Kaleidogen Kaleidogen is a little contemplative game (or toy game where, starting from just unicolored disks, you combine abstract circular patterns to breed more interesting patterns. See my FARM 2019 talk for more details, or check out the source repository. BTW, I am looking for help turning it into an Android app!

KaleidogenBot in action

Amazon Lambda Amazon Lambda is the Function as a service offering of Amazon Web Services. The idea is that you don t rent a server, where you have to deal with managing the whole system and that you are paying for constantly, but you just upload the code that responds to outside requests, and AWS takes care of the rest: Starting and stopping instances, providing a secure base system etc. When nobody is using the service, no cost occurs. This sounds ideal for hosting a toy Telegram bot: Most of the time nobody will be using it, and I really don't want to have to baby sit yet another service on my server. On Amazon Lambda, I can probably just forget about it. But Haskell is not one of the officially supported languages on Amazon Lambda. So to run Haskell on Lambda, one has to solve two problems:

• how to invoke the Haskell code on the server, and
• how to build Haskell so that it runs on the Amazon Linux distribution

A Haskell runtime for Lambda For the first we need a custom runtime. While this sounds complicated, it is actually a pretty simple concept: A runtime is an executable called bootstrap that queries the Lambda Runtime Interface for the next request to handle. The Lambda documentation is phrased as if this runtime has to be a dispatcher that calls the separate function s handler. But it could just do all the things directly. I found the Haskell package aws-lambda-haskell-runtime which provides precisely that: A function

runLambda :: (LambdaOptions -> IO (Either String LambdaResult)) -> IO ()

that talks to the Lambda Runtime API and invokes its argument on each message. The package also provides Template Haskell magic to collect handlers of any JSON-able type and generates a dispatcher, like you might expect from other, more dynamic languages. But that was too much magic for me, so I ignored that and just wrote the handler manually:

main :: IO ()
main = runLambda run
  where
   run ::  LambdaOptions -> IO (Either String LambdaResult)
   run opts = do
    result <- handler (decodeObj (eventObject opts)) (decodeObj (contextObject opts))
    either (pure . Left . encodeObj) (pure . Right . LambdaResult . encodeObj) result
data Event = Event
    path :: T.Text
  , body :: Maybe T.Text
    deriving (Generic, FromJSON)
data Response = Response
    statusCode :: Int
  , headers :: Value
  , body :: T.Text
  , isBase64Encoded :: Bool
    deriving (Generic, ToJSON)
handler :: Event -> Context -> IO (Either String Response)
handler Event body, path  context =
 

I expose my Lambda function to the world via Amazon s API Gateway, configured to just proxy the HTTP requests. This means that my code receives a JSON data structure describing the HTTP request (here called Event, listing only the fields I care about), and it will respond with a Response, again as JSON. The handler can then simply pattern-match on the path to decide what to do. For example this code handles URLs like /img/CAFFEEFACE.png, and responds with an image.

handler :: TC -> Event -> Context -> IO (Either String Response)
handler Event body, path  context
      Just bytes <- isImgPath path >>= T.decodeHex = do
        let pngData = genPurePNG bytes
        pure $ Right Response
              statusCode = 200
            , headers = object [ "Content-Type" .= ("image/png" :: String) ]
            , isBase64Encoded = True
            , body = T.decodeUtf8 $ LBS.toStrict $ Base64.encode pngData
             
     
isImgPath :: T.Text -> Maybe T.Text
isImgPath  = T.stripPrefix "/img/" >=> T.stripSuffix ".png"

If this program would grow more, then one should probably use something more structured for routing here; maybe servant, or bridging towards wai apps (amost like wai-lamda, but that still assumes an existing runtime, instead of simply being the runtime). But for my purposes, no extra layers of indirection or abstraction are needed!

Deploying Haskell to Lambda Building Haskell locally and deploying to different machiens is notoriously tricky; you often end up depending on a shared library that is not available on the other platform. The aws-lambda-haskell-runtime package, and similar projects like serverless-haskell, solve this using stack and Docker two technologies that are probably great, but I never warmed up to them. So instead adding layers and complexities, can I solve this instead my making things simpler? If I compiler my bootstrap into a static Linux binary, it should run on any Linux, including Amazon Linux. Unfortunately, building Haskell programs statically is also notoriously tricky. But it is made much simpler by the work of Niklas Hamb chen and others in the context of the Nix package manager, coordinated in the static-haskell-nix project. The promise here is that once you have set up building your project with Nix, then getting a static version is just one flag away. The support is not completely upstreamed into nixpkgs proper yet, but their repository has a nix file that contains a nixpkgs set with their patches:

let pkgs = (import (sources.nixpkgs-static + "/survey/default.nix")  ).pkgs; in

This, plus a fairly standard nix setup to build the package, yields what I was hoping for:

$ nix-build -A kaleidogen
/nix/store/ppwyq4d964ahd6k56wsklh93vzw07ln0-kaleidogen-0.1.0.0
$ file result/bin/kaleidogen-amazon-lambda
result/bin/kaleidogen-amazon-lambda: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, stripped
$ ls -sh result/bin/kaleidogen-amazon-lambda
6,7M result/bin/kaleidogen-amazon-lambda

If we put this file, named bootstrap, into a zip file and upload it to Amazon Lambda, then it just works! Creating the zip file is easily scripted using nix:

  function-zip = pkgs.runCommandNoCC "kaleidogen-lambda"  
    buildInputs = [ pkgs.zip ];
    ''
    mkdir -p $out
    cp $ kaleidogen /bin/kaleidogen-amazon-lambda bootstrap
    zip $out/function.zip bootstrap
  '';

So to upload this, I use this one-liner (line-wrapped for your convenience):

nix-build -A function-zip &&
aws lambda update-function-code --function-name kaleidogen \
  --zip-file fileb://result/function.zip

Thanks to how Nix pins all dependencies, I am fairly confident that I can return to this project in 4 months and still be able to build it. Of course, I want continuous integration and deployment. So I build the project with GitHub Actions, using a cachix nix cache to significantly speed up the build, and auto-deploy to Lambda using aws-lambda-deploy; see my workflow file for details.

