Dr Justin Lehmiller s blog post comparing his official (academic style) and real biographies is interesting [1]. Also the rest of his blog is interesting too, he works at the Kinsey Institute so you know he s good. Media Matters has an interesting article on the spread of vaccine misinformation on Instagram [2]. John Goerzen wrote a long post summarising some of the many ways of having a decentralised Internet [3]. One problem he didn t address is how to choose between them, I could spend months of work to setup a fraction of those services. Erasmo Acosta wrote an interesting medium article Could Something as Pedestrian as the Mitochondria Unlock the Mystery of the Great Silence? [4]. I don t know enough about biology to determine how plausible this is. But it is a worry, I hope that humans will meet extra-terrestrial intelligences at some future time. Meredith Haggerty wrote an insightful Medium article about the love vs money aspects of romantic comedies [5]. Changes in viewer demographics would be one factor that makes lead actors in romantic movies significantly less wealthy in recent times. Informative article about ZIP compression and the history of compression in general [6]. Vice has an insightful article about one way of taking over SMS access of phones without affecting voice call or data access [7]. With this method the victom won t notice that they are having their sservice interfered with until it s way too late. They also explain the chain of problems in the US telecommunications industry that led to this. I wonder what s happening in this regard in other parts of the world. The clown code of ethics (8 Commandments) is interesting [8]. Sam Hartman wrote an insightful blog post about the problems with RMS and how to deal with him [9]. Also Sam Whitton has an interesting take on this [10]. Another insightful post is by Selam G about RMS long history of bad behavior and the way universities are run [11]. Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article for Locus about free markets with a focus on DRM on audio books [12]. We need legislative changes to fix this!

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/yevmmyga
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/ydnaoluj
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/yb2bjmtm
• [4] https://medium.com/predict/bd635102b0da
• [5] https://tinyurl.com/qxkppsu
• [6] https://www.hanshq.net/zip2.html
• [7] https://tinyurl.com/yznxhodl
• [8] https://mycoai.com/code-of-ethics/
• [9] https://hartmans.livejournal.com/100652.html
• [10] https://spwhitton.name//blog/entry/rmsopenletter/
• [11] https://tinyurl.com/yh36dkop
• [12] https://locusmag.com/2021/03/cory-doctorow-free-markets/

Review: Beyond Shame, by Kit Rocha

Series:	Beyond #1
Publisher:	Kit Rocha
Copyright:	December 2013
ASIN:	B00GIA4GN8
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	270

I read this book as part of the Beyond Series Bundle (Books 1-3), which is what the sidebar information is for. Noelle is a child of Eden, the rich and technologically powerful city of a post-apocalyptic world. As the daughter of a councilman, she had everything she wanted except the opportunity to feel. Eden's religious elite embrace a doctrine of strict Puritanism: Even hugging one's children was frowned upon, let alone anything related to sex. Noelle was too rebellious to settle for that, which is why this book opens with her banished from Eden, ejected into Sector Four. The sectors are the city slums, full of gangs and degenerates and violence, only a slight step up from the horrific farming communes. Luckily for her, she literally stumbles into one of the lieutenants of the O'Kane gang, who are just as violent as their reputations but who have surprising sympathy for a helpless city girl. My shorthand distinction between romance and erotica is that romance mixes some sex into the plot and erotica mixes some plot into the sex. Beyond Shame is erotica, specifically BDSM erotica. The forbidden sensations that Noelle got kicked out of Eden for pursuing run strongly towards humiliation, which is tangled up in the shame she was taught to feel about anything sexual. There is a bit of a plot surrounding the O'Kanes who take her in, their leader, some political skulduggery that eventually involves people she knows, and some inter-sector gang warfare, but it's quite forgettable (and indeed I've already forgotten most of it). The point of the story is Noelle navigating a relationship with Jasper (among others) that involves a lot of very graphic sex. I was of two minds about reviewing this. Erotica is tricky to review, since to an extent it's not trying to do what most books are doing. The point is less to tell a coherent story (although that can be a bonus) than it is to turn the reader on, and what turns the reader on is absurdly personal and unpredictable. Erotica is arguably more usefully marked with story codes (which in this case would be something like MF, MMFF, FF, Mdom, Fdom, bd, ds, rom, cons, exhib, humil, tattoos) so that the reader has an idea whether the scenarios in the story are the sort of thing they find hot. This is particularly true of BDSM erotica, since the point is arousal from situations that wouldn't work or might be downright horrifying in a different sort of book. Often the forbidden or taboo nature of the scene is why it's erotic. For example, in another genre I would complain about the exaggerated and quite sexist gender roles, where all the men are hulking cage fighters who want to control the women, but in male-dominant BDSM erotica that's literally the point. As you can tell, I wrote a review anyway, primarily because of how I came to read this book. Kit Rocha (which is a pseudonym for the writing team of Donna Herren and Bree Bridges) recently published Deal with the Devil, a book about mercenary librarians in a post-apocalyptic future. Like every right-thinking person, I immediately wanted to read a book about mercenary librarians, but discovered that it was set in an existing universe. I hate not starting at the beginning of things, so even though there was probably no need to read the earlier books first, I figured out Beyond Shame was the first in this universe and the bundle of the first three books was only $2. If any of you are immediately hooked by mercenary librarians but are back-story completionists, now you know what you'll be getting into. That said, there are a few notable things about this book other than it has a lot of sex. The pivot of the romantic relationship was more interesting and subtle than most erotica. Noelle desperately wants a man to do all sorts of forbidden things to her, but she starts the book unable to explain or analyze why she wants what she wants, and both Jasper and the story are uncomfortable with that and unwilling to leave it alone. Noelle builds up a more coherent theory of herself over the course of the book, and while it's one that's obviously designed to enable lots of erotic scenes, it's not a bad bit of character development. Even better is Lex, the partner (sort of) of the leader of the O'Kane gang and by far the best character in the book. She takes Noelle under her wing from the start, and while that relationship is sexualized like nearly everything in this book, it also turns into an interesting female friendship that I would have also enjoyed in a different genre. I liked Lex a lot, and the fact she's the protagonist of the next book might keep me reading. Beyond Shame also has a lot more female gaze descriptions of the men than is often the case in male-dominant BDSM. The eye candy is fairly evenly distributed, although the gender roles are very much not. It even passes the Bechdel test, although it is still erotica and nearly all the conversations end up being about sex partners or sex eventually. I was less fond of the fact that the men are all dangerous and violent and the O'Kane leader frequently acts like a controlling, abusive psychopath. A lot of that was probably the BDSM setup, but it was not my thing. Be warned that this is the sort of book in which one of the (arguably) good guys tortures someone to death (albeit off camera). Recommendations are next to impossible for erotica, so I won't try to give one. If you want to read the mercenary librarian novel and are dubious about this one, it sounds like (although I can't confirm) that it's a bit more on the romance end of things and involves a lot fewer group orgies. Having read this book, I suspect it was entirely unnecessary to have done so for back-story. If you are looking for male-dominant BDSM, Beyond Shame is competently written, has a more thoughtful story than most, and has a female friendship that I fully enjoyed, which may raise it above the pack. Rating: 6 out of 10

I ve finally found the time to improve the GUI of my pet project: cme (aka Config::Model). Several years ago, I stumbled on a usability problem on the GUI. Some configuration (like OpenSsh or Systemd) feature a lot of configuration parameters. Which means that the GUI displays all these parameters, so finding a specfic parameter might be challenging:

To workaround this problem, I ve added a Filter widget in 2018 which did more or less the job, but it suffered from several bugs which made its behavior confusing. This is now fixed. The Filter widget is now working in a more consistent way. In the example below, I ve typed IdentityFile (1) in the Filter widget to show the identityFile used for various hosts (2):

Which is quite good, but some hosts use the default identity file so no value show up in the GUI. You can then click on hide empty value checkbox to show only the hosts that use a specific identity file:

