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

• [DLA 2788-1] strongswan security update for one CVE
• [DLA 2789-1] squashfs-tools security update for one CVE
• [DLA 2792-1] faad2 security update for seven CVEs
• [DLA 2796-1] jbig2dec security update for two CVEs
• [DLA 2800-1] cups security update for one CVE
• [#998042] for jbig2dec in Buster

• ELA-494-1 for curl
• ELA-497-1 for squashfs-tools
• ELA-498-1 for openssl
• ELA-501-1 for faad2
• ELA-504-1 for jbig2dec
• ELA-508-1 for cups

• c2050
• fxlinuxprint
• c2esp
• lprint
• usb-modeswitch
• cups-bjnp
• dymo-cups-drivers
• pnm2ppa
• sane-airscan
• ippsample

• libapogee3
• libasi
• planetary-system-stacker
• astap
• astap-cli

• sshesame
• c2go

• npd6
• arpalert
• entropybroker

Uniform representation The Motoko programming language, designed by Andreas Rossberg and implemented by a pretty cool team at DFINITY is a high-level language with strict semantics and a strong, structural, equi-recursive type system that compiles down to WebAssembly. Because the type system supports polymorphism, it represents all values uniformly. Simplified for the purpose of this blog post, they are always pointers into a heap object where the first word of the heap object, the heap tag, contains information about the value:

 
  tag    
 

The tag is something like array, int64, blob, variant, record, , and it has two purposes:

• The garbage collector uses it to understand what kind of object it is looking at, so that it can move it around and follow pointers therein. Variable size objects such as arrays include the object size in a subsequent word of the heap object.
• Some types have values that may have different shapes on the heap. For example, the ropes used in our text representation can either be a plain blob, or a concatenation node of two blobs. For these types, the tag of the heap object is inspected.

The optional type, naively The optional type (?t) is another example of such a type: Its values can either be null, or ?v for some value v of type t, and the primitive operations on this type are the two introduction forms, an analysis function, and a projection for non-null values:

null : () -> ?t
some : t -> ?t
is_some : ?t -> bool
project : ?t -> t     // must only be used if is_some holds

It is natural to use the heap tag to distinguish the two kind of values:

• The null value is a simple one-word heap object with just a tag that says that this is null:

   
    null  
   

• The other values are represented by a two-word object: The tag some, indicating that it is a ?v, and then the payload, which is the pointer that represents the value v:

   
    some   payload  
   

With this, the four operations can be implemented as follows:

def null():
  ptr <- alloc(1)
  ptr[0] = NULL_TAG
  return ptr
def some(v):
  ptr <- alloc(2)
  ptr[0] = SOME_TAG
  ptr[1] = v
  return ptr
def is_some(p):
  return p[0] == SOME_TAG
def project(p):
  return p[1]

The problem with this implementation is that null() and some(v) both allocate memory. This is bad if they are used very often, and very liberally, and this is the case in Motoko: For example the iterators used for the for (x in e) construct have type

type Iter<T> =   next : () -> ?T  

and would unavoidably allocate a few words on each iteration. Can we avoid this?

Static values It is quite simple to avoid this for for null: Just statically create a single null value and use it every time:

static_null = [NULL_TAG]
def null():
  return static_null

This way, at least null() doesn t allocate. But we gain more: Now every null value is represented by the same pointer, and since the pointer points to static memory, it does not change even with a moving garbage collector, so we can speed up is_some:

def is_some(p):
  return p != static_null

This is not a very surprising change so far, and most compilers out there can and will do at least the static allocation of such singleton constructors. For example, in Haskell, there is only a single empty list ([]) and a single Nothing value in your program, as you can see in my videos exploring the Haskell heap. But can we get rid of the allocation in some(v) too?

Unwrapped optional values If we don t want to allocate in some(v), what can we do? How about simply

def some(v):
  return v

That does not allocate! But it is also broken. At type ??Int, the values null, ?null and ??null are distinct values, but here this breaks. Or, more formally, the following laws should hold for our four primitive operations:

1. is_some(null()) = false
2. v. is_some(some(v)) = true
3. p. project(some(p)) = p

But with the new definition of some, we d get is_some(some(null())) = false. Not good! But note that we only have a problem if we are wrapping a value that is null or some(v). So maybe take the shortcut only then, and write the following:

def some(v):
  if v == static_null   v[0] == SOME_TAG:
    ptr <- alloc(2)
    ptr[0] = SOME_TAG
    ptr[1] = v
    return ptr
  else:
    return v

The definition of is_some can stay as it is: It is still the case that all null values are represented by static_null. But the some values are now no longer all of the same shape, so we have to change project():

def project(p):
  if p[0] == SOME_TAG:
    return p[1]
  else:
    return p

Now things fall into place: A value ?v can, in many cases, be represented the same way as v, and no allocation is needed. Only when v is null or ?null or ??null or ???null etc. we need to use the some heap object, and thus have to allocate. In fact, it doesn t cost much to avoid allocation even for ?null:

static_some_null = [SOME_TAG, static_null]
def some(v):
  if v == static_null:
    return static_some_null
  else if v[0] == SOME_TAG:
    ptr <- alloc(2)
    ptr[0] = SOME_TAG
    ptr[1] = v
    return ptr
  else:
    return v

So unless one nests the ? type two levels deep, there is no allocation whatsoever, and the only cost is a bit more branching in some and project. That wasn t hard, but quite rewarding, as one can now use idioms like the iterator shown above with greater ease.