The Telegram part The above allows me to run basically any stateless service, and a Telegram bot is nothing else: When configured to act as a WebHook, Telegram will send a request with a message to our Lambda function, where we can react on it. The telegram-api package provides bindigs for the Telegram Bot API (although I had to use the repository version, as the version on Hackage has some bitrot). Slightly simplified I can write a handler for an Update:

handleUpdate :: Update -> TelegramClient ()
handleUpdate Update  message = Just m   = do
  let c = ChatId (chat_id (chat m))
  liftIO $ printf "message from %s: %s\n" (maybe "?" user_first_name (from m)) (maybe "" T.unpack (text m))
  if "/start"  T.isPrefixOf  fromMaybe "" (text m)
  then do
    rm <- sendMessageM $ sendMessageRequest c "Hi! I am @KaleidogenBot.  "
    return ()
  else do
    m1 <- sendMessageM $ sendMessageRequest c "One moment "
    withPNGFile  $ \pngFN -> do
      m2 <- uploadPhotoM $ uploadPhotoRequest c
        (FileUpload (Just "image/png") (FileUploadFile pngFN))
      return ()
handleUpdate _ u =
  liftIO $ putStrLn $ "Unhandled message: " ++ show u

and call this from the handler that I wrote above:

     
      path == "/telegram" =
      case eitherDecode (LBS.fromStrict (T.encodeUtf8 (fromMaybe "" body))) of
        Left err ->  
        Right update -> do
          runTelegramClient token manager $ handleUpdate Nothing update
          pure $ Right Response
              statusCode = 200
            , headers = object [ "Content-Type" .= ("text/plain" :: String) ]
            , isBase64Encoded = False
            , body = "Done"
             
     

Note that the Lambda code receives the request as JSON data structure with a body that contains the original HTTP request body. Which, in this case, is itself JSON, so we have to decode that. All that is left to do is to tell Telegram where this code lives:

curl --request POST \
  --url https://api.telegram.org/bot<token>/setWebhook
  --header 'content-type: application/json'
  --data ' "url": "https://api.kaleidogen.nomeata.de/telegram" '

As a little add on, I also created a Telegram game for Kaleidogen. A Telegram game is nothing but a webpage that runs inside Telegram, so it wasn t much work to wrap the Web version of Kaleidogen that way, but the resulting Telegram game (which you can access via https://core.telegram.org/bots/games) still looks pretty neat.

No /dev/dri/renderD128 I am mostly happy with this setup: My game is now available to more people in more ways. I don t have to maintain any infrastructure. When nobody is using this bot no resources are wasted, and the costs of the service are neglectible -- this is unlikely to go beyond the free tier, and even if it would, the cost per generated image is roughly USD 0.000021. There is one slight disappointment, though. What I find most intersting about Kaleidogen from a technical point of view is that when you play it in the browser, the images are not generated by my code. Instead, my code creates a WebGL shader program on the fly, and that program generates the image on your graphics card. I even managed to make the GL rendering code work headlessly, i.e. from a command line program, using EGL and libgbm and a helper written in C. But it needs access to a graphics card via /dev/dri/renderD128. Amazon does not provide that to Lambda code, and neither do the other big Function-as-a-service providers. So I had to swallow my pride and reimplement the rendering in pure Haskell. So if you think the bot is kinda slow, then that s why. Despite properly optimizing the pure implementation (the inner loop does not do allocations and deals only with unboxed Double# values), the GL shader version is still three times as fast. Maybe in a few years GPU access will be so ubiquitous that it s even on Amazon Lambda; then I can easily use that.

DPL Campaign 2020 On the 12th of March, I posted my self-nomination for the Debian Project Leader election. This is the second time I m running for DPL, and you can read my platform here. The campaign period covered the second half of the month, where I answered a bunch of questions on the debian-vote list. The voting period is currently open and ends on 18 April.

Debian Social

• Team accounts. Some Debian teams already have accounts on a myriad of other platforms. For example, the Debian Med team has a blog on blogspot and the Debian Publicity team has an account on framapiaf.org. I d really like to make our Debian Social platforms (like our WordPress multisite instance and Pleroma) a place where Debian teams can trust to host their updates on. It would also be nice to have more teams use these that don t have a particularly big online presence right now, like Debian women or a DPL team account.
• Developer demos. I enjoy the videos that the GNOME project makes that demos the new features in every release, as they ve done for the 3.36 release. I think it would be great if people in Debian could make some small videos to demo the things that they ve been working on. It doesn t have to be as flashy or elaborate as the GNOME video I ve linked to, but sometimes just a minute long demo can be really useful to convey a new idea or feature or to show progress that has been made.
• User participation. YouTube is full of videos that review Debian or demo how to customise it. It would be great if we could get users to post such videos to PeerTube. For Pixelfed, I d like to try out projects like users posting pictures of their computers with freshly installed Debian systems with a hashtag like #WeInstallDebian, then at the end of the year we could build a nice big mosaic that contains these images. Might make a cool poster for events too.
• DebConf and other Debian events. We used to use a Gallery instance to host DebConf photos, but it s always been a bit cumbersome managing photos there and Gallery hasn t updated it s UI much over the years causing it to fall a bit out of favour with attendees at these events. As a result, photos end up getting lost in WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal groups, Twitter, Facebook, etc. I hope that we could get enough users signed up on the Pixelfed instance that it could become the de facto standard for posting Debian event photos to. Having a known central place to post these make them easier to find as well.