I hope that this new behavior of the Filter box will make this project more useful. The improved GUI was released with Config::Model::TkUI 1.374. This new version is available on CPAN and on Debian/experimental). It will be released on Debian/unstable once the next Debian version is out. All the best

I previously wrote about getting a Brother MFC-9120CN multifunction printer/scanner to print on Linux [1]. I had also got it scanning which I didn t blog about.

found USB scanner (vendor=0x04f9, product=0x021d) at libusb:003:002

I recently upgraded that Linux system to Debian/Testing (which will soon be released as Debian/Bullseye) and scanning broke. The command sane-find-scanner would find the USB connected scanner (with the above output), but scanimage -L didn t. It turned out that I had to edit /etc/sane.d/dll.d/hplip which had a single uncommented line of hpaio and replace that with brother3 to make SANE load the driver /usr/lib64/sane/libsane-brother3.so from the brscan3 package (which Brother provided from their web site years ago). I have the following script to do the scanning (which can run as non-root):

#!/bin/bash
set -e
if [ "$1" == "" ]; then
  echo "specify output filename"
  exit 1
fi
TMP=$(mktemp)
scanimage > $TMP
convert $TMP $1
rm $TMP

Final Note This blog post doesn t describe everything that needs to be done to setup a scanner, I already had part of it setup from 10 years ago. But for anyone who finds this after having trouble, /etc/sane.d/dll.d is one place you should look for important configuration (especially if sane-find-scanner works and scanimage -L fails). Also the Brother drivers are handy to have although I apparently had it working in the past with the hpaio driver from HP (the Brother device emulates a HP device).

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/05/28/brother-mfc-9120cn-color-laser-printer/

Review: Learning React, by Alex Banks & Eve Porcello

Publisher:	O'Reilly
Copyright:	June 2020
ISBN:	1-4920-5172-1
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	287

My first JavaScript project was a React frontend to a REST service. As part of that project, I read two books: JavaScript: The Definitive Guide to learn the language foundation and this book to learn the framework on top of it. This was an unintentional experiment in the ways programming books can approach the topic. I commented in my review of JavaScript: the Definitive Guide that it takes the reference manual approach to the language. Learning React is the exact opposite. It's goal-driven, example-heavy, and has a problem and solution structure. The authors present a sample application, describe some desired new feature or deficiency in it, and then introduce the specific React technique that solves that problem. There is some rewriting of previous examples using more sophisticated techniques, but most chapters introduce new toy applications along with new parts of the React framework. The best part of this book is its narrative momentum, so I think the authors were successful at their primary goal. The first eight chapters of the book (more on the rest of the book in a moment) feel like a whirlwind tour where one concept flows naturally into the next and one's questions while reading about one technique are often answered in the next section. I thought the authors tried too hard in places and overdid the enthusiasm, but it's very readable in a way that I think may appeal to people who normally find programming books dry. Learning React is also firm and definitive about the correct way to use React, which may appeal to readers who only want to learn the preferred way of using the framework. (For example, React class components are mentioned briefly, mostly to tell the reader not to use them, and the rest of the book only uses functional components.) I had two major problems with this book, however. The first is that this breezy, narrative style turns out to be awful when one tries to use it as a reference. I read through most of this book with both enjoyment and curiosity, sat down to write a React component, and immediately struggled to locate the information I needed. Everything felt logically connected when I was focusing on the problems the authors introduced, but as soon as I started from my own problem, the structure of the book fell apart. I had to page through chapters to locate some nugget buried in the text, or re-read sections of the book to piece together which motivating problem my code was most similar to. It was a frustrating experience. This may be a matter of learning style, since this is why I prefer programming books with a reference structure. But be warned that I can't recommend this book as a reference while you're programming, nor does it prepare you to use the official React documentation as a reference. The second problem is less explicable and less defensible. I don't know what happened with O'Reilly's copy-editing for this book, but the code snippets are a train wreck. The Amazon reviews are full of people complaining about typos, syntax errors, omitted code, and glaring logical flaws, and they are entirely correct. It's so bad that I was left wondering if a very early, untested draft of the examples was somehow substituted into the book at the last minute by mistake. I'm not the sort of person who normally types code in from a book, so I don't care about a few typos or obvious misprints as long as the general shape is correct. The general shape was not correct. In a few places, the code is so completely wrong and incomplete that even combined with the surrounding text I was unable to figure out what it was supposed to be. It's possible this is fixed in a later printing (I read the June 2020 printing of the second edition), but otherwise beware. The authors do include a link to a GitHub repository of the code samples, which are significantly different than what's printed in the book, but that repository is incomplete; many of the later chapter examples are only links to JavaScript web sandboxes, which bodes poorly for the longevity of the example code. And then there's chapter nine of this book, which I found entirely baffling. This is a direct quote from the start of the chapter:

This is the least important chapter in this book. At least, that's what we've been told by the React team. They didn't specifically say, "this is the least important chapter, don't write it." They've only issued a series of tweets warning educators and evangelists that much of their work in this area will very soon be outdated. All of this will change.

This chapter is on suspense and error boundaries, with a brief mention of Fiber. I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with this material as a reader who is new to React (and thus presumably the target audience). Should I use this feature? When? Why is this material in the book at all when it's so laden with weird stream-of-consciousness disclaimers? It's a thoroughly odd editorial choice. The testing chapter was similarly disappointing in that it didn't answer any of my concrete questions about testing. My instinct with testing UIs is to break out Selenium and do integration testing with its backend, but the authors are huge fans of unit testing of React applications. Great, I thought, this should be interesting; unit testing seems like a poor fit for UI code because of how artificial the test construction is, but maybe I'm missing some subtlety. Convince me! And then the authors... didn't even attempt to convince me. They just asserted unit testing is great and explained how to write trivial unit tests that serve no useful purpose in a real application. End of chapter. Sigh. I'm not sure what to say about this book. I feel like it has so many serious problems that I should warn everyone away from it, and yet the narrative introduction to React was truly fun to read and got me excited about writing React code. Even though the book largely fell apart as a reference, I still managed to write a working application using it as my primary reference, so it's not all bad. If you like the problem and solution style and want a highly conversational and informal tone (that errs on the side of weird breeziness), this may still be the book for you. Just be aware that the code examples are a trash fire, so if you learn from examples, you're going to have to chase them down via the GitHub repository and hope that they still exist (or get a later edition of the book where this problem has hopefully been corrected). Rating: 6 out of 10

Time flies. Back in 2008, I wrote a game clock. Since then, what was first called "chess clock" was renamed to pychessclock and then Gameclock (2008). It shipped with Debian 6 squeeze (2011), 7 wheezy (4.0, 2013, with a new UI), 8 jessie (5.0, 2015, with a code cleanup, translation, go timers), 9 stretch (2017), and 10 buster (2019), phew! Eight years in Debian over 4 releases, not bad! But alas, Debian 11 bullseye (2021) won't ship with Gameclock because both Python 2 and GTK 2 were removed from Debian. I lack the time, interest, and energy to port this program. Even if I could find the time, everyone is on their phone nowadays. So finding the right toolkit would require some serious thinking about how to make a portable program that can run on Linux and Android. I care less about Mac, iOS, and Windows, but, interestingly, it feels it wouldn't be much harder to cover those as well if I hit both Linux and Android (which is already hard enough, paradoxically). (And before you ask, no, Java is not an option for me thanks. If I switch to anything else than Python, it would be Golang or Rust. And I did look at some toolkit options a few years ago, was excited by none.) So there you have it: that is how software dies, I guess. Alternatives include:

• Chessclock - really old Ruby which made Gameclock rename
• Ghronos - also really old Java app
• Lichess - has a chess clock built into the app
• Otter - if you squint a little

PS: Monkeysign also suffered the same fate, for what that's worth. Alternatives include caff, GNOME Keysign, and pius. Note that this does not affect the larger Monkeysphere project, which will ship with Debian bullseye.

