seen that UK fares have been higher. In fact, an oldish article from Metro (a UK publication) shares the same. In fact, UK nationalized its railways effectively as many large rail operators were running in red. Even Scotland is set to nationalised back in March 2022. Remember this is a country which hasn t seen inflation go upwards of 5% in nearly a decade. The only outlier was 2011 where they indeed breached the 5% mark. So from this, what we see is Private Gains and Private Gains Public Losses perhaps seem fit. But then maybe we didn t use the right example. Perhaps Japan would be better. They have bullet trains while UK is still thinking about it. (HS2).

Japanese Railway Below is the map of Japanese Railway
Railway map of Japan with private ownership courtesy Wikimedia commons
Japan started privatizing its railway in 1987 and to date it has not been fully privatized. And on top of it, amount as much as 24 trillion of the long-term JNR debt was shouldered by the government at the expense of taxpayers of Japan while also reducing almost 1/4th of it employees. To add to it, while some parts of Japanese Railways did make profits, many of them made profits by doing large-scale non-railway business mostly real estate of land adjacent to railway stations. In many cases, it seems this went all the way up to 60% of the revenue. The most profitable has been the Shinkansen though. And while it has been profitable, it has not been without safety scandals over the years, the biggest in recent years was the 2005 Amagasaki derailment. What was interesting to me was the Aftermath, while the Wikipedia page doesn t share much, I had read at the time and probably could be found how a lot of ordinary people stood up to the companies in a country where it is a known fact that most companies are owned by the Yakuza. And this is a country where people are loyal to their corporation or company no matter what. It is a strange culture to west and also here in India where people change jobs on drop of hat, although nowadays we have record unemployment. So perhaps Japan too does not meet our standard as it doesn t do competition with each other but each is a set monopoly in those regions. Also how much subsidy is there or not is not really transparent.

U.S. Railways Last, but not the least I share the U.S. Railway map. This is provided by A Mr. Tom Alison on reddit on channel maporn. As the thread itself is archived and I do not know the gentleman concerned, nor have taken permission for the map, hence sharing the compressed version


U.S. Railway lines with the different owners
Now the U.S. Railways is and has always been peculiar as unlike the above two the U.S. has always been more of a freight network. Probably, much of it has to do that in the 1960 s when oil was cheap, the U.S. made zillions of roadways and romanticized the road trip and has been doing it ever since. Also the creation of low-cost airlines definitely didn t help the railways to have more passenger services, in fact the opposite. There are and have been smaller services and attempts of privatization in both New Zealand and Australia and both have been failures. Please see papers in that regard. My simple point is this, as can be seen above, there have been various attempts at privatization of railways and most of them have been a mixed bag. The only one which comes close to what we think as good is Japanese but that also used a lot of public debt which we don t know what will happen on next. Also for higher-speed train services like a bullet train or whatever, you need to direct, no hair pen bends. In fact, a good talk on the topic is the TBD podcast which while it talks about hyperloop, the same questions is and would be asked if were to do in India. Another thing to be kept in mind is that the Japanese have been exceptional builders and this is because they have been forced to. They live in a seismically active zone which made Fukushima disaster a reality but at the same time, their buildings are earthquake-resistant. Standard Disclaimer The above is a simplified version of things. I could have added in financial accounts but that again has no set pattern. For e.g. some Railways use accrual, some use cash and some use hybrid. I could have also shared in either the guage or electrification but all have slightly different standards, although uniguage is something that all Railways aspire for and electrification is again something that all Railways want although in many cases it just isn t economically feasible.

Indian Railways Indian Railways itself recently made the move from Cash to Accrual couple of years back. In-between for a couple of years, it was hybrid. The sad part is and was you can now never measure against past performance in the old way because it is so different. Hence, whether the Railways will be making a loss or a profit, we would come to know only much later. Also, most accountants don t know the new system well, so it is gonna take more time, how much unknown. Sadly, what GOI did a few years back is merge the Railway budget into the Union Budget. Of course, the excuse they gave is too many pressures of new trains, while the truth is, by doing this, they decreased transparency about the whole thing. For e.g. for the last few years, the only state which had significant work being done is in U.P. (Uttar Pradesh) and a bit in Goa, although that is has been protested time and again. I being from the neighborly state of Maharashtra , and have been there several times. Now it does feels all like a dream, going to Goa :(.

