Search Results: "ema"

14 November 2016

Raphaël Hertzog: Freexian s report about Debian Long Term Support, October 2016

A Debian LTS logoLike each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS. Individual reports In October, about 175 work hours have been dispatched among 14 paid contributors. Their reports are available: Evolution of the situation The number of sponsored hours did not change this month. We still need a couple of supplementary sponsors to reach our objective of funding the equivalent of a full time position. The security tracker currently lists 34 packages with a known CVE and the dla-needed.txt file 29. The situation improved slightly compared to last month. Thanks to our sponsors New sponsors are in bold.

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Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, October 2016

I was assigned 13.75 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative and worked all of them. I reviewed the fix for CVE-2016-7796 in wheezy's systemd, which needed substantial changes and a few iterations to get right. I updated linux to the 3.2.82 stable release (and 3.2.82-rt119 for PREEMPT_RT), and added fixes for several security issues including CVE-2016-5195 "Dirty Cow". I uploaded and issued DLA-670-1. In my role as Linux 3.2 stable maintainer, I made a 3.2.83 release fixing just that issue, and started to prepare a 3.2.84 release with many more fixes. I cleaned up my work on imagemagick, but didn't go further through the backlog of issues. I put the partly updated package on people.debian.org for another LTS maintatainer to pick up.

13 November 2016

Gregor Herrmann: RC bugs 2016/40-45

time for a quick update, I guess. here's the list of release-critical bugs in debian I've worked on during the last couple of weeks.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: pkgKitten 0.1.4: Creating R Packages that purr

kitten A new minor release 0.1.4 of pkgKitten just hit on CRAN this morning. One small change is that the package manual page it creates now makes use of the (still new-ish and under-documented and under-used) Rd macros described at the end of Section 2.13 of Writing R Extensions:
See the system.Rd file in share/Rd/macros for more details and macro definitions, including macros \packageTitle, \packageDescription, \packageAuthor, \packageMaintainer, \packageDESCRIPTION and \packageIndices.
By using these macros, and referencing them from the DESCRIPTION file, we can avoid redundancy, or worse, inconsitency, between both files. Or just be plain lazy and describe things just once in the higher-level file: A good thing! Otherwise we fixed a URL to the manual thanks to a PR, and just added some of the regular polish to some of the corners which R CMD check --as-cran is looking into:

Changes in version 0.1.4 (2016-11-13)
  • Utilize newer R macros in package-default manual page.
  • Repair a link to Wrting R Extensions (PR #7 by Josh O'Brien)

More details about the package are at the pkgKitten webpage and the pkgKitten GitHub repo. Courtesy of CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release

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

Andrew Cater: MiniDebconf ARM Cambridge 13/11/16 - Day 4 post 4 - lightning talks

Ian Jackson - dgit in two slides with attitude :)

Mike Crowe - Code Club - volunteering to teach programming to school children in after school clubs. Scratch: version 1 is packaged for Debian and Raspberry Pi CSS HTML Python - all materials provided. Projects for Microbits as well. No slides.

Dimitri Ledkov - SPI board - explaining about SPI. SPI - US non-profit, also registered in Europe. Collects donations, can register trademarks, can hold assets on your project's behalf. Volunteer project: controlled by member orgs.

Guus Sliepen - ifupdown - dual protocol, bonding, VPNs, wireless,
- too many slides :)






11 November 2016

Jonathan Dowland: Vinyl is killing Vinyl (but that's ok)

I started buying vinyl records about 16 years ago, but recently I've become a bit uncomfortable being identified as a "vinyl lover". The market is ascendant, with vinyl album sales growing for 8 consecutive years, at least in the UK. So why am I uncomfortable about it? A quick word about audio fidelity/quality here. I don't subscribe to the school of thought that audio on vinyl is inherently better than digital audio, far from it. I'm aware of its limitations. For recordings that I love, I try to seek out the best quality version available, which is almost always digital. Some believe that vinyl is immune to the "loudness war" brickwall mastering plaguing some modern releases, but for some of the worst offenders (Depeche Mode's Playing The Angel; Red Hot Chili Pepper's Californication) I haven't found the vinyl masterings to sound any different. 16 years ago Let's go back to why I started buying vinyl. Back when I started, the world was a very different place to what it is today. You could not buy most music in a digital form: it was 3 more years before the iTunes Store was opened, and it was Mac-only at first, and the music it sold was DRM-crippled for the first 5 or so years afterwards. The iPod had not been invented yet and there was no real market for personal music players. Minidiscs were still around, but Net-MD (the only sanctioned way to get digital music onto them from a computer) was terrible.
old-ish LPs old-ish LPs
Buying vinyl 16 years ago was a way to access music that was otherwise much harder to reach. There were still plenty of albums, originally recorded and released before CDs, which either had not been re-issued digitally at all, or had been done so early, and badly. Since vinyl was not fashionable, the second hand market was pretty cheap. I bought quite a lot of stuff for pennies at markets and car boot sales. Some music such as b-sides and 12" mixes and other mixes prepared especially for the format remains unavailable and uncollected on CD. (I'm a big fan of the B-side culture that existed prior to CDs. I might write more about that one day.) 10 years ago
modern-ish 7 inches modern-ish 7 inches
Fast forward to around 10 years ago. Ephemeral digital music is now much more common, the iPod and PMPs are well established. High-street music stores start to close down, including large chains like MOS, Our Price, and Virgin. Streaming hasn't particularly taken off yet, attempts to set up digital radio stations are fought by the large copyright owners. Vinyl is still not particularly fashionable, but it is still being produced, in particular for singles for up-and-coming bands in 7" format. You can buy a 7" single for between 1 and 4, getting the b-side with it. The b-side is often exclusive to the 7" release as an incentive to collectors. I was very prepared to punt 1-2 on a single from a group I was not particularly familiar with just to see what they were like. I discovered quite a lot of artists this way. One of the songs we played at our wedding was such an exclusive: a recording of the Zutons' covering Jackie Wilson's "Higher and Higher", originally broadcast once on Colin Murray's Evening Session radio show. Now
Vangelis - Blade Runner OST An indulgence
So, where are we now? Vinyl album sales are a huge growth market. They are very fashionable. Many purchasers are younger people who are new to the format; it's believed many don't have the means to play the music on the discs. Many (most?) albums are now issued as 12" vinyl in parallel with digital releases. These are usually exactly the same product (track listing, mixes, etc.) and usually priced at exactly twice that of the CD (with digital prices normally a fraction under that). The second hand market for 12" albums has inflated enormously. Gone are the bargains that could be had, a typical second hand LP is now priced quite close to the digital price for a popular/common album in most places. The popularity of vinyl has caused a huge inflation in the price of most 7" singles, which average somewhere between 8- 10 each, often without any b-side whatsoever. The good news is from my observations the 2nd hand market for 7" singles hasn't been affected quite as much. I guess they are not as desirable to buyers. The less said about Record Store Day, the better. So, that's all quite frustrating. But most of the reasons I used to buy vinyl have gone away anyway. Many of the rushed-to-market CD masterings have been reworked and reissued, correcting the earlier problems. B-side compilations are much more common so there are far fewer obscure tracks or mixes, and when the transfer has been done right, you're getting those previously-obscure tracks in a much higher quality. Several businesses exist to sell 2nd hand CDs for rock bottom prices, so it's still possible to get popular music very cheaply. The next thing to worry about is probably streaming services.

