Search Results: "cts"

18 November 2017

Matthieu Caneill: MiniDebconf in Toulouse

I attended the MiniDebconf in Toulouse, which was hosted in the larger Capitole du Libre, a free software event with talks, presentation of associations, and a keysigning party. I didn't expect the event to be that big, and I was very impressed by its organization. Cheers to all the volunteers, it has been an amazing week-end! Here's a sum-up of the talks I attended. Du logiciel libre la monnaie libre Speaker: lo s The first talk I attended was, translated to English, "from free software to free money". lo s compared the 4 freedoms of free software with money, and what properties money needs to exhibit in order to be considered free. He then introduced 1, a project of free (as in free speech!) money, started in the region around Toulouse. Contrary to some distributed ledgers such as Bitcoin, 1 isn't based on an hash-based proof-of-work, but rather around a web of trust of people certifying each other, hence limiting the energy consumption required by the network to function. YunoHost Speaker: Jimmy Monin I then attended a presentation of YunoHost. Being an happy user myself, it was very nice to discover the future expected features, and also meet two of the developers. YunoHost is a Debian-based project, aimed at providing all the tools necessary to self-host applications, including email, website, calendar, development tools, and dozens of other packages. Premiers pas dans l'univers de Debian Speaker: Nicolas Dandrimont For the first talk of the MiniDebConf, Nicolas Dandrimont introduced Debian, its philosophy, and how it works with regards to upstreams and downstreams. He gave many details on the teams, the infrastructure, and the internals of Debian. Trusting your computer and system Speaker: Jonas Smedegaard Jonas introduced some security concepts, and how they are abused and often meaningless (to quote his own words, "secure is bullshit"). He described a few projects which lean towards a more secure and open hardware, for both phones and laptops. Automatiser la gestion de configuration de Debian avec Ansible Speaker: J r my Lecour J r my, from Evolix, introduced Ansible, and how they use it to manage hundreds of Debian servers. Ansible is a very powerful tool, and a huge ecosystem, in many ways similar to Puppet or Chef, except it is agent-less, using only ssh connections to communicate with remote machines. Very nice to compare their use of Ansible with mine, since that's the software I use at work for deploying experiments. Making Debian for everybody Speaker: Samuel Thibault Samuel gave a talk about accessibility, and the general availability of the tools in today's operating systems, including Debian. The lesson to take home is that we often don't do enough in this domain, particularly when considering some issues people might have that we don't always think about. Accessibility on computers (and elsewhere) should be the default, and never require complex setups. Retour d'exp rience : mise jour de milliers de terminaux Debian Speaker: Cyril Brulebois Cyril described a problem he was hired for, an update of thousands of Debian servers from wheezy to jessie, which he discovered afterwards was worse than initially thought, since the machines were running the out-of-date squeeze. Since they were not always administered with the best sysadmin practices, they were all exhibiting different configurations and different packages lists, which raised many issues and gave him interesting challenges. They were solved using Ansible, which also had the effect of standardizing their system administration practices. Retour d'exp rience : utilisation de Debian chez Evolix Speaker: Gr gory Colpart Gr gory described Evolix, a company which manages servers for their clients, and how they were inspired by Debian, for both their internal tools and their practices. It is very interesting to see that some of the Debian values can be easily exported for a more open and collaborative business. Lightning talks To close the conference, two lightning talks were presented, describing the switch from Windows XP to Debian in an ecologic association near Toulouse; and how snapshot.debian.org can be used with bisections to find the source of some regressions. Conclusion A big thank you to all the organizers and the associations who contributed to make this event a success. Cheers!

17 November 2017

Renata Scheibler: Hello, world!

Renata's picture, a white woman profile. She touches her chin with her left hand fingertips About me Hello, world! For those who are meeting me for the first time, I am a 31 year old History teacher from Porto Alegre, Brazil. Some people might know me from the Python community, because I have been leading PyLadies Porto Alegre and helping organize Django Girls workshops in my state since 2016. If you don't, that's okay. Either way, it's nice to have you here. Ever since I learned about Rails Girls Summer of Code, during the International Free Software Forum - FISL 16, I have been wanting to get into a tech internship program. Google Summer of Code made into my radar as well, but I didn't really feel like I knew enough to try and get into those programs... until I found Outreachy. From their site:
Outreachy is an organization that provides three-month internships for people from groups traditionally underrepresented in tech. Interns work remotely with mentors from Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities on projects ranging from programming, user experience, documentation, illustration and graphical design, to data science.
There were many good projects to choose from on this round, a lot of them with few requirements - and most with requirements that I believed I could fullfill, such as some knowledge of HTML, CSS, Python or Django. I ought to say that I am not an expert in any of those. And, since you're reading this, I'm going to be completely honest. Coding is hard. Coding is hard to learn, it takes a lot of studying and a lot of practice. Even though I have been messing around computers pretty much since I was a kid, because I was a girl lucky enough to have a father who owned a computer store, I hadn't began learning how to program until mid-2015 - and I am still learning. I think I became such an autodidact because I had to (and, of course, because I was given the conditions to be, such as having spare time to study when I wasn't at school). I had to get any and all information from my surroundings and turn into knowledge that I could use to achieve my goals. In a time when I could only get new computer games through a CD-ROM and the computer I was allowed to use didn't have a CD-ROM drive, I had to try and learn how to open a computer cabinet and connect/disconnect hardware properly, so I could use my brother's CD-ROM drive on the computer I was allowed to and install the games without anyone noticing. When, back in 1998, I couldn't connect to the internet because the computer I was allowed to use didn't have a modem, I had to learn about networks to figure out how to do it from my brother's computer on the LAN (local network). I would go to the community public library and read books and any tech magazines I could get my hands into (libraries didn't usually have computers to be used by the public back then). It was about 2002 when I learned how to create HTML sites by studying at the source code from pages I had saved to read offline in one of the very, very few times I was allowed to access the internet and browse the web. Of course, the site I created back then never saw the light of the day, because I didn't have really have internet access at home. So, how come it is that only now, 14 years later, I am trying to get into tech? Because when I finished high school in 2003, I was still a minor and my family didn't allow me to go to Vocational School and take an IT course. (Never mind that my own oldest brother had graduated in IT and working with for almost a decade.) I ended up going to study... teacher training in History as an undergrad course. A lot has happened since then. I took the exam to become a public school teacher and more than two years had passed without being called to work. I spent 3 years in odd-jobs that paid barely enough to pay rent (and, sometimes, not even that). Since the IT is the new thing and all jobs are in IT, finally, finally it seemed okay for me to take that Vocational School training in a public school - and so I did. I gotta say, I thought that while I studied, I would be able to get some sort of job or internship to help with my learning. After all, I had seen it easily happening with people I met before getting into the course. And by "people", of course, I mean white men. For me, it took a whole year of searching, trying and interviewing for me to get an internship related to the field - tech support in a school computer lab, running GNU/Linux. And, in that very same week, I was hired as a public school teacher. There is a lot more... actually, there is so much more to this story, but I think I have told enough for now. Enough to know where I came from and who I am, as of now. I hope you stick around. I am bound to write here every two weeks, so I guess I will see you then! o/