Covid news Now before I jump on the news, I should share the movie Virus (2019) which was made by the talented Aashiq Abu. Even though, am not a Malayalee, I still have enjoyed many of his movies simply because he is a terrific director and Malayalam movies, at least most of them have English subtitles and lot of original content.. Interestingly, unlike the first couple of times when I saw it a couple of years back. The first time I saw it, I couldn t sleep a wink for a week. Even the next time, it was heavy. I had shared the movie with mum, and even she couldn t see it in one go. It is and was that powerful Now maybe because we are headlong in the pandemic, and the madness is all around us. There are two terms that helped me though understand a great deal of what is happening in the movie, the first term was altered sensorium which has been defined here. The other is saturation or to be more precise oxygen saturation . This term has also entered the Indian twitter lexicon quite a bit as India has started running out of oxygen. Just today Delhi High Court did an emergency hearing on the subject late at night. Although there is much to share about the mismanagement of the center, the best piece on the subject has been by Miss Priya Ramani. Yup, the same lady who has won against M.J. Akbar and this is when Mr. Akbar had 100 lawyers for this specific case. It would be interesting to see what happens ahead. There are however few things even she forgot in her piece, For e.g. reverse migration i.e. from urban to rural migration started again. Two articles from different entities sharing a similar outlook.Sadly, the right have no empathy or feeling for either the poor or the sick. Even the labor minister Santosh Gangwar s statement that around 1.04 crores were the only people who walked back home. While there is not much data, however some work/research has been done on migration to cites that the number could be easily 10 times as much. And this was in the lockdown of last year. This year, again the same issue has re-surfaced and migrants learning lessons started leaving cities. And I m ashamed to say I think they are doing the right thing. Most State Governments have not learned lessons nor have they done any work to earn the trust of migrants. This is true of almost all state Governments. Last year, just before the lockdown was announced, me and my friend spent almost 30k getting a cab all the way from Chennai to Pune, how much we paid for the cab, how much we bribed the various people just so we could cross the state borders to return home to our anxious families. Thankfully, unlike the migrants, we were better off although we did make a loss. I probably wouldn t be alive if I were in their situation as many didn t. That number is still in the air undocumented deaths Vaccine issues Currently, though the issue has been the Vaccine and the pricing of the same. A good article to get a summation of the issues outlined has been shared on Economist. Another article that goes to the heart of the issue is at scroll. To buttress the argument, the SII chairman had shared this few weeks back
Adar Poonawala talking to Vishnu Som on Left, right center, 7th April 2021.
So, a licensee manufacturer wants to make super-profits during the pandemic. And now, as shared above they can very easily do it. Even the quotes given to nearby countries is smaller than the quotes given to Indian states

Prices of AstraZeneca among various states and countries.
The situation around beds, vaccines, oxygen, anything is so dire that people could go to any lengths to save their loved ones. Even if they know if a certain medicine doesn t work. For e.g. Remdesivir, 5 WHO trials have concluded that it doesn t increase mortality. Heck, even AIIMS chief said the same. But both doctors and relatives desperation to cling on hope has made Remdesivir as a black market drug with unoffical prices hovering anywhere between INR 14k/- to INR30k/- per vial. One of the executives of a top firm was also arrested in Gujarat. In Maharashtra, the opposition M.P. came to the rescue of the officials of Bruick pharms in Mumbai. Sadly, this strange affliction to the party in the center is also there in my extended family. At one end, they will heap praise on Mr. Modi, at the same time they can t get wait to get fast out of India. Many of them have settled in horrors of horror Dubai, as it is the best place to do business, get international schools for the young ones at decent prices, cheaper or maybe a tad more than what they paid in Delhi or elsewhere. Being an Agarwal or a Gupta makes it easier to compartmentalize both things. Ease of doing business, 5 days flat to get a business registered, up and running. And the paranoia is still there. They won t talk on the phone about him because they are afraid they may say something which comes back to bite them. As far as their decision to migrate, can t really blame them. If I were 20-25 yeas younger and my mum were in a better shape than she is, we probably would have migrated as well, although would have preferred Europe than anywhere else.

Internet Freedom and Aarogya Setu App.