Back in 2005 we had Debconf in Helsinki. Earlier in the year I'd ended up invited to Canonical's Ubuntu Down Under event in Sydney, and one of the things we'd tried to design was a reasonable graphical boot environment that could also display status messages. The design constraints were awkward - we wanted it to be entirely in userland (so we didn't need to carry kernel patches), and we didn't want to rely on vesafb[1] (because at the time we needed to reinitialise graphics hardware from userland on suspend/resume[2], and vesa was not super compatible with that). Nothing currently met our requirements, but by the time we'd got to Helsinki there was a general understanding that Paul Sladen was going to implement this.

The Helsinki Debconf ended being an extremely strange event, involving me having to explain to Mark Shuttleworth what the physics of a bomb exploding on a bus were, many people being traumatised by the whole sauna situation, and the whole unfortunate water balloon incident, but it also involved Sladen spending a bunch of time trying to produce an SVG of a London bus as a D-Bus logo and not really writing our hypothetical userland bootsplash program, so on the last night, fueled by Koff that we'd bought by just collecting all the discarded empty bottles and returning them for the deposits, I started writing one.

I knew that Debian was already using graphics mode for installation despite having a textual installer, because they needed to deal with more complex fonts than VGA could manage. Digging into the code, I found that it used BOGL - a graphics library that made use of the VGA framebuffer to draw things. VGA had a pre-allocated memory range for the framebuffer[3], which meant the firmware probably wouldn't map anything else there any hitting those addresses probably wouldn't break anything. This seemed safe.

A few hours later, I had some code that could use BOGL to print status messages to the screen of a machine booted with vga16fb. I woke up some time later, somehow found myself in an airport, and while sitting at the departure gate[4] I spent a while staring at VGA documentation and worked out which magical calls I needed to make to have it behave roughly like a linear framebuffer. Shortly before I got on my flight back to the UK, I had something that could also draw a graphical picture.

Usplash shipped shortly afterwards. We hit various issues - vga16fb produced a 640x480 mode, and some laptops were not inclined to do that without a BIOS call first. 640x400 worked basically everywhere, but meant we had to redraw the art because circles don't work the same way if you change the resolution. My brief "UBUNTU BETA" artwork that was me literally writing "UBUNTU BETA" on an HP TC1100 shortly after I'd got the Wacom screen working did not go down well, and thankfully we had better artwork before release.

But 16 colours is somewhat limiting. SVGALib offered a way to get more colours and better resolution in userland, retaining our prerequisites. Unfortunately it relied on VM86, which doesn't exist in 64-bit mode on Intel systems. I ended up hacking the X.org x86emu into a thunk library that exposed the same API as LRMI, so we could run it without needing VM86. Shockingly, it worked - we had support for 256 colour bootsplashes in any supported resolution on 64 bit systems as well as 32 bit ones.

But by now it was obvious that the future was having the kernel manage graphics support, both in terms of native programming and in supporting suspend/resume. Plymouth is much more fully featured than Usplash ever was, but relies on functionality that simply didn't exist when we started this adventure. There's certainly an argument that we'd have been better off making reasonable kernel modesetting support happen faster, but at this point I had literally no idea how to write decent kernel code and everyone should be happy I kept this to userland.

Anyway. The moral of all of this is that sometimes history works out such that you write some software that a huge number of people run without any idea of who you are, and also that this can happen without you having any fucking idea what you're doing.

Write code. Do crimes.

[1] vesafb relied on either the bootloader or the early stage kernel performing a VBE call to set a mode, and then just drawing directly into that framebuffer. When we were doing GPU reinitialisation in userland we couldn't guarantee that we'd run before the kernel tried to draw stuff into that framebuffer, and there was a risk that that was mapped to something dangerous if the GPU hadn't been reprogrammed into the same state. It turns out that having GPU modesetting in the kernel is a Good Thing.

[2] ACPI didn't guarantee that the firmware would reinitialise the graphics hardware, and as a result most machines didn't. At this point Linux didn't have native support for initialising most graphics hardware, so we fell back to doing it from userland. VBEtool was a terrible hack I wrote to try to re-execute the system's graphics hardware through a range of mechanisms, and it worked in a surprising number of cases.

[3] As long as you were willing to deal with 640x480 in 16 colours

[4] Helsinki-Vantaan had astonishingly comfortable seating for time

comments

I m playing with a HP Proliant ML350P Gen8 server (part num 646676-011). For HP servers ML means tower (see the ProLiant Wikipedia page for more details [1]). For HP servers the generation indicates how old the server is, Gen8 was announced in 2012 and Gen10 seems to be the current generation. Debian Packages from HP

wget -O /usr/local/hpePublicKey2048_key1.pub https://downloads.linux.hpe.com/SDR/hpePublicKey2048_key1.pub
echo "# HP RAID" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/local/hpePublicKey2048_key1.pub] http://downloads.linux.hpe.com/SDR/downloads/MCP/Debian/ buster/current non-free" >> /etc/apt/sources.list

The above commands will setup the APT repository for Debian/Buster. See the HP Downloads FAQ [2] for more information about their repositories. hponcfg This package contains the hponcfg program that configures ILO (the HP remote management system) from Linux. One noteworthy command is hponcfg -r to reset the ILO, something you should do before selling an old system. ssacli This package contains the ssacli program to configure storage arrays, here are some examples of how to use it:

# list controllers and show slot numbers
ssacli controller all show
# list arrays on controller identified by slot and give array IDs
ssacli controller slot=0 array all show
# show details of one array
ssacli controller slot=0 array A show
# show all disks on one controller
ssacli controller slot=0 physicaldrive all show
# show config of a controller, this gives RAID level etc
ssacli controller slot=0 show config
# delete array B (you can immediately pull the disks from it)
ssacli controller slot=0 array B delete
# create an array type RAID0 with specified drives, do this with one drive per array for BTRFS/ZFS
ssacli controller slot=0 create type=arrayr0 drives=1I:1:1

When a disk is used in JBOD mode just under 33MB will be used at the end of the disk for the RAID metadata. If you have existing disks with a DOS partition table you can put it in a HP array as a JBOD and it will work with all data intact (GPT partition table is more complicated). When all disks are removed from the server the cooling fans run at high speed, this would be annoying if you wanted to have a diskless workstation or server using only external storage. ssaducli This package contains the ssaducli diagnostic utility for storage arrays. The SSD wear gauge report doesn t work for the 2 SSDs I tested it on, maybe it only supports SAS SSDs not SATA SSDs. It doesn t seem to do anything that I need. storcli This package contains both 32bit and 64bit versions of the MegaRAID utility and deletes whichever one doesn t match the installation in the package postinst, so it fails debsums checks etc. The MegaRAID utility is for a different type of RAID controller to the Smart Storage Array (AKA SSA) that the other utilities work with. As an aside it seems that there are multiple types of MegaRAID controller, the management program from the storcli package doesn t work on a Dell server with MegaRAID. They should have made separate 32bit and 64bit versions of this package. Recommendations Here is HP page for downloading firmware updates (including security updates) [3], you have to login first and have a warranty. This is legal but poor service. Dell servers have comparable prices (on the second hand marker) and comparable features but give free firmware updates to everyone. Dell have overall lower quality of Debian packages for supporting utilities, but a wider range of support so generally Dell support seems better in every way. Dell and HP hardware seems of equal quality so overall I think it s best to buy Dell. Suggestions for HP Finding which of the signing keys to use is unreasonably difficult. You should get some HP employees to sign the HP keys used for repositories with their personal keys and then go to LUG meetings and get their personal keys well connected to the web of trust. Then upload the HP keys to the public key repositories. You should also use the same keys for signing all versions of the repositories. Having different keys for the different versions of Debian wastes people s time. Please provide firmware for all users, even if they buy systems second hand. It is in your best interests to have systems used long-term and have them run securely. It is not in your best interests to have older HP servers perform badly. Having all the fans run at maximum speed when power is turned on is a standard server feature. Some servers can throttle the fan when the BIOS is running, it would be nice if HP servers did that. Having ridiculously loud fans until just before GRUB starts is annoying.