16 November 2017

Michal Čihař: New projects on Hosted Weblate

Hosted Weblate provides also free hosting for free software projects. The hosting requests queue has grown too long, so it's time to process it and include new project. This time, the newly hosted projects include: If you want to support this effort, please donate to Weblate, especially recurring donations are welcome to make this service alive. You can do that easily on Liberapay or Bountysource.

Filed under: Debian English SUSE Weblate

15 November 2017

Kees Cook: security things in Linux v4.14

Previously: v4.13. Linux kernel v4.14 was released this last Sunday, and there s a bunch of security things I think are interesting: vmapped kernel stack on arm64
Similar to the same feature on x86, Mark Rutland and Ard Biesheuvel implemented CONFIG_VMAP_STACK for arm64, which moves the kernel stack to an isolated and guard-paged vmap area. With traditional stacks, there were two major risks when exhausting the stack: overwriting the thread_info structure (which contained the addr_limit field which is checked during copy_to/from_user()), and overwriting neighboring stacks (or other things allocated next to the stack). While arm64 previously moved its thread_info off the stack to deal with the former issue, this vmap change adds the last bit of protection by nature of the vmap guard pages. If the kernel tries to write past the end of the stack, it will hit the guard page and fault. (Testing for this is now possible via LKDTM s STACK_GUARD_PAGE_LEADING/TRAILING tests.) One aspect of the guard page protection that will need further attention (on all architectures) is that if the stack grew because of a giant Variable Length Array on the stack (effectively an implicit alloca() call), it might be possible to jump over the guard page entirely (as seen in the userspace Stack Clash attacks). Thankfully the use of VLAs is rare in the kernel. In the future, hopefully we ll see the addition of PaX/grsecurity s STACKLEAK plugin which, in addition to its primary purpose of clearing the kernel stack on return to userspace, makes sure stack expansion cannot skip over guard pages. This stack probing ability will likely also become directly available from the compiler as well. set_fs() balance checking
Related to the addr_limit field mentioned above, another class of bug is finding a way to force the kernel into accidentally leaving addr_limit open to kernel memory through an unbalanced call to set_fs(). In some areas of the kernel, in order to reuse userspace routines (usually VFS or compat related), code will do something like: set_fs(KERNEL_DS); ...some code here...; set_fs(USER_DS);. When the USER_DS call goes missing (usually due to a buggy error path or exception), subsequent system calls can suddenly start writing into kernel memory via copy_to_user (where the to user really means within the addr_limit range ). Thomas Garnier implemented USER_DS checking at syscall exit time for x86, arm, and arm64. This means that a broken set_fs() setting will not extend beyond the buggy syscall that fails to set it back to USER_DS. Additionally, as part of the discussion on the best way to deal with this feature, Christoph Hellwig and Al Viro (and others) have been making extensive changes to avoid the need for set_fs() being used at all, which should greatly reduce the number of places where it might be possible to introduce such a bug in the future. SLUB freelist hardening
A common class of heap attacks is overwriting the freelist pointers stored inline in the unallocated SLUB cache objects. PaX/grsecurity developed an inexpensive defense that XORs the freelist pointer with a global random value (and the storage address). Daniel Micay improved on this by using a per-cache random value, and I refactored the code a bit more. The resulting feature, enabled with CONFIG_SLAB_FREELIST_HARDENED, makes freelist pointer overwrites very hard to exploit unless an attacker has found a way to expose both the random value and the pointer location. This should render blind heap overflow bugs much more difficult to exploit. Additionally, Alexander Popov implemented a simple double-free defense, similar to the fasttop check in the GNU C library, which will catch sequential free()s of the same pointer. (And has already uncovered a bug.) Future work would be to provide similar metadata protections to the SLAB allocator (though SLAB doesn t store its freelist within the individual unused objects, so it has a different set of exposures compared to SLUB). setuid-exec stack limitation
Continuing the various additional defenses to protect against future problems related to userspace memory layout manipulation (as shown most recently in the Stack Clash attacks), I implemented an 8MiB stack limit for privileged (i.e. setuid) execs, inspired by a similar protection in grsecurity, after reworking the secureexec handling by LSMs. This complements the unconditional limit to the size of exec arguments that landed in v4.13. randstruct automatic struct selection
While the bulk of the port of the randstruct gcc plugin from grsecurity landed in v4.13, the last of the work needed to enable automatic struct selection landed in v4.14. This means that the coverage of randomized structures, via CONFIG_GCC_PLUGIN_RANDSTRUCT, now includes one of the major targets of exploits: function pointer structures. Without knowing the build-randomized location of a callback pointer an attacker needs to overwrite in a structure, exploits become much less reliable. structleak passed-by-reference variable initialization
Ard Biesheuvel enhanced the structleak gcc plugin to initialize all variables on the stack that are passed by reference when built with CONFIG_GCC_PLUGIN_STRUCTLEAK_BYREF_ALL. Normally the compiler will yell if a variable is used before being initialized, but it silences this warning if the variable s address is passed into a function call first, as it has no way to tell if the function did actually initialize the contents. So the plugin now zero-initializes such variables (if they hadn t already been initialized) before the function call that takes their address. Enabling this feature has a small performance impact, but solves many stack content exposure flaws. (In fact at least one such flaw reported during the v4.15 development cycle was mitigated by this plugin.) improved boot entropy
Laura Abbott and Daniel Micay improved early boot entropy available to the stack protector by both moving the stack protector setup later in the boot, and including the kernel command line in boot entropy collection (since with some devices it changes on each boot). eBPF JIT for 32-bit ARM
The ARM BPF JIT had been around a while, but it didn t support eBPF (and, as a result, did not provide constant value blinding, which meant it was exposed to being used by an attacker to build arbitrary machine code with BPF constant values). Shubham Bansal spent a bunch of time building a full eBPF JIT for 32-bit ARM which both speeds up eBPF and brings it up to date on JIT exploit defenses in the kernel. seccomp improvements
Tyler Hicks addressed a long-standing deficiency in how seccomp could log action results. In addition to creating a way to mark a specific seccomp filter as needing to be logged with SECCOMP_FILTER_FLAG_LOG, he added a new action result, SECCOMP_RET_LOG. With these changes in place, it should be much easier for developers to inspect the results of seccomp filters, and for process launchers to generate logs for their child processes operating under a seccomp filter. Additionally, I finally found a way to implement an often-requested feature for seccomp, which was to kill an entire process instead of just the offending thread. This was done by creating the SECCOMP_RET_ACTION_FULL mask (n e SECCOMP_RET_ACTION) and implementing SECCOMP_RET_KILL_PROCESS. That s it for now; please let me know if I missed anything. The v4.15 merge window is now open!