Debian packaging I had the sense that there were fewer upstream releases this month. I suspect that everyone was busy figuring out how to cope during Covid-19 lockdowns taking place all over the world. 2020-03-02: Upload package calamares (3.2.10-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-03-10: Upload package gnome-shell-extension-dash-to-panel (29-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-03-10: Upload package gnome-shell-extension-draw-on-your-screen (5.1-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-03-28: Upload package gnome-shell-extension-dash-to-panel (31-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-03-28: Upload package gnome-shell-extension-draw-on-your-screen (6-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-03-28: Update package python3-flask-autoindexing packaging, not releasing due to licensing change that needs further clarification. (GitHub issue #55). 2020-03-28: Upload package gamemode (1.5.1-1) to Debian unstable. 2020-03-28: Upload package calamares (3.2.21-1) to Debian unstable.

Debian mentoring 2020-03-03: Sponsor package python-jaraco.functools (3.0.0-1) (Python team request). 2020-03-03: Review python-ftputil (3.4-1) (Needs some more work) (Python team request). 2020-03-04: Sponsor package pythonmagick (0.9.19-6) for Debian unstable (Python team request). 2020-03-23: Sponsor package bitwise (0.41-1) for Debian unstable (Email request). 2020-03-23: Sponsor package gpxpy (1.4.0-1) for Debian unstable (Python team request). 2020-03-28: Sponsor package gpxpy (1.4.0-2) for Debian unstable (Python team request). 2020-03-28: Sponsor package celery (4.4.2-1) for Debian unstable (Python team request). 2020-03-28: Sponsor package buildbot (2.7.0-1) for Debian unstable (Python team request).

What many black women were angry about was how I located myself in what I'd written. I said, blithely as a matter of observable fact, that I am unattractive. Because I am unattractive, the argument went, I have a particular kind of experience of beauty, race, racism, and interacting with what we might call the white gaze. I thought nothing of it at the time I was writing it, which is unusual. I can usually pinpoint what I have said, written, or done that will piss people off and which people will be pissed off. I missed this one entirely.

When I say that I am unattractive or ugly, I am not internalizing the dominant culture's assessment of me. I am naming what has been done to me. And signaling who did it. I am glad that doing so unsettles folks, including the many white women who wrote to me with impassioned cases for how beautiful I am. They offered me neoliberal self-help nonsense that borders on the religious. They need me to believe beauty is both achievable and individual, because the alternative makes them vulnerable.

We do not share much in the U.S. culture of individualism except our delusions about meritocracy. God help my people, but I can talk to hundreds of black folks who have been systematically separated from their money, citizenship, and personhood and hear at least eighty stories about how no one is to blame but themselves. That is not about black people being black but about people being American. That is what we do. If my work is about anything it is about making plain precisely how prestige, money, and power structure our so-called democratic institutions so that most of us will always fail.

Agent forwarding should be enabled with caution. Users with the ability to bypass file permissions on the remote host (for the agent s UNIX-domain socket) can access the local agent through the forwarded connection. An attacker cannot obtain key material from the agent, however they can perform operations on the keys that enable them to authenticate using the identities loaded into the agent. A safer alternative may be to use a jump host (see -J).

• it holds only the private key to connect to the target host, and
• it asks confirmation for each requested signature.

alias assh="ssh-agent ssh -o AddKeysToAgent=confirm -o ForwardAgent=yes"

Request for the agent to use the specified private key

• The Persecutor. I'm right. It's all your fault. The Persecutor acts out criticism, accusation, and condemnation. Their behavior is controlling, blaming, shaming, oppressive, hurtful, angry, authoritarian, superior. They know everything better, they laugh about others, bully, shame, or belittle them. The Persecutor discounts others' value, looking down on them. Persecutor's thought: I'm okay, you're not okay.
• The Victim. I'm blameless. Poor me. The Victim feels not accepted by others, oppressed, helpless, hopeless, powerless, ashamed, inferior. The Victim thinks they are unable or not good enough to solve problems on their own. The Victim discounts themselves. Victim's thought: I'm not okay, you're okay.
• The Rescuer. I'm good. Let me help you! The Rescuer is a person who has unsolicited and unlimited advice concerning the Victim's problems. They think for the Victim, and comfort them, generally without having been asked to do so. The Rescuer acts seemingly to help the Victim but rescuing mostly helps them to feel better themselves, as it allows them to ignore their own anxieties, worries, or shortcomings. The Rescuer needs a Victim to rescue, effectively keeping the Victim powerless. The Rescuer discounts others' abilities to think and act for themselves, looking down on them. Rescuer's thought: I'm okay, you're not okay.

