Search Results: "reg"

31 May 2020

Chris Lamb: Free software activities in May 2020

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world during May 2020 (previous month): In Lintian, the static analysis tool for Debian packages:
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 initiative is proud to be a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy, a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) charity focused on ethical technology and user freedom. 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.
Elsewhere in our tooling, I made the following changes to diffoscope, our in-depth and content-aware diff utility that can locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, including preparing and uploading versions 142, 143, 144, 145 and 146 to Debian: I also performed a huge overhaul of diffoscope's website:
Lastly, I made a large number of changes to the main Reproducible Builds website and documentation:
Debian LTS This month I contributed 17 hours to Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and 9 hours on its sister Extended LTS project. You can find out more about the two projects via the following video:
Debian I filed the following bug reports in Debian this month: I also filed a number of bugs against packages that are not compatible with Django 3.x, (organised around a single master bug) including django-taggit, sorl-thumbnail, django-simple-captcha, django-cas-server, django-cors-headers, python-django-csp, django-pipeline, python-django-jsonfield, python-django-contact-form, django-model-utils, django-fsm, django-modeltranslation, django-oauth-toolkit, libthumbor, python-django-extensions, python-django-imagekit, python-django-navtag, python-django-tagging, djangorestframework, django-haystack, django-taggit, django-simple-captcha, python-django-registration, python-django-pyscss, python-django-compressor, python-django-crispy-forms & python-django-mptt,
Lastly, I made the following uploads to Debian: I also sponsored an upload for adminer (4.7.7-1), also uploading it to buster-backports.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: T^4 #4: Introducing Byobu

The next video (following the announcement, and shells sessions one, two, and three) is up in the T^4 series of video lightning talks with tips, tricks, tools, and toys. This time we introduce the wonderful byobu tool which is called both a text-based window manager and a terminal multiplexer :

The slides are here. This repo at GitHub support the series: use it to open issues for comments, criticism, suggestions, or feedback. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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

30 May 2020

Sean Whitton: GNU Emacs' Transient Mark mode

Something I ve found myself doing as the pandemic rolls on is picking out and (re-)reading through sections of the GNU Emacs manual and the GNU Emacs Lisp reference manual. This has got me (too) interested in some of the recent history of Emacs development, and I did some digging into archives of emacs-devel from 2008 (15M mbox) regarding the change to turn Transient Mark mode on by default and set mark-even-if-inactive to true by default in Emacs 23.1. It s not always clear which objections to turning on Transient Mark mode by default take into account the mark-even-if-inactive change. I think that turning on Transient Mark mode along with mark-even-if-inactive is a good default. The question that remains is whether the disadvantages of Transient Mark mode are significant enough that experienced Emacs users should consider altering Emacs default behaviour to mitigate them. Here s one popular blog arguing for some mitigations. How might Transient Mark mode be disadvantageous? The suggestion is that it makes using the mark for navigation rather than for acting on regions less convenient:
  1. setting a mark just so you can jump back to it (i) is a distinct operation you have to think of separately; and (ii) requires two keypresses, C-SPC C-SPC, rather than just one keypress
  2. using exchange-point-and-mark activates the region, so to use it for navigation you need to use either C-u C-x C-x or C-x C-x C-g, neither of which are convenient to type, or else it will be difficult to set regions at the place you ve just jumped to because you ll already have one active.
There are two other disadvantages that people bring up which I am disregarding. The first is that it makes it harder for new users to learn useful ways in which to use the mark when it s deactivated. This happened to me, but it can be mitigated without making any behavioural changes to Emacs. The second is that the visual highlighting of the region can be distracting. So far as I can tell, this is only a problem with exchange-point-and-mark, and it s subsumed by the problem of that command actually activating the region. The rest of the time Emacs automatic deactivation of the region seems sufficient. How might disabling Transient Mark mode be disadvantageous? When Transient Mark mode is on, many commands will do something usefully different when the mark is active. The number of commands in Emacs which work this way is only going to increase now that Transient Mark mode is the default. If you disable Transient Mark mode, then to use those features you need to temporarily activate Transient Mark mode. This can be fiddly and/or require a lot of keypresses, depending on exactly where you want to put the region. Without being able to see the region, it might be harder to know where it is. Indeed, this is one of the main reasons for wanting Transient Mark mode to be the default, to avoid confusing new users. I don t think this is likely to affect experienced Emacs users often, however, and on occasions when more precision is really needed, C-u C-x C-x will make the region visible. So I m not counting this as a disadvantage. How might we mitigate these two sets of disadvantages? Here are the two middle grounds I m considering. Mitigation #1: Transient Mark mode, but hack C-x C-x behaviour 
(defun spw/exchange-point-and-mark (arg)
  "Exchange point and mark, but reactivate mark a bit less often.

Specifically, invert the meaning of ARG in the case where
Transient Mark mode is on but the region is inactive."
  (interactive "P")
  (exchange-point-and-mark
   (if (and transient-mark-mode (not mark-active))
       (not arg)
     arg)))
(global-set-key [remap exchange-point-and-mark] &aposspw/exchange-point-and-mark)
We avoid turning Transient Mark mode off, but mitigate the second of the two disadvantages given above. I can t figure out why it was thought to be a good idea to make C-x C-x reactivate the mark and require C-u C-x C-x to use the action of exchanging point and mark as a means of navigation. There needs to a binding to reactivate the mark, but in roughly ten years of having Transient Mark mode turned on, I ve found that the need to reactivate the mark doesn t come up often, so the shorter and longer bindings seem the wrong way around. Not sure what I m missing here. Mitigation #2: disable Transient Mark mode, but enable it temporarily more often 
(setq transient-mark-mode nil)
(defun spw/remap-mark-command (command &optional map)
  "Remap a mark-* command to temporarily activate Transient Mark mode."
  (let* ((cmd (symbol-name command))
         (fun (intern (concat "spw/" cmd)))
         (doc (concat "Call  "
                      cmd
                      "&apos and temporarily activate Transient Mark mode.")))
    (fset fun  (lambda ()
                 ,doc
                 (interactive)
                 (call-interactively #&apos,command)
                 (activate-mark)))
    (if map
        (define-key map (vector &aposremap command) fun)
      (global-set-key (vector &aposremap command) fun))))
(dolist (command &apos(mark-word
                   mark-sexp
                   mark-paragraph
                   mark-defun
                   mark-page
                   mark-whole-buffer))
  (spw/remap-mark-command command))
(with-eval-after-load &aposorg
  (spw/remap-mark-command &aposorg-mark-element org-mode-map)
  (spw/remap-mark-command &aposorg-mark-subtree org-mode-map))
;; optional
(global-set-key "\M-=" (lambda () (interactive) (activate-mark)))
;; resettle the previous occupant
(global-set-key "\C-cw" &aposcount-words-region)
Here we remove both of the disadvantages of Transient Mark mode given above, and mitigate the main disadvantage of not activating Transient Mark mode by making it more convenient to activate it temporarily. For example, this enables using C-M-SPC C-M-SPC M-( to wrap the following two function arguments in parentheses. And you can hit M-h a few times to mark some blocks of text or code, then operate on them with commands like M-% and C-/ which behave differently when the region is active.1 Comparing these mitigations Both of these mitigations handle the second of the two disadvantages of Transient Mark mode given above. What remains, then, is
  1. under the effects of mitigation #1, how much of a barrier to using marks for navigational purposes is it to have to press C-SPC C-SPC instead of having a single binding, C-SPC, for all manual mark setting2
  2. under the effects of mitigation #2, how much of a barrier to taking advantage of commands which act differently when the region is active is it to have to temporarily enable Transient Mark mode with C-SPC C-SPC, M-= or one of the mark-* commands?
These are unknowns.3 So I m going to have to experiment, I think, to determine which mitigation to use, if either. In particular, I don t know whether it s really significant that setting a mark for navigational purposes and for region marking purposes are distinct operations under mitigation #1. My plan is to start with mitigation #2 because that has the additional advantage of allowing me to confirm or disconfirm my belief that not being able to see where the region is will only rarely get in my way.
  1. The idea of making the mark-* commands activate the mark comes from an emacs-devel post by Stefan Monnier in the archives linked above.
  2. One remaining possibility I m not considering is mitigation #1 plus binding something else to do the same as C-SPC C-SPC. I don t believe there are any easily rebindable keys which are easier to type than typing C-SPC twice. And this does not deal with the two distinct mark-setting operations problem.
  3. Another way to look at this is the question of which of setting a mark for navigational purposes and activating a mark should get C-SPC and which should get C-SPC C-SPC.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: drat 0.1.6: Rewritten macOS binary support