2017, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
Creative Commons License

13 November 2017

Markus Koschany: My Free Software Activities in October 2017

Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you re interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you. Debian Games Debian Java Debian LTS This was my twentieth month as a paid contributor and I have been paid to work 19 hours on Debian LTS, a project started by Rapha l Hertzog. I will catch up with the remaining 1,75 hours in November. In that time I did the following: Misc Thanks for reading and see you next time.

12 November 2017

Lars Wirzenius: Unit and integration testing: an analogy with cars

A unit is a part of your program you can test in isolation. You write unit tests to test all aspects of it that you care about. If all your unit tests pass, you should know that your unit works well. Integration tests are for testing that when your various well-tested, high quality units are combined, integrated, they work together. Integration tests test the integration, not the individual units. You could think of building a car. Your units are the ball bearings, axles, wheels, brakes, etc. Your unit tests for the ball bearings might test, for example, that they can handle a billion rotations, at various temperatures, etc. Your integration test would assume the ball bearings work, and should instead test that the ball bearings are installed in the right way so that the car, as whole, can run a kilometers, and accelerate and brake every kilometer, uses only so much fuel, produces only so much pollution, and doesn't kill passengers in case of a crash.

10 November 2017

Thadeu Lima de Souza Cascardo: Software Freedom Strategy with Community Projects

It's been some time since I last wrote. Life and work have been busy. At the same time, the world has been busy, and as I would love to write a larger post, I will try to be short here. I would love to touch on the Librem 5 and postmarketOS. In fact, I had, in a podcast in Portuguese, Papo Livre. Maybe, I'll touch a little on the latter. Some of the inspiration for this post include: All of those led me to understand how software freedom is under attack, in particular how copyleft in under attack. And, as I talked during FISL, though many might say that "Open Source has won", end users software freedom has not. Lots of companies have co-opted "free software" but give no software freedom to their users. They seem friends with free software, and they are. Because they want software to be free. But freedom should not be a value for software itself, it needs to be a value for people, not only companies or people who are labeled software developers, but all people. That's why I want to stop talking about free software, and talk more about software freedom. Because I believe the latter is more clear about what we are talking about. I don't mind that we use whatever label, as long as we stablish its meaning during conversations, and set the tone to distinguish them. The thing is: free software does not software freedom make. Not by itself. As Bradley Kuhn puts it: it's not magic pixie dust. Those who have known me for years might remember me as a person who studied free software licenses and how I valued copyleft, the GPL specifically, and how I concerned myself with topics like license compatibility and other licensing matters. Others might remember me as a person who valued a lot about upstreaming code. Not carrying changes to software openly developed that you had not made an effort to put upstream. I can't say I was wrong on both accounts. I still believe in those things. I still believe in the importance of copyleft and the GPL. I still value sharing your code in the commons by going upstream. But I was certaily wrong in valuing them too much. Or not giving as much or even more value to distribution efforts of getting software freedom to the users. And it took me a while in seeing how many people also saw the GPL as a tool to get code upstream. You see that a lot in Linus' discourse about the GPL. And that is on the minds of a lot of people, who I have seen argue that copyleft is not necessary for companies to contribute code back. But that's the problem. The point is not about getting code upstream. But about assuring people have the freedom to run a modified version of the software they received on their computers. It turns out that many examples of companies who had contributed code upstream, have not delivered that freedom to their end-users, who had received a modified version of that same software, which is not free. Bradley Kuhn also alerts us that many companies have been replacing copyleft software with non-copyleft software. And I completely agree with him that we should be writing more copyleft software that we hold copyright for, so we can enforce it. But looking at what has been happening recently in the Linux community about enforcement, even thought I still believe in enforcement as an strategy, I think we need much more than that. And one of those strategies is delivering more free software that users may be able to install on their own computers. It's building those replacements for software that people have been using for any reason. Be it the OS they get when they buy a device, or the application they use for communication. It's not like the community is not doing it, it's just that we need to acknowledge that this is a necessary strategy to guarantee software freedom. That distribution of software that users may easily install on their computers is as much or even more valuable than developing software closer to the hacker/developer community. That doing downstream changes to free software in the effort of getting them to users is worth it. That maintaining that software stable and secure for users is a very important task. I may be biased when talking about that, as I have been shifting from doing upstream work to downstream work and both on the recent years. But maybe that's what I needed to realize that upstreaming does not necessarily guarantees that users will get software freedom. I believe we need to talk more about that. I have seen many people dear to me disregard that difference between the freedom of the user and the freedom of software. There is much more to talk about that, go into detail about some of those points, and I think we need to debate more. I am subscribed to the libreplanet-discuss mailing list. Come join us in discussing about software freedom there, if you want to comment on anything I brought up here. As I promised I would, I would like to mention about postmarketOS, which is an option users have now to get some software freedom on some mobile devices. It's an effort I wanted to build myself, and I applaud the community that has developed around it and has been moving forward so quickly. And it's a good example of a balance between upstream and dowstream code that gets to deliver a better level of software freedom to users than the vendor ever would. I wanted to write about much of the topics I brought up today, but postponed that for some time. I was motivated by recent events in the community, and I am really disappointed at some the free software players and some of the events that happened in the last few years. That got me into thinking in how we need to manifest ourselves about those issues, so people know how we feel. So here it is: I am disappointed at how the Linux Foundation handled the situation about Software Freedom Conversancy taking a case against VMWare; I am disappointed about how Software Freedom Law Center handled a trademark issue against the Software Freedom Conservancy; and I really appreciate all the work the Software Freedom Conservancy has been doing. I have supported them for the last two years, and I urge you to become a supporter too.