Examples The following tables shows the representation of various values before and after. Here [ ] is a pointed-to dynamically allocated heap object, a statically allocated heap object, N = NULL_TAG and S = SOME_TAG.

type	value	before	after
Null	null	N	N
?Int	null	N	N
?Int	?23	[S,23]	23
??Int	null	N	N
??Int	?null	[S, N ]	S, N
??Int	??23	[S,[S,23]]	23
???Int	null	N	N
???Int	?null	[S, N ]	S, N
???Int	??null	[S,[S, N ]]	[S, S, N ]
???Int	???23	[S,[S,[S,23]]]	23

Concluding remarks

• If you know what parametric polymorphism is, and wonder how this encoding can work in a language that has that, note that this representation is on the low-level of the untyped run-time value representation: We don t need to know the type of v in some(v), merely its heap representation.
• The uniform representation in Motoko is a bit more involved: The pointers are tagged (by subtracting 1) and some scalar values are represented directly in place (shifted left by 1 bit). But this is luckily orthogonal to what I showed here.
• Could Haskell do this for its Maybe type? Not so easily:
  • The Maybe type is not built-in, but rather a standard library-defined algebraic data type. But the compiler could feasible detect that this is option-like?
  • Haskell is lazy, so at runtime, the type Maybe could be Nothing, or Just v, or, and this is crucial, a yet to be evaluated expression, also called a thunk. And one definitely needs to distinguish between a thunk t :: Maybe a that may evaluate to Nothing, and a value Just t :: Maybe a that definitely is Just, but contains a value, which may be a thunk.
  Something like this may work for a strict Maybe type or unlifted sums like (# (# #) a #), but may clash with other ticks in GHC, such as pointer tagging.
• As I said above, I don t expect this to be novel, and I am happy to add references to prior art here.
• Given that a heap object with tag SOME_TAG now always encodes a tower ? null for n>0, one could try to optimize that even more by just storing the n:

   
    some    n   
   

  But that seems unadvisable: It is only a win if you have deep towers, which is probably rare. Worse, now the project function would have to return such a heap object with n decremented, so now projection might have to allocate, which goes against the cost model expected by the programmer.
• If you rather want to see code than blog posts, feel free to check out Motoko PR #2115.
• Does this kind of stuff excite you? Motoko is open source, so your contributions may be welcome!

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/ygoyeuzr
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/yekmajo5
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/yzpkbeec
• [4] https://tinyurl.com/ygbq6ccf
• [5] https://shop.hak5.org/products/o-mg-cable-usb-a
• [6] https://tinyurl.com/yzfwg2a5
• [7] https://tinyurl.com/yz2a3vf3
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/yhd9zg72
• [9] https://tinyurl.com/yjg9wcj7
• [10] https://tinyurl.com/yf2exqva
• [11] https://locusmag.com/2021/09/cory-doctorow-breaking-in/
• [12] https://tinyurl.com/yzkh29mz
• [13] https://tinyurl.com/yhhg7xf2
• [14] https://tinyurl.com/yjktynmo

(defhost lxc1.silentflame.com ()
  (os:debian-stable "bullseye" :amd64)
  (basic-props)
  (apt:installed "systemd" "netcat")
  (apache:https-vhost ...))
(defhost lxctest.laptop.silentflame.com ()
  (os:debian-stable "bullseye" :amd64)
  (apt:proxy "http://192.168.122.1:3142")
  (basic-props)
  (apt:installed "linux-image-amd64" "lxc")
  (lxc:usernet-usable-by "spwhitton" "lxcbr0")
  (lxc:user-containers-autostart "spwhitton")
  (lxc:user-container-for '(:additional-lines
                            ("lxc.net.0.type = veth"
                             "lxc.net.0.flags = up"
                             "lxc.net.0.link = lxcbr0"
                             ...))
                          "spwhitton"
                          lxc1.silentflame.com))
(defhost laptop.silentflame.com ()
  ...
  (libvirt:kvm-boots-chroot-for '(:always-deploys t)
                                lxctest.laptop.silentflame.com))