9 November 2016

Russ Allbery: Some thoughts on the US elections

I apparently am not going to get anything done today until I write this. Some thoughts, in no particular order. I don't have any profound conclusions. I'm honestly pretty upset. And pretty scared. But we have to talk to each other. And we have to listen to each other. And we have to persaude each other. And we have to be willing to be persuaded. And please go tell someone this morning that you have their back.

Enrico Zini: On SPF

I woke up this morning with some Django server error mails in my inbox: 
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc5 in position 9: ordinal not in range(128)
 
 'REMOTE_USER': u' -guest@users.alioth.debian.org',
I did what one does in cases like these, I tried to fix the bug and mailed -guest@users.alioth.debian.org asking them to try again and let me know if it works. I get a bounce: 
  <Actual user's email>
    (generated from  -guest@users.alioth.debian.org)
    SMTP error from remote mail server after MAIL FROM:<enrico@enricozini.org> SIZE=3948:
    host   [ ]: 550 Please see http://www.openspf.org/Why?id=enrico%40enricozini.org&ip=2001%3a41c8%3a1000%3a21%3a%3a21%3a21&receiver=bq :
    Reason: mechanism
I resent the mail to the actual user's address, and it went through. Job done, at least until they get back to me telling me that my fix didn't work. Lessons learnt:

Daniel Pocock: Understanding what lies behind Trump and Brexit

As the US elections finish, many people are scratching their heads wondering what it all means. For example, is Trump serious about the things he has been saying, or is he simply saying whatever was most likely to make a whole bunch of really stupid people crawl out from under their rocks to vote for him? Was he serious about winning at all, or was it just the ultimate reality TV experiment? Will he show up for work in 2017, or like Australia's billionaire Clive Palmer, will he set a new absence record for an elected official? Ironically, Palmer and Trump have both been dogged by questions over their business dealings, will Palmer's descent towards bankruptcy be replicated in the ongoing fraud trial against Trump University and similar scandals? While the answer to those questions may not be clear for some time, some interesting observations can be made at this point. The world has been going racist. In the UK, for example, authorities have started putting up anti-Muslim posters with an eery resemblance to Hitler's anti-Jew propaganda. It makes you wonder if the Brexit result was really the "will of the people", or were the people deliberately whipped up into a state of irrational fear by a bunch of thugs seeking political power? Who thought The Man in the High Castle was fiction? In January 2015, a pilot of The Man in the High Castle, telling the story of a dystopian alternative history where Hitler has conquered America, was the most-watched original series on Amazon Prime. It appears Trump supporters have already been operating US checkpoints abroad for some time, achieving widespread notoriety when they blocked a family of British Muslims from visiting Disneyland in 2015. Ambushing them at the last moment as they were about to board their flight, it is unthinkable how anybody could be so cruel. When you reflect on statements made by Trump and the so-called "security" practices around the world, this would appear to be only a taste of things to come though. Is it a coincidence that Brexit and Trump both happened in the same year that the copyright on Mein Kampf expired? Ironically, in the chapter on immigration Hitler specifically singles out the U.S.A. for his praise, is that the sort of rave review that Trump aspires to when he talks about making America great again? US voters have traditionally held concerns about the power of the establishment. The US Federal Reserve has been in the news almost every week since the financial crisis, but did you know that the very concept of central banking was thrown out the window four times in America's history? Is Trump the type of hardliner who will go down this path again, or will it be business as usual? In his book Rich Dad's Guide to Investing in Gold & Silver, Robert Kiyosaki and Michael Maloney encourage people to consider putting most of their wealth into gold and silver bullion. Whether you like the politics of Trump and Brexit or not, are we entering an era where it will be prudent for people to keep at least ten percent of net wealth in this asset class again? Online dealers like BullionVault in Europe already appear to be struggling under the pressure as people rush to claim the free grams of bullion credited to newly opened accounts. The Facebook effect In recent times, there has been significant attention on the question of how Facebook and Google can influence elections, some European authorities have even issued alerts comparing this threat to terrorism. Yet in the US election, it was simple email that stole the limelight (or conveniently diverted attention from other threats), first with Clinton's private email server and later with Wikileaks exposing the entire email history of Clinton's chief of staff. The Podesta emails, while being boring for outsiders, are potentially far more damaging as they undermine the morale of Clinton's grass roots supporters. These people are essential for knocking on doors and distributing leaflets in the final phase of an election campaign, but after reading about Clinton's close relationship with big business, many of them may well have chosen to stay home. Will future political candidates seek to improve their technical competance, or will they simply be replaced by candidates who are born hackers and fluent in the language of a digital world?

7 November 2016

Petter Reinholdtsen: How to talk with your loved ones in private

A few days ago I ran a very biased and informal survey to get an idea about what options are being used to communicate with end to end encryption with friends and family. I explicitly asked people not to list options only used in a work setting. The background is the uneasy feeling I get when using Signal, a feeling shared by others as a blog post from Sander Venima about why he do not recommend Signal anymore (with feedback from the Signal author available from ycombinator). I wanted an overview of the options being used, and hope to include those options in a less biased survey later on. So far I have not taken the time to look into the individual proposed systems. They range from text sharing web pages, via file sharing and email to instant messaging, VOIP and video conferencing. For those considering which system to use, it is also useful to have a look at the EFF Secure messaging scorecard which is slightly out of date but still provide valuable information. So, on to the list. There were some used by many, some used by a few, some rarely used ones and a few mentioned but without anyone claiming to use them. Notice the grouping is in reality quite random given the biased self selected set of participants. First the ones used by many: Then the ones used by a few. Then the ones used by even fewer people And finally the ones mentioned by not marked as used by anyone. This might be a mistake, perhaps the person adding the entry forgot to flag it as used? Given the network effect it seem obvious to me that we as a society have been divided and conquered by those interested in keeping encrypted and secure communication away from the masses. The finishing remarks from Aral Balkan in his talk "Free is a lie" about the usability of free software really come into effect when you want to communicate in private with your friends and family. We can not expect them to allow the usability of communication tool to block their ability to talk to their loved ones. Note for example the option IRC w/OTR. Most IRC clients do not have OTR support, so in most cases OTR would not be an option, even if you wanted to. In my personal experience, about 1 in 20 I talk to have a IRC client with OTR. For private communication to really be available, most people to talk to must have the option in their currently used client. I can not simply ask my family to install an IRC client. I need to guide them through a technical multi-step process of adding extensions to the client to get them going. This is a non-starter for most. I would like to be able to do video phone calls, audio phone calls, exchange instant messages and share files with my loved ones, without being forced to share with people I do not know. I do not want to share the content of the conversations, and I do not want to share who I communicate with or the fact that I communicate with someone. Without all these factors in place, my private life is being more or less invaded.