8 November 2017

Neil McGovern: Software Freedom Law Center and Conservancy

Before I start, I would like to make it clear that the below is entirely my personal view, and not necessarily that of the GNOME Foundation, the Debian Project, or anyone else. There s been quite a bit of interest recently about the petition by Software Freedom Law Center to cancel the Software Freedom Conservancy s trademark. A number of people have asked my views on it, so I thought I d write up a quick blog on my experience with SFLC and Conservancy both during my time as Debian Project Leader, and since. It s clear to me that for some time, there s been quite a bit of animosity between SFLC and Conservancy, which for me started to become apparent around the time of the large debate over ZFS on Linux. I talked about this in my DebConf 16 talk, which fortunately was recorded (ZFS bit from 8:05 to 17:30).
This culminated in SFLC publishing a statement, and Conservancy also publishing their statement, backed up by the FSF. These obviously came to different conclusions, and it seems bizarre to me that SFLC who were acting as Debian s legal counsel published a position that was contrary to the position taken by Debian. Additionally, Conservancy and FSF who were not acting as counsel mirrored the position of the project. Then, I hear of an even more confusing move that SFLC has filed legal action against Conservancy, despite being the organisation they helped set up. This happened on the 22nd September, the day after SFLC announced corporate and support services for Free Software projects. SFLC has also published a follow up, which they say that the act is not an attack, let alone a bizarre attack , and that the response from Conservancy, who view it as such was like reading a declaration of war issued in response to a parking ticket . Then, as SFLC somehow find the threat of your trademark being taken away as something other than an attack, they also state: Any project working with the Conservancy that feels in any way at risk should contact us. We will immediately work with them to put in place measures fully ensuring that they face no costs and no risks in this situation. which I read as a direct pitch to try and pull projects away from Conservancy and over to SFLC. Now, even if there is a valid claim here, despite the objections that were filed by a trademark lawyer who I have a great deal of respect for (disclosure: Pam also provides pro-bono trademark advice to my employer, the GNOME Foundation), the optics are pretty terrible. We have a case of one FOSS organisation taking another one to court, after many years of them being aware of the issue, and when wishing to promote a competing service. At best, this is a distraction from the supposed goals of Free Software organisations, and at worst is a direct attempt to interrupt the workings of an established and successful umbrella organisation which lots of projects rely on. I truly hope that this case is simply dropped, and if I was advising SFLC, that s exactly what I would suggest, along with an apology for the distress. Put it this way if SFLC win, then they re simply displaying what would be viewed as an aggressive move to hold the term software freedom exclusively to themselves. If they lose, then it shows that they re willing to do so to another 501(c)3 without actually having a case. Before I took on the DPL role, I was under the naive impression that although there were differences in approach, at least we were coming to try and work together to promote software freedoms for the end user. Unfortunately, since then, I ve now become a lot more jaded about exactly who, and which organisations hold our best interests at heart. (Featured image by Nick Youngson CC-BY-SA-3.0 http://nyphotographic.com/)

Dirk Eddelbuettel: R / Finance 2018 Call for Papers

The tenth (!!) annual annual R/Finance conference will take in Chicago on the UIC campus on June 1 and 2, 2018. Please see the call for papers below (or at the website) and consider submitting a paper. We are once again very excited about our conference, thrilled about who we hope may agree to be our anniversary keynotes, and hope that many R / Finance users will not only join us in Chicago in June -- and also submit an exciting proposal. So read on below, and see you in Chicago in June!