drat user A new version of drat arrived on CRAN overnight, once again taking advantage of the fully automated process available for such packages with few reverse depends and no open issues. As we remarked at the last release fourteen months ago when we scored the same nice outcome: Being a simple package can have its upsides This release is mostly the work of Felix Ernst who took on what became a rewrite of how binary macOS packages are handled. If you need to distribute binary packages for macOS users, this may help. Two more small updates were made, see below for full details. drat stands for drat R Archive Template, and helps with easy-to-create and easy-to-use repositories for R packages. Since its inception in early 2015 it has found reasonably widespread adoption among R users because repositories with marked releases is the better way to distribute code. As your mother told you: Friends don t let friends install random git commit snapshots. Rolled-up releases it is. drat is easy to use, documented by five vignettes and just works. The NEWS file summarises the release as follows:

Changes in drat version 0.1.6 (2020-05-29)
  • Changes in drat functionality
    • Support for the various (current) macOS binary formats was rewritten (Felix Ernst in #89 fixing #88).
    • Travis CI use was updated to R 4.0.0 and bionic (Dirk).
    • A drat repo was added to the README (Thomas Fuller in #86)

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is a comparison to the previous release. More detailed information is on the drat page. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 146 released

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 146. This version includes the following changes: 
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Refactor .changes and .buildinfo handling to show all details (including
  the GPG header and footer components), even when referenced files are not
  present. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#122)
* Normalise filesystem stat(2) "birth times" (ie. st_birthtime) in the same
  way we do with stat(1)'s "Access:" and "Change:" times to fix a
  nondetermistic build failure on GNU Guix.
  (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#74)
* Drop the (default) subprocess.Popen(shell=False) keyword argument so that
  the more unsafe shell=True is more obvious.
* Ignore lower vs. upper-case when ordering our file format descriptions.
* Don't skip string normalisation in Black.
[ Mattia Rizzolo ]
* Add a "py3dist" override for the rpm-python module (Closes: #949598)
* Bump the debhelper compat level to 13 and use the new
  execute_after_*/execture_before_* style rules.
* Fix a spelling error in changelog.
[ Daniel Fullmer ]
* Mount GuestFS filesystem images readonly.
[ Jean-Romain Garnier ]
* Prevent an issue where (for example) LibarchiveMember's has_same_content
  method is called regardless of the actual type of file.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

27 May 2020

Kees Cook: security things in Linux v5.5

Previously: v5.4. I got a bit behind on this blog post series! Let s get caught up. Here are a bunch of security things I found interesting in the Linux kernel v5.5 release: restrict perf_event_open() from LSM
Given the recurring flaws in the perf subsystem, there has been a strong desire to be able to entirely disable the interface. While the kernel.perf_event_paranoid sysctl knob has existed for a while, attempts to extend its control to block all perf_event_open() calls have failed in the past. Distribution kernels have carried the rejected sysctl patch for many years, but now Joel Fernandes has implemented a solution that was deemed acceptable: instead of extending the sysctl, add LSM hooks so that LSMs (e.g. SELinux, Apparmor, etc) can make these choices as part of their overall system policy. generic fast full refcount_t
Will Deacon took the recent refcount_t hardening work for both x86 and arm64 and distilled the implementations into a single architecture-agnostic C version. The result was almost as fast as the x86 assembly version, but it covered more cases (e.g. increment-from-zero), and is now available by default for all architectures. (There is no longer any Kconfig associated with refcount_t; the use of the primitive provides full coverage.) linker script cleanup for exception tables
When Rick Edgecombe presented his work on building Execute-Only memory under a hypervisor, he noted a region of memory that the kernel was attempting to read directly (instead of execute). He rearranged things for his x86-only patch series to work around the issue. Since I d just been working in this area, I realized the root cause of this problem was the location of the exception table (which is strictly a lookup table and is never executed) and built a fix for the issue and applied it to all architectures, since it turns out the exception tables for almost all architectures are just a data table. Hopefully this will help clear the path for more Execute-Only memory work on all architectures. In the process of this, I also updated the section fill bytes on x86 to be a trap (0xCC, int3), instead of a NOP instruction so functions would need to be targeted more precisely by attacks. KASLR for 32-bit PowerPC
Joining many other architectures, Jason Yan added kernel text base-address offset randomization (KASLR) to 32-bit PowerPC. seccomp for RISC-V
After a bit of long road, David Abdurachmanov has added seccomp support to the RISC-V architecture. The series uncovered some more corner cases in the seccomp self tests code, which is always nice since then we get to make it more robust for the future! seccomp USER_NOTIF continuation
When the seccomp SECCOMP_RET_USER_NOTIF interface was added, it seemed like it would only be used in very limited conditions, so the idea of needing to handle normal requests didn t seem very onerous. However, since then, it has become clear that the overhead of a monitor process needing to perform lots of normal open() calls on behalf of the monitored process started to look more and more slow and fragile. To deal with this, it became clear that there needed to be a way for the USER_NOTIF interface to indicate that seccomp should just continue as normal and allow the syscall without any special handling. Christian Brauner implemented SECCOMP_USER_NOTIF_FLAG_CONTINUE to get this done. It comes with a bit of a disclaimer due to the chance that monitors may use it in places where ToCToU is a risk, and for possible conflicts with SECCOMP_RET_TRACE. But overall, this is a net win for container monitoring tools. EFI_RNG_PROTOCOL for x86
Some EFI systems provide a Random Number Generator interface, which is useful for gaining some entropy in the kernel during very early boot. The arm64 boot stub has been using this for a while now, but Dominik Brodowski has now added support for x86 to do the same. This entropy is useful for kernel subsystems performing very earlier initialization whre random numbers are needed (like randomizing aspects of the SLUB memory allocator). FORTIFY_SOURCE for MIPS
As has been enabled on many other architectures, Dmitry Korotin got MIPS building with CONFIG_FORTIFY_SOURCE, so compile-time (and some run-time) buffer overflows during calls to the memcpy() and strcpy() families of functions will be detected. limit copy_ to,from _user() size to INT_MAX
As done for VFS, vsnprintf(), and strscpy(), I went ahead and limited the size of copy_to_user() and copy_from_user() calls to INT_MAX in order to catch any weird overflows in size calculations. Other things
Alexander Popov pointed out some more v5.5 features that I missed in this blog post. I m repeating them here, with some minor edits/clarifications. Thank you Alexander! Edit: added Alexander Popov s notes That s it for v5.5! Let me know if there s anything else that I should call out here. Next up: Linux v5.6.