Persecutor            Rescuer       Assertive              Caring
I'm right.            I'm good.     I have needs.          I'm listening.
    ----------------------              ----------------------
    \                    /              \                    /
     \                  /                \                  /
      \                /                  \                /
       \              /                    \              /
        \            /                      \            /
         \          /                        \          /
          \        /                          \        /
           \      /                            \      /
            \    /                              \    /
             \  /                                \  /
              \/                                  \/
            Victim                            Vulnerable
            I'm blameless.                    I'm struggling.
Karpman Dreaded Drama Triangle            Choy's Winner Triangle

• Package pre-downloading for Debian and Ubuntu
• Automatic generation of bootstrap repositories
• Provisioning API for Salt clients (previously only for traditional clients), which allows to provision and re-provision Salt minions
• Recurring actions scheduling, e. g. schedule highstate to happen every so often, repeatedly
• Content Lifecycle Management filters for RHEL 8 appstreams so that you can convert modular repositories to plain repositories by applying a combination of filters. It will also work on RHEL derivatives, of course: CentOS, Oracle Linux and SLES Expanded Support.
• Yomi: Yet One More Installer is a Salt-based installer for SUSE and openSUSE operating systems. More architectures (e. g. ARM) and Linux distributions will follow soon!
• Hub XML-RPC API: the first component of our multi-Server architecture, to support hundreds of thousands of clients
• SUSE Container as a Platform 4 (SUSE s Kubernetes distribution) cluster awareness. Nodes in a SUSE CaaSP 4 cluster will by default not install updates, patches, run commands, etc from Uyuni Server on the normal schedule but default to doing that using skuba, CaaSP s tool in charge of updates and reboots. Further enhancements are coming to this feature soon.

• Run Uyuni Server and Proxy on Debian (currently only supported on openSUSE Leap, sponsored by SUSE)
• Autoinstallation with preseed (currently only AutoYaST and Kickstart are supported)
• CVE auditing and errata (patch) concept. Uyuni currently treats all .deb packages equally as normal updates.
• Use Salt from Debian (currently using the openSUSE version for Debian 9 and Debian 10, because it s more recent and it includes a lot of patches and backports from upstream)
• Building Debian-based images (e. g. using Kiwi)
• Package and system locking (the kind of locking used on CaaSP 4 systems)
• And probably more I cannot even remember at this point

• Patched the browserify-lite Javascript compiler to ensure that module dependency maps are rendered in a deterministic order. (#14)
• Pushed a change to the "pmemkv" key-value data store to make their documentation build reproducibly. (#615)
• As part of my duties of being on the board of directors of the Open Source Initiative and Software in the Public Interest I attended their respective monthly meetings and participated in various licensing and other discussions occurring on the internet as well as the usual internal discussions regarding logistics, licensing, policy and liaising with the ClearlyDefined and so Congratulations to Megan Sanicki and Josh Simmons who were elected and re-elected respectively to the OSI Board's two individual member seats and to Italo Vignoli who was elected to the affiliate member seat. These newly-elected Directors will took their seats on March 20, 2020.
• Opened a pull request against the onionbalance load balancer for hidden Tor services to fix test failures under Pytest 3.x. (#75)
• Filed an issue against IMAP Spam Begone (isbg), a script by Louis-Philippe V ronneau (pollo) that makes it easy to process an email inbox using SpamAssassin, to report that a duplicate documentation entry includes a nondeterministic value taken from the value of the XDG cache directory. (#151)

• As part of being on being on the judging panel of the OpenUK Awards I am pleased to announce that after some discussion nominations are now open until 15th June in five different categories.
• Merged a number of contributions to my django-cache-toolbox "non-magical" caching library for Django web applications, including caching negative relation lookups locally (#14) and to include the README file in the package long description (#17).
• Made some small changes to my tickle-me-email library which implements Gettings Things Done (GTD)-like behaviours in IMAP inboxes to support to optionally limiting the number of messages in the send-later functionality. [...]

• New features:
  • Check for py3versions -i in autopkgtests and debian/rules files. (#954763)
  • Warn when py3versions -s is used without a python3-all dependency. (#954763)
  • Expand possible-missing-colon-in-closes to also check for semicolons used in place of colons. (#954484)
  • Check for new packages that use a date-based versioning scheme (eg. YYYYMMDD-1) without a 0~ suffix. (#953036)
• Improvements:
  • Don't emit duplicate-short-description or duplicate-long-description if they contain substitution variables. (#947168)
  • Don't report about using a newer Standards-Version when uploading to the backports repository. [...]
  • Don't check the length of Checksums-Sha256 fields. (#954798)
  • Don't check for DEBIAN/md5sums control files in udebs. (#954803)
  • Apply a patch from gregoa to remove some <!nocheck> annotations; some packages are required to build successfully. (#954338)
• Misc:
  • Correct reference to build dependencies in the long description of the debian-rules-uses-installed-python-versions tag. [...]
  • Make some cosmetic improvements to the CONTRIBUTING.md file. [...]
  • Correct reference to a bug in a previous debian/changelog entry. [...]
  • Avoid indenting approximately 150 lines by returning early from a subroutine and other code improvements. [...]

• Filed an issue against IMAP Spam Begone a script by Louis-Philippe V ronneau (pollo) that makes it easy to process an email inbox using SpamAssassin to report that a (duplicate) documentation entry includes nondeterministic value taken from the value of the XDG cache directory (#151) and filed an upstream pull requests against the pmemkv key-value data store to make their documentation build reproducibly (#615).
• Further refined my merge request against the debian-installer component to allow all arguments from sources.list files (such as [check-valid-until=no]) in order that we can test the reproducibility of the installer images on the Reproducible Builds own testing infrastructure. (#13)
• Submitted two following patches to fix reproducibility-related toolchain issues within Debian:
  • node-browserify-lite: Please make the output reproducible. (#954409)
  • pdb2pqr: Please make the aconf.py file reproducible. (#955287)
• Submitted eight patches to fix specific reproducibility issues in beep (caused by a variation between /bin/dash and /bin/bash), cloudkitty (due to a default value being taken from the number of CPUs on the build machine), font-manager (embedding the value of @abs_top_srcdir@ into the resulting binary), gucharmap (due to embedding the absolute build path when generating a comment in a header file), infernal (timestamps are injected into a Python example, which should not be shipped anyway), ndisc6 (embeds the value of CFLAGS into the binary without sanitising any absolute build paths), node-nodedbi (embedded timestamp in binary) & pmemkv (does not respect SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH when populating a YEAR variable).
• Kept isdebianreproducibleyet.com up to date. [...]
• Continued collaborative work on an academic paper to be published within the next few months.
• Categorised a large number of packages and issues in the Reproducible Builds "notes" repository.
• Drafted, published and publicised our monthly report.
• Improved our website, including correcting the syntax of some CSS class formatting [...], improved some "filed against" copy a little better [...] and corrected a reference to calendar.monthrange Python method. [...]