Call for Papers R/Finance 2018: Applied Finance with R
June 1 and 2, 2018
University of Illinois at Chicago, IL, USA The tenth annual R/Finance conference for applied finance using R will be held June 1 and 2, 2018 in Chicago, IL, USA at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The conference will cover topics including portfolio management, time series analysis, advanced risk tools, high-performance computing, market microstructure, and econometrics. All will be discussed within the context of using R as a primary tool for financial risk management, portfolio construction, and trading. Over the past nine years, R/Finance has includedattendeesfrom around the world. It has featured presentations from prominent academics and practitioners, and we anticipate another exciting line-up for 2018. We invite you to submit complete papers in pdf format for consideration. We will also consider one-page abstracts (in txt or pdf format) although more complete papers are preferred. We welcome submissions for both full talks and abbreviated "lightning talks." Both academic and practitioner proposals related to R are encouraged. All slides will be made publicly available at conference time. Presenters are strongly encouraged to provide working R code to accompany the slides. Data sets should also be made public for the purposes of reproducibility (though we realize this may be limited due to contracts with data vendors). Preference may be given to presenters who have released R packages. Please submit proposals online at http://go.uic.edu/rfinsubmit. Submissions will be reviewed and accepted on a rolling basis with a final submission deadline of February 2, 2018. Submitters will be notified via email by March 2, 2018 of acceptance, presentation length, and financial assistance (if requested). Financial assistance for travel and accommodation may be available to presenters. Requests for financial assistance do not affect acceptance decisions. Requests should be made at the time of submission. Requests made after submission are much less likely to be fulfilled. Assistance will be granted at the discretion of the conference committee. Additional details will be announced via the conference website at http://www.RinFinance.com/ as they become available. Information on previous years'presenters and their presentations are also at the conference website. We will make a separate announcement when registration opens. For the program committee:
Gib Bassett, Peter Carl, Dirk Eddelbuettel, Brian Peterson,
Dale Rosenthal, Jeffrey Ryan, Joshua Ulrich

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RQuantLib 0.4.4: Several smaller updates

A shiny new (mostly-but-not-completely maintenance) release of RQuantLib, now at version 0.4.4, arrived on CRAN overnight, and will get to Debian shortly. This is the first release in over a year, and it it contains (mostly) a small number of fixes throughout. It also includes the update to the new DateVector and DatetimeVector classes which become the default with the upcoming Rcpp 0.12.14 release (just like this week's RcppQuantuccia release). One piece of new code is due to Fran ois Cocquemas who added support for discrete dividends to both European and American options. See below for the complete set of changes reported in the NEWS file. As with release 0.4.3 a little over a year ago, we will not have new Windows binaries from CRAN as I apparently have insufficient powers of persuasion to get CRAN to update their QuantLib libraries. So we need a volunteer. If someone could please build a binary package for Windows from the 0.4.4 sources, I would be happy to once again host it on the GHRR drat repo. Please contact me directly if you can help. Changes are listed below:

Changes in RQuantLib version 0.4.4 (2017-11-07)
  • Changes in RQuantLib code:
    • Equity options can now be analyzed via discrete dividends through two vectors of dividend dates and values (Francois Cocquemas in #73 fixing #72)
    • Some package and dependency information was updated in files DESCRIPTION and NAMESPACE.
    • The new Date(time)Vector classes introduced with Rcpp 0.12.8 are now used when available.
    • Minor corrections were applied to BKTree, to vanilla options for the case of intraday time stamps, to the SabrSwaption documentation, and to bond utilities for the most recent QuantLib release.

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for the this release. As always, more detailed information is on the RQuantLib page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rquantlib-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page. Issue tickets can be filed at the GitHub repo.

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

7 November 2017

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #132

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday October 29 and Saturday November 4 2017: Past events Upcoming events Reproducible work in other projects Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed Reviews of unreproducible packages 7 package reviews have been added, 43 have been updated and 47 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by: Documentation updates diffoscope development Version 88 was uploaded to unstable by Mattia Rizzolo. It included contributions (already covered by posts of the previous weeks) from: strip-nondeterminism development Version 0.040-1 was uploaded to unstable by Mattia Rizzolo. It included contributions already covered by posts of the previous weeks, as well as new ones from:
Version 0.5.2-2 was uploaded to unstable by Holger Levsen. It included contributions already covered by posts of the previous weeks, as well as new ones from: reprotest development buildinfo.debian.net development tests.reproducible-builds.org Misc. This week's edition was written by Bernhard M. Wiedemann, Chris Lamb, Mattia Rizzolo & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

Lucas Kanashiro: My Debian LTS work on October

In this post I describe the work that I ve done until the end of October in the context of the Debian LTS team. This month I was allocated 5h and spent just 2h of them because I have written my master s qualification text (I am almost on my deadline to finish it). During November I intend to finish these 3h pending, so I did not request more hours. I basically worked with CVE-2017-0903 which is an issue related to YAML deserialization of gem specifications that could allow one execute remote code. Two packages in wheezy could be affected by this security vulnerability, rubygems and ruby1.9.1. The issue affects just RubyGems source code, but before Ruby version 1.9.1 it was maintained in a separated package, after that it was incorporated by ruby interpreter source package. After carefully read the upstream blogpost and reviewed the commit that intruduced this vulnerability, I was able to figure out whether the mentioned packages were affected or not. The modification was not present in both of them, and after some tests I did confirm that those versions of rubygems were not affected. The two packages were marked as not affected by CVE-2017-0903 in wheezy. Well, this was the summary of my activities in the Debian LTS team in October. See you next month :)