2020, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
Creative Commons License

Russ Allbery: Review: Middlegame

Review: Middlegame, by Seanan McGuire
Publisher: Tor
Copyright: May 2019
ISBN: 1-250-19551-9
Format: Kindle
Pages: 528
Roger and Dodger are cuckoo children, alchemical constructs created by other alchemical constructs masquerading as humans. They are halves of the primal force of the universe, the Doctrine of Ethos (which is not what the Doctrine of Ethos is, but that is one of my lesser problems with this book), divided into language and math and kept separate to properly mature. In this case, separate means being adopted by families on opposite coasts of the United States, ignorant of each other's existence and closely monitored by agents Reed controls. None of that prevents Roger and Dodger from becoming each other's invisible friends at the age of seven, effortlessly communicating psychically even though they've never met. That could have been the start of an enjoyable story that hearkened back to an earlier age of science fiction: the secret science experiments discover that they have more power than their creators expected, form a clandestine alliance, and fight back against the people who are trying to control them. I have fond memories of Escape to Witch Mountain and would have happily read that book. Unfortunately, that isn't the story McGuire wanted to tell. The story she told involves ripping Roger and Dodger apart, breaking Dodger, and turning Roger into an abusive asshole. Whooboy, where to start. This book made me very angry, in a way that I would not have been if it didn't contain the bones of a much better novel. Four of them, to be precise: four other books that would have felt less gratuitously cruel and less apparently oblivious to just how bad Roger's behavior is. There are some things to like. One of them is that the structure of this book is clever. I can't tell you how it's clever because the structure doesn't become clear until more than halfway through and it completely changes the story in a way that would be a massive spoiler. But it's an interesting spin on an old idea, one that gave Roger and Dodger a type of agency in the story that has far-ranging implications. I enjoyed thinking about it. That leads me to another element I liked: Erin. She makes only fleeting appearances until well into the story, but I thought she competed with Dodger for being the best character of the book. The second of the better novels I saw in the bones of Middlegame was the same story told from Erin's perspective. I found myself guessing at her motives and paying close attention to hints that led to a story with a much different emotional tone. Viewing the ending of the book through her eyes instead of Roger and Dodger's puts it in a different, more complicated, and more thought-provoking light. Unfortunately, she's not McGuire's protagonist. She instead is one of the monsters of this book, which leads to my first, although not my strongest, complaint. It felt like McGuire was trying too hard to write horror, packing Middlegame with the visuals of horror movies without the underlying structure required to make them effective. I'm not a fan of horror personally, so to some extent I'm grateful that the horrific elements were ineffective, but it makes for some frustratingly bad writing. For example, one of the longest horror scenes in the book features Erin, and should be a defining moment for the character. Unfortunately, it's so heavy on visuals and so focused on what McGuire wants the reader to be thinking that it doesn't show any of the psychology underlying Erin's decisions. The camera is pointed the wrong way; all the interesting storytelling work, moral complexity, and world-building darkness is happening in the character we don't get to see. And, on top of that, McGuire overuses foreshadowing so much that it robs the scene of suspense and terror. Again, I'm partly grateful, since I don't read books for suspense and terror, but it means the scene does only a fraction of the work it could. This problem of trying too hard extends to the writing. McGuire has a bit of a tendency in all of her books to overdo the descriptions, but is usually saved by narrative momentum. Unfortunately, that's not true here, and her prose often seems overwrought. She also resorts to this style of description, which never fails to irritate me:
The thought has barely formed when a different shape looms over him, grinning widely enough to show every tooth in its head. They are even, white, and perfect, and yet he somehow can't stop himself from thinking there's something wrong with them, that they're mismatched, that this assortment of teeth was never meant to share a single jaw, a single terrible smile.
This isn't effective. This is telling the reader how they're supposed to feel about the thing you're describing, without doing the work of writing a description that makes them feel that way. (Also, you may see what I mean by overwrought.) That leads me to my next complaint: the villains. My problem is not so much with Leigh, who I thought was an adequate monster, if a bit single-note. There's some thought and depth behind her arguments with Reed, a few hints of her own motives that were more convincing for not being fully shown. The descriptions of how dangerous she is were reasonably effective. She's a good villain for this type of dark fantasy story where the world is dangerous and full of terrors (and reminded me of some of the villains from McGuire's October Daye series). Reed, though, is a storytelling train wreck. The Big Bad of the novel is the least interesting character in it. He is a stuffed tailcoat full of malicious incompetence who is only dangerous because the author proclaims him to be. It only adds insult to injury that he kills off a far more nuanced and creative villain before the novel starts, replacing her ambiguous goals with Snidely Whiplash mustache-twirling. The reader has to suffer through extended scenes focused on him as he brags, monologues, and obsesses over his eventual victory without an ounce of nuance or subtlety. Worse is the dynamic between him and Leigh, which is only one symptom of the problem with Middlegame that made me the most angry: the degree to this book oozes patriarchy. Every man in this book, including the supposed hero, orders around the women, who are forced in various ways to obey. This is the most obvious between Leigh and Reed, but it's the most toxic, if generally more subtle, between Roger and Dodger. Dodger is great. I had absolutely no trouble identifying with and rooting for her as a character. The nasty things that McGuire does to her over the course of the book (and wow does that never let up) made me like her more when she tenaciously refuses to give up. Dodger is the math component of the Doctrine of Ethos, and early in the book I thought McGuire handled that well, particularly given how difficult it is to write a preternatural genius. Towards the end of this book, her math sadly turns into a very non-mathematical magic (more on this in a moment), but her character holds all the way through. It felt like she carved her personality out of this story through sheer force of will and clung to it despite the plot. I wanted to rescue her from this novel and put her into a better book, such as the one in which her college friends (who are great; McGuire is very good at female friendships when she writes them) stage an intervention, kick a few people out of her life, and convince her to trust them. Unfortunately, Dodger is, by authorial fiat, half of a bound pair, and the other half of that pair is Roger, who is the sort of nice guy everyone likes and thinks is sweet and charming until he turns into an emotional trap door right when you need him the most and dumps you into the ocean to drown. And then somehow makes you do all the work of helping him feel better about his betrayal. The most egregious (and most patriarchal) thing Roger does in this book is late in the book and a fairly substantial spoiler, so I can't rant about that properly. But even before that, Roger keeps doing the the same damn emotional abandonment trick, and the book is heavily invested into justifying it and making excuses for him. Excuses that, I should note, are not made for Dodger; her failings are due to her mistakes and weaknesses, whereas Roger's are natural reactions to outside forces. I got very, very tired of this, and I'm upset by how little awareness the narrative voice showed for how dysfunctional and abusive this relationship is. The solution is always for Dodger to reunite with Roger; it's built into the structure of the story. I have a weakness for the soul-bound pair, in part from reading a lot of Mercedes Lackey at an impressionable age, but one of the dangerous pitfalls of the concept is that the characters then have to have an almost flawless relationship. If not, it can turn abusive very quickly, since the characters by definition cannot leave each other. It's essentially coercive, so as soon as the relationship shows a dark side, the author needs to be extremely careful. McGuire was not. There is an attempted partial patch, late in the book, for the patriarchal structure. One of the characters complains about it, and another says that the gender of the language and math pairs is random and went either way in other pairs. Given that both of the pairs that we meet in this story have the same male-dominant gender dynamic, what I took from this is that McGuire realized there was a problem but wasn't able to fix it. (I'm also reminded of David R. Henry's old line that it's never a good sign when the characters start complaining about the plot.) The structural problems are all the more frustrating because I think there were ways out of them. Roger is supposedly the embodiment of language, not that you'd be able to tell from most scenes in this novel. For reasons that I do not understand, McGuire expressed that as a love of words: lexicography, translation, and synonyms. This makes no sense to me. Those are some of the more structured and rules-based (and hence mathematical) parts of language. If Roger had instead been focused on stories collecting them, telling them, and understanding why and how they're told he would have had a clearer contrast with Dodger. More importantly, it would have solved the plot problem that McGuire solved with a nasty bit of patriarchy. So much could have been done with Dodger building a structure of math around Roger's story-based expansion of the possible, and it would have grounded Dodger's mathematics in something more interesting than symbolic magic. To me, it's such an obvious lost opportunity. I'm still upset about this book. McGuire does a lovely bit of world-building with Asphodel Baker, what little we see of her. I found the hidden alchemical war against her work by L. Frank Baum delightful, and enjoyed every excerpt from the fictional Over the Woodward Wall scattered throughout Middlegame. But a problem with inventing a fictional book to excerpt in a real novel is that the reader may decide that the fictional book sounds a lot better than the book they're reading, and start wishing they could just read that book instead. That was certainly the case for me. I'm sad that Over the Woodward Wall doesn't exist, and am mostly infuriated by Middlegame. Dodger and Erin deserved to live in a better book. Should you want to read this anyway (and I do know people who liked it), serious content warning for self-harm. Rating: 4 out of 10