Internet Freedom had shared the chilling effects of the Aarogya Setu App. This had also been shared by FSCI in the past, and recently had their handle being banned on Twitter. This was also apparent in a legal bail order which the high court judge gave. While I won t go into the merits and demerits of the bail order, it is astounding for the judge to say that the accused, even though he would be on bail install an app. so he can be surveilled. And this is a high court judge, such a sad state of affairs. We seem to be putting up new lows every day when it comes to judicial jurisprudence. One interesting aspect of the whole case was shared by Aishwarya Iyer. She shared a story that she and her team worked on quint which raises questions on the quality of the work done by Delhi Police. This is of course, up to Delhi Police to ascertain the truth of the matter because unless and until they are able to tie in the PMO s office in for a leak or POTUS s office it hardly seems possible. For e.g. the dates when two heads of state can meet each other would be decided by the secretaries of the two. Once the date is known, it would be shared with the press while at the same time some sort of security apparatus would kick in place. It is incumbent, especially on the host to take as much care as he can of the guest. We all remember that World War 1 (the war to end all wars) started due to the murder of Archduke Ferdinand.

As nobody wants that, the best way is to make sure that a political murder doesn t happen on your watch. Now while I won t comment on what it would be, it would be safe to assume that it would be z+ security along with higher readiness. Especially if it as somebody as important as POTUS. Now, it would be quite a reach for Delhi Police to connect the two dates. They either will have to get creative with the dates or some other way. Otherwise, with practically no knowledge in the public domain, they can t work in limbo. In either case, I do hope the case comes up for hearing soon and we see what the Delhi Police says and contends in the High Court about the same. At the very least, it would be irritating for them to talk of the dates unless they can contend some mass conspiracy which involves the PMO (and would bring into question the constant vetting done by the Intelligence dept. of all those who work in PMO). And this whole case is to kind of shelter to the Delhi riots which happened in which majorly the Muslims died but their deaths lay unaccounted till date

Conclusion In Conclusion, I would like to share a bit of humor because right now the atmosphere is humorless, both with authoritarian tendencies of the Central Govt. and the mass mismanagement of public health which they now have left to the state to do as they fit. The peice I am sharing is from arre, one of my goto sites whenever I feel low.

21 April 2021

Enrico Zini: Python output buffering

Here's a little toy program that displays a message like a split-flap display: 
#!/usr/bin/python3
import sys
import time
def display(line: str):
    cur = '0' * len(line)
    while True:
        print(cur, end="\r")
        if cur == line:
            break
        time.sleep(0.09)
        cur = "".join(chr(min(ord(c) + 1, ord(oc))) for c, oc in zip(cur, line))
    print()
message = " ".join(sys.argv[1:])
display(message.upper())
This only works if the script's stdout is unbuffered. Pipe the output through cat, and you get a long wait, and then the final string, without the animation. What is happening is that since the output is not going to a terminal, optimizations kick in that buffer the output and send it in bigger chunks, to make processing bulk I/O more efficient. I haven't found a good introductory explanation of buffering in Python's documentation. The details seem to be scattered in the io module documentation and they mostly assume that one is already familiar with concepts like unbuffered, line-buffered or block-buffered. The libc documentation has a good quick introduction that one can read to get up to speed. Controlling buffering in Python In Python, one can force a buffer flush with the flush() method of the output file descriptor, like sys.stdout.flush(), to make sure pending buffered output gets sent. Python's print() function also supports flush=True as an optional argument: 
    print(cur, end="\r", flush=True)
If one wants to change the default buffering for a file descriptor, since Python 3.7 there's a convenient reconfigure() method, which can reconfigure line buffering only: 
sys.stdout.reconfigure(line_buffering=True)
Otherwise, the technique is to reassign sys.stdout to something that has the behaviour one wants (code from this StackOverflow thread): 
import io
# Python 3, open as binary, then wrap in a TextIOWrapper with write-through.
sys.stdout = io.TextIOWrapper(open(sys.stdout.fileno(), 'wb', 0), write_through=True)
If one needs all this to implement a progressbar, one should make sure to have a look at the progressbar module first.