(defun route-athenet-container-veth (host)
  (let ((user (getenv "USERV_USER"))
        (peer (getenv "USERV_U_PEER"))
        (ip (car (uiop:command-line-arguments))))
    (unless (string-prefix-p (format nil "veth~D_" (getenv "USERV_UID")) peer)
      (error "~A does not belong to requester." peer))
    (unless (member (cons user ip) (get-hostattrs 'veth-ips host) :test #'equal)
      (error "~A does not have permission to route ~A." user ip))
    (flet ((r (&rest args)
             ;; Explicitly passing nil means UIOP will not invoke a shell.
             (run-program args :force-shell nil)))
      (eswitch ((getenv "USERV_U_HOOK_TYPE") :test #'string=)
        ("up"
         (apply #'r
                "sysctl" "-w"
                "net.ipv6.conf.all.forwarding=1"
                ...)
         (r "ip" "addr" "flush" "dev" peer "scope" "link")
         (r "ip" "-6" "addr" "add" "fe80::1/64" "dev" peer)
         (r "ip" "-6" "route" "add" (strcat ip "/128") "dev" peer)
         ...)
        ("down"
         ...
         (r "ip" "-6" "route" "del" (strcat ip "/128") "dev" peer))))))

(image-dumped
 "/usr/lib/userv/route-athenet-container-veth"
  (route-athenet-container-veth ,(intern (string-upcase (get-hostname)))))

What is Neo-Colonialism? The term "neo-colonialism" was coined by Kwame Nkrumah, first president of Ghana. In Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism (1965), he wrote:

In place of colonialism, as the main instrument of imperialism, we have today neo-colonialism ... [which] like colonialism, is an attempt to export the social conflicts of the capitalist countries. ... The result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investment, under neo-colonialism, increases, rather than decreases, the gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world.

So basically, if colonialism is Europeans bringing genocide, war, and its religion to the Africa, Asia, and the Americas, neo-colonialism is the Americans (note the "n") bringing capitalism to the world. Before we see how this applies to the Internet, we must therefore make a detour into US history. This matters, because anyone would be hard-pressed to decouple neo-colonialism from the empire under which it evolves, and here we can only name the United States of America.

US Declaration of Independence Let's start with the United States declaration of independence (1776). Many Americans may roll their eyes at this, possibly because that declaration is not actually part of the US constitution and therefore may have questionable legal standing. Still, it was obviously a driving philosophical force in the founding of the nation. As its author, Thomas Jefferson, stated:

it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion

In that aging document, we find the following pearl:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

As a founding document, the Declaration still has an impact in the sense that the above quote has been called an:

"immortal declaration", and "perhaps [the] single phrase" of the American Revolutionary period with the greatest "continuing importance." (Wikipedia)

Let's read that "immortal declaration" again: "all men are created equal". "Men", in that context, is limited to a certain number of people, namely "property-owning or tax-paying white males, or about 6% of the population". Back when this was written, women didn't have the right to vote, and slavery was legal. Jefferson himself owned hundreds of slaves. The declaration was aimed at the King and was a list of grievances. A concern of the colonists was that the King:

has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

This is a clear mark of the frontier myth which paved the way for the US to exterminate and colonize the territory some now call the United States of America. The declaration of independence is obviously a colonial document, having being written by colonists. None of this is particularly surprising, historically, but I figured it serves as a good reminder of where the Internet is coming from, since it was born in the US.

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace Two hundred and twenty years later, in 1996, John Perry Barlow wrote a declaration of independence of cyberspace. At this point, (almost) everyone has a right to vote (including women), slavery was abolished (although some argue it still exists in the form of the prison system); the US has made tremendous progress. Surely this text will have aged better than the previous declaration it is obviously derived from. Let's see how it reads today and how it maps to how the Internet is actually built now.

Borders of Independence One of the key ideas that Barlow brings up is that "cyberspace does not lie within your borders". In that sense, cyberspace is the final frontier: having failed to colonize the moon, Americans turn inwards, deeper into technology, but still in the frontier ideology. And indeed, Barlow is one of the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (the beloved EFF), founded six years prior. But there are other problems with this idea. As Wikipedia quotes:

The declaration has been criticized for internal inconsistencies.[9] The declaration's assertion that 'cyberspace' is a place removed from the physical world has also been challenged by people who point to the fact that the Internet is always linked to its underlying geography.[10]

And indeed, the Internet is definitely a physical object. First controlled and severely restricted by "telcos" like AT&T, it was somewhat "liberated" from that monopoly in 1982 when an anti-trust lawsuit broke up the monopoly, a key historical event that, one could argue, made the Internet possible. (From there on, "backbone" providers could start competing and emerge, and eventually coalesce into new monopolies: Google has a monopoly on search and advertisement, Facebook on communications for a few generations, Amazon on storage and computing, Microsoft on hardware, etc. Even AT&T is now pretty much as consolidated as it was before.) The point is: all those companies have gigantic data centers and intercontinental cables. And those are definitely prioritizing the western world, the heart of the empire. Take for example Google's latest 3,900 mile undersea cable: it does not connect Argentina to South Africa or New Zealand, it connects the US to UK and Spain. Hardly a revolutionary prospect.