• [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProLiant
• [2] http://downloads.linux.hpe.com/SDR/faq.html
• [3] http://downloads.linux.hpe.com/SDR/project/fwpp/

I had a twitter fight few days back with a gentleman and the article is a result of that fight. Sadly, I do not know the name of the gentleman as he goes via a psuedo name and then again I ve not taken permission from him to quote him in either way. So I will just state the observations I was able to make from the conversations we had. As people who read this blog regularly would know, I am and have been against Railway Privatization which is happening in India. And will be sharing some of the case studies from other countries as to how it panned out for them.

UK Railways

How Privatization Fails : Railways

The Above video is by a gentleman called Shaun who basically shared that privatization as far as UK is concerned is nothing but monopolies and while there are complex reasons for the same, the design of the Railways is such that it will always be a monopoly structure. At the most what you can do is have several monopolies but that is all that can happen. The idea of competition just cannot happen. Even the idea that subsidies will be less or/and trains will run on time is far from fact. Both of these facts have been checked and found to be truthful by fullfact.org. It is and argued that UK is small and perhaps it doesn t have the right conditions. It is probably true but still we do deserve to have a glance at the UK railway map.

UK railway map with operators

The above map is copyrighted to Map Marketing where you could see it today . As can be seen above most companies had their own specified areas. Now if you had looked at the facts then you would have seen that UK fares have been higher. In fact, an oldish article from Metro (a UK publication) shares the same. In fact, UK nationalized its railways effectively as many large rail operators were running in red. Even Scotland is set to nationalised back in March 2022. Remember this is a country which hasn t seen inflation go upwards of 5% in nearly a decade. The only outlier was 2011 where they indeed breached the 5% mark. So from this, what we see is Private Gains and Private Gains Public Losses perhaps seem fit. But then maybe we didn t use the right example. Perhaps Japan would be better. They have bullet trains while UK is still thinking about it. (HS2).

Japanese Railway Below is the map of Japanese Railway

Railway map of Japan with private ownership courtesy Wikimedia commons

Japan started privatizing its railway in 1987 and to date it has not been fully privatized. And on top of it, amount as much as 24 trillion of the long-term JNR debt was shouldered by the government at the expense of taxpayers of Japan while also reducing almost 1/4th of it employees. To add to it, while some parts of Japanese Railways did make profits, many of them made profits by doing large-scale non-railway business mostly real estate of land adjacent to railway stations. In many cases, it seems this went all the way up to 60% of the revenue. The most profitable has been the Shinkansen though. And while it has been profitable, it has not been without safety scandals over the years, the biggest in recent years was the 2005 Amagasaki derailment. What was interesting to me was the Aftermath, while the Wikipedia page doesn t share much, I had read at the time and probably could be found how a lot of ordinary people stood up to the companies in a country where it is a known fact that most companies are owned by the Yakuza. And this is a country where people are loyal to their corporation or company no matter what. It is a strange culture to west and also here in India where people change jobs on drop of hat, although nowadays we have record unemployment. So perhaps Japan too does not meet our standard as it doesn t do competition with each other but each is a set monopoly in those regions. Also how much subsidy is there or not is not really transparent.

U.S. Railways Last, but not the least I share the U.S. Railway map. This is provided by A Mr. Tom Alison on reddit on channel maporn. As the thread itself is archived and I do not know the gentleman concerned, nor have taken permission for the map, hence sharing the compressed version

U.S. Railway lines with the different owners

Now the U.S. Railways is and has always been peculiar as unlike the above two the U.S. has always been more of a freight network. Probably, much of it has to do that in the 1960 s when oil was cheap, the U.S. made zillions of roadways and romanticized the road trip and has been doing it ever since. Also the creation of low-cost airlines definitely didn t help the railways to have more passenger services, in fact the opposite. There are and have been smaller services and attempts of privatization in both New Zealand and Australia and both have been failures. Please see papers in that regard. My simple point is this, as can be seen above, there have been various attempts at privatization of railways and most of them have been a mixed bag. The only one which comes close to what we think as good is Japanese but that also used a lot of public debt which we don t know what will happen on next. Also for higher-speed train services like a bullet train or whatever, you need to direct, no hair pen bends. In fact, a good talk on the topic is the TBD podcast which while it talks about hyperloop, the same questions is and would be asked if were to do in India. Another thing to be kept in mind is that the Japanese have been exceptional builders and this is because they have been forced to. They live in a seismically active zone which made Fukushima disaster a reality but at the same time, their buildings are earthquake-resistant. Standard Disclaimer The above is a simplified version of things. I could have added in financial accounts but that again has no set pattern. For e.g. some Railways use accrual, some use cash and some use hybrid. I could have also shared in either the guage or electrification but all have slightly different standards, although uniguage is something that all Railways aspire for and electrification is again something that all Railways want although in many cases it just isn t economically feasible.

Indian Railways Indian Railways itself recently made the move from Cash to Accrual couple of years back. In-between for a couple of years, it was hybrid. The sad part is and was you can now never measure against past performance in the old way because it is so different. Hence, whether the Railways will be making a loss or a profit, we would come to know only much later. Also, most accountants don t know the new system well, so it is gonna take more time, how much unknown. Sadly, what GOI did a few years back is merge the Railway budget into the Union Budget. Of course, the excuse they gave is too many pressures of new trains, while the truth is, by doing this, they decreased transparency about the whole thing. For e.g. for the last few years, the only state which had significant work being done is in U.P. (Uttar Pradesh) and a bit in Goa, although that is has been protested time and again. I being from the neighborly state of Maharashtra , and have been there several times. Now it does feels all like a dream, going to Goa :(.

Covid news Now before I jump on the news, I should share the movie Virus (2019) which was made by the talented Aashiq Abu. Even though, am not a Malayalee, I still have enjoyed many of his movies simply because he is a terrific director and Malayalam movies, at least most of them have English subtitles and lot of original content.. Interestingly, unlike the first couple of times when I saw it a couple of years back. The first time I saw it, I couldn t sleep a wink for a week. Even the next time, it was heavy. I had shared the movie with mum, and even she couldn t see it in one go. It is and was that powerful Now maybe because we are headlong in the pandemic, and the madness is all around us. There are two terms that helped me though understand a great deal of what is happening in the movie, the first term was altered sensorium which has been defined here. The other is saturation or to be more precise oxygen saturation . This term has also entered the Indian twitter lexicon quite a bit as India has started running out of oxygen. Just today Delhi High Court did an emergency hearing on the subject late at night. Although there is much to share about the mismanagement of the center, the best piece on the subject has been by Miss Priya Ramani. Yup, the same lady who has won against M.J. Akbar and this is when Mr. Akbar had 100 lawyers for this specific case. It would be interesting to see what happens ahead. There are however few things even she forgot in her piece, For e.g. reverse migration i.e. from urban to rural migration started again. Two articles from different entities sharing a similar outlook.Sadly, the right have no empathy or feeling for either the poor or the sick. Even the labor minister Santosh Gangwar s statement that around 1.04 crores were the only people who walked back home. While there is not much data, however some work/research has been done on migration to cites that the number could be easily 10 times as much. And this was in the lockdown of last year. This year, again the same issue has re-surfaced and migrants learning lessons started leaving cities. And I m ashamed to say I think they are doing the right thing. Most State Governments have not learned lessons nor have they done any work to earn the trust of migrants. This is true of almost all state Governments. Last year, just before the lockdown was announced, me and my friend spent almost 30k getting a cab all the way from Chennai to Pune, how much we paid for the cab, how much we bribed the various people just so we could cross the state borders to return home to our anxious families. Thankfully, unlike the migrants, we were better off although we did make a loss. I probably wouldn t be alive if I were in their situation as many didn t. That number is still in the air undocumented deaths Vaccine issues Currently, though the issue has been the Vaccine and the pricing of the same. A good article to get a summation of the issues outlined has been shared on Economist. Another article that goes to the heart of the issue is at scroll. To buttress the argument, the SII chairman had shared this few weeks back

Adar Poonawala talking to Vishnu Som on Left, right center, 7th April 2021.