26 May 2020

Russell Coker: Cruises and Covid19

Problems With Cruises GQ has an insightful and detailed article about Covid19 and the Diamond Princess [1], I recommend reading it. FastCompany has a brief article about bookings for cruises in August [2]. There have been many negative comments about this online. The first thing to note is that the cancellation policies on those cruises are more lenient than usual and the prices are lower. So it s not unreasonable for someone to put down a deposit on a half price holiday in the hope that Covid19 goes away (as so many prominent people have been saying it will) in the knowledge that they will get it refunded if things don t work out. Of course if the cruise line goes bankrupt then no-one will get a refund, but I think people are expecting that won t happen. The GQ article highlights some serious problems with the way cruise ships operate. They have staff crammed in to small cabins and the working areas allow transmission of disease. These problems can be alleviated, they could allocate more space to staff quarters and have more capable air conditioning systems to put in more fresh air. During the life of a cruise ship significant changes are often made, replacing engines with newer more efficient models, changing the size of various rooms for entertainment, installing new waterslides, and many other changes are routinely made. Changing the staff only areas to have better ventilation and more separate space (maybe capsule-hotel style cabins with fresh air piped in) would not be a difficult change. It would take some money and some dry-dock time which would be a significant expense for cruise companies. Cruises Are Great People like social environments, they want to have situations where there are as many people as possible without it becoming impossible to move. Cruise ships are carefully designed for the flow of passengers. Both the layout of the ship and the schedule of events are carefully planned to avoid excessive crowds. In terms of meeting the requirement of having as many people as possible in a small area without being unable to move cruise ships are probably ideal. Because there is a large number of people in a restricted space there are economies of scale on a cruise ship that aren t available anywhere else. For example the main items on the menu are made in a production line process, this can only be done when you have hundreds of people sitting down to order at the same time. The same applies to all forms of entertainment on board, they plan the events based on statistical knowledge of what people want to attend. This makes it more economical to run than land based entertainment where people can decide to go elsewhere. On a ship a certain portion of the passengers will see whatever show is presented each night, regardless of whether it s singing, dancing, or magic. One major advantage of cruises is that they are all inclusive. If you are on a regular holiday would you pay to see a singing or dancing show? Probably not, but if it s included then you might as well do it and it will be pretty good. This benefit is really appreciated by people taking kids on holidays, if kids do things like refuse to attend a performance that you were going to see or reject food once it s served then it won t cost any extra. People Who Criticise Cruises For the people who sneer at cruises, do you like going to bars? Do you like going to restaurants? Live music shows? Visiting foreign beaches? A cruise gets you all that and more for a discount price. If Groupon had a deal that gave you a cheap hotel stay with all meals included, free non-alcoholic drinks at bars, day long entertainment for kids at the kids clubs, and two live performances every evening how many of the people who reject cruises would buy it? A typical cruise is just like a Groupon deal for non-stop entertainment from 8AM to 11PM. Will Cruises Restart? The entertainment options that cruises offer are greatly desired by many people. Most cruises are aimed at budget travellers, the price is cheaper than a hotel in a major city. Such cruises greatly depend on economies of scale, if they can t get the ships filled then they would need to raise prices (thus decreasing demand) to try to make a profit. I think that some older cruise ships will be scrapped in the near future and some of the newer ships will be sold to cruise lines that cater to cheap travel (IE P&O may scrap some ships and some of the older Princess ships may be transferred to them). Overall I predict a decrease in the number of middle-class cruise ships. For the expensive cruises (where the cheapest cabins cost over $1000US per person per night) I don t expect any real changes, maybe they will have fewer passengers and higher prices to allow more social distancing or something. I am certain that cruises will start again, but it s too early to predict when. Going on a cruise is about as safe as going to a concert or a major sporting event. No-one is predicting that sporting stadiums will be closed forever or live concerts will be cancelled forever, so really no-one should expect that cruises will be cancelled forever. Whether companies that own ships or stadiums go bankrupt in the mean time is yet to be determined. One thing that s been happening for years is themed cruises. A group can book out an entire ship or part of a ship for a themed cruise. I expect this to become much more popular when cruises start again as it will make it easier to fill ships. In the past it seems that cruise lines let companies book their ships for events but didn t take much of an active role in the process. I think that the management of cruise lines will look to aggressively market themed cruises to anyone who might help, for starters they could reach out to every 80s and 90s pop group those fans are all old enough to be interested in themed cruises and the musicians won t be asking for too much money. Conclusion Humans are social creatures. People want to attend events with many other people. Covid 19 won t be the last pandemic, and it may not even be eradicated in the near future. The possibility of having a society where no-one leaves home unless they are in a hazmat suit has been explored in science fiction, but I don t think that s a plausible scenario for the near future and I don t think that it s something that will be caused by Covid 19.
Related posts:
  1. Cruises It seems that in theory cruises can make for quite...
  2. A Computer Conference on a Cruise Ship After LCA [1] there was a discussion about possible locations...
  3. My First Cruise A few weeks ago I went on my first cruise,...