Private Internet But back to the Declaration:

Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

In Barlow's mind, the "public" is bad, and private is good, natural. Or, in other words, a "public construction project" is unnatural. And indeed, the modern "nature" of development is private: most of the Internet is now privately owned and operated. I must admit that, as an anarchist, I loved that sentence when I read it. I was rooting for "us", the underdogs, the revolutionaries. And, in a way, I still do: I am on the board of Koumbit and work for a non-profit that has pivoted towards censorship and surveillance evasion. Yet I cannot help but think that, as a whole, we have failed to establish that independence and put too much trust in private companies. It is obvious in retrospect, but it was not, 30 years ago. Now, the infrastructure of the Internet has zero accountability to traditional political entities supposedly representing the people, or even its users. The situation is actually worse than when the US was founded (e.g. "6% of the population can vote"), because the owners of the tech giants are only a handful of people who can override any decision. There's only one Amazon CEO, he's called Jeff Bezos, and he has total control. (Update: Bezos actually ceded the CEO role to Andy Jassy, AWS and Amazon music founder, while remaining executive chairman. I would argue that, as the founder and the richest man on earth, he still has strong control over Amazon.)

Social Contract Here's another claim of the Declaration:

We are forming our own Social Contract.

I remember the early days, back when "netiquette" was a word, it did feel we had some sort of a contract. Not written in standards of course -- or barely (see RFC1855) -- but as a tacit agreement. How wrong we were. One just needs to look at Facebook to see how problematic that idea is on a global network. Facebook is the quintessential "hacker" ideology put in practice. Mark Zuckerberg explicitly refused to be "arbiter of truth" which implicitly means he will let lies take over its platforms. He also sees Facebook as place where everyone is equal, something that echoes the Declaration:

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

(We note, in passing, the omission of gender in that list, also mirroring the infamous "All men are created equal" claim of the US declaration.) As the Wall Street Journal's (WSJ) Facebook files later shown, both of those "contracts" have serious limitations inside Facebook. There are VIPs who systematically bypass moderation systems including fascists and rapists. Drug cartels and human traffickers thrive on the platform. Even when Zuckerberg himself tried to tame the platform -- to get people vaccinated or to make it healthier -- he failed: "vaxxer" conspiracies multiplied and Facebook got angrier. This is because the "social contract" behind Facebook and those large companies is a lie: their concern is profit and that means advertising, "engagement" with the platform, which causes increased anxiety and depression in teens, for example. Facebook's response to this is that they are working really hard on moderation. But the truth is that even that system is severely skewed. The WSJ showed that Facebook has translators for only 50 languages. It's a surprisingly hard to count human languages but estimates range the number of distinct languages between 2500 and 7000. So while 50 languages seems big at first, it's actually a tiny fraction of the human population using Facebook. Taking the first 50 of the Wikipedia list of languages by native speakers we omit languages like Dutch (52), Greek (74), and Hungarian (78), and that's just a few random nations picks from Europe. As an example, Facebook has trouble moderating even a major language like Arabic. It censored content from legitimate Arab news sources when they mentioned the word al-Aqsa because Facebook associates it with the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades when they were talking about the Al-Aqsa Mosque... This bias against Arabs also shows how Facebook reproduces the American colonizer politics. The WSJ also pointed out that Facebook spends only 13% of its moderation efforts outside of the US, even if that represents 90% of its users. Facebook spends three more times moderating on "brand safety", which shows its priority is not the safety of its users, but of the advertisers.

Military Internet Sergey Brin and Larry Page are the Lewis and Clark of our generation. Just like the latter were sent by Jefferson (the same) to declare sovereignty over the entire US west coast, Google declared sovereignty over all human knowledge, with its mission statement "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". (It should be noted that Page somewhat questioned that mission but only because it was not ambitious enough, Google having "outgrown" it.) The Lewis and Clark expedition, just like Google, had a scientific pretext, because that is what you do to colonize a world, presumably. Yet both men were military and had to receive scientific training before they left. The Corps of Discovery was made up of a few dozen enlisted men and a dozen civilians, including York an African American slave owned by Clark and sold after the expedition, with his final fate lost in history. And just like Lewis and Clark, Google has a strong military component. For example, Google Earth was not originally built at Google but is the acquisition of a company called Keyhole which had ties with the CIA. Those ties were brought inside Google during the acquisition. Google's increasing investment inside the military-industrial complex eventually led Google to workers organizing a revolt although it is currently unclear to me how much Google is involved in the military apparatus. Other companies, obviously, do not have such reserve, with Microsoft, Amazon, and plenty of others happily bidding on military contracts all the time.