6 November 2016

Russ Allbery: Review: Digger

Review: Digger, by Ursula Vernon
Publisher: Sofawolf
Copyright: October 2013
ISBN: 1-936689-32-4
Format: Graphic novel
Pages: 837
As Digger opens, the eponymous wombat is digging a tunnel. She's not sure why, or where to, since she hit a bad patch of dirt. It happens sometimes, underground: pockets of cave gas and dead air that leave one confused and hallucinating. But this one was particularly bad, it's been days, she broke into a huge cave system, and she's thoroughly lost. Tripping on an ammonite while running from voices in the dark finally helps her come mostly to her senses and start tunneling up, only to break out at the feet of an enormous statue of Ganesh. A talking statue of Ganesh. Digger is a web comic that ran from 2005 to 2011. The archives are still on the web, so you can read the entire saga for free. Reviewed here is the complete omnibus edition, which collects the entire strip (previously published in six separate graphic novels containing two chapters each), a short story, a bonus story that was published in volume one, a bunch of random illustrated bits about the world background, author's notes from the web version, and all of the full-color covers of the series chapters (the rest of the work is in black and white). Publication of the omnibus was originally funded by a Kickstarter, but it's still available for regular sale. (I bought it normally via Amazon long after the Kickstarter finished.) It's a beautiful and durable printing, and I recommend it if you have the money to buy things you can read for free. This was a very long-running web comic, but Digger is a single story. It has digressions, of course, but it's a single coherent work with a beginning, middle, and end. That's one of the impressive things about it. Another is that it's a fantasy work involving gods, magic, oracles, and prophecies, but it's not about a chosen one, and it's not a coming of age story. Digger (Digger-of-Needlessly-Convoluted-Tunnels, actually, but Digger will do) is an utterly pragmatic wombat who considers magic to be in poor taste (as do all right-thinking wombats), gods to be irritating underground obstacles that require care and extra bracing, and prophecies to not be worth the time spent listening to them. It's a bit like the famous Middle Earth contrast between the concerns of the hobbits and the affairs of the broader world, if the hobbits were well aware of the broader world, able to deal with it, but just thought all the magic was tacky and irritating. Magic and gods do not, of course, go away just because one is irritated by them, and Digger eventually has to deal with quite a lot of magic and mythology while trying to figure out where home is and how to get back to it. However, she is drawn into the plot less by any grand danger to the world and more because she keeps managing to make friends with everyone, even people who hate each other. It's not really an explicit goal, but Digger is kind-hearted, sensible, tries hard to do the right thing, and doesn't believe in walking away from problems. In this world, that's a recipe for eventual alliances from everything from warrior hyenas to former pirate shrews, not to mention a warrior cult, a pair of trolls, and a very confused shadow... something. All for a wombat who would rather be digging out a good root cellar. (She does, at least, get a chance to dig out a good root cellar.) The characters are the best part, but I love everything about this story. Vernon's black and white artwork isn't as detailed as, say, Dave Sim at his best, and some of the panels (particularly mostly dark ones) seemed a bit scribbly. But it's mostly large-panel artwork with plenty of room for small touches and Easter eggs (watch for the snail, and the cave fish graffiti that I missed until it was pointed out by the author's notes), and it does the job of telling the story. Honestly, I like the black and white panels better than the color chapter covers reproduced in the back. And the plot is solid and meaty, with a satisfying ending and some fantastic detours (particularly the ghosts). I think my favorite bits, though, are the dialogue.
"Do you have any idea how long twelve thousand years is?"
"I know it's not long enough to make a good rock."
Digger is snarky in all the right ways, and sees the world in terms of tunnels, digging, and geology. Vernon is endlessly creative in how she uses that to create comebacks, sayings, analysis, and an entire culture. This is one of the best long-form comics I've read: a solid fantasy story with great characters, reliably good artwork, a coherent plot arc, wonderful dialogue, a hard-working and pragmatic protagonist (who happens to be female), and a wonderfully practical sense of morality and ethics. I'm sorry it's over. If you've not already read it, I highly recommend it. Remember tunnel 17! Rating: 9 out of 10

Russell Coker: Is a Thinkpad Still Like a Rolls-Royce

For a long time the Thinkpad has been widely regarded as the Rolls-Royce of laptops . Since 2003 one could argue that Rolls-Royce is no longer the Rolls-Royce of cars [1]. The way that IBM sold the Think business unit to Lenovo and the way that Lenovo is producing both Thinkpads and cheaper Ideapads is somewhat similar to the way the Rolls-Royce trademark and car company were separately sold to companies that are known for making cheaper cars. Sam Varghese has written about his experience with Thinkpads and how he thinks it s no longer the Rolls-Royce of laptops [2]. Sam makes some reasonable points to support this claim (one of which only applies to touchpad users not people like me who prefer the Trackpoint), but I think that the real issue is whether it s desirable to have a laptop that could be compared to a Rolls-Royce nowadays. Support The Rolls-Royce car company is known for great reliability and support as well as features that other cars lack (mostly luxury features). The Thinkpad marque (both before and after it was sold to Lenovo) was also known for great support. You could take a Thinkpad to any service center anywhere in the world and if the serial number indicated that it was within the warranty period it would be repaired without any need for paperwork. The Thinkpad service centers never had any issue with repairing a Thinkpad that lacked a hard drive just as long as the problem could be demonstrated. It was also possible to purchase an extended support contract at any time which covered all repairs including motherboard replacement. I know that not everyone had as good an experience as I had with Thinkpad support, but I ve been using them since 1998 without problems which is more than I can say for most hardware. Do we really need great reliability from laptops nowadays? When I first got a laptop hardly anyone I knew owned one. Nowadays laptops are common. Having a copy of important documents on a USB stick is often a good substitute for a reliable laptop, when you are in an environment where most people own laptops it s usually not difficult to find someone who will let you use theirs for a while. I think that there is a place for a laptop with RAID-1 and ECC RAM, it s a little known fact that Thinkpads have a long history of supporting the replacement of a CD/DVD drive with a second hard drive (I don t know if this is still supported) but AFAIK they have never supported ECC RAM. My first Thinkpad cost $3,800. In modern money that would be something like $7,000 or more. For that price you really want something that s well supported to protect the valuable asset. Sam complains about his new Thinkpad costing more than $1000 and needing to be replaced after 2.5 years. Mobile phones start at about $600 for the more desirable models (IE anything that runs Pokemon Go) and the new Google Pixel phones range from $1079 to $1,419. Phones aren t really expected to be used for more than 2.5 years. Phones are usually impractical to service in any way so for most of the people who read my blog (who tend to buy the more expensive hardware) they are pretty much a disposable item costing $600+. I previously wrote about a failed Nexus 5 and the financial calculations for self-insuring an expensive phone [3]. I think there s no way that a company can provide extended support/warranty while making a profit and offering a deal that s good value to customers who can afford to self-insure. The same applies for the $499 Lenovo Ideapad 310 and other cheaper Lenovo products. Thinkpads (the higher end of the Lenovo laptop range) are slightly more expensive than the most expensive phones but they also offer more potential for the user to service them. Features My first Thinkpad was quite underpowered when compared to desktop PCs, it had 32M of RAM and could only be expanded to 96M at a time when desktop PCs could be expanded to 128M easily and 256M with some expense. It had a 800*600 display when my desktop display was 1280*1024 (37% of the pixels). Nowadays laptops usually start at about 8G of RAM (with a small minority that have 4G) and laptop displays start at about 1366*768 resolution (51% of the pixels in a FullHD display). That compares well to desktop systems and also is capable of running most things well. My current Thinkpad is a T420 with 8G of RAM and a 1600*900 display (69% of FullHD), it would be nice to have higher resolution but this works well and it was going cheap when I needed a new laptop. Modern Thinkpads don t have some of the significant features that older ones had. The legendary Butterfly Keyboard is long gone, killed by the wide displays that economies of scale and 16:9 movies have forced upon us. It s been a long time since Thinkpads had some of the highest resolution displays and since anyone really cared about it (you only need pixels to be small enough that you can t see them). For me one of the noteworthy features of the Thinkpads has been the great keyboard. Mechanical keys that feel like a desktop keyboard. It seems that most Thinkpads are getting the rubbery keyboard design made popular by Apple. I guess this is due to engineering factors in designing thin laptops and the fact that most users don t care. Matthew Garrett has blogged about the issue of Thinkpad storage configured as RAID mode without any option to disable it [4]. This is an annoyance (which incidentally has been worked around) and there are probably other annoyances like it. Designing hardware and an OS are both complex tasks. The interaction between Windows and the hardware is difficult to get right from both sides and the people who design the hardware often don t think much about Linux support. It has always been this way, the early Thinkpads had no Linux support for special IBM features (like fan control) and support for ISA-PnP was patchy. It is disappointing that Lenovo doesn t put a little extra effort into making sure that Linux works well on their hardware and this might be a reason for considering another brand. Service Life I bought my curent Thinkpad T420 in October 2013 [5] It s more than 3 years old and has no problems even though I bought it refurbished with a reduced warranty. This is probably the longest I ve had a Thinkpad working well, which seems to be a data point against the case that modern Thinkpads aren t as good. I bought a T61 in February 2010 [6], it started working again (after mysteriously not working for a month in late 2013) and apart from the battery lasting 5 minutes and a CPU cooling problem it still works well. If that Thinkpad had cost $3,800 then I would have got it repaired, but as it cost $796 (plus the cost of a RAM upgrade) and a better one was available for $300 it wasn t worth repairing. In the period 1998 to 2010 I bought a 385XD, a 600E, a T21, a T43, and a T61 [6]. During that time I upgraded laptops 4 times in 12 years (I don t have good records of when I bought each one). So my average Thinkpad has lasted 3 years. The first 2 were replaced to get better performance, the 3rd was replaced when an employer assigned me a Thinkpad (and sold it to be when I left), and 4 and 5 were replaced due to hardware problems that could not be fixed economically given the low cost of replacement. Conclusion Thinkpads possibly don t have the benefits over other brands that they used to have. But in terms of providing value for the users it seems that they are much better than they used to be. Until I wrote this post I didn t realise that I ve broken a personal record for owning a laptop. It just keeps working and I hadn t even bothered looking into the issue. For some devices I track how long I ve owned them while thinking can I justify replacing it yet , but the T420 just does everything I want. The battery still lasts 2+ hours which is a new record too, with every other Thinkpad I ve owned the battery life has dropped to well under an hour within a year of purchase. If I replaced this Thinkpad T420 now it will have cost me less than $100 per year (or $140 per year including the new SSD I installed this year), that s about 3 times better than any previous laptop! I wouldn t feel bad about replacing it as I ve definitely got great value for money from it. But I won t replace it as it s doing everything I want. I ve just realised that by every measure (price, reliability, and ability to run all software I want to run) I ve got the best Thinkpad I ve ever had. Maybe it s not like a Rolls-Royce, but I d much rather drive a 2016 Tesla than a 1980 Rolls-Royce anyway.
Related posts:
  1. Thinkpad T420 I ve owned a Thinkpad T61 since February 2010 [1]. In...
  2. PC prices drop again! A few weeks ago Dell advertised new laptops for $849AU,...
  3. I Just Bought a new Thinkpad and the Lenovo Web Site Sucks I ve just bought a Thinkpad T61 at auction for $AU796....