Don Armstrong: Autorandr: automatically adjust screen layout

Like many laptop users, I often plug my laptop into different monitor setups (multiple monitors at my desk, projector when presenting, etc.) Running xrandr commands or clicking through interfaces gets tedious, and writing scripts isn't much better. Recently, I ran across autorandr, which detects attached monitors using EDID (and other settings), saves xrandr configurations, and restores them. It can also run arbitrary scripts when a particular configuration is loaded. I've packed it, and it is currently waiting in NEW. If you can't wait, the deb is here and the git repo is here. To use it, simply install the package, and create your initial configuration (in my case, undocked): 
 autorandr --save undocked
then, dock your laptop (or plug in your external monitor(s)), change the configuration using xrandr (or whatever you use), and save your new configuration (in my case, workstation): 
autorandr --save workstation
repeat for any additional configurations you have (or as you find new configurations). Autorandr has udev, systemd, and pm-utils hooks, and autorandr --change should be run any time that new displays appear. You can also run autorandr --change or autorandr --load workstation manually too if you need to. You can also add your own ~/.config/autorandr/$PROFILE/postswitch script to run after a configuration is loaded. Since I run i3, my workstation configuration looks like this: 
 #!/bin/bash
 xrandr --dpi 92
 xrandr --output DP2-2 --primary
 i3-msg '[workspace="^(1 4 6)"] move workspace to output DP2-2;'
 i3-msg '[workspace="^(2 5 9)"] move workspace to output DP2-3;'
 i3-msg '[workspace="^(3 8)"] move workspace to output DP2-1;'
which fixes the dpi appropriately, sets the primary screen (possibly not needed?), and moves the i3 workspaces about. You can also arrange for configurations to never be run by adding a block hook in the profile directory. Check it out if you change your monitor configuration regularly!

Rog rio Brito: Some activities of the day

Yesterday, I printed the first draft of the first chapter when my little boy was here and he was impressed with this strange object called a "printer". Before I printed what I needed, I fired up LibreOffice and chose the biggest font size that was available and let him type his first name by himself. He was quicker than I thought with a keyboard. After seeing me print his first name, he was jumping up and down with joy of having created something and even showed grandma and grandpa what he had done. He, then, wanted more and I taught him how to use that backspace key, what it meant and he wanted to type his full name. I let him and taught him that there is a key called space that he should type every time he wants to start a new word and, in the end, he typed his first two names. To my surprise, he memorized the icon with the printer (which I must say that I have to hunt every time, since it seems so similar to the adjacent ones!) and pressed this new key called "Enter". When he pressed, he wasn't expecting the printer on his right to start making noises and printing his name. He was so excited and it was so nice to see his reaction full of joy to get a job done! I am thinking of getting a spare computer, building it with him and for him, so that he can call it his computer every time he comes to see daddy. As a serendipitous situation, Packt Publishing offered yesterday their title "Python Projects for Kids". Unfortunately, he does not yet know how to read, but I guess that the right age is coming soon, which is a good thing to make him be educated "the right way" (that is, with the best support, teaching and patience that I can give him). Anyway, I printed the first draft of the first chapter and today I have to turn it in. As I write this, I am downloading a virtual machine from Microsoft to try to install Java on it. Let me see if it works. I have none of the virtualization options used, tough the closest seems to be virtualbox. Let me cross my fingers. In other news, I updated some of the tags of very old posts of this blog, and I am seriously thinking about switching from [ikiwiki][0] to another blog platform. It is slow, very slow on my system with the repositories that I have, especially on my armel system. Some non-interpreted system would be best, but I don't know if such a thing even exists. But the killer problem is that it doesn't support easily the typing of Mathematics (even though a 3rd party plugin for MathJax exists). On the other hand, I just received an answer on twitter from @telegram and it was nice:
Hello, Telegram supports bold and italic. You can type **bold** and __italic__. On mobile, you can also highlight text for this as well.
It is nice that this works with telegram-desktop too. Besides that, I filed some bugs on Debian's BTS, responded to some issues on my projects on GitHub (I'm slowly getting back on maintaining things) and file wishlist bugs on some other projects. Oh, and I grabbed a copy of "Wonder woman" ("Mulher Maravilha") and "Despicable Me 3" ("Meu Malvado Favorito 3") dubbed in Brazilian Portuguese for my son. I have to convert the audio from AAC-LC in 6 channels to AC3 or to stereo. Otherwise, my TVs have problem with the videos (one refuses to play the entire file and another plays the audio with sounds of hiccups). Edit: After converting the VirtualBox image taken from Microsoft, I could easily use qemu/kvm to create screenshots of the installation of Java. The command that I used (for future reference) is: qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 4096 -smp 2 -net nic,model=e1000 -net user -soundhw ac97 -drive index=0,media=disk,cache=unsafe,file=win7.qcow2 Edit: Fixed some typos.

6 November 2017

James Bromberger: Web Security 2017

I started web development around late 1994. Some of my earliest paid web work is still online (dated June 1995). Clearly, that was a simpler time for content! I went on to be Webmaster (yes, for those joining us in the last decade, that was a job title once) for UWA, and then for Hartley Poynton/JDV.com at time when security became important as commerce boomed online. At the dawn of the web era, the consideration of backwards compatibility with older web clients (browsers) was deemed to be important; content had to degrade nicely, even without any CSS being applied. As the years stretched out, the legacy became longer and longer. Until now. In mid-2018, the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) 3.2 comes into effect, requiring card holder environments to use (at minimum) TLS 1.2 for the encrypted transfer of data. Of course, that s also the maximum version typically available today (TLS 1.3 is in draft 21 at this point in time of writing). This effort by the PCI is forcing people to adopt new browsers that can do the TLS 1.2 protocol (and the encryption ciphers that permits), typically by running modern/recent Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Edge browsers. And for the majority of people, Chrome is their choice, and the majority of those are all auto-updating on every release. Many are pushing to be compliant with the 2018 PCI DSS 3.2 as early as possible; your logging of negotiated protocols and ciphers will show if your client base is ready as well. I ve already worked with one government agency to demonstrate they were ready, and have already helped disable TLS 1.0 and 1.1 on their public facing web sites (and previously SSL v3). We ve removed RC4 ciphers, 3DES ciphers, and enabled ephemeral key ciphers to provide forward secrecy. Web developers (writing Javascript and using various frameworks) can rejoice the age of having to support legacy MS IE 6/7/8/9/10 is pretty much over. None of those browsers support TLS 1.2 out of the box (IE 10 can turn this on, but for some reason, it is off by default). This makes Javascript code smaller as it doesn t have to have conditional code to work with the quirks of those older clients. But as we find ourselves with modern clients, we can now ask those clients to be complicit in our attempts to secure the content we serve. They understand modern security constructs such as Content Security Policies and other HTTP security-related headers. There s two tools I am currently using to help in this battle to improve web security. One is SSLLabs.com, the work of Ivan Risti (and now owned/sponsored by Qualys). This tool gives a good view of the encryption in flight (protocols, ciphers), chain of trust (certificate), and a new addition of checking DNS records for CAA records (which I and others piled on a feature request for AWS Route53 to support). The second tool is Scott Helm s SecurityHeaders.io, which looks at the HTTP headers that web content uses to ask browsers to enforce security on the client side. There s a really important reason why these tools are good; they are maintained. As new recommendations on ciphers, protocols, signature algorithms or other actions become recommended, they re updated on these tools. And these tools are produced by very small, but agile teams like one person teams, without the bureaucracy (and lag) associated with large enterprise tools. But these shouldn t be used blindly. These services make suggestions, and you should research them yourselves. For some, not all the recommendations may meet your personal risk profile. Personally, I m uncomfortable with Public-Key-Pins, so that can wait for a while indeed, Chrome has now signalled they will drop this. So while PCI is hitting merchants with their DSS-compliance stick (and making it plainly obvious what they have to do), we re getting a side-effect of having a concrete reason for drawing a line under where our backward compatibility must stretch back to, and the ability to have the web client assist in ensure security of content.