Spreading the Internet I am obviously not the first to identify colonial structures in the Internet. In an article titled The Internet as an Extension of Colonialism, Heather McDonald correctly identifies fundamental problems with the "development" of new "markets" of Internet "consumers", primarily arguing that it creates a digital divide which creates a "lack of agency and individual freedom":

Many African people have gained access to these technologies but not the freedom to develop content such as web pages or social media platforms in their own way. Digital natives have much more power and therefore use this to create their own space with their own norms, shaping their online world according to their own outlook.

But the digital divide is certainly not the worst problem we have to deal with on the Internet today. Going back to the Declaration, we originally believed we were creating an entirely new world:

This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

How I dearly wished that was true. Unfortunately, the Internet is not that different from the offline world. Or, to be more accurate, the values we have embedded in the Internet, particularly of free speech absolutism, sexism, corporatism, and exploitation, are now exploding outside of the Internet, into the "real" world. The Internet was built with free software which, fundamentally, was based on quasi-volunteer labour of an elite force of white men with obviously too much time on their hands (and also: no children). The mythical writing of GCC and Emacs by Richard Stallman is a good example of this, but the entirety of the Internet now seems to be running on random bits and pieces built by hit-and-run programmers working on their copious free time. Whenever any of those fails, it can compromise or bring down entire systems. (Heck, I wrote this article on my day off...) This model of what is fundamentally "cheap labour" is spreading out from the Internet. Delivery workers are being exploited to the bone by apps like Uber -- although it should be noted that workers organise and fight back. Amazon workers are similarly exploited beyond belief, forbidden to take breaks until they pee in bottles, with ambulances nearby to carry out the bodies. During peak of the pandemic, workers were being dangerously exposed to the virus in warehouses. All this while Amazon is basically taking over the entire economy. The Declaration culminates with this prophecy:

We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

This prediction, which first felt revolutionary, is now chilling.

Colonial Internet The Internet is, if not neo-colonial, plain colonial. The US colonies had cotton fields and slaves, we have disposable cell phones and Foxconn workers. Canada has its cultural genocide, Facebook has his own genocides in Ethiopia, Myanmar, and mob violence in India. Apple is at least implicitly accepting the Uyghur genocide. And just like the slaves of the colony, those atrocities are what makes the empire run. The Declaration actually ends like this, a quote which I have in my fortune cookies file:

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

That is still inspiring to me. But if we want to make "cyberspace" more humane, we need to decolonize it. Work on cyberpeace instead of cyberwar. Establish clear code of conduct, discuss ethics, and question your own privileges, biases, and culture. For me the first step in decolonizing my own mind is writing this article. Breaking up tech monopolies might be an important step, but it won't be enough: we have to do a culture shift as well, and that's the hard part.

Appendix: an apology to Barlow I kind of feel bad going through Barlow's declaration like this, point by point. It is somewhat unfair, especially since Barlow passed away a few years ago and cannot mount a response (even humbly assuming that he might read this). But then again, he himself recognized he was a bit too "optimistic" in 2009, saying: "we all get older and smarter":

I'm an optimist. In order to be libertarian, you have to be an optimist. You have to have a benign view of human nature, to believe that human beings left to their own devices are basically good. But I'm not so sure about human institutions, and I think the real point of argument here is whether or not large corporations are human institutions or some other entity we need to be thinking about curtailing. Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government.

And, in a sense, it was a little naive to expect Barlow to not be a colonist. Barlow is, among many things, a cattle rancher who grew up on a colonial ranch in Wyoming. The ranch was founded in 1907 by his great uncle, 17 years after the state joined the Union, and only a generation or two after the Powder River War (1866-1868) and Black Hills War (1876-1877) during which the US took over lands occupied by Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and other native American nations, in some of the last major First Nations Wars.

Appendix: further reading There is another article that almost has the same title as this one: Facebook and the New Colonialism. (Interestingly, the <title> tag on the article is actually "Facebook the Colonial Empire" which I also find appropriate.) The article is worth reading in full, but I loved this quote so much that I couldn't resist reproducing it here:

Representations of colonialism have long been present in digital landscapes. ( Even Super Mario Brothers, the video game designer Steven Fox told me last year. You run through the landscape, stomp on everything, and raise your flag at the end. ) But web-based colonialism is not an abstraction. The online forces that shape a new kind of imperialism go beyond Facebook.

It goes on:

Consider, for example, digitization projects that focus primarily on English-language literature. If the web is meant to be humanity s new Library of Alexandria, a living repository for all of humanity s knowledge, this is a problem. So is the fact that the vast majority of Wikipedia pages are about a relatively tiny square of the planet. For instance, 14 percent of the world s population lives in Africa, but less than 3 percent of the world s geotagged Wikipedia articles originate there, according to a 2014 Oxford Internet Institute report.