3 November 2016

Iain R. Learmonth: PATHspider Plugins

This post is cross-posted on the MAMI Project blog here. In today s Internet we see an increasing deployment of middleboxes. While middleboxes provide in-network functionality that is necessary to keep networks manageable and economically viable, any packet mangling whether essential for the needed functionality or accidental as an unwanted side effect makes it more and more difficult to deploy new protocols or extensions of existing protocols. For the evolution of the protocol stack, it is important to know which network impairments exist and potentially need to be worked around. While classical network measurement tools are often focused on absolute performance values, PATHspider performs A/B testing between two different protocols or different protocol extensions to perform controlled experiments of protocol-dependent connectivity problems as well as differential treatment. PATHspider 1.0.1 has been released today and is now available from GitHub, PyPI and Debian unstable. This is a small stable update containing a documentation fix for the example plugin. PATHspider now contains 3 built-in plugins for measuring path transparency to explicit congestion notification, DiffServ code points and TCP Fast Open. It s easy to write your own plugins, and if they re good enough, they may be included in the PATHspider distribution at the next feature release. We have a GitHub repository you can fork that has a premade directory structure for new plugins. You ll need to implement logic for performing the two connections, for the A and the B tests. Once you ve verified your connection logic is working with Wireshark, you can move on to writing Observer functions to analyse the connections made in real time as PATHspider runs. The final step is to merge the results of the connection logic (e.g. did the operating system report a timeout?) with the results of your observer functions (e.g. was ECN successfully negotiated?) and write out the final result. We have dedicated a section of the manual to the development of plugins and we really see plugins as first-class citizens in the PATHspider ecosystem. While future releases of PATHspider may contain new plugins, we re also making it easier to write plugins by providing reusable library functions such as the tcp_connect() function of the SynchronisedSpider that allows for easy A/B testing of TCP connections with any globally configured state set. We also provide reusable observer functions for simple tasks such as determining if a 3-way handshake completed or if there was an ICMP unreachable message received.
If you d like to check out PATHspider, you can find the website at https://pathspider.net/. Current development of PATHspider is supported by the European Union s Horizon 2020 project MAMI. This project has received funding from the European Union s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 688421. The opinions expressed and arguments employed reflect only the authors view. The European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of that information.