So, a licensee manufacturer wants to make super-profits during the pandemic. And now, as shared above they can very easily do it. Even the quotes given to nearby countries is smaller than the quotes given to Indian states

Prices of AstraZeneca among various states and countries.

The situation around beds, vaccines, oxygen, anything is so dire that people could go to any lengths to save their loved ones. Even if they know if a certain medicine doesn t work. For e.g. Remdesivir, 5 WHO trials have concluded that it doesn t increase mortality. Heck, even AIIMS chief said the same. But both doctors and relatives desperation to cling on hope has made Remdesivir as a black market drug with unoffical prices hovering anywhere between INR 14k/- to INR30k/- per vial. One of the executives of a top firm was also arrested in Gujarat. In Maharashtra, the opposition M.P. came to the rescue of the officials of Bruick pharms in Mumbai. Sadly, this strange affliction to the party in the center is also there in my extended family. At one end, they will heap praise on Mr. Modi, at the same time they can t get wait to get fast out of India. Many of them have settled in horrors of horror Dubai, as it is the best place to do business, get international schools for the young ones at decent prices, cheaper or maybe a tad more than what they paid in Delhi or elsewhere. Being an Agarwal or a Gupta makes it easier to compartmentalize both things. Ease of doing business, 5 days flat to get a business registered, up and running. And the paranoia is still there. They won t talk on the phone about him because they are afraid they may say something which comes back to bite them. As far as their decision to migrate, can t really blame them. If I were 20-25 yeas younger and my mum were in a better shape than she is, we probably would have migrated as well, although would have preferred Europe than anywhere else.

Internet Freedom and Aarogya Setu App.

Internet Freedom had shared the chilling effects of the Aarogya Setu App. This had also been shared by FSCI in the past, and recently had their handle being banned on Twitter. This was also apparent in a legal bail order which the high court judge gave. While I won t go into the merits and demerits of the bail order, it is astounding for the judge to say that the accused, even though he would be on bail install an app. so he can be surveilled. And this is a high court judge, such a sad state of affairs. We seem to be putting up new lows every day when it comes to judicial jurisprudence. One interesting aspect of the whole case was shared by Aishwarya Iyer. She shared a story that she and her team worked on quint which raises questions on the quality of the work done by Delhi Police. This is of course, up to Delhi Police to ascertain the truth of the matter because unless and until they are able to tie in the PMO s office in for a leak or POTUS s office it hardly seems possible. For e.g. the dates when two heads of state can meet each other would be decided by the secretaries of the two. Once the date is known, it would be shared with the press while at the same time some sort of security apparatus would kick in place. It is incumbent, especially on the host to take as much care as he can of the guest. We all remember that World War 1 (the war to end all wars) started due to the murder of Archduke Ferdinand.

As nobody wants that, the best way is to make sure that a political murder doesn t happen on your watch. Now while I won t comment on what it would be, it would be safe to assume that it would be z+ security along with higher readiness. Especially if it as somebody as important as POTUS. Now, it would be quite a reach for Delhi Police to connect the two dates. They either will have to get creative with the dates or some other way. Otherwise, with practically no knowledge in the public domain, they can t work in limbo. In either case, I do hope the case comes up for hearing soon and we see what the Delhi Police says and contends in the High Court about the same. At the very least, it would be irritating for them to talk of the dates unless they can contend some mass conspiracy which involves the PMO (and would bring into question the constant vetting done by the Intelligence dept. of all those who work in PMO). And this whole case is to kind of shelter to the Delhi riots which happened in which majorly the Muslims died but their deaths lay unaccounted till date

Conclusion In Conclusion, I would like to share a bit of humor because right now the atmosphere is humorless, both with authoritarian tendencies of the Central Govt. and the mass mismanagement of public health which they now have left to the state to do as they fit. The peice I am sharing is from arre, one of my goto sites whenever I feel low.

The dovecot version which will be released with bullseye seems to require some subtle config adjustment if you

• use ssl (ok that should be almost everyone)
• and you would like to execute doveadm as a user, who can not read the ssl cert and keys (quite likely).

I guess one of the common cases is executing doveadm pw e.g. if you use postfixadmin. For myself that manifested in the nginx error log, which I use in combination with php-fpm, as.

2021/04/19 20:22:59 [error] 307467#307467: *13 FastCGI sent in stderr: "PHP message:
Failed to read password from /usr/bin/doveadm pw ... stderr: doveconf: Fatal: 
Error in configuration file /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-ssl.conf line 12: ssl_cert:
Can't open file /etc/dovecot/private/dovecot.pem: Permission denied

You easily see the same error message if you just execute something like doveadm pw -p test123. The workaround is to move your ssl configuration to a new file which is only readable by root, and create a dummy one which disables ssl, and has a !include_try on the real one. Maybe best explained by showing the modification:

cd /etc/dovecot/conf.d
cp 10-ssl.conf 10-ssl_server
chmod 600 10-ssl_server
echo 'ssl = no' > 10-ssl.conf
echo '!include_try 10-ssl_server' >> 10-ssl.conf

Discussed upstream here.

I ve mostly had the preference of controlling my data rather than depend on someone else. That s one reason why I still believe email to be my most reliable medium for data storage, one that is not plagued/locked by a single entity. If I had the resources, I d prefer all digital data to be broken down to its simplest form for storage, like email format, and empower the user with it i.e. their data. Yes, there are free services that are indirectly forced upon common users, and many of us get attracted to it. Many of us do not think that the information, which is shared for the free service in return, is of much importance. Which may be fair, depending on the individual, given that they get certain services without paying any direct dime.

New age communication So first, we had email and usenet. As I mentioned above, email was designed with fine intentions. Intentions that make it stand even today, independently. But not everything, back then, was that great either. For example, instant messaging was very closed and centralised then too. Things like: ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger; all were centralized. I wonder if people still have access to their ICQ logs. Not much has chagned in the current day either. We now have domination by: Facebook Messenger, Google Whatever the new marketing term they introdcue, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal etc. To my knowledge, they are all centralized. Over all this time, I m yet to see a product come up with good (business) intentions, to really empower the end user. In this information age, the most invaluable data is user activity. That s one data everyone is after. If you decline to share that bit of free data in exchange for the free services, mind you, that that free service like Facebook, Google, Instagram, WhatsApp, Truecaller, Twitter; none of it would come to you at all. Try it out. So the reality is that while you may not be valuating the data you offer in exchange correctly, there s a lot that is reaped from it. But still, I think each user has (and should have) the freedom to opt in for these tech giants and give them their personal bit, for free services in return. That is a decent barter deal. And it is a choice that one if free to choose

Retaining my data I m fond of keeping an archive folder in my mailbox. A folder that holds significant events in the form of an email usually, if documented. Over the years, I chose to resort to the email format because I felt it was more reliable in the longer term than any other formats. The next best would be plain text. In my lifetime, I have learnt a lot from the internet; so it is natural that my preference has been with it. Mailing Lists, IRCs, HOWTOs, Guides, Blog posts; all have helped. And over the years, I ve come across hundreds of such content that I d always like to preserve. Now there are multiple ways to preserving data. Like, for example, big tech giants. In most usual cases, your data for your lifetime, should be fine with a tech giant. In some odd scenarios, you may be unlucky if you relied on a service provider that went bankrupt. But seriously, I think users should be fine if they host their data with Microsoft, Google etc; as long as they abide by their policies. There s also the catch of alignment. As the user, you should ensure to align (and transition) with the product offerings of your service provider. Otherwise, what may look constant and always reliable, will vanish in the blink of an eye. I guess Google Plus would be a good example. There was some Google Feed service too. Maybe Google Photos in the near decade future, just like Google Picasa in the previous (or current) decade.