• Improvements:
  • Don't allow errors with R script deserialisation cause the entire operation to fail, for example if an external library cannot be loaded. (#91)
  • Experiment with memoising output from expensive external commands, eg. readelf. (#93)
  • Use dumppdf from the python3-pdfminer if we do not see any other differences from pdftext, etc. (#92)
  • Prevent a traceback when comparing two R .rdx files directly as the get_member method will return a file even if the file is missing. [...]
• Reporting:
  • Display the supported file formats into the package long description. (#90)
  • Print a potentially-helpful message if the PyPDF2 module is not installed. [...]
  • Remove any duplicate comparator descriptions when formatting in the --help output or in the package long description. [...]
  • Weaken "Install the X package to get a better output." message to "... may produce a better output." as the former is not guaranteed. [...]
• Misc:
  • Ensure we only parse the recommended packages from --list-debian-substvars when we want them for debian/tests/control generation. [...]
  • Add upstream metadata file [...] and add a Lintian override for upstream-metadata-in-native-source as "we" are upstream. [...]
  • Inline the RequiredToolNotFound.get_package method's functionality as it is only used once. [...]
  • Drop the deprecated "py36 = [..]" argument in the pyproject.toml file. [...]

• Require a HTTP POST method in the web-based scheduler as not only should HTTP GET requests be idempotent but this will allow many future improvements in the user interface. [...][...][...]
• Improve the authentication error message in the rescheduler to suggest that the developer's SSL certificate may have expired. [...]

• Investigated and triaged glibc (CVE-2020-1751), jackson-databind, libbsd (CVE-2019-20367), libvirt (CVE-2019-20485), netkit-telnet & netkit-telnet-ssl (CVE-2020-10188), pdfresurrect (CVE-2020-9549) & shiro (CVE-2020-1957), etc.
• In the script that reserves a unique advisory number don't warn about potential duplicate work when issuing a regression in order to avoid this message being missed when it does apply. [...]
• Frontdesk duties, responding to user/developer questions, reviewing others' packages, participating in mailing list discussions, etc.
• xtrlock versions 2.8+deb9u1 (#949112) and 2.8+deb10u1 (#949113) was accepted to the Debian jessie and buster distributions.
• Issued DLA 2115-2 to correct a regression in a previous fix (a use-after-free vulnerability) in the ProFTPD FTP server.
• Issued DLA 2132-1 to fix an issue where incorrect default permissions on a HTTP cookie store could have allowed local attackers to read private credentials in libzypp, the library underpinning package management tools such as YaST, zypper and the openSUSE/SLE implementation of PackageKit.
• Issued DLA 2134-1 to patch an out-of-bounds write vulnerability in pdfresurrect, a tool for extracting or scrubbing versioning data from PDF documents.
• Issued DLA 2136-1, addressing an out-of-bounds buffer read vulnerability in libvpx, a library implementing the VP8 & VP9 video codecs.
• Issued DLA 2142-1. It was discovered that there was a buffer overflow vulnerability in slirp, a SLIP/PPP emulator for using a dial up shell account. This was caused by the incorrect usage of return values from snprintf(3).
• Issued DLA 2145-1 and DLA 2145-2 for twisted to prevent a large number of HTTP request splitting vulnerabilities in Twisted, a Python event-based framework for building various types of internet applications.
• Issued ELA-219-1 to address an out-of-bounds read vulnerability during string comparisons in libbsd, a library of functions commonly available on BSD systems but not on others such as GNU.

• python-django (2.2.11-1 & 3.0.4-1) New upstream security releases. (#953102)
• redis:
  • 6.0~rc1-3 Install OpenSSL when running the testsuite as it is required for generating test certificates.
  • 6.0~rc2-1 New upstream beta release.
• xtrlock (2.13) Add a warning that X11 does not support grabbing events under the Wayland display server protocol. (#953319)
• gunicorn (20.0.4-4) Ensure that the Python 3.x gunicorn binary package replaces the now-legacy gunicorn3 that was removed in 19.9.0-2 upon installation. I also backported this version to buster-backports. (#953883)
• hiredis (0.14.1-1) New upstream release.
• libfiu (1.00-7) Fix build failures under Python 3.8. (#954287)
• memcached:
  • 1.6.0-1 New upstream release.
  • 1.6.1-1 New upstream release.
  • 1.6.2-1 New upstream security release. (#954808)
• bfs (1.6-2, 1.6-3 & 1.6-4) Fix various build failures on kFreeBSD architectures.
• mtools (4.0.24-1) New upstream release.
• xcb (2.4-6) Remove a vague "pigeon holes" metaphor from package description.