Simon Josefsson: Why I don t Use 2048 or 4096 RSA Key Sizes

I have used non-standard RSA key size for maybe 15 years. For example, my old OpenPGP key created in 2002. With non-standard key sizes, I mean a RSA key size that is not 2048 or 4096. I do this when I generate OpenPGP/SSH keys (using GnuPG with a smartcard like this) and PKIX certificates (using GnuTLS or OpenSSL, e.g. for XMPP or for HTTPS). People sometimes ask me why. I haven t seen anyone talk about this, or provide a writeup, that is consistent with my views. So I wanted to write about my motivation, so that it is easy for me to refer to, and hopefully to inspire others to think similarily. Or to provoke discussion and disagreement that s fine, and hopefully I will learn something. Before proceeding, here is some context: When building new things, it is usually better to use the Elliptic Curve technology algorithm Ed25519 instead of RSA. There is also ECDSA which has had a comparatively slow uptake, for a number of reasons that is widely available and is a reasonable choice when Ed25519 is not available. There are also post-quantum algorithms, but they are newer and adopting them today requires a careful cost-benefit analysis. First some background. RSA is an asymmetric public-key scheme, and relies on generating private keys which are the product of distinct prime numbers (typically two). The size of the resulting product, called the modulus n, is usually expressed in bit length and forms the key size. Historically RSA key sizes used to be a couple of hundred bits, then 512 bits settled as a commonly used size. With better understanding of RSA security levels, the common key size evolved into 768, 1024, and later 2048. Today s recommendations (see keylength.com) suggest that 2048 is on the weak side for long-term keys (5+ years), so there has been a trend to jump to 4096. The performance of RSA private-key operations starts to suffer at 4096, and the bandwidth requirements is causing issues in some protocols. Today 2048 and 4096 are the most common choices. My preference for non-2048/4096 RSA key sizes is based on the simple and na ve observation that if I would build a RSA key cracker, there is some likelihood that I would need to optimize the implementation for a particular key size in order to get good performance. Since 2048 and 4096 are dominant today, and 1024 were dominent some years ago, it may be feasible to build optimized versions for these three key sizes. My observation is a conservative decision based on speculation, and speculation on several levels. First I assume that there is an attack on RSA that we don t know about. Then I assume that this attack is not as efficient for some key sizes than others, either on a theoretical level, at implementation level (optimized libraries for certain characteristics), or at an economic/human level (decision to focus on common key sizes). Then I assume that by avoiding the efficient key sizes I can increase the difficulty to a sufficient level. Before analyzing whether those assumptions even remotely may make sense, it is useful to understand what is lost by selecting uncommon key sizes. This is to understand the cost of the trade-off. A significant burden would be if implementations didn t allow selecting unusual key sizes. In my experience, enough common applications support uncommon key sizes, for example GnuPG, OpenSSL, OpenSSH, FireFox, and Chrome. Some applications limit the permitted choices; this appears to be rare, but I have encountered it once. Some environments also restrict permitted choices, for example I have experienced that LetsEncrypt has introduced a requirement for RSA key sizes to be a multiples of 8. I noticed this since I chose a RSA key size of 3925 for my blog and received a certificate from LetsEncrypt in December 2015 however during renewal in 2016 it lead to an error message about the RSA key size. Some commercial CAs that I have used before restrict the RSA key size to one of 1024, 2048 or 4096 only. Some smart-cards also restrict the key sizes, sadly the YubiKey has this limitation. So it is not always possible, but possible often enough for me to be worthwhile. Another cost is that RSA signature operations are slowed down. This is because the exponentiation function is faster than multiplication, and if the bit pattern of the RSA key is a 1 followed by several 0 s, it is quicker to compute. I have not done benchmarks, but I have not experienced that this is a practical problem for me. I don t notice RSA operations in the flurry of all of other operations (network, IO) that is usually involved in my daily life. Deploying this on a large scale may have effects, of course, so benchmarks would be interesting. Back to the speculation that leads me to this choice. The first assumption is that there is an attack on RSA that we don t know about. In my mind, until there are proofs that the currently known attacks (GNFS-based attacks) are the best that can be found, or at least some heuristic argument that we can t do better than the current attacks, the probability for an unknown RSA attack is therefor, as strange as it may sound, 100%. The second assumption is that the unknown attack(s) are not as efficient for some key sizes than others. That statement can also be expressed like this: the cost to mount the attack is higher for some key sizes compared to others. At the implementation level, it seems reasonable to assume that implementing a RSA cracker for arbitrary key sizes could be more difficult and costlier than focusing on particular key sizes. Focusing on some key sizes allows optimization and less complex code. At the mathematical level, the assumption that the attack would be costlier for certain types of RSA key sizes appears dubious. It depends on the kind of algorithm the unknown attack is. For something similar to GNFS attacks, I believe the same algorithm applies equally for a RSA key size of 2048, 2730 and 4096 and that the running time depends mostly on the key size. Other algorithms that could crack RSA, such as some approximation algorithms, does not seem likely to be thwarted by using non-standard RSA key sizes either. I am not a mathematician though. At the economical or human level, it seems reasonable to say that if you can crack 95% of all keys out there (sizes 1024, 2048, 4096) then that is good enough and cracking the last 5% is just diminishing returns of the investment. Here I am making up the 95% number. Currently, I would guess that more than 95% of all RSA key sizes on the Internet are 1024, 2048 or 4096 though. So this aspect holds as long as people behave as they have done. The final assumption is that by using non-standard key sizes I raise the bar sufficiently high to make an attack impossible. To be honest, this scenario appears unlikely. However it might increase the cost somewhat, by a factor or two or five. Which might make someone target a lower hanging fruit instead. Putting my argument together, I have 1) identified some downsides of using non-standard RSA Key sizes and discussed their costs and implications, and 2) mentioned some speculative upsides of using non-standard key sizes. I am not aware of any argument that the odds of my speculation is 0% likely to be true. It appears there is some remote chance, higher than 0%, that my speculation is true. Therefor, my personal conservative approach is to hedge against this unlikely, but still possible, attack scenario by paying the moderate cost to use non-standard RSA key sizes. Of course, the QA engineer in me also likes to break things by not doing what everyone else does, so I end this with an ObXKCD.

Norbert Preining: Debian/TeX Live 2016.20161103-1

This month s update falls onto a national holiday in Japan. My recent start as a normal company employee in Japan doesn t leave me enough time during normal days to work on Debian, so things have to wait for holidays. There have been a few notable changes in the current packages, and above all I wanted to fix an RC bug and on the way fixed also several other (sometimes rather old) bugs.
texlive2016-debian From the list of new packages I want to pick apxproof: I have written something myself for one of my rather long papers (with proofs about 60pp), where at times I had to factor out the proofs into an appendix. I did this my own way, but I would have preferred to have a nice package! Another interesting change is the upstream merge of collection-mathextra (which translated to the Debian package texlive-math-extra) and collection-science (Debian: texlive-science) into a new collection collection-mathscience. Since introducing new packages and phasing out old ones is generally a pain in Debian, I decided to digress from the upstream naming convention and use texlive-science for the new collection-mathscience. In the end Mathematics is the most important science of all Finally also a word about removals: Several ConTeXt packages have been removed due to the fact that they are outdated. These removals will find their way in an update of the Debian ConTeXt package in near future. The TeX Live packages lost voss-mathmode, which was retracted by the author due to various reasons. He is working on an updated version that will hopeful reappear in both TeX Live and Debian in near future. Well, that s it for now. Here now the full list with links. Enjoy. New packages apxproof, bangorexam, biblatex-gb7714-2015, biblatex-lni, biblatex-sbl, context-cmscbf, context-cmttbf, context-inifile, context-layout, delimset, latex2nemeth, latexbangla, latex-papersize, ling-macros, notex-bst, platex-tools, testidx, uppunctlm, wtref, xcolor-material. Removed packages voss-mathmode. Updated packages apa6, autoaligne, babel-german, biblatex-abnt, biblatex-anonymous, biblatex-apa, biblatex-manuscripts-philology, biblatex-nature, biblatex-realauthor, bibtex, bidi, boondox, bxcjkjatype, chickenize, churchslavonic, cjk-gs-integrate, context-filter, cooking-units, ctex, denisbdoc, dvips, europasscv, fixme, glossaries, gzt, handout, imakeidx, ipaex-type1, jsclasses, jslectureplanner, kpathsea, l3build, l3experimental, l3kernel, l3packages, latexindent, latexmk, listofitems, luatexja, marginnote, mcf2graph, minted, multirow, nameauth, newpx, newtx, noto, nucleardata, optidef, overlays, pdflatexpicscale, pst-eucl, reledmac, repere, scanpages, semantic-markup, tableaux, tcolorbox, tetex, texlive-scripts, ticket, todonotes, tracklang, tudscr, turabian-formatting, updmap-map, uspace, visualtikz, xassoccnt, xecjk, yathesis.