History what is On the topic of retaining information, lets take a small drift. I still admire our ancestors. I don t know what went in their mind when they were documenting events in the form of scriptures, carvings, temples, churches, mosques etc; but one things for sure, they were able to leave a fine means of communication. They are all gone but a large number of those events are evident through the creations that they left. Some of those events have been strong enough that further rulers/invaders have had tough times trying to wipe it out from history. Remember, history is usually not the truth, but the statement to be believed by the teller. And the teller is usually the survivor, or the winner you may call. But still, the information retention techniques were better. I haven t visited, but admire whosoever built the Kailasa Temple, Ellora, without which, we d be made to believe what not by all invaders and rulers of the region. But the majestic standing of the temple, is a fine example of the history and the events that have occured in the past.

Ellora Temple - The majectic carving believed to be carved out of a single stone

Dominance has the power to rewrite history and unfortunately that s true and it has done its part. It is just that in a mere human s defined lifetime, it is not possible to witness the transtion from current to history, and say that I was there then and I m here now, and this is not the reality. And if not dominance, there s always the other bit, hearsay. With it, you can always put anything up for dispute. Because there s no way one can go back in time and produce a fine evidence. There s also a part about religion. Religion can be highly sentimental. And religion can be a solid way to get an agenda going. For example, in India - a country which today consitutionally is a secular country, there have been multiple attempts to discard the belief, that never ever did the thing called Ramayana exist. That the Rama Setu, nicely reworded as Adam s Bridge by who so ever, is a mere result of science. Now Rama, or Hanumana, or Ravana, or Valmiki, aren t going to come over and prove that that is true or false. So such subjects serve as a solid base to get an agenda going. And probably we ve even succeeded in proving and believing that there was never an event like Ramayana or the Mahabharata. Nor was there ever any empire other than the Moghul or the British Empire. But yes, whosoever made the Ellora Temple or the many many more of such creations, did a fine job of making a dent for the future, to know of what the history possibly could also be.

Enough of the drift So, in my opinion, having events documented is important. It d be nice to have skills documented too so that it can be passed over generations but that s a debatable topic. But events, I believe should be documented. And documented in the best possible ways so that its existence is not diminished. A documentation in the form of certain carvings on a rock is far more better than links and posts shared on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc. For one, these are all corporate entities with vested interests and can pretext excuse in the name of compliance and conformance. So, for the helpless state and generation I am in, I felt email was the best possible independent form of data retention in today s age. If I really had the resources, I d not rely on digital age. This age has no guarantee of retaining and recording information in any reliable manner. Instead, it is just mostly junk, which is manipulative and changeable, conditionally.

Email and RSS So for my communication, I like to prefer emails over any other means. That doesn t mean I don t use the current trends. I do. But this blog is mostly about penning my desires. And desire be to have communication over email format. Such is the case that for information useful over the internet, I crave to have it formatted in email for archival. RSS feeds is my most common mode of keeping track of information I care about. Not all that I care for is available in RSS feeds but hey such is life. And adaptability is okay. But my preference is still RSS. So I use RSS feeds through a fine software called feed2imap. A software that fits my bill fairly well. feed2imap is:

• An rss feed news aggregator
• Pulls and extracts news feeds in the form of an email
• Can push the converted email over pop/imap
• Can convert all image content to email mime attachment

In a gist, it makes the online content available to me offline in the most admired email format In my mail box, in today s day, my preferred email client is Evolution. It does a good job of dealing with such emails (rss feed items). An image example of accessing the rrs feed item through it is below

RSS News Item through Evolution

The good part is that my actual data is always independent of such MUAs. Tomorrow, as technology - trends - economics evolve, something new would come as a replacement but my data would still be mine.

Mobile trends Trends have shown. Data mobility is a commodity expectation now. As such, I wanted to have something fill in that gap for me. So that I could access my information - which I ve preferred in a format - easily in today s trendy options. I tried multiple options on my current preferred platform of choice for mobiles, i.e. Android. Finally I came across Aqua Mail, which fits in most of my requirements. Aqua Mail does

• Connect to my laptop over imap
• Can sync the requested folders
• Can sync requested data for offlince accessibility
• Can present the synchronized data in a quite flexible and customizable manner, to match my taste
• Has a very extensible User Interface, allowing me to customize it to my taste

Pictures can do a better job of describing my english words.

Aqua Mail Message List Interface

Aqua Mail Message View Normal

Aqua Mail Message View Zoomed - Fit to Screen

All of this done with no dependence on network connectivity, post the sync. And all information is stored is best possible simple format.

One of the things that I found most vexing about lockdown was that I was unable to play some of my favourite board games. There are online systems for many games, but not all. And online systems cannot support games like Mao where the players make up the rules as we go along. I had an idea for how to solve this problem, and set about implementing it. The result is Otter (the Online Table Top Environment Renderer). We have played a number of fun games of Penultima with it, and have recently branched out into Mao. The Otter is now ready to be released! More about Otter (cribbed shamelessly from the README) Otter, the Online Table Top Environment Renderer, is an online game system. But it is not like most online game systems. It does not know (nor does it need to know) the rules of the game you are playing. Instead, it lets you and your friends play with common tabletop/boardgame elements such as hands of cards, boards, and so on. So it s something like a tabletop simulator (but it does not have any 3D, or a physics engine, or anything like that). This means that with Otter:

• Supporting a new game, that Otter doesn t know about yet, would usually not involve writing or modifying any computer programs.
• If Otter already has the necessary game elements (cards, say) all you need to do is write a spec file saying what should be on the table at the start of the game. For example, most Whist variants that start with a standard pack of 52 cards are already playable.
• You can play games where the rules change as the game goes along, or are made up by the players, or are too complicated to write as a computer program.
• House rules are no problem, since the computer isn t enforcing the rules - you and your friends are.
• Everyone can interact with different items on the game table, at any time. (Otter doesn t know about your game s turn-taking, so doesn t know whose turn it might be.)

Installation and usage Otter is fully functional, but the installation and account management arrangements are rather unsophisticated and un-webby. And there is not currently any publicly available instance you can use to try it out. Users on chiark will find an instance there. Other people who who are interested in hosting games (of Penultima or Mao, or other games we might support) will have to find a Unix host or VM to install Otter on, and will probably want help from a Unix sysadmin. Otter is distributed via git, and is available on Salsa, Debian's gitlab instance. There is documentation online. Future plans I have a number of ideas for improvement, which go off in many different directions. Quite high up on my priority list is making it possible for players to upload and share game materials (cards, boards, pieces, and so on), rather than just using the ones which are bundled with Otter itself (or dumping files ad-hoc on the server). This will make it much easier to play new games. One big reason I wrote Otter is that I wanted to liberate boardgame players from the need to implemet their game rules as computer code. The game management and account management is currently done with a command line tool. It would be lovely to improve that, but making a fully-featured management web ui would be a lot of work. Screenshots! (Click for the full size images.)

comments

I ve been experimenting with IMA/EVM. Here is the Sourceforge page for the upstream project [1]. The aim of that project is to check hashes and maybe public key signatures on files before performing read/exec type operations on them. It can be used as the next logical step from booting a signed kernel with TPM. I am a long way from getting that sort of thing going, just getting the kernel to boot and load keys is my current challenge and isn t helped due to the lack of documentation on error messages. This blog post started as a way of documenting the error messages so future people who google errors can get a useful result. I am not trying to document everything, just help people get through some of the first problems. I am using Debian for my work, but some of this will apply to other distributions (particularly the kernel error messages). The Debian distribution has the ima-evm-utils but no other support for IMA/EVM. To get this going in Debian you need to compile your own kernel with IMA support and then boot it with kernel command-line options to enable IMA, in recent kernels that includes lsm=integrity as a mandatory requirement to prevent a kernel Oops after mounting the initrd (there is already a patch to fix this). If you want to just use IMA (not get involved in development) then a good option would be to use RHEL (here is their documentation) [2] or SUSE (here is their documentation) [3]. Note that both RHEL and SUSE use older kernels so their documentation WILL lead you astray if you try and use the latest kernel.org kernel. The Debian initrd I created a script named /etc/initramfs-tools/hooks/keys with the following contents to copy the key(s) from /etc/keys to the initrd where the kernel will load it/them. The kernel configuration determines whether x509_evm.der or x509_ima.der (or maybe both) is loaded. I haven t yet worked out which key is needed when.