25 May 2020

Bits from Debian: DebConf20 registration is open!

DebConf20 banner We are happy to announce that registration for DebConf20 is now open. The event will take place from August 23rd to 29th, 2020 at the University of Haifa, in Israel, and will be preceded by DebCamp, from August 16th to 22nd. Although the Covid-19 situation is still rather fluid, as of now, Israel seems to be on top of the situation. Days with less than 10 new diagnosed infections are becoming common and businesses and schools are slowly reopening. As such, we are hoping that, at least as far as regulations go, we will be able to hold an in-person conference. There is more (and up to date) information at the conference's FAQ. Which means, barring a second wave, that there is reason to hope that the conference can go forward. For that, we need your help. We need to know, assuming health regulations permit it, how many people intend to attend. This year probably more than ever before, prompt registration is very important to us. If after months of staying at home you feel that rubbing elbows with fellow Debian Developers is precisely the remedy that will salvage 2020, then we ask that you do register as soon as possible. Sadly, things are still not clear enough for us to make a final commitment to holding an in-person conference, but knowing how many people intend to attend will be a great help in making that decision. The deadline for deciding on postponing, cancelling or changing the format of the conference is June 8th. To register for DebConf20, please visit our website and log into the registration system and fill out the form. You can always edit or cancel your registration, but please note that the last day to confirm or cancel is July 26th, 2020 23:59:59 UTC. We cannot guarantee availability of accommodation, food and swag for unconfirmed registrations. We do suggest that attendees begin making travel arrangements as soon as possible, of course. Please bear in mind that most air carriers allow free cancellations and changes. Any questions about registrations should be addressed to registration@debconf.org. Bursary for travel, accomodation and meals In an effort to widen the diversity of DebConf attendees, the Debian Project allocates a part of the financial resources obtained through sponsorships to pay for bursaries (travel, accommodation, and/or meals) for participants who request this support when they register. As resources are limited, we will examine the requests and decide who will receive the bursaries. They will be destined: Giving a talk, organizing an event or helping during DebConf20 is taken into account when deciding upon your bursary, so please mention them in your bursary application. For more information about bursaries, please visit Applying for a Bursary to DebConf Attention: deadline to apply for bursaries using the registration form before May 31st, 2019 23:59:59 UTC. This deadline is necessary in order to the organisers to have some time to analyze the requests. To register for the Conference, either with or without a bursary request, please visit: https://debconf20.debconf.org/register Participation to DebConf20 is conditional to your respect of our Code of Conduct. We require you to read, understand and abide by this code. DebConf would not be possible without the generous support of all our sponsors, especially our Platinum Sponsor Lenovo and Gold Sponsors deepin and Matanel Foundation. DebConf20 is still accepting sponsors; if you are interested, or think you know of others who would be willing to help, please get in touch!