Jonathan Dowland: Coil

Peter Christopherson and Jhonn Balance, from [Santa Sangre](https://santasangremagazine.wordpress.com/2014/11/16/the-angelic-conversation-in-remembrance-of-coil/) Peter Christopherson and Jhonn Balance, from Santa Sangre
A friend asked me to suggest five tracks by Coil that gave an introduction to their work. Trying to summarize Coil in 5 tracks is tough. I think it's probably impossible to fairly summarize Coil with any subset of their music, for two reasons. Firstly, their music was the output of their work but I don't think is really the whole of the work itself. There's a real mystique around them. They were deeply interested in arcania, old magic, Aleister Crowley, scatology; they were both openly and happily gay and their work sometimes explored their experiences in various related underground scenes and sub-cultures; they lost friends to HIV/AIDS and that had a profound impact on them. They had a big influence on some people who discovered them who were exploring their own sexualities at the time and might have felt excluded from mainstream society. They frequently explored drugs, meditation and other ways to try to expand and open their minds; occultism. They were also fiercely anti-commercial, their stuff was released in limited quantities across a multitude of different music labels, often under different names, and often paired with odd physical objects, runes, vials of blood, etc. Later fascinations included paganism and moon worship. I read somewhere that they literally cursed one of their albums. Secondly, part of their "signature" was the lack of any consistency in their work, or to put it another way, their style over time varied enormously. I'm also not necessarily well-versed in all their stuff, I'm part way on this journey myself... but these are tracks which stand out at least from the subset I've listened to. Both original/core members of Coil have passed away and the legal status of their catalogue is in a state of limbo. Some of these songs are available on currently-in-print releases, but all such releases are under dispute by some associate or other.

1. Heaven's Blade Like (probably) a lot of Coil songs, this one exists in multiple forms, with some dispute about which are canonical, which are officially sanctioned, etc. the video linked above actually contains 5 different versions, but I've linked to a time offset to the 4th: "Heaven's Blade (Backwards)". This version was the last to come to light with the recent release of "Backwards", an album originally prepared in the 90s at Trent Reznor's Nothing Studios in New Orleans, but not finished or released. The circumstances around its present-day release, as well as who did what to it and what manipulation may have been performed to the audio a long time after the two core members had passed, is a current topic in fan circles. Despite that, this is my preferred version. You can choose to investigate the others, or not, at your own discretion.

2. how to destroy angels (ritual music for the accumulation of male sexual energy) A few years ago, "guidopaparazzi", a user at the Echoing the Sound music message board attempted to listen to every Coil release ever made and document the process. He didn't do it chronologically, leaving the EPs until near the end, which is when he tackled this one (which was the first release by Coil, and was the inspiration behind the naming of Trent Reznor's one-time side project "How To Destroy Angels"). Guido seemed to think this was some kind of elaborate joke. Personally I think it's a serious piece and there's something to it but this just goes to show, different people can take things in entirely different ways. Here's Guido's review, and you can find the rest of his reviews linked from that one if you wish. https://archive.org/details/Coil-HowToDestroyAngels1984

3. Red Birds Will Fly Out Of The East And Destroy Paris In A Night Both "Musick To Play In The Dark" volumes (one and two) are generally regarded as amongst the most accessible entry points to the Coil discography. This is my choice of cut from volume 1. For some reason this reminds me a little of some of the background music from the game "Unreal Tournament". I haven't played that in at least 15 years. I should go back and see if I can figure out why it does. The whole EP is worth a listen, especially at night. https://archive.org/details/CoilMusickToPlayInTheDarkVol1/Coil+-+Musick+To+Play+In+The+Dark+Vol+1+-+2+Red+Birds+Will+Fly+Out+Of+The+East+And+Destroy+Paris+In+A+Night.flac

4. Things Happen It's tricky to pick a track from either "Love's Secret Domain" or "Horse Rotorvator"; there are other choices which I think are better known and loved than this one but it's one that haunted me after I first heard it for one reason or another, so here it is.