2 November 2016

Rapha&#235;l Hertzog: My Free Software Activities in October 2016

My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donors (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me. Debian LTS Last month I started to work on tiff3 but had not enough time to complete an update, it turns out the issues were hairy enough that nobody else picked up the package. So this month I started again with tiff3 and tiff and I ended up spending my 13h on those two packages. I filed bugs for issues that were not yet reported to the BTS (#842361 for CVE-2016-5652, #842046 for CVE-2016-5319/CVE-2016-3633/CVE-2015-8668). I marked many CVE as not affecting tiff3 as this source package does not ship the tools (the tiff source package does). Since upstream decided to drop many tools instead of fixing the corresponding security issues, I opted to remove the tools as well. Before doing this, I looked up reverse dependencies of libtiff-tools to ensure that none of the tools removed are used by other packages (the maintainer seems to agree too). I backported upstream patches for CVE-2016-6223 and CVE-2016-5652. But the bulk of the time, I spent on CVE-2014-8128, CVE-2015-7554 and CVE-2016-5318. I believe they are all variants of the same problem and upstream seems to agree since he opened a sort of meta-bug to track them. I took inspiration from a patch suggested in ticket #2499 and generalized it a bit by trying to add the tag data for all tags manipulated by the various tools. It was a tiresome process as there are many tags used in multiple places. But in the end, it works as expected. I can no longer reproduce any of the segfaults with the problematic files. I asked for review/test on the mailing list but did not get much feedback. I m going to upload the updated packages soon. Distro Tracker I noticed a sudden raise in the number of email addresses being automatically unsubscribed from the Debian Package Tracker and I got a few request of bounces. It turns out the BTS has been relaying lots of spam with executables files and those are bounced by Google (and not silently discarded). This is all very unfortunate the spam flood is unlikely to stop soon and I can t expect Google to change either, so I had little choice except trying to make the bounce handler smarter. That s what I did: I have a list of regular expression that will discard a bounce. In other words, once matched the bounce won t count towards the limit that triggers the automatic unsubscription. Misc Debian work Bugs filed. In #839403, I suggest the possibility to set the default pin priority for a source in the sources.list file directly. In #840436 I ask the selenium-firefoxdriver maintainer to do what is required to get this non-free package auto-built. Packaging. I sponsored puppet-lint 2.0.2-0.1 and I reviewed the rozofs package (wihch I just sponsored into experimental for a start). Publicity. I m maintaining the Debian account on Twitter and Facebook. I have been using twitterfeed.com up to now but it s closing down. I followed their recommendations and switched to dlvr.it to automatically post entries out of the micronews.debian.org feed. In #841165, I reported that the chroots created by sbuild-createchroot are lacking the usual IPv6 entries created by netbase. In #841503, I report a very common cryptsetup upgrade failure that I saw multiple times (both in Debian and in Kali). Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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1 November 2016

Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in October 2016

FTP assistant This month I caught up from last month and marked 317 packages for accept and rejected 23 packages. I also sent 5 emails to maintainers asking questions. Debian LTS This was my twenty-eighth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian. This month my all in all workload has been 13h. During that time I did uploads of The second upload of bind was an embargoed one. Other stuff I uploaded a new version of greylistd and fixed RC bug #837501. A new version of highlight.js fixed RC bug #830189. With a new upstream version of chktex I could close bugs #782342, #782343 and #819885. I also uploaded the new package node-random-bytes and new upstream versions of alljoyn-core-1604 and duktape Finally, after about 4 years, I managed to upload entropybroker and instantly had to deal with #840018, #840019 and #840020. One cannot overemphasize the importance of our QA stuff! I also uploaded a new version of libctl to solve the -fPIC issue but was asked short time after to revert that again :-(. As already mentioned some days ago I adopted libmatthew-java. At that time about 956 package were orphaned and I asked everybody to adopt one of these packages. Unfortunately now there are 982 package orphaned. I guess I have to clear up a misunderstanding. You should adopt those packages and not oprhan more of them!

31 October 2016

Steve McIntyre: Twenty years...

So, it's now been twenty years since I became a Debian Developer. I couldn't remember the exact date I signed up, but I decided to do some forensics to find out. First, I can check on the dates on my first Debian system, as I've kept it running as a Debian system ever since! 
jack:~$ ls -alt /etc
...
-rw-r--r--   1 root   root     6932 Feb 10  1997 pine.conf.old
-rw-r--r--   1 root   root     6907 Dec 29  1996 pine.conf.old2
-rw-r--r--   1 root   root    76739 Dec  7  1996 mailcap.old
-rw-r--r--   1 root   root     1225 Oct 20  1996 fstab.old
jack:~$
I know that I did my first Debian installation in late October 1996, migrating over from my existing Slackware installation with the help of my friend Jon who was already a DD. That took an entire weekend and it was painful, so much so that several times that weekend I very nearly bailed and went back. But, I stuck with it and after a few more days I decided I was happier with Debian than with the broken old Slackware system I'd been using. That last file (fstab.old) is the old fstab file from the Slackware system, backed up just before I made the switch. I was already a software developer at the time, so of course the first thing I wanted to do once I was happy with Debian was to become a DD and take over the Debian maintenance of mikmod, the module player I was working on at the time. So, I mailed Bruce to ask for an account (there was none of this NM concept back then!) and I think he replied the next day. Unfortunately, I don't have the email in my archives any more due to a disk crash back in the dim and distant past. But I can see that the first PGP key I generated for the sake of joining Debian dates from October 30th 1996 which gives me a date of 31st October 1996 for joining Debian. Twenty years, wow... Since then, I've done lots in the project. I'm lucky enough to been to 11 DebConfs, hosted all around the world. I'm massively proud to have been voted DPL for two of those twenty years. I've worked on a huge number of different things in Debian, from the audio applications I started with to the installer (yay, how things come back to bite you!), from low-level CD and DVD tools (and making our CD images!) to a wiki engine written in python. I've worked hard to help make the best Operating System on the planet, both for my own sake and the sake of our users. Debian has been both excellent fun and occasionally a huge cause of stress in my life for the last 20 years, but despite the latter I wouldn't go back and change anything. Why? Through Debian, I've made some great friends: in Cambridge, in the UK, in Europe, on every continent. Thanks to you all, and here's to (hopefully) many years to come!

Chris Lamb: Free software activities in October 2016

Here is my monthly update covering what I have been doing in the free software world (previously):

Debian & Reproducible builds

Whilst anyone can inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, most GNU/Linux distributions provide binary (or "compiled") packages to end users. The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to allow verification that no flaws have been introduced either maliciously and accidentally during this compilation process by promising identical binary packages are always generated from a given source.

  • Presented a talk entitled "Reproducible Builds" talk at Software Freedom Kosova, in Prishtina, Republic of Kosovo.

  • I filed my 2,500th bug in the Debian BTS: #840972: golang-google-appengine: accesses the internet during build.

  • In order to build packages reproducibly, one not only needs identical sources but also some external and sharable definition of the environment used for a particular build, stipulating such things such as the version numbers of the required build-dependencies. It is not currently clear how to handle these .buildinfo files after the archive software has processed them and how to make them available to the world so I started development on a proof-of-concept server to see what issues arise in practice. It is available at buildinfo.debian.net.