And they introduce another definition of Neo-colonialism, while warning about abusing the word like I am sort of doing here:

I m loath to toss around words like colonialism but it s hard to ignore the family resemblances and recognizable DNA, to wit, said Deepika Bahri, an English professor at Emory University who focuses on postcolonial studies. In an email, Bahri summed up those similarities in list form:

1. ride in like the savior
2. bandy about words like equality, democracy, basic rights
3. mask the long-term profit motive (see 2 above)
4. justify the logic of partial dissemination as better than nothing
5. partner with local elites and vested interests
6. accuse the critics of ingratitude

In the end, she told me, if it isn t a duck, it shouldn t quack like a duck.

Another good read is the classic Code and other laws of cyberspace (1999, free PDF) which is also critical of Barlow's Declaration. In "Code is law", Lawrence Lessig argues that:

computer code (or "West Coast Code", referring to Silicon Valley) regulates conduct in much the same way that legal code (or "East Coast Code", referring to Washington, D.C.) does (Wikipedia)

And now it feels like the west coast has won over the east coast, or maybe it recolonized it. In any case, Internet now christens emperors.

Dropdown for GitHub workflows input parameters Sometimes when we look at CI/CD tools embedded within git-based software repository manager like GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket, we ran into a lack of some features. This time me and my DevOps/SRE team were facing a pain of not being able to have the option to create drop-downs within GitHub workflows using input parameters. Although this functionality is already available on other platforms such as Bitbucket, the specific client we were working on stored the code inside GitHub. At first I thought that someone has already solved this problem somehow, but doing an extensive search on the internet I found several angry GitHub users opening requests within the Support Community and even in the stack overflow. So I decided to create a solution for this, always thinking about simplicity and in a way that makes it easy to get this missing functionality. I started by creating an input array pattern using commas and using a tag (the selector) e.g brackets as the default value marker. Here is an example of what an input string would look like:

name: gh-action-dropdown-list-input
on:
  workflow_dispatch:
    inputs:
      environment:
        description: 'Environment'
        required: true
        default: 'dev,staging,[uat],prod'

Now the final question that would turn out to be the most complicated to deal with. How can I change the GitHub Actions interface to replace the input pattern we created earlier to a dropdown? The simplest answer I thought was to create a chrome and firefox extension that would do all this logic behind the scenes and replace the HTML input element with the selected tag containing the array values and leaving the tag value (selector) always as the default. All code was developed in pure JavaScript, open-source licensed under Apache 2.0 and available at https://github.com/arthurbdiniz/gh-action-dropdown-list-input.

Install extension

• Chrome
• Firefox

Once installed, the extension is ready to use and the final result we see is the Actions interface with drop-downs. :)

Configuring selectors Go to the top right corner of the browser you are using and click on the extension logo. A screen will popup with tag options. Choose the right tags for you and save it.

This action might require reloading the GitHub workflow tab.

---

Have fun using drop-downs inside GitHub. If you liked this project please share this post and if possible star within the repository. Also feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthurbdiniz

References

• https://github.community/t/can-workflow-dispatch-input-be-option-list/127338
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/69296314/dropdown-for-github-workflows-input-parameters

deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/other-deps/DISTRIBUTION/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/frameworks/DISTRIBUTION/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/plasma523/DISTRIBUTION/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/apps2108/DISTRIBUTION/ ./
deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/other/DISTRIBUTION/ ./

deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/krita-beta/DISTRIBUTION/ ./

• Adopt and introduce a new Openstack component into our cloud: Manila this was the right choice if we were interested in a general NFS as a service offering for our Cloud VPS users.
• Put the data on Cinder volumes and serve NFS from a couple of virtual machines created by hand this was the right choice if we wanted something that required low effort to engineer and adopt.

• #1946002 generic driver: service instance ends up with 2 ports in the admin network
• #1945463 generic driver: service instance name template is ignored
• #1944980 generic driver: support additional SSH options for service instance
• #1944696 [DOC] document additional generic driver configuration options

• https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/manila/+/810702
• https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/manila/+/810719
• https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/manila/+/811736

• Abhijith PA has returned hours and marked themselves inactive, at least for the time being. He did 0h out of 14h, carried over 14h and returned 28h.
• Adrian Bunk did 19.5h (out of 24.75h assigned and 12.75 from August), carrying over 18h to October.
• Anton Gladky did 12h (out of 12h assigned).
• Ben Hutchings did 2h (out of 12.75h assigned and 19.25h from August), thus carrying over 30h to October.
• Chris Lamb did 18h (out of 18h assigned).
• Emilio Pozuelo Monfort did not report back about their work so we assume they did nothing (out of 5.5h assigned plus 74.5h from August), thus is carrying over 80h for October.
• Holger Levsen did 3h (out of 12h assigned) and gave back 9h and carried over 3h.
• Jeremiah Foster worked 10 hours (out of 20h assigned) on LTS work, carrying over 10h.
• Lee Garrett did not report back about their work so we assume they did nothing (out of 24.75h assigned and 23.75 from August), thus is carrying over 48.50h for October.
• Markus Koschany did 43.5h (out of 24.75h assigned and 18.75h from August)
• Neil Williams did 24.5h (out of 24.75h assigned)
• Roberto C. S nchez did 6h (out of 24.75h assigned and gave back 18.75h)
• Sylvain Beucler did 27h (out of 24.75h assigned).
• Thorsten Alteholz did 24.75h (out of 24.75h assigned).
• Utkarsh Gupta did 24.75h (out of 24.75h assigned) but did not publish his report yet.
• Ola Lundqvist did 2 hours (out of 21h carried over from previous months), and is thus carrying 19h for October.