Russ Allbery: Review: The Last Emperox

Review: The Last Emperox, by John Scalzi
Series: Interdependency #3
Publisher: Tor
Copyright: April 2020
ISBN: 0-7653-8917-7
Format: Kindle
Pages: 318
This is the conclusion of the Interdependency trilogy, which is a single story told in three books. Start with The Collapsing Empire. You don't want to read this series out of order. All the pieces and players are in place, the causes and timeline of the collapse of the empire she is accidentally ruling are now clear, and Cardenia Wu-Patrick knows who her friends and enemies are. What she doesn't know is what she can do about it. Her enemies, unfettered Cardenia's ethics or desire to save the general population, have the advantage of clearer and more achievable goals. If they survive and, almost as important, remain in power, who cares what happens to everyone else? As with The Consuming Fire, the politics may feel a bit too on-the-nose for current events, this time for the way that some powerful people are handling (or not handling) the current pandemic. Also as with The Consuming Fire, Scalzi's fast-moving story, likable characters, banter, and occasional humorous descriptions prevent those similarities from feeling heavy or didactic. This is political wish fulfillment to be sure, but it doesn't try to justify itself or linger too much on its improbabilities. It's a good story about entertaining people trying (mostly) to save the world with a combination of science and political maneuvering. I picked up The Last Emperox as a palate cleanser after reading Gideon the Ninth, and it provided exactly what I was looking for. That gave me an opportunity to think about what Scalzi does in his writing, why his latest novel was one of my first thoughts for a palate cleanser, and why I react to his writing the way that I do. Scalzi isn't a writer about whom I have strong opinions. In my review of The Collapsing Empire, I compared his writing to the famous description of Asimov as the "default voice" of science fiction, but that's not quite right. He has a distinct and easily-recognizable style, heavy on banter and light-hearted description. But for me his novels are pleasant, reliable entertainment that I forget shortly after reading them. They don't linger or stand out, even though I enjoy them while I'm reading them. That's my reaction. Others clearly do not have that reaction, fully engage with his books, and remember them vividly. That indicates to me that there's something his writing is doing that leaves substantial room for difference of personal taste and personal reaction to the story, and the sharp contrast between The Last Emperox and Gideon the Ninth helped me put my finger on part of it. I don't feel like Scalzi's books try to tell me how to feel about the story. There's a moment in The Last Emperox where Cardenia breaks down crying over an incredibly difficult decision that she's made, one that the readers don't find out about until later. In another book, there would be considerably more emotional build-up to that moment, or at least some deep analysis of it later once the decision is revealed. In this book, it's only a handful of paragraphs and then a few pages of processing later, primarily in dialogue, and less focused on the emotions of the characters than on the forward-looking decisions they've made to deal with those emotions. The emotion itself is subtext. Many other authors would try to pull the reader into those moments and make them feel what the characters are feeling. Scalzi just relates them, and leaves the reader free to feel what they choose to feel. I don't think this is a flaw (or a merit) in Scalzi's writing; it's just a difference, and exactly the difference that made me reach for this book as an emotional break after a book that got its emotions all over the place. Calling Scalzi's writing emotionally relaxing isn't quite right, but it gives me space to choose to be emotionally relaxed if I want to be. I can pick the level of my engagement. If I want to care about these characters and agonize over their decisions, there's enough information here to mull over and use to recreate their emotional states. If I just want to read a story about some interesting people and not care too much about their hopes and dreams, I can choose to do that instead, and the book won't fight me. That approach lets me sidle up on the things that I care about and think about them at my leisure, or leave them be. This approach makes Scalzi's books less intense than other novels for me. This is where personal preference comes in. I read books in large part to engage emotionally with the characters, and I therefore appreciate books that do a lot of that work for me. Scalzi makes me do the work myself, and the result is not as effective for me, or as memorable. I think this may be part of what I and others are picking up on when we say that Scalzi's writing is reminiscent of classic SF from decades earlier. It used to be common for SF to not show any emotional vulnerability in the main characters, and to instead focus on the action plot and the heroics and martial virtues. This is not what Scalzi is doing, to be clear; he has a much better grasp of character and dialogue than most classic SF, adds considerable light-hearted humor, and leaves clear clues and hooks for a wide range of human emotions in the story. But one can read Scalzi in that tone if one wants to, since the emotional hooks do not grab hard at the reader and dig in. By comparison, you cannot read Gideon the Ninth without grappling with the emotions of the characters. The book will not let you. I think this is part of why Scalzi is so consistent for me. If you do not care deeply about Gideon Nav, you will not get along with Gideon the Ninth, and not everyone will. But several main characters in The Last Emperox (Mance and to some extent Cardenia) did little or nothing for me emotionally, and it didn't matter. I liked Kiva and enjoyed watching her strategically smash her way through social conventions, but it was easy to watch her from a distance and not get too engrossed in her life or her thoughts. The plot trundled along satisfyingly, regardless. That lack of emotional involvement precludes, for me, a book becoming the sort of work that I will rave about and try to press into other people's hands, but it also makes it comfortable and gentle and relaxing in a way that a more emotionally fraught book could not be. This is a long-winded way to say that this was a satisfying conclusion to a space opera trilogy that I enjoyed reading, will recommend mildly to others, and am already forgetting the details of. If you liked the first two books, this is an appropriate and fun conclusion with a few new twists and a satisfying amount of swearing (mostly, although not entirely, from Kiva). There are a few neat (albeit not horribly original) bits of world-building, a nice nod to and subversion of Asimov, a fair bit of political competency wish fulfillment (which I didn't find particularly believable but also didn't mind being unbelievable), and one enjoyable "oh no she didn't" moment. If you like the thing that Scalzi is doing, you will enjoy this book. Rating: 8 out of 10

24 May 2020

Enrico Zini: Music links

Great Big Sea - End Of The World
music
2020-05-25
It's the end of the world as we know it, twice as fast
Smash Mouth - All Star (Melon Cover)
music
2020-05-25
Brett Domino: Bad Romance (Lady Gaga) - Korg Monotron and Kaossilator
music
2020-05-25
J.S. Bach - Crab Canon on a M bius Strip
music
2020-05-25
Homemade Instruments and PVC Pipe - Rare And Strange Instruments
music archive.org
2020-05-25
After Homemade Instruments Week on the facebook page, here is an article with some PVC pipes instruments! Percussion on PVC pipes A classic, long pipes for big bass, easy to tune by changing the length
Ut queant laxis - Wikipedia
history music archive.org
2020-05-25
"Ut queant laxis" or "Hymnus in Ioannem" is a Latin hymn in honor of John the Baptist, written in Horatian Sapphics and traditionally attributed to Paulus Diaconus, the eighth-century Lombard historian. It is famous for its part in the history of musical notation, in particular solmization. The hymn belongs to the tradition of Gregorian chant.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: #3 T^4: Customizing The Shell

The third video (following the announcement, the shell colors) one as well as last week s shell prompt one, is up in the stil new T^4 series of video lightning talks with tips, tricks, tools, and toys. Today we cover customizing the shell some more.

The slides are here. This repo at GitHub support the series: use it to open issues for comments, criticism, suggestions, or feedback. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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

23 May 2020

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppSimdJson 0.0.5: Updated Upstream

A new RcppSimdJson release with updated upstream simdjson code just arrived on CRAN. RcppSimdJson wraps the fantastic and genuinely impressive simdjson library by Daniel Lemire and collaborators. Via some very clever algorithmic engineering to obtain largely branch-free code, coupled with modern C++ and newer compiler instructions, it results in parsing gigabytes of JSON parsed per second which is quite mindboggling. The best-case performance is faster than CPU speed as use of parallel SIMD instructions and careful branch avoidance can lead to less than one cpu cycle use per byte parsed; see the video of the recent talk by Daniel Lemire at QCon (which was also voted best talk). This release brings updated upstream code (thanks to Brendan Knapp) plus a new example and minimal tweaks. The full NEWS entry follows.

Changes in version 0.0.5 (2020-05-23)
  • Add parseExample from earlier upstream announcement (Dirk).
  • Synced with upstream (Brendan in #12) closing #11).
  • Updated example parseExample to API changes (Brendan).

Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. For questions, suggestions, or issues please use the issue tracker at the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 145 released

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 145. This version includes the following changes: 
[ Chris Lamb ]
* Improvements:
  - Add support for Apple Xcode mobile provisioning .mobilepovision files.
    (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#113)
  - Add support for printing the signatures via apksigner(1).
    (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#121)
  - Use SHA256 over MD5 when generating page names for the HTML directory
    presenter, validate checksums for files referenced in .changes files
    using SHA256 too, and move to using SHA256 in "Too much input for diff"
    output too. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#124)
  - Don't leak the full path of the temporary directory in "Command [..]
    exited with 1".  (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#126)
  - Identify "iOS App Zip archive data" files as .zip files.
    (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#116)
* Bug fixes:
  - Correct "differences" typo in the ApkFile handler.
    (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#127)
* Reporting/output improvements:
  - Never emit the same id="foo" TML anchor reference twice, otherwise
    identically-named parts will not be able to linked to via "#foo".
    (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#120)
  - Never emit HTML with empty "id" anchor lements as it is not possible to
    link to "#" (vs "#foo"). We use "#top" as a fallback value so it will
    work for the top-level parent container.
  - Clarify the message when we cannot find the "debian" Python module.
  - Clarify "Command [..] failed with exit code" to remove duplicate "exited
    with exit" but also to note that diffoscope is interpreting this as an
    error.
  - Add descriptions for the 'fallback' Debian module file types.
  - Rename the --debugger command-line argument to --pdb.
* Testsuite improvements:
  - Prevent CI (and runtime) apksigner test failures due to lack of
    binfmt_misc on Salsa CI and elsewhere.
* Codebase improvements:
  - Initially add a pair of comments to tidy up a slightly abstraction level
    violating code in diffoscope.comparators.mising_file and the
    .dsc/.buildinfo file handling, but replace this later by by inlining
    MissingFile's special handling of deb822 to prevent leaking through
    abstraction layers in the first place.
  - Use a BuildinfoFile (etc.) regardless of whether the associated files
    such as the orig.tar.gz and the .deb are present, but don't treat them as
    actual containers. (Re: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#122)
  - Rename the "Openssl" command class to "OpenSSLPKCS7" to accommodate other
    commands with this prefix.
  - Wrap a docstring across multiple lines, drop an inline pprint import and
    comment the HTMLPrintContext class, etc.
[ Emanuel Bronshtein ]
* Avoid build-cache in building the released Docker image.
  (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#123)
[ Holger Levsen ]
* Wrap long lines in older changelog entries.
You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

17 May 2020

Dirk Eddelbuettel: #2 T^4: Customizing The Shell Prompt

The second video (following the announcement and last week s shell colors) is up in the stil new T^4 series of video lightning talks with tips, tricks, tools, and toys. Today we cover customizing shell prompts.

The slides are available here. Next week we likely continue on shell customization with aliases. This repo at GitHub support the series: use it to open issues for comments, criticism, suggestions, or feedback. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub. For the first year, GitHub will match your contributions.

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

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 0.9.880.1.0

armadillo image Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language and is widely used by (currently) 719 other packages on CRAN. Conrad released a new upstream version 9.880.1 of Armadillo on Friday which I packaged and tested as usual (result log here in the usual repo). The R package also sports a new OpenMP detection facility once again motivated by macOS which changed its setup yet again. Changes in the new release are noted below.

Changes in RcppArmadillo version 0.9.880.1.0 (2020-05-15)
  • Upgraded to Armadillo release 9.880.1 (Roasted Mocha Detox)
    • expanded qr() to optionally use pivoted decomposition
    • updated physical constants to NIST 2018 CODATA values
    • added ARMA_DONT_USE_CXX11_MUTEX confguration option to disable use of std::mutex
  • OpenMP capability is tested explicitly (Kevin Ushey and Dirk in #294, #295, and #296 all fixing #290).

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

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

Erich Schubert: Contact Tracing Apps are Useless

Some people believe that automatic contact tracing apps will help contain the Coronavirus epidemic. They won t. Sorry to bring the bad news, but IT and mobile phones and artificial intelligence will not solve every problem. In my opinion, those that promise to solve these things with artificial intelligence / mobile phones / apps / your-favorite-buzzword are at least overly optimistic and blinder Aktionismus (*), if not naive, detachted from reality, or fraudsters that just want to get some funding. (*) there does not seem to be an English word for this doing something just for the sake of doing something, without thinking about whether it makes sense to do so Here are the reasons why it will not work:
  1. Signal quality. Forget detecting proximity with Bluetooth Low Energy. Yes, there are attempts to use BLE beacons for indoor positioning. But these use that you can learn fingerprints of which beacons are visible at which points, combined with additional information such as movement sensors and history (you do not teleport around in a building). BLE signals and antennas apparently tend to be very prone to orientation differences, signal reflections, and of course you will not have the idealized controlled environment used in such prototypes. The contacts have a single device, and they move this is not comparable to indoor positioning. I strongly doubt you can tell whether you are close to someone, or not.
  2. Close vs. protection. The app cannot detect protection in place. Being close to someone behind a plexiglass window or even a solid wall is very different from being close otherwise. You will get a lot of false contacts this way. That neighbor that you have never seen living in the appartment above will likely be considered a close contact of yours, as you sleep next to each other every day
  3. Low adoption rates. Apparently even in technology affine Singapore, fewer than 20% of people installed the app. That does not even mean they use it regularly. In Austria, the number is apparently below 5%, and people complain that it does not detect contact But in order for this approach to work, you will need Chinese-style mass surveillance that literally puts you in prison if you do not install the app.
  4. False alerts. Because of these issues, you will get false alerts, until you just do not care anymore.
  5. False sense of security. Honestly: the app does not pretect you at all. All it tries to do is to make the tracing of contacts easier. It will not tell you reliably if you have been infected (as mentioned above, too many false positives, too few users) nor that you are relatively safe (too few contacts included, too slow testing and reporting). It will all be on the quality of about 10 days ago you may or may not have contact with someone that tested positive, please contact someone to expose more data to tell you that it is actually another false alert .
  6. Trust. In Germany, the app will be operated by T-Systems and SAP. Not exactly two companies that have a lot of fans SAP seems to be one of the most hated software around. Neither company is known for caring about privacy much, but they are prototypical for business first . Its trust the cat to keep the cream. Yes, I know they want to make it open-source. But likely only the client, and you will still have to trust that the binary in the app stores is actually built from this source code, and not from a modified copy. As long as the name T-Systems and SAP are associated to the app, people will not trust it. Plus, we all know that the app will be bad, given the reputation of these companies at making horrible software systems
  7. Too late. SAP and T-Systems want to have the app ready in mid June. Seriously, this must be a joke? It will be very buggy in the beginning (because it is SAP!) and it will not be working reliably before end of July. There will not be a substantial user before fall. But given the low infection rates in Germany, nobody will bother to install it anymore, because the perceived benefit is 0 one the infection rates are low.
  8. Infighting. You may remember that there was the discussion before that there should be a pan-european effort. Except that in the end, everybody fought everybody else, countries went into different directions and they all broke up. France wanted a centralized systems, while in Germany people pointed out that the users will not accept this and only a distributed system will have a chance. That failed effort was known as Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) vs. Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (DP-3T) , and it turned out to have become a big clusterfuck . And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Iceleand, probably the country that handled the Corona crisis best (they issued a travel advisory against Austria, when they were still happily spreading the virus at apres-ski; they massively tested, and got the infections down to almost zero within 6 weeks), has been experimenting with such an app. Iceland as a fairly close community managed to have almost 40% of people install their app. So did it help? No: The technology is more or less I wouldn t say useless [ ] it wasn t a game changer for us. The contact tracing app is just a huge waste of effort and public money. And pretty much the same applies to any other attempts to solve this with IT. There is a lot of buzz about solving the Corona crisis with artificial intelligence: bullshit! That is just naive. Do not speculate about magic power of AI. Get the data, understand the data, and you will see it does not help. Because its real data. Its dirty. Its late. Its contradicting. Its incomplete. It is all what AI currently can not handle well. This is not image recognition. You have no labels. Many of the attempts in this direction already fail at the trivial 7-day seasonality you observe in the data For example, the widely known John Hopkins Has the curve flattened trend has a stupid, useless indicator based on 5 day averages. And hence you get the weekly up and downs due to weekends. They show pretty up and down indicators. But these are affected mostly by the day of the week. And nobody cares. Notice that they currently even have big negative infections in their plots? There is no data on when someone was infected. Because such data simply does not exist. What you have is data when someone tested positive (mostly), when someone reported symptons (sometimes, but some never have symptoms!), and when someone dies (but then you do not know if it was because of Corona, because of other issues that became just worse because of Corona, or hit by a car without any relation to Corona). The data that we work with is incredibly delayed, yet we pretend it is live . Stop reading tea leaves. Stop pretending AI can save the world from Corona.