#!/bin/bash
mkdir -p $ DESTDIR /etc/keys
cp /etc/keys/* $ DESTDIR /etc/keys

Making the Keys

#!/bin/sh
GENKEY=ima.genkey
cat << __EOF__ >$GENKEY
[ req ]
default_bits = 1024
distinguished_name = req_distinguished_name
prompt = no
string_mask = utf8only
x509_extensions = v3_usr
[ req_distinguished_name ]
O =  hostname 
CN =  whoami  signing key
emailAddress =  whoami @ hostname 
[ v3_usr ]
basicConstraints=critical,CA:FALSE
#basicConstraints=CA:FALSE
keyUsage=digitalSignature
#keyUsage = nonRepudiation, digitalSignature, keyEncipherment
subjectKeyIdentifier=hash
authorityKeyIdentifier=keyid
#authorityKeyIdentifier=keyid,issuer
__EOF__
openssl req -new -nodes -utf8 -sha1 -days 365 -batch -config $GENKEY \
                -out csr_ima.pem -keyout privkey_ima.pem
openssl x509 -req -in csr_ima.pem -days 365 -extfile $GENKEY -extensions v3_usr \
                -CA ~/kern/linux-5.11.14/certs/signing_key.pem -CAkey ~/kern/linux-5.11.14/certs/signing_key.pem -CAcreateserial \
                -outform DER -out x509_evm.der

To get the below result I used the above script to generate a key, it is the /usr/share/doc/ima-evm-utils/examples/ima-genkey.sh script from the ima-evm-utils package but changed to use the key generated from kernel compilation to sign it. You can copy the files in the certs directory from one kernel build tree to another to have the same certificate and use the same initrd configuration. After generating the key I copied x509_evm.der to /etc/keys on the target host and built the initrd before rebooting.

[    1.050321] integrity: Loading X.509 certificate: /etc/keys/x509_evm.der
[    1.092560] integrity: Loaded X.509 cert 'xev: etbe signing key: 99d4fa9051e2c178017180df5fcc6e5dbd8bb606'

Errors Here are some of the kernel error messages I received along with my best interpretation of what they mean. [ 1.062031] integrity: Loading X.509 certificate: /etc/keys/x509_ima.der
[ 1.063689] integrity: Problem loading X.509 certificate -74 Error -74 means -EBADMSG, which means there s something wrong with the certificate file. I have got that from /etc/keys/x509_ima.der not being in der format and I have got it from a der file that contained a key pair that wasn t signed.

[    1.049170] integrity: Loading X.509 certificate: /etc/keys/x509_ima.der
[    1.093092] integrity: Problem loading X.509 certificate -126

Error -126 means -ENOKEY, so the key wasn t in the file or the key wasn t signed by the kernel signing key.

[    1.074759] integrity: Unable to open file: /etc/keys/x509_evm.der (-2)

Error -2 means -ENOENT, so the file wasn t found on the initrd. Note that it does NOT look at the root filesystem. References

• [1] https://sourceforge.net/p/linux-ima/wiki/Home/
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/yfvhqdjr
• [3] https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Ima_evm

A new version of the RcppAPT package interfacing from R to the C++ library behind the awesome apt, apt-get, apt-cache, commands and their cache powering Debian, Ubuntu and the like arrived on CRAN yesterday. This comes a good year after the previous maintenance update for release 0.0.6. RcppAPT allows you to query the (Debian or Ubuntu) package dependency graph at will, with build-dependencies (if you have deb-src entries), reverse dependencies, and all other goodies. See the vignette and examples for illustrations. The maintenance release responds to call for updates from CRAN desiring that make all implicit dependencies on packages markdown and rmarkdown explicit via a Suggests: entry. Two of the many packages I maintain were part of the (large !!) list in the CRAN email, and this is one of them. While making the update, we refreshed two other packaging details.

Changes in version 0.0.7 (2021-04-16)

• Add rmarkdown to Suggests: as an implicit conditional dependency
• Switch vignette to minidown and its water framework, add minidown to Suggests as well
• Update two URLs in the README.md file

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. A bit more information about the package is available here as well as as the GitHub repo. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

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

In the past, I've talked about building a Z80-based computer. I made some progress towards that goal, in the sense that I took the initial (trivial steps) towards making something:

• I built a clock-circuit.
• I wired up a Z80 processor to the clock.
• I got the thing running an endless stream of NOP instructions.
  • No RAM/ROM connected, tying all the bus-lines low, meaning every attempted memory-read returned 0x00 which is the Z80 NOP instruction.

But then I stalled, repeatedly, at designing an interface to RAM and ROM, so that it could actually do something useful. Over the lockdown I've been in two minds about getting sucked back down the rabbit-hole, so I compromised. I did a bit of searching on tindie, and similar places, and figured I'd buy a Z80-based single board computer. My requirements were minimal:

• It must run CP/M.
• The source-code to "everything" must be available.
• I want it to run standalone, and connect to a host via a serial-port.

With those goals there were a bunch of boards to choose from, rc2014 is the standard choice - a well engineered system which uses a common backplane and lets you build mini-boards to add functionality. So first you build the CPU-card, then the RAM card, then the flash-disk card, etc. Over-engineered in one sense, extensible in another. (There are some single-board variants to cut down on soldering overhead, at a cost of less flexibility.) After a while I came across https://8bitstack.co.uk/, which describes a simple board called the the Z80 playground. The advantage of this design is that it loads code from a USB stick, making it easy to transfer files to/from it, without the need for a compact flash card, or similar. The downside is that the system has only 64K RAM, meaning it cannot run CP/M 3, only 2.2. (CP/M 3.x requires more RAM, and a banking/paging system setup to swap between pages.) When the system boots it loads code from an EEPROM, which then fetches the CP/M files from the USB-stick, copies them into RAM and executes them. The memory map can be split so you either have ROM & RAM, or you have just RAM (after the boot the ROM will be switched off). To change the initial stuff you need to reprogram the EEPROM, after that it's just a matter of adding binaries to the stick or transferring them over the serial port. In only a couple of hours I got the basic stuff working as well as I needed:

• A z80-assembler on my Linux desktop to build simple binaries.
• An installation of Turbo Pascal 3.00A on the system itself.
  • I used this to build some simple utilities.
  • There's a good overview of using turbopascal here which covers how to use/quit the editor, compile binaries, etc.
• An installation of FORTH on the system itself.
  • Which is nice.
• A couple of simple games compiled from Pascal
  • Snake, Tetris, etc.
• The Zork trilogy installed, along with Hitchhikers guide.

I had some fun with a CP/M emulator to get my hand back in things before the board arrived, and using that I tested my first "real" assembly language program (cls to clear the screen), as well as got the hang of using the wordstar keyboard shortcuts as used within the turbo pascal environment. I have some plans for development:

• Add command-line history (page-up/page-down) for the CP/M command-processor.
• Add paging to TYPE, and allow terminating with Q.