• [1] http://tinyurl.com/r2zyrpz
• [2] https://blog.eyas.sh/2020/03/data-oriented-architecture/
• [3] https://abe-winter.github.io/2020/03/07/wfhdemic.html
• [4] http://tinyurl.com/tf4yj4m
• [5] http://tinyurl.com/y9dcnzma
• [6] http://tinyurl.com/v3mxgh5
• [7] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/05/cia_leak_trial/
• [8] http://tinyurl.com/y6cn42us
• [9] http://tinyurl.com/y67mo4rr
• [10] http://tinyurl.com/wucsgw8
• [11] https://curlybracket.net/2020/03/16/control-freaks.html
• [12] http://tinyurl.com/s6e7luk
• [13] http://tinyurl.com/qpx3dah

• review forks of unity-api, ubuntu-download-manager and unity-app-launch under the names lomiri-api, lomiri-download-manager, lomiri-app-launch.
• request upstream releases of lomiri-api and lomiri-download-manager
• package and upload lomiri-api to Debian unstable (unfortunately still in Debian's NEW queue)
• package and upload lomiri-download-manager to Debian unstable (dito)
• package (and with 'package' I mean Debian policy compliant packaging) lomiri-app-launch (no upload, yet, as there are some strange unit test failures that need more debugging)
• package and upload qtsystems (under the umbrella of the Debian QT/KDE Maintainers' team) to Debian unstable (pending review in Debian's NEW queue)
• package and upload qtfeedback (under the umbrella of the Debian QT/KDE Maintainers' team) to Debian unstable (pending review in Debian's NEW queue)
• package and (upload) [1] qtpim (under the umbrella of the Debian Qt/KDE Maintainers' team) to Debian unstable (pending review in Debian's NEW queue)

• UBports: Packaging of Unity8 Desktop Environment for Debian (part 01)

• [1] Unfortunately, I missed a crucial element of the GPG key update workflow as Debian Developer. My GPG key was about to expire at the end of March 2020. I renewed its expiration date and exported its public key to the public PGP/GPG keyserver. However, for being able to upload packages to Debian, one has to push the public key to Debian's own keyring server. Which I missed. Thus, I won't be able to upload any packages before the end of April myself and will depend on DD colleagues helping out with sponsoring my uploads.

• [1] https://docs.mailman3.org/en/latest/
• [2] https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/gnu-mailman/
• [3] https://gitlab.com/mailman/postorius/-/issues/355

How our Policies fail to reach the poor and the vulnerable The sad part is most policies in India are made in castles in the air . An interview by the wire shares the conundrum of those who are affected and the policies which are enacted for them (it s a youtube video, sorry)

If one with an open and fresh mind sees the interview it is clear that why there was a huge reverse migration from Indian cities to villages. The poor and marginalized has always seen the Indian state as an extortive force so it doesn t make sense for them to be in the cities. The Prime Minister s annoucement of food for 3 months was a clear indication for the migrant population that for 3 months they will have no work. Faced with such a scenario, the best option for them was to return to their native places. While videos of huge number of migrants were shown of Delhi, this was the scenario of most states and cities, including Pune, my own city . Another interesting point which was made is most of the policies will need the migrants to be back in the villages. Most of these are tied to the accounts which are opened in villages, so even if they want to have the benefits they will have to migrate to villages in order to use them. Of course, everybody in India knows how leaky the administration is. The late Shri Rajiv Gandhi had famously and infamously remarked once how leaky the Public Distribution system and such systems are. It s only 10 paise out of rupee which reaches the poor. And he said this about 30 years ago. There have been numerous reports of both IPS (Indian Police Services) reforms and IAS (Indian Administrative Services) reforms over the years, many of the committee reports have been in public domain and in fact was part of the election manifesto of the ruling party in 2014 but no movement has happened on that part. The only thing which has happened is people from the ruling party have been appointed on various posts which is same as earlier governments. I was discussing with a friend who is a contractor and builder about the construction labour issues which were pointed in the report and if it is true that many a times the migrant labour is not counted. While he shared a number of cases where he knew, a more recent case in public memory was when some labourers died while building Amanora mall which is perhaps one of largest malls in India. There were few accidents while constructing the mall. Apparently, the insurance money which should have gone to the migrant laborer was taken by somebody close to the developers who were building the mall. I have a friend in who lives in Jharkhand who is a labour officer. She has shared with me so many stories of how the labourers are exploited. Keep in mind she has been a labor officer appointed by the state and her salary is paid by the state. So she always has to maintain a balance of ensuring worker s rights and the interests of the state, private entities etc. which are usually in cahoots with the state and it is possible that lot of times the State wins over the worker s rights. Again, as a labour officer, she doesn t have that much power and when she was new to the work, she was often frustrated but as she remarked few months back, she has started taking it easy (routinized) as anyways it wasn t helping her in any good way. Also there have been plenty of cases of labor officers being murdered so its easier to understand why one tries to retain some sanity while doing their job.