16 April 2021

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Announcing Introductions to Emacs Speaks Statistics

A new website containing introductory videos and slide decks is now available for your perusal at ess-intro.github.io. It provides a series of introductions to the excellent Emacs Speaks Statistics (ESS) mode for the Emacs editor. This effort started following my little tips, tricks, tools and toys series of short videos and slide decks for the command-line and R, broadly-speaking . Which I had mentioned to friends curious about Emacs, and on the ess-help mailing list. And lo and behold, over the fall and winter sixteen of us came together in one GitHub org and are now proud to present the initial batch of videos about first steps, installing, using with spaceemacs, customizing, and org-mode with ESS. More may hopefully fellow, the group is open and you too can join: see the main repo and its wiki. This is in fact the initial announcement post, so it is flattering that we have already received over 350 views, four comments and twenty-one likes. We hope it proves to be a useful starting point for some of you. The Emacs editor is quite uniquely powerful, and coupled with ESS makes for a rather nice environment for programming with data, or analysing, visualising, exploring, data. But we are not zealots: there are many editors and environments under the sun, and most people are perfectly happy with their choice, which is wonderful. We also like ours, and sometimes someone asks tell me more or how do I start . We hope this series satisifies this initial curiousity and takes it from here. With that, my thanks to Fr d ric, Alex, Tyler and Greg for the initial batch, and for everybody else in the org who chipped in with comments and suggestion. We hope it grows from here, so happy Emacsing with R from us!

15 April 2021

Ian Jackson: Dreamwidth blocking many RSS readers and aggregators

There is a serious problem with Dreamwidth, which is impeding access for many RSS reader tools. This started at around 0500 UTC on Wednesday morning, according to my own RSS reader cron job. A friend found #43443 in the DW ticket tracker, where a user of a minority web browser found they were blocked. Local tests demonstrated that Dreamwidth had applied blocking by the HTTP User-Agent header, and were rejecting all user-agents not specifically permitted. Today, this rule has been relaxed and unknown user-agents are permitted. But user-agents for general http client libraries are still blocked. I'm aware of three unresolved tickets about this: #43444 #43445 #43447 We're told there by a volunteer member of Dreamwidth's support staff that this has been done deliberately for "blocking automated traffic". I'm sure the volunteer is just relaying what they've been told by whoever is struggling to deal with what I suppose is probably a spam problem. But it's still rather unsatisfactory. I have suggested in my own ticket that a good solution might be to apply the new block only to posting and commenting (eg, maybe, by applying it only to HTTP POST requests). If the problem is indeed spam then that ought to be good enough, and would still let RSS readers work properly. I'm told that this new blocking has been done by "implementing" (actually, configuring or enabling) "some AWS rules for blocking automated traffic". I don't know what facilities AWS provides. This kind of helplessness is of course precisely the kind of thing that the Free Software movement is against and precisely the kind of thing that proprietary services like AWS produce. I don't know if this blog entry will appear on planet.debian.org and on other people's reader's and aggregators. I think it will at least be seen by other Dreamwidth users. I thought I would post here in the hope that other Dreamwidth users might be able to help get this fixed. At the very least other Dreamwidth blog owners need to know that many of their readers may not be seeing their posts at all. If this problem is not fixed I will have to move my blog. One of the main points of having a blog is publishing it via RSS. RSS readers are of course based on general http client libraries and many if not most RSS readers have not bothered to customise their user-agent. Those are currently blocked.