16 May 2020

Lucas Kanashiro: Quarantine times

After quite some time without publishing anything here, I decided to share the latest events. It is a hard time for most of us but with all this time at home, one can also do great things. I would like to start with the wonderful idea the Debian Brasil community had! Why not create an online Debian related conference to keep people s minds busy and also share knowledge? After brainstorming, we came up with our online conference called #FiqueEmCasaUseDebian (in English it would be #StayHomeUseDebian). It started on May 3rd and will last until May 30th (yes, one month)! Every weekday, we have one online talk at night and on every Saturday, a Debian packaging workshop. The feedback so far has been awesome and the Brazilian Debian community is reaching out to more people than usual at our regular conferences (as you might have imagined, Brazil is huge and it is hard to bring people at the same place). At the end of the month, we will have the first MiniDebConf online and I hope it will be as successful as our experience here in Brazil. Another thing that deserves a highlight is the fact that I became an Ubuntu Core Developer this month; yay! After 9 months of working almost daily on the Ubuntu Server, I was able to get my upload rights to the Ubuntu archive. I was tired of asking for sponsorship, and probably my peers were tired of me too. I could spend more time here complaining about the Brazilian government but I think it isn t worth it. Let s try to do something useful instead!

15 May 2020

Ingo Juergensmann: XMPP: ejabberd Project on the-federation.info

For those interested in alternative social networks there is that website that is called the-federation.info, which collects some statistics of "The Fediverse". The biggest part of the fediverse is Mastodon, but there are other projects (or parts) like Friendica or Matrix that do "federation". One of the oldest projects doing federation is XMPP. You could find some Prosody servers for some time now, because there is a Prosody module "mod_nodeinfo2" that can be used. But for ejabberd there is no such module (yet?) so far, which makes it a little bit difficult to get listed on the-federation.info. Some days ago I wrote a small script to export the needed values to x-nodeinfo2 that is queried by the-federation.info. It's surely not the best script or solution for that job and is currently limited to ejabberd servers that use a PostgreSQL database as backend, although it should be fairly easy to adapt the script for use with MySQL. Well, at least it does its job. At least as there is no native ejabberd module for this task. You can find the script on Github: https://github.com/ingoj/ejabberd-nodeinfo2 Enjoy it and register your ejabberd server on the-federation.info! :-)
Kategorie:
Debian
Tags:
Debian
ejabberd
XMPP
Server
git

13 May 2020

Mike Gabriel: Q: Remote Support Framework for the GNU/Linux Desktop?

TL;DR; For those (admins) of you who run GNU/Linux on staff computers: How do you organize your graphical remote support in your company? Get in touch, share your expertise and experiences. Researching on FLOSS based Linux Desktops When bringing GNU/Linux desktops to a generic folk of productive office users on a large scale, graphical remote support is a key feature when organizing helpdesk support teams' workflows. In a research project that I am currently involved in, we investigate the different available remote support technologies (VNC screen mirroring, ScreenCasts, etc.) and the available frameworks that allow one to provide a remote support infrastructure 100% on-premise. In this research project we intend to find FLOSS solutions for everything required for providing a large scale GNU/Linux desktop to end users, but we likely will have to recommend non-free solutions, if a FLOSS approach is not available for certain demands. Depending on the resulting costs, bringing forth a new software solution instead of dumping big money in subscription contracts for non-free software is seen as a possible alternative. As a member of the X2Go upstream team and maintainer of several remote desktop related tools and frameworks in Debian, I'd consider myself as sort of in-the-topic. The available (as FLOSS) underlying technologies for plumbing a remote support framework are pretty much clear (x11vnc, recent pipewire-related approaches in Wayland compositors, browser-based screencasting). However, I still lack a good spontaneous answer to the question: "How to efficiently software-side organize a helpdesk scenario for 10.000+ users regarding graphical remote support?". Framework for Remote Desktop in Webbrowsers In fact, in the context of my X2Go activities, I am currently planning to put together a Django-based framework for running X2Go sessions in a web browser. The framework that we will come up with (two developers have already been hired for an initial sprint in July 2020) will be designed to be highly pluggable and it will probably be easy to add remote support / screen sharing features further on. And still, I walk around with the question in mind: Do I miss anything? Is there anything already out there that provides a remote support solution as 100% FLOSS, that has enterprise grade, that up-scales well, that has a modern UI design, etc. Something that I simply haven't come across, yet? Looking forward to Your Feedback Please get in touch (OFTC/Freenode IRC, Telegram, Email), if you can fill the gap and feel like sharing your ideas and experiences. light+love
Mike

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