  • Chaired an IRC meeting and ran a poll to determine a regular time .

  • Submitted two design proposals to our wiki page.

  • Improvements to our tests.reproducible-builds.org testing framework:

    • Move regular "Scheduled in..." messages to the #debian-reproducible-changes IRC channel.
    • Use our log_info method instead of manual echo calls.
    • Correct an "all sources packages" "all source packages" typo.
    • Submit .buildinfo files to buildinfo.debian.net.
    • Create GPG key on nodes for buildinfo.debian.net at deploy time, not "lazily".

My work in the Reproducible Builds project was also covered in our weekly reports. (#75, #76, #77 & #78).

I also submitted 14 patches to fix specific reproducibility issues in bio-eagle, cf-python, fastx-toolkit, fpga-icestorm, http-icons, lambda-align, mypy, playitslowly, seabios, stumpwm, sympa, tj3, wims-help & xotcl.
Debian LTS

This month I have been paid to work 13 hours on Debian Long Term Support (LTS). In that time I did the following:
  • Seven days of "frontdesk" duties, triaging CVEs, etc.
  • Issued DLA 647-1 for freeimage correcting an out-of-bounds write vulnerability in the XMP image handling functionality.
  • Issued DLA 649-1 for python-django fixing a possible CSRF protection bypass on sites that use Google Analytics.
  • Issued DLA 654-1 for libxfixes preventing an integer overflow when a malicious client sent INT_MAX as a "length".
  • Issued DLA 662-1 for quagga correcting a programming error where two constants were confused that could cause stack overrun in IPv6 routing code.
  • Issued DLA 688-1 for cairo to prevent a DoS attack where a malicious SVG could generate invalid pointers.
Uploads
  • gunicorn:
    • 19.6.0-7 Set supplementary groups when changing uid, add an example systemd .service file to gunicorn-examples, and expand README.Debian to make it clearer what to do now that /etc/gunicorn.d has been removed.
    • 19.6.0-8 Correct previous supplementary groups patch to be compatible with Python 3.
  • redis:
    • 3:3.2.4-2 Ensure that sentinel's configuration actually writes to a pidfile location so that systemd can detect that the daemon has started.
    • 3:3.2.5-1 New upstream release.
  • libfiu:
    • 0.94-8 Fix FTBFS under Bash due to lack of && in debian/rules.
    • 0.94-9 Ensure the build is reproducible by sorting injected modules.
  • aptfs (2:0.8-2) Minor cosmetic changes.

NMUs
  • libxml-dumper-perl (0.81-1.2) Move away from a unsupported debhelper compat level 4.
  • netatalk (2.2.5-1.1) Drop build-dependency on hardening-includes.

QA uploads
  • anon-proxy (00.05.38+20081230-4) Move to a supported debhelper compatibility level 9.
  • ara (1.0.32) Make the build reproducible.
  • binutils-m68hc1x (1:2.18-8) Make the build reproducible & move to a supported debhelper compatibility level.
  • fracplanet (0.4.0-5) Make the build reproducible.
  • libnss-ldap (265-5) Make the build reproducible.
  • python-uniconvertor (1.1.5-3) Fix an "option release requires an argument" FTBFS. (#839375)
  • ripole (0.2.0+20081101.0215-3) Actually include the ripole binary in package. (#839919) & enable hardening flags.
  • twitter-bootstrap (2.0.2+dfsg-10) Fix incorrect copyright formatting when building under Bash. (#824592)
  • zpaq (1.10-3) Make the build reproducible.
Debian FTP Team

As a Debian FTP assistant I ACCEPTed 147 packages: ace-link, amazon-s2n, avy, basez, bootstrap-vz, bucklespring, camitk, carettah, cf-python, debian-reference, dfcgen-gtk, efivar, entropybroker, fakesleep, gall, game-data-packager, gitano, glare, gnome-panel, gnome-shell-extension-dashtodock, gnome-shell-extension-refreshwifi, gnome-shell-extension-remove-dropdown-arrows, golang-github-gogits-go-gogs-client, golang-github-gucumber-gucumber, golang-github-hlandau-buildinfo, golang-github-hlandau-dexlogconfig, golang-github-hlandau-goutils, golang-github-influxdata-toml, golang-github-jacobsa-crypto, golang-github-kjk-lzma, golang-github-miekg-dns, golang-github-minio-sha256-simd, golang-github-nfnt-resize, golang-github-nicksnyder-go-i18n, golang-github-pointlander-compress, golang-github-pointlander-jetset, golang-github-pointlander-peg, golang-github-rfjakob-eme, golang-github-thecreeper-go-notify, golang-github-twstrike-gotk3adapter, golang-github-unknwon-goconfig, golang-gopkg-dancannon-gorethink.v1, golang-petname, haskell-argon2, haskell-binary-parsers, haskell-bindings-dsl, haskell-deriving-compat, haskell-hackage-security, haskell-hcwiid, haskell-hsopenssl-x509-system, haskell-megaparsec, haskell-mono-traversable-instances, haskell-prim-uniq, haskell-raaz, haskell-readable, haskell-readline, haskell-relational-record, haskell-safe-exceptions, haskell-servant-client, haskell-token-bucket, haskell-zxcvbn-c, irclog2html, ironic-ui, lace, ledger, libdancer2-plugin-passphrase-perl, libdatetime-calendar-julian-perl, libdbix-class-optimisticlocking-perl, libdbix-class-schema-config-perl, libgeo-constants-perl, libgeo-ellipsoids-perl, libgeo-functions-perl, libgeo-inverse-perl, libio-async-loop-mojo-perl, libmojolicious-plugin-assetpack-perl, libmojolicious-plugin-renderfile-perl, libparams-validationcompiler-perl, libspecio-perl, libtest-time-perl, libtest2-plugin-nowarnings-perl, linux, lua-scrypt, mono, mutt-vc-query, neutron, node-ansi-font, node-buffer-equal, node-defaults, node-formatio, node-fs-exists-sync, node-fs.realpath, node-is-buffer, node-jison-lex, node-jju, node-jsonstream, node-kind-of, node-lex-parser, node-lolex, node-loud-rejection, node-random-bytes, node-randombytes, node-regex-not, node-repeat-string, node-samsam, node-set-value, node-source-map-support, node-spdx-correct, node-static-extend, node-test, node-to-object-path, node-type-check, node-typescript, node-unset-value, nutsqlite, opencv, openssl1.0, panoramisk, perl6, pg-rage-terminator, pg8000, plv8, puppet-module-oslo, pymoc, pyramid-jinja2, python-bitbucket-api, python-ceilometermiddleware, python-configshell-fb, python-ewmh, python-gimmik, python-jsbeautifier, python-opcua, python-pyldap, python-s3transfer, python-testing.common.database, python-testing.mysqld, python-testing.postgresql, python-wheezy.template, qspeakers, r-cran-nleqslv, recommonmark, rolo, shim, swift-im, tendermint-go-clist, tongue, uftrace & zaqar-ui.