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14 April 2021

Russell Coker: Basics of Linux Kernel Debugging

Firstly a disclaimer, I m not an expert on this and I m not trying to instruct anyone who is aiming to become an expert. The aim of this blog post is to help someone who has a single kernel issue they want to debug as part of doing something that s mostly not kernel coding. I welcome comments about the second step to kernel debugging for the benefit of people who need more than this (which might include me next week). Also suggestions for people who can t use a kvm/qemu debugger would be good. Below is a command to run qemu with GDB. It should be run from the Linux kernel source directory. You can add other qemu options for a blog device and virtual networking if necessary, but the bug I encountered gave an oops from the initrd so I didn t need to go further. The nokaslr is to avoid address space randomisation which deliberately makes debugging tasks harder (from a certain perspective debugging a kernel and compromising a kernel are fairly similar). Loading the bzImage is fine, gdb can map that to the different file it looks at later on. 
qemu-system-x86_64 -kernel arch/x86/boot/bzImage -initrd ../initrd-$KERN_VER -curses -m 2000 -append "root=/dev/vda ro nokaslr" -gdb tcp::1200
The command to run GDB is gdb vmlinux , when at the GDB prompt you can run the command target remote localhost:1200 to connect to the GDB server port 1200. Note that there is nothing special about port 1200, it was given in an example I saw and is as good as any other port. It is important that you run GDB against the vmlinux file in the main directory not any of the several stripped and packaged files, GDB can t handle a bzImage file but that s OK, it ends up much the same in RAM. When the target remote command is processed the kernel will be suspended by the debugger, if you are looking for a bug early in the boot you may need to be quick about this. Using qemu-system-x86_64 instead of kvm slows things down and can help in that regard. The bug I was hunting happened 1.6 seconds after kernel load with KVM and 7.8 seconds after kernel load with qemu. I am not aware of all the implications of the kvm vs qemu decision on debugging. If your bug is a race condition then trying both would be a good strategy. After the target remote command you can debug the kernel just like any other program. If you put a breakpoint on print_modules() that will catch the operation of printing an Oops which can be handy.
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13 April 2021

Shirish Agarwal: what to write

First up, I am alive and well. I have been receiving calls from friends for quite sometime but now that I have become deaf, it is a pain and the hearing aids aren t all that useful. But moreover, where we have been finding ourselves each and every day sinking lower and lower feels absurd as to what to write and not write about India. Thankfully, I ran across this piece which does tell in far more detail than I ever could. The only interesting and somewhat positive news I had is from south of India otherwise sad days, especially for the poor. The saddest story is that this time Covid has reached alarming proportions in India and surprise, surprise this time the villain for many is my state of Maharashtra even though it hasn t received its share of GST proceeds for last two years and this was Kerala s perspective, different state, different party, different political ideology altogether.
Kerala Finance Minister Thomas Issac views on GST, October 22, 2020 Indian Express.
I briefly also share the death of somewhat liberal Film censorship in India unlike Italy which abolished film censorship altogether. I don t really want spend too much on how we have become No. 2 in Covid cases in the world and perhaps death also. Many people still believe in herd immunity but don t really know what it means. So without taking too much time and effort, bid adieu. May post when I m hopefully emotionally feeling better, stronger

12 April 2021

Russell Coker: Riverdale

I ve been watching the show Riverdale on Netflix recently. It s an interesting modern take on the Archie comics. Having watched Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space when I was younger I was anticipating something aimed towards a similar audience. As solving mysteries and crimes was apparently a major theme of the show I anticipated something along similar lines to Scooby Doo, some suspense and some spooky things, but then a happy ending where criminals get arrested and no-one gets hurt or killed while the vast majority of people are nice. Instead the first episode has a teen being murdered and Ms Grundy being obsessed with 15yo boys and sleeping with Archie (who s supposed to be 15 but played by a 20yo actor). Everyone in the show has some dark secret. The filming has a dark theme, the sky is usually overcast and it s generally gloomy. This is a significant contrast to Veronica Mars which has some similarities in having a young cast, a sassy female sleuth, and some similar plot elements. Veronica Mars has a bright theme and a significant comedy element in spite of dealing with some dark issues (murder, rape, child sex abuse, and more). But Riverdale is just dark. Anyone who watches this with their kids expecting something like Scooby Doo is in for a big surprise. There are lots of interesting stylistic elements in the show. Lots of clothing and uniform designs that seem to date from the 1940 s. It seems like some alternate universe where kids have smartphones and laptops while dressing in the style of the 1940s. One thing that annoyed me was construction workers using tools like sledge-hammers instead of excavators. A society that has smart phones but no earth-moving equipment isn t plausible. On the upside there is a racial mix in the show that more accurately reflects American society than the original Archie comics and homophobia is much less common than in most parts of our society. For both race issues and gay/lesbian issues the show treats them in an accurate way (portraying some bigotry) while the main characters aren t racist or homophobic. I think it s generally an OK show and recommend it to people who want a dark show. It s a good show to watch while doing something on a laptop so you can check Wikipedia for the references to 1940s stuff (like when Bikinis were invented). I m half way through season 3 which isn t as good as the first 2, I don t know if it will get better later in the season or whether I should have stopped after season 2. I don t usually review fiction, but the interesting aesthetics of the show made it deserve a review.
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