The Indian response and the World Response The Indian response has been the lockdown and very limited testing. We seem to be following the pattern of UK and U.S. which had been slow to respond and slow to testing. In the past Kerala showed the way but this time even that is not enough. At the end of the day we need to test, test and test just as shared by the WHO chairman. India is trying to create its own cheap test kits with ICMR approval, for e.g. a firm from my own city Pune MyLab has been given approval. We will know how good or bad they are only after they have been field-tested. For ventilators we have asked Mahindra and Mahindra even though there are companies like Allied Medical and others who have exported to EU and others which the Govt. is still taking time to think through. This is similar to how in UK some companies who are with the Govt. but who have no experience in making ventilators are been given orders while those who have experience and were exporting to Germany and other countries are not been given orders. The playbook is errily similar. In India, we don t have the infrastructure for any new patients, period. Heck only a couple of states have done something proper for the anganwadi workers. In fact, last year there were massive strikes by anganwadi workers all over India but only NDTV showed a bit of it along with some of the news channels from South India. Most mainstream channels chose to ignore it. On the world stage, some of the other countries and how they have responded perhaps need sharing. For e.g. I didn t know that Cuba had so many doctors and the politics between it and Brazil. Or the interesting stats. shared by Andreas Backhaus which seems to show how distributed the issue (age-wise) is rather than just a few groups as has been told in Indian media. What was surprising for me is the 20-29 age group which has not been shared so much in the Indian media which is the bulk of our population. The HBR article also makes a few key points which I hope both the general public and policymakers both in India as well as elsewhere take note of. What is worrying though that people can be infected twice or more as seems to be from Singapore or China and elsewhere. I have read enough of Robin Cook and Michael Crichton books to be aware that viruses can do whatever. They will over time mutate, how things will happen then is anybody s guess. What I found interesting is the world economic forum article which hypothesis that it may be two viruses which got together as well as research paper from journal from poteome research which has recently been published. The biggest myth flying around is that summer will halt or kill the spread which even some of my friends have been victim of . While a part of me wants to believe them, a simple scientific fact has been viruses have probably been around us and evolved over time, just like we have. In fact, there have been cases of people dying due to common cold and other things. Viruses are so prevalent it s unbelivable. What is and was interesting to note is that bat-borne viruses as well as pangolin viruses had been theorized and shared by Chinese researchers going all the way back to 90 s . The problem is even if we killed all the bats in the world, some other virus will take its place for sure. One of the ideas I had, dunno if it s feasible or not that at least in places like Airports, we should have some sort of screenings and a labs working on virology. Of course, this will mean more expenses for flying passengers but for public health and safety maybe it would worth doing so. In any case, virologists should have a field day cataloging various viruses and would make it harder for viruses to spread as fast as this one has. The virus spread also showed a lack of leadership in most of our leaders who didn t react fast enough. While one hopes people do learn from this, I am afraid the whole thing is far from over. These are unprecedented times and hope that all are maintaining social distancing and going out only when needed.

dpkg --add-architecture i386
apt update
apt install wine32:i386
wget http://www.envertec.com/uploads/bigfiles/Set%20ID.zip
unzip Set\ ID.zip
wine Set\ ID.exe

• ID of the EnverBridge
• char 9 to 16 of the inverter serial 1
• char 9 to 16 of the inverter serial 2

./enverbridge.py -h
Usage: enverbridge.py [options] MIIDs
Options:
  -h, --help         show this help message and exit
  -b BID, --bid=BID  Serial Number of your EnverBridge
./enverbridge.py -b 90087654 CN19100912345678 CN19100912345679

My free software activities in february 2020 March is ending but I finally wrote my monthly report about activities in Debian and Free Software in general for February. As I already wrote here, I attended to FOSDEM 2020 on February 1st and 2nd in Brussels. It was a amazing experience. After my return to Curitiba, I felt my energies renewed to start new challenges.

MiniDebConf Macei 2020 I continued helping to organize MiniDebConf and I got positive answers from 4Linux and Globo.com and they are sponsorsing the event.

FLISOL 2020 I started to talk with Maristela from IEP - Instituto de Engenharia do Paran and after some messages and I joined a meeting with her and other members of C mara T cnica de Eletr nica, Computa o e Ci ncias de Dados. I explained about FLISOL in Curitiba to them and they agreed to host the event at IEP. I asked to use three spaces: Auditorium for FLISOL talks, Sal o Nobre for meetups from WordPress and PostgreSQL Communities, and the hall for Install Fest. Besides FLISOL, they would like to host other events and meetups from Communities in Curitiba as Python, PHP, and so on. At least one per month. I helped to schedule a PHP Paran Community meetup on March.

New job Since 17th I started to work at Rentcars as Infrastructure Analyst. I m very happy to work there because we use a lot of FLOSS and with nice people. Ubuntu LTS is the approved OS for desktops but I could install Debian on my laptop :-)

Misc I signed pgp keys from friends I met in Brussels and I had my pgp key signed by them. Finally my MR to the DebConf20 website fixing some texts was accepted. I have watched v deos from FOSDEM

1. Until now, I saw these great talks:

• Growing Sustainable Contributions Through Ambassador Networks
• Building Ethical Software Under Capitalism
• Cognitive biases, blindspots and inclusion
• Building a thriving community in company-led open source projects
• Building Community for your Company s OSS Projects
• The Ethics of Open Source
• Be The Leader You Need in Open Source
• The next generation of contributors is not on IRC
• Open Source Won, but Software Freedom Hasn t Yet
• Open Source Under Attack
• Lessons Learned from Cultivating Open Source Projects and Communities

That s all folks!

Testing basic WebRTC functionality Before you place a real call, I suggest using the official test page which will test your camera, microphone and network connectivity. Note that this test page makes use of a Google TURN server which is locked to particular HTTP referrers and so you'll need to disable privacy features that might interfere with this:

• Brave: Disable Shields entirely for that page (Simple view) or allow all cookies for that page (Advanced view).

• Firefox: Ensure that http.network.referer.spoofSource is set to false in about:config, which it is by default.
• uMatrix: The "Spoof Referer header" option needs to be turned off for that site.

Checking the type of peer connection you have Once you know that WebRTC is working in your browser, it's time to establish a connection and look at the network configuration that the two peers agreed on. My favorite service at the moment is Whereby (formerly Appear.in), so I'm going to use that to connect from two different computers:

• canada is a laptop behind a regular home router without any port forwarding.
• siberia is a desktop computer in a remote location that is also behind a home router, but in this case its internal IP address (192.168.1.2) is set as the DMZ host.