• Platinum sponsors:
  • TOSHIBA (for 73 months)
  • GitHub (for 64 months)
  • Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) (for 41 months)
• Gold sponsors:
  • Roche Diagnostics International AG (for 84 months)
  • Linode (for 78 months)
  • Babiel GmbH (for 67 months)
  • Plat Home (for 67 months)
  • University of Oxford (for 23 months)
  • Deveryware (for 10 months)
  • VyOS
• Silver sponsors:
  • The Positive Internet Company (for 89 months)
  • Domeneshop AS (for 88 months)
  • Nantes M tropole (for 82 months)
  • Univention GmbH (for 74 months)
  • Universit Jean Monnet de St Etienne (for 74 months)
  • Ribbon Communications, Inc. (for 68 months)
  • Exonet B.V. (for 58 months)
  • Leibniz Rechenzentrum (for 52 months)
  • CINECA (for 41 months)
  • Minist re de l Europe et des Affaires trang res (for 35 months)
  • Cloudways Ltd (for 24 months)
  • Dinahosting SL (for 22 months)
  • Bauer Xcel Media Deutschland KG (for 17 months)
  • Platform.sh (for 17 months)
  • Moxa Intelligence Co., Ltd. (for 11 months)
  • sipgate GmbH (for 8 months)
  • OVH US LLC (for 6 months)
  • Tilburg University (for 6 months)
• Bronze sponsors:
  • Evolix (for 89 months)
  • Seznam.cz, a.s. (for 89 months)
  • Linuxhotel GmbH (for 86 months)
  • Intevation GmbH (for 85 months)
  • Daevel SARL (for 84 months)
  • Bitfolk LTD (for 83 months)
  • Megaspace Internet Services GmbH (for 83 months)
  • Greenbone Networks GmbH (for 82 months)
  • NUMLOG (for 82 months)
  • WinGo AG (for 81 months)
  • Ecole Centrale de Nantes LHEEA (for 78 months)
  • Entr ouvert (for 73 months)
  • Adfinis AG (for 70 months)
  • Laboratoire LEGI UMR 5519 / CNRS (for 65 months)
  • Tesorion (for 65 months)
  • GNI MEDIA (for 64 months)
  • Bearstech (for 56 months)
  • LiHAS (for 56 months)
  • People Doc (for 52 months)
  • Catalyst IT Ltd (for 51 months)
  • Demarcq SAS (for 45 months)
  • Universit Grenoble Alpes (for 31 months)
  • TouchWeb SAS (for 23 months)
  • SPiN AG (for 19 months)
  • CoreFiling (for 15 months)
  • Institut des sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod (for 10 months)
  • Observatoire des Sciences de l Univers de Grenoble (for 7 months)
  • Tem Innovations GmbH
  • WordFinder.pro

> library(RcppQuantuccia)
> setCalendar("UnitedStates/FederalReserve")
> getHolidays(as.Date("2022-06-01"), as.Date("2022-06-30"))
[1] "2022-06-20"
> 

Changes in version 0.0.4 (2021-10-12)

• Allow for 'Null' calendar without weekends or holidays
• Switch CI use to r-ci
• Updated UnitedStates calendar to current QuantLib calendar
• Small updates to DESCRIPTION and README.md

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

source /path/to/collab-qa-tools/activate.sh

cqa-scanlogs   grep -v OK > todo

split --lines=30 --numeric-suffixes todo todo

cqa-fetchbugs --TODO=todo01

cqa-annotate --TODO=todo01

#!/bin/sh
set -eu
for todo in $@; do
  # force downloading bugs
  awk ' print(".bugs." $1) ' "$ todo "   xargs rm -f
  cqa-fetchbugs --TODO="$ todo "
  cqa-annotate \
    --template=template.txt.jinja2 \
    --TODO="$ todo "
done

From:   fullname   <  email  >
To: submit@bugs.debian.org
Subject:   package  : FTBFS with ruby3.0:   summary  
Source:   package  
Version:   version   split:'+rebuild'   first  
Severity: serious
Justification: FTBFS
Tags: bookworm sid ftbfs
User: debian-ruby@lists.debian.org
Usertags: ruby3.0
Hi,
We are about to enable building against ruby3.0 on unstable. During a test
rebuild,   package   was found to fail to build in that situation.
To reproduce this locally, you need to install ruby-all-dev from experimental
on an unstable system or build chroot.
Relevant part (hopefully):
 % for line in extract % >   line  
 % endfor % 
The full build log is available at
https://people.debian.org/~kanashiro/ruby3.0/round2/builds/3/  package  /  filename   replace:".log",".build.txt"  