5. The Anal Staircase Track 1 from Horse Rotorvator. What the heck is a Horse Rotorvator anyway? I think it was supposed to have been a lucid nightmare experienced by the vocalist Jhonn Balance. So here they wrote a song about anal sex. No messing about, no allusion particularly, but why should there be? https://archive.org/details/CoilHorseRotorvator2001Remaster/Coil+-+Horse+Rotorvator+%5B2001+remaster%5D+-+01+The+Anal+Staircase.flac

Bonus 6th: 7-Methoxy-B-Carboline (Telepathine) From the drone album "Time Machines", which has just been re-issued by DIAS records, who describe it as "authorized". Each track is titled by the specific combination of compounds that inspired its composition, supposedly. Or, perhaps it's a "recommended dosing" for listening along. https://archive.org/details/TimeMachines-TimeMachines

Post-script If those piqued your interest, there's some decent words and a list of album suggestions in this Vinyl Factory article. Finally, if you can track them down, Stuart Maconie had two radio shows about Coil on his "Freak Zone" programme. The main show discusses the release of "Backwards", including an interview with collaborator Danny Hyde, who was the main person behind the recent re-issue. The shorter show is entitled John Doran uncoils Coil. Guest John Doran from The Quietus discusses the group and their history interspersed with Coil tracks and tracks from their contemporaries. Interestingly they chose a completely different set of 5 tracks to me.

Andreas Bombe: Reviving GHDL in Debian

It has been a few years since Debian last had a working VHDL simulator in the archive. Its competitor Verilog has been covered by the iverilog and verilator simulator packages, but GHDL was the only option for VHDL in Debian and that has become broken, orphaned and was eventually removed. I have just submitted an ITP to make my work on it official. A lot has changed since the last Debian upload of GHDL. Upstream development is quite active and it has gained free reimplementations of the standard library definitions (the lack of which frustrated at least two attempts at adoption of the Debian package). It has gained additional backends, in addition to GCC it can now also use LLVM and its own custom mcode (x86 only) code generator. The mcode backend should provide faster compilation at the expense of lacking sophisticated optimization, hence it might be preferable over the other two for small projects. My intentions are to provide all three backends in separate packages which would also offer easier backend troubleshooting a user experiencing problems can simply install another package to try a different backend. The problem with that idea is that GHDL is not designed for that kind of parallel installation. The backend is chosen at build configure time and that configuration is built and installed. Parallel installation will probably need some development but if that would turn out to be much work I could always have the packages conflicting initially. Given all these changes I am redoing the Debianization from ground up and maybe take bits and pieces from the old packaging where suitable. Right now I m building the different backends to compare and see what files are backend specific and what can go into a common package.

3 November 2017

Reproducible builds folks: Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #131

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday October 22 and Saturday October 28 2017: Past Events Upcoming/current events Documentation updates Bernhard Wiedemann started The Unreproducible Package which "is meant as a practical way to demonstrate the various ways that software can break reproducible builds using just low level primitives without requiring external existing programs that implement these primitives themselves. It is structured so that one subdirectory demonstrates one class of issues in some variants observed in the wild." Reproducible work in other projects Hush, a fork of ZCash, opened an issue into reproducible builds. A new tag was added to lintian (lint checker for Debian packages) to ensure that changelog entry timestamps are strictly increasing. This avoids certain real-world issues with identical timestamps, documented in Debian #843773. Packages reviewed and fixed, and bugs filed Patches sent upstream: Debian bug reports: Reviews of unreproducible packages 14 package reviews have been added, 35 have been updated and 28 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. 1 issue type has been updated: Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by: strip-nondeterminism development Version 0.040-1 was uploaded to unstable by Mattia Rizzolo. It included contributions already covered by posts of the previous weeks, as well as new ones from: reprotest development Development continued in git: buildinfo.debian.net development Development continued in git: reproducible-website development Misc. This week's edition was written by Ximin Luo, Chris Lamb, Bernhard M. Wiedemann and Holger Levsen & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

Raphaël Hertzog: My Free Software Activities in October 2017

My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donors (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me. Debian LTS This month I was allocated 12h but I had 1.5h left from September too. During this time, I finally finished my work on exiv2: I completed the triage of all CVE, backported 3 patches to the version in wheezy and released DLA-1147-1. I also did some review of the oldest entries in dla-needed. I reclassified a bunch of CVE on zoneminder and released DLA-1145-1 for the most problematic issue on that package. Many other packages got their CVE reclassified as not worth an update: xbmc, check-mk, rbenv, phamm, yaml-cpp. For mosquitto, I released DLA-1146-1. I filed #879001 (security issue) and #879002 (removal suggestion) on libpam4j. This library is no longer used by any other package in Debian, so it could be removed instead of costing us time in support. Misc Debian work After multiple months of wait, I was allowed to upload my schroot stable update (#864297). After ack from the d-i release manager, I pushed my pkgsel changes and uploaded version 0.46 of the package: this brings unattended-upgrades support in the installer. It s now installed by default. I nudged the upstream developer of gnome-shell-timer to get a new release for GNOME 3.26 compatibility and packaged it. Finally, I was pleased to merge multiple patches from Ville Skytt on Distro Tracker (the software powering tracker.debian.org). It looks like Ville will continue to contribute on a regular basis, yay. \o/ He already helped me to fix the remaining blockers for the switch to Python 3. Not really Debian related, but I also filed a bug against Tryton that I discovered after upgrading to the latest version. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

No comment Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

Chris Lamb: Faking cleaner URLs in the Debian BTS

Debian bug #846500 requests that the Bug Tracking System moves the canonical URL for a given bug from:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=846500 to the shorter, cleaner and generally less ugly:

https://bugs.debian.org/846500 (The latter currently redirects to the former.)

However, whilst we wait for a fix we can abuse the window.history object from the HTML History API to fake this locally: 
var m = window.location.href
  .match(/https:\/\/bugs.debian.org\/cgi-bin\/bugreport.cgi\?bug=(\d+)(#.*)?$/);
if (!m) return;
for (var x of document.getElementsByTagName("a"))  
  var href = x.getAttribute("href");
  if (href && href.match(/^[^:]+\.cgi/))  
      // Mangle relative URIs; <base> tag does not DTRT
      x.setAttribute('href', "/cgi-bin/" + href);
   
 
history.replaceState( , "", "/" + m[1] + window.location.hash);
This should work with most "user script" managers I happen to use TamperMonkey in Chrome.

Next.

Previous.