Chromium For all Chromium-based browsers, such as Brave, Chrome, Edge, Opera and Vivaldi, the debugging page you'll need to open is called chrome://webrtc-internals. Look for RTCIceCandidatePair lines and expand them one at a time until you find the one which says:

• state: succeeded (or state: in-progress)
• nominated: true
• writable: true

Then from the name of that pair (N6cxxnrr_OEpeash in the above example) find the two matching RTCIceCandidate lines (one local-candidate and one remote-candidate) and expand them. In the case of a direct connection, I saw the following on the remote-candidate:

• ip shows the external IP address of siberia
• port shows a random number between 1024 and 65535
• candidateType: srflx

and the following on local-candidate:

• ip shows the external IP address of canada
• port shows a random number between 1024 and 65535
• candidateType: prflx

These candidate types indicate that a STUN server was used to determine the public-facing IP address and port for each computer, but the actual connection between the peers is direct. On the other hand, for a relayed/proxied connection, I saw the following on the remote-candidate side:

• ip shows an IP address belonging to the TURN server
• candidateType: relay

and the same information as before on the local-candidate.

Firefox If you are using Firefox, the debugging page you want to look at is about:webrtc. Expand the top entry under "Session Statistics" and look for the line (should be the first one) which says the following in green:

• ICE State: succeeded
• Nominated: true
• Selected: true

then look in the "Local Candidate" and "Remote Candidate" sections to find the candidate type in brackets.

Firewall ports to open to avoid using a relay In order to get a direct connection to the other WebRTC peer, one of the two computers (in my case, siberia) needs to open all inbound UDP ports since there doesn't appear to be a way to restrict Chromium or Firefox to a smaller port range for incoming WebRTC connections. This isn't great and so I decided to tighten that up in two ways by:

• restricting incoming UDP traffic to the IP range of siberia's ISP, and
• explicitly denying incoming to the UDP ports I know are open on siberia.

To get the IP range, start with the external IP address of the machine (I'll use the IP address of my blog in this example: 66.228.46.55) and pass it to the whois command:

$ whois 66.228.46.55   grep CIDR
CIDR:           66.228.32.0/19

To get the list of open UDP ports on siberia, I sshed into it and ran nmap:

$ sudo nmap -sU localhost
Starting Nmap 7.60 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2020-03-28 15:55 PDT
Nmap scan report for localhost (127.0.0.1)
Host is up (0.000015s latency).
Not shown: 994 closed ports
PORT      STATE         SERVICE
631/udp   open filtered ipp
5060/udp  open filtered sip
5353/udp  open          zeroconf
Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 190.25 seconds

I ended up with the following in my /etc/network/iptables.up.rules (ports below 1024 are denied by the default rule and don't need to be included here):

# Deny all known-open high UDP ports before enabling WebRTC for canada
-A INPUT -p udp --dport 5060 -j DROP
-A INPUT -p udp --dport 5353 -j DROP
-A INPUT -s 66.228.32.0/19 -p udp --dport 1024:65535 -j ACCEPT

Do you recall the temple of science, in which the foundations of physics are the bottommost level, and we try to break through to deeper understanding? As I've come to the end of my travels, I worry that the cracks we're seeing in the floor aren't really cracks at all but merely intricate patterns. We're digging in the wrong places.

I went into physics because I don't understand human behavior. I went into physics because math tells it how it is. I liked the cleanliness, the unambiguous machinery, the command math has over nature. Two decades later, what prevents me from understanding physics is that I still don't understand human behavior. "We cannot give exact mathematical rules that define if a theory is attractive or not," says Gian Francesco Giudice. "However, it is surprising how the beauty and elegance of a theory are universally recognized by people from different cultures. When I tell you, 'Look, I have a new paper and my theory is beautiful,' I don't have to tell you the details of my theory; you will get why I'm excited. Right?" I don't get it. That's why I am talking to him. Why should the laws of nature care what I find beautiful? Such a connection between me and the universe seems very mystical, very romantic, very not me. But then Gian doesn't think that nature cares what I find beautiful, but what he finds beautiful.

# apt install yubikey-manager libu2f-host0

$ lsusb
Bus 002 Device 109: ID 1050:0407 Yubico.com Yubikey 4 OTP+U2F+CCID

$ ykman info
Device type: YubiKey 4
Serial number: 1234567
Firmware version: 4.3.7
Enabled USB interfaces: OTP+FIDO+CCID
Applications
OTP         Enabled             
FIDO U2F    Enabled             
OpenPGP     Enabled             
PIV         Enabled             
OATH            Enabled             
FIDO2       Not available

ykman mode FIDO

Firefox message on the yubikey demo site. A normal site with U2F would not require the extended information, and have a simpler popup message.

Lotte Reiniger pioneered early animation, yet her name remains largely unknown. We pay homage to her life and work, and reflect on why she never received the recognition she deserves.

Stephen Wolfram shares what he learned in researching Ada Lovelace's life, writings about the Analytical Engine, and computation of Bernoulli numbers.

Elizabeth Cochran Seaman[1] (May 5, 1864[2] January 27, 1922), better known by her pen name Nellie Bly, was an American journalist who was widely known for her record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days, in emulation of Jules Verne's fictional character Phileas Fogg, and an expos in which she worked undercover to report on a mental institution from within.[3] She was a pioneer in her field, and launched a new kind of investigative journalism.[4] Bly was also a writer, inventor, and industrialist.

Delia Ann Derbyshire (5 May 1937 3 July 2001)[1] was an English musician and composer of electronic music.[2] She carried out pioneering work with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop during the 1960s, including her electronic arrangement of the theme music to the British science-fiction television series Doctor Who.[3][4] She has been referred to as "the unsung heroine of British electronic music,"[3] having influenced musicians including Aphex Twin, the Chemical Brothers and Paul Hartnoll of Orbital.[5]

Charity Adams Earley (5 December 1918 13 January 2002) was the first African-American woman to be an officer in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (later WACS) and was the commanding officer of the first battalion of African-American women to serve overseas during World War II. Adams was the highest ranking African-American woman in the army by the completion of the war.