######## ruby-cocaine_0.5.8-1.1+rebuild1633376733_amd64.log ########
--------- Error:
     Failure/Error: undef_method :exitstatus
     FrozenError:
       can't modify frozen object: pid 2351759 exit 0
     # ./spec/support/unsetting_exitstatus.rb:4:in  undef_method'
     # ./spec/support/unsetting_exitstatus.rb:4:in  singleton class'
     # ./spec/support/unsetting_exitstatus.rb:3:in  assuming_no_processes_have_been_run'
     # ./spec/cocaine/errors_spec.rb:55:in  block (2 levels) in <top (required)>'
Deprecation Warnings:
Using  should  from rspec-expectations' old  :should  syntax without explicitly enabling the syntax is deprecated. Use the new  :expect  syntax or explicitly enable  :should  with  config.expect_with(:rspec)    c  c.syntax = :should   instead. Called from /<<PKGBUILDDIR>>/spec/cocaine/command_line/runners/backticks_runner_spec.rb:19:in  block (2 levels) in <top (required)>'.
If you need more of the backtrace for any of these deprecations to
identify where to make the necessary changes, you can configure
 config.raise_errors_for_deprecations! , and it will turn the
deprecation warnings into errors, giving you the full backtrace.
1 deprecation warning total
Finished in 6.87 seconds (files took 2.68 seconds to load)
67 examples, 1 failure
Failed examples:
rspec ./spec/cocaine/errors_spec.rb:54 # When an error happens does not blow up if running the command errored before execution
/usr/bin/ruby3.0 -I/usr/share/rubygems-integration/all/gems/rspec-support-3.9.3/lib:/usr/share/rubygems-integration/all/gems/rspec-core-3.9.2/lib /usr/share/rubygems-integration/all/gems/rspec-core-3.9.2/exe/rspec --pattern ./spec/\*\*/\*_spec.rb --format documentation failed
ERROR: Test "ruby3.0" failed:
----------------
ERROR: Test "ruby3.0" failed:      Failure/Error: undef_method :exitstatus
----------------
package: ruby-cocaine
lines: 30
------------------------------------------------------------------------
s: skip
i: ignore this package permanently
r: report new bug
f: view full log
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Action [s i r f]:

• s - skip this package and do nothing. You can run cqa-annotate again later and come back to it.
• i - ignore this package completely. New runs of cqa-annotate won't ask about it again. This is useful if the package only fails in your rebuilds due to another package, and would just work when that other package gets fixes. In the Ruby transition this happens when A depends on B, while B builds a C extension and failed to build against the new Ruby. So once B is fixed, A should just work (in principle). But even if A would even have problems of its own, we can't really know before B is fixed so we can retry A.
• r - report a bug. cqa-annotate will expand the template with the data from the current log, and feed it to mutt. This is currently a limitation: you have to use mutt to report bugs. After you report the bug, cqa-annotate will ask if it should edit the TODO file. In my opinion it's best to not do this, and annotate the package with a bug number when you have one (see below).
• f - view the full log. This is useful when the extract displayed doesn't have enough info, or you want to inspect something that happened earlier (or later) during the build.

----------------
ERROR: Test "ruby3.0" failed:      Failure/Error: undef_method :exitstatus
----------------
package: ruby-cocaine
lines: 30
------------------------------------------------------------------------
s: skip
i: ignore this package permanently
1: 996206 serious ruby-cocaine: FTBFS with ruby3.0: ERROR: Test "ruby3.0" failed:      Failure/Error: undef_method :exitstatus  
r: report new bug
f: view full log
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Action [s i 1 r f]:

# For more information on what jobs are run see:
# https://salsa.debian.org/salsa-ci-team/pipeline
#
---
include:
  - https://salsa.debian.org/salsa-ci-team/pipeline/raw/master/salsa-ci.yml
  - https://salsa.debian.org/salsa-ci-team/pipeline/raw/master/pipeline-jobs.yml

variables:
   RELEASE: 'unstable'
   SALSA_CI_COMPONENTS: 'main contrib non-free'

variables:
   RELEASE: 'unstable'
   SALSA_CI_COMPONENTS: 'main contrib non-free'
   SALSA_CI_DISABLE_BUILD_PACKAGE_I386: 1

https://salsa.debian.org/<team>/<project>/-/settings/ci_cd

Key: SALSA_CI_EXTRA_REPOSITORY Value: deb https://deb.debian.org/debian/ sid contrib non-free

• 6th Gen NVMe (read intensive) Ceph-based block devices
• AMD Epyc CPU (128 threads per server)
• 2x 25Gbits/s (using BGP-to-the-host networking)