Antoine Beaupr : My free software activities, October 2016

Debian Long Term Support (LTS) This is my 7th month working on Debian LTS, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian, after a long pause during the summer. I have worked on the following packages and CVEs: I have also helped review work on the following packages:
  • imagemagick: reviewed BenH's work to figure out what was done. unfortunately, I forgot to officially take on the package and Roberto started working on it in the meantime. I nevertheless took time to review Roberto's work and outline possible issues with the original patchset suggested
  • tiff: reviewed Raphael's work on the hairy TIFFTAG_* issues, all the gory details in this email
The work on ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick was particularly intriguing. Looking at the source of those programs makes me wonder why were are still using them at all: it's a tangled mess of C code that is bound to bring up more and more vulnerabilities, time after time. It seems there's always an "Magick" vulnerability waiting to be fixed out there... I somehow hoped that the fork would bring more stability and reliability, but it seems they are suffering from similar issues because, fundamentally, they haven't rewritten ImageMagick... It looks this is something that affects all image programs. The review I have done on the tiff suite give me the same shivering sensation as reviewing the "Magick" code. It feels like all image libraries are poorly implemented and then bound to be exploited somehow... Nevertheless, if I had to use a library of the sort in my software, I would stay away from the "Magick" forks and try something like imlib2 first... Finally, I also did some minor work on the user and developer LTS documentation and some triage work on samba, xen and libass. I also looked at the dreaded CVE-2016-7117 vulnerability in the Linux kernel to verify its impact on wheezy users. I also looked at implementing a --lts flag for dch (see bug #762715). It was difficult to get back to work after such a long pause, but I am happy I was able to contribute a significant number of hours. It's a bit difficult to find work sometimes in LTS-land, even if there's actually always a lot of work to be done. For example, I used to be one of the people doing frontdesk work, but those duties are now assigned until the end of the year, so it's unlikely I will be doing any of that for the forseable future. Similarly, a lot of packages were assigned when I started looking at the available packages. There was an interesting discussion on the internal mailing list regarding unlocking package ownership, because some people had packages locked for weeks, sometimes months, without significant activity. Hopefully that situation will improve after that discussion. Another interesting discussion I participated in is the question of whether the LTS team should be waiting for unstable to be fixed before publishing fixes in oldstable. It seems the consensus right now is that it shouldn't be mandatory to fix issues in unstable before we fix security isssues in oldstable and stable. After all, security support for testing and unstable is limited. But I was happy to learn that working on brand new patches is part of our mandate as part of the LTS work. I did work on such a patch for tar which ended up being adopted by the original reporter, although upstream ended up implementing our recommendation in a better way. It's coincidentally the first time since I start working on LTS that I didn't get the number of requested hours, which means that there are more people working on LTS. That is a good thing, but I am worried it may also mean people are more spread out and less capable of focusing for longer periods of time on more difficult problems. It also means that the team is growing faster than the funding, which is unfortunate: now is a good time as any to remind you to see if you can make your company fund the LTS project if you are still running Debian wheezy.

Other free software work It seems like forever that I did such a report, and while I was on vacation, a lot has happened since the last report.

Monkeysign I have done extensive work on Monkeysign, trying to bring it kicking and screaming in the new world of GnuPG 2.1. This was the objective of the 2.1 release, which collected about two years of work and patches, including arbitrary MUA support (e.g. Thunderbird), config files support, and a release on PyPI. I have had to release about 4 more releases to try and fix the build chain, ship the test suite with the program and have a primitive preferences panel. The 2.2 release also finally features Tor suport! I am also happy to have moved more documentation to Read the docs, part of which I mentionned in in a previous article. The git repositories and issues were also moved to a Gitlab instance which will hopefully improve the collaboration workflow, although we still have issues in streamlining the merge request workflow. All in all, I am happy to be working on Monkeysign, but it has been a frustrating experience. In the last years, I have been maintaining the project largely on my own: although there are about 20 contributors in Monkeysign, I have committed over 90% of the commits in the code. New contributors recently showed up, and I hope this will release some pressure on me being the sole maintainer, but I am not sure how viable the project is.

Funding free software work More and more, I wonder how to sustain my contributions to free software. As a previous article has shown, I work a lot on the computer, even when I am not on a full-time job. Monkeysign has been a significant time drain in the last months, and I have done this work on a completely volunteer basis. I wouldn't mind so much except that there is a lot of work I do on a volunteer basis. This means that I sometimes must prioritize paid consulting work, at the expense of those volunteer projects. While most of my paid work usually revolves around free sofware, the benefits of paid work are not always immediately obvious, as the primary objective is to deliver to the customer, and the community as a whole is somewhat of a side-effect. I have watched with interest joeyh's adventures into crowdfunding which seems to be working pretty well for him. Unfortunately, I cannot claim the incredible (and well-deserved) reputation Joey has, and even if I could, I can't live with 500$ a month. I would love to hear if people would be interested in funding my work in such a way. I am hesitant in launching a crowdfunding campaign because it is difficult to identify what exactly I am working on from one month to the next. Looking back at earlier reports shows that I am all over the place: one month I'll work on a Perl Wiki (Ikiwiki), the next one I'll be hacking at a multimedia home cinema (Kodi). I can hardly think of how to fund those things short of "just give me money to work on anything I feel like", which I can hardly ask for of anyone. Even worse, it feels like the audience here is either friends or colleagues. It would make little sense for me to seek funding from those people: colleagues have the same funding problems I do, and I don't want to empoverish my friends... So far I have taken the approach of trying to get funding for work I am doing, bit by bit. For example, I have recently been told that LWN actually pays for contributed articles and have started running articles by them before publishing them here. This is looking good: they will publish an article I wrote about the Omnia router I have recently received. I give them exclusive rights on the article for two weeks, but I otherwise retain full ownership over the article and will publish them after the exclusive period here. Hopefully, I will be able to find more such projects that pays for the work I do on a day to day basis.

Open Street Map editing I have ramped up my OpenStreetMap contributions, having (temporarily) moved to a different location. There are lots of things to map here: trails, gaz stations and lots of other things are missing from the map. Sometimes the effort looks a bit ridiculous, reminding me of my early days of editing OSM. I have registered to OSM Live, a project to fund OSM editors that, I must admit, doesn't help much with funding my work: with the hundreds of edits I did in October, I received the equivalent of 1.80$CAD in Bitcoins. This may be the lowest hourly salary I have ever received, probably going at a rate of 10 per hour! Still, it's interesting to be able to point people to the project if someone wants to contribute to OSM mappers. But mappers should have no illusions about getting a decent salary from this effort, I am sorry to say.

Bounties I feel this is similar to the "bounty" model used by the Borg project: I claimed around $80USD in that project for what probably amounts to tens of hours of work, yet another salary that would qualify as "poor". Another example is a feature I would like to implement in Borg: support for protocols other than SSH. There is currently no bounty on this, but a similar feature, S3 support has one of the largest bounties Borg has ever seen: $225USD. And the claimant for the bounty hasn't actually implemented the feature, instead backing up to S3, the patch (to a third-party tool) actually enables support for Amazon Cloud Drive, a completely different API. Even at $225, I wouldn't be able to complete any of those features and get a decent salary. As well explained by the Snowdrift reviews, bounties just don't work at all... The ludicrous 10% fee charged by Bountysource made sure I would never do business with them ever again anyways.

Other work There are probably more things I did recently, but I am having difficulty keeping track of the last 5 months of on and off work, so you will forgive that I am not as exhaustive as I usually am.

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