Nothing major, but fun changes that won't be too difficult to implement. Since CP/M 2.x has no concept of sub-directories you end up using drives for everything, I implemented a "search-path" so that when you type "FOO" it will attempt to run "A:FOO.COM" if there is no file matching on the current-drive. That's a nicer user-experience at all. I also wrote some Z80-assembly code to search all drives for an executable, if not found in current drive and not already qualified. Remember CP/M doesn't have a concept of sub-directories) that's actually pretty useful:

  B>LOCATE H*.COM
  P:HELLO   COM
  P:HELLO2  COM
  G:HITCH   COM
  E:HYPHEN  COM

I've also written some other trivial assembly language tools, which was surprisingly relaxing. Especially once I got back into the zen mode of optimizing for size. I forked the upstream repository, mostly to tidy up the contents, rather than because I want to go into my own direction. I'll keep the contents in sync, because there's no point splitting a community even further - I guess there are fewer than 100 of these boards in the wild, probably far far fewer!

• My fork
• The original

There is a serious problem with Dreamwidth, which is impeding access for many RSS reader tools. This started at around 0500 UTC on Wednesday morning, according to my own RSS reader cron job. A friend found #43443 in the DW ticket tracker, where a user of a minority web browser found they were blocked. Local tests demonstrated that Dreamwidth had applied blocking by the HTTP User-Agent header, and were rejecting all user-agents not specifically permitted. Today, this rule has been relaxed and unknown user-agents are permitted. But user-agents for general http client libraries are still blocked. I'm aware of three unresolved tickets about this: #43444 #43445 #43447 We're told there by a volunteer member of Dreamwidth's support staff that this has been done deliberately for "blocking automated traffic". I'm sure the volunteer is just relaying what they've been told by whoever is struggling to deal with what I suppose is probably a spam problem. But it's still rather unsatisfactory. I have suggested in my own ticket that a good solution might be to apply the new block only to posting and commenting (eg, maybe, by applying it only to HTTP POST requests). If the problem is indeed spam then that ought to be good enough, and would still let RSS readers work properly. I'm told that this new blocking has been done by "implementing" (actually, configuring or enabling) "some AWS rules for blocking automated traffic". I don't know what facilities AWS provides. This kind of helplessness is of course precisely the kind of thing that the Free Software movement is against and precisely the kind of thing that proprietary services like AWS produce. I don't know if this blog entry will appear on planet.debian.org and on other people's reader's and aggregators. I think it will at least be seen by other Dreamwidth users. I thought I would post here in the hope that other Dreamwidth users might be able to help get this fixed. At the very least other Dreamwidth blog owners need to know that many of their readers may not be seeing their posts at all. If this problem is not fixed I will have to move my blog. One of the main points of having a blog is publishing it via RSS. RSS readers are of course based on general http client libraries and many if not most RSS readers have not bothered to customise their user-agent. Those are currently blocked.

comments

Firstly a disclaimer, I m not an expert on this and I m not trying to instruct anyone who is aiming to become an expert. The aim of this blog post is to help someone who has a single kernel issue they want to debug as part of doing something that s mostly not kernel coding. I welcome comments about the second step to kernel debugging for the benefit of people who need more than this (which might include me next week). Also suggestions for people who can t use a kvm/qemu debugger would be good. Below is a command to run qemu with GDB. It should be run from the Linux kernel source directory. You can add other qemu options for a blog device and virtual networking if necessary, but the bug I encountered gave an oops from the initrd so I didn t need to go further. The nokaslr is to avoid address space randomisation which deliberately makes debugging tasks harder (from a certain perspective debugging a kernel and compromising a kernel are fairly similar). Loading the bzImage is fine, gdb can map that to the different file it looks at later on.

qemu-system-x86_64 -kernel arch/x86/boot/bzImage -initrd ../initrd-$KERN_VER -curses -m 2000 -append "root=/dev/vda ro nokaslr" -gdb tcp::1200

The command to run GDB is gdb vmlinux , when at the GDB prompt you can run the command target remote localhost:1200 to connect to the GDB server port 1200. Note that there is nothing special about port 1200, it was given in an example I saw and is as good as any other port. It is important that you run GDB against the vmlinux file in the main directory not any of the several stripped and packaged files, GDB can t handle a bzImage file but that s OK, it ends up much the same in RAM. When the target remote command is processed the kernel will be suspended by the debugger, if you are looking for a bug early in the boot you may need to be quick about this. Using qemu-system-x86_64 instead of kvm slows things down and can help in that regard. The bug I was hunting happened 1.6 seconds after kernel load with KVM and 7.8 seconds after kernel load with qemu. I am not aware of all the implications of the kvm vs qemu decision on debugging. If your bug is a race condition then trying both would be a good strategy. After the target remote command you can debug the kernel just like any other program. If you put a breakpoint on print_modules() that will catch the operation of printing an Oops which can be handy.

Due to what I suspect is disk corruption error due to a faulty RAM module or network interface on my GnuBee, my restic backup failed with the following error:

$ restic check
using temporary cache in /var/tmp/restic-tmp/restic-check-cache-854484247
repository b0b0516c opened successfully, password is correct
created new cache in /var/tmp/restic-tmp/restic-check-cache-854484247
create exclusive lock for repository
load indexes
check all packs
check snapshots, trees and blobs
error for tree 4645312b:
  decrypting blob 4645312b443338d57295550f2f4c135c34bda7b17865c4153c9b99d634ae641c failed: ciphertext verification failed
error for tree 2c3248ce:
  decrypting blob 2c3248ce5dc7a4bc77f03f7475936041b6b03e0202439154a249cd28ef4018b6 failed: ciphertext verification failed
Fatal: repository contains errors

I started by locating the snapshots which make use of these corrupt trees:

$ restic find --tree 4645312b
repository b0b0516c opened successfully, password is correct
Found tree 4645312b443338d57295550f2f4c135c34bda7b17865c4153c9b99d634ae641c
 ... path /usr/include/boost/spirit/home/support/auxiliary
 ... in snapshot 41e138c8 (2021-01-31 08:35:16)
Found tree 4645312b443338d57295550f2f4c135c34bda7b17865c4153c9b99d634ae641c
 ... path /usr/include/boost/spirit/home/support/auxiliary
 ... in snapshot e75876ed (2021-02-28 08:35:29)
$ restic find --tree 2c3248ce
repository b0b0516c opened successfully, password is correct
Found tree 2c3248ce5dc7a4bc77f03f7475936041b6b03e0202439154a249cd28ef4018b6
 ... path /usr/include/boost/spirit/home/support/char_encoding
 ... in snapshot 41e138c8 (2021-01-31 08:35:16)
Found tree 2c3248ce5dc7a4bc77f03f7475936041b6b03e0202439154a249cd28ef4018b6
 ... path /usr/include/boost/spirit/home/support/char_encoding
 ... in snapshot e75876ed (2021-02-28 08:35:29)

and then deleted them:

$ restic forget 41e138c8 e75876ed
repository b0b0516c opened successfully, password is correct
[0:00] 100.00%  2 / 2 files deleted
$ restic prune 
repository b0b0516c opened successfully, password is correct
counting files in repo
building new index for repo
[13:23] 100.00%  58964 / 58964 packs
repository contains 58964 packs (1417910 blobs) with 278.913 GiB
processed 1417910 blobs: 0 duplicate blobs, 0 B duplicate
load all snapshots
find data that is still in use for 20 snapshots
[1:15] 100.00%  20 / 20 snapshots
found 1364852 of 1417910 data blobs still in use, removing 53058 blobs
will remove 0 invalid files
will delete 942 packs and rewrite 1358 packs, this frees 6.741 GiB
[10:50] 31.96%  434 / 1358 packs rewritten
hash does not match id: want 9ec955794534be06356655cfee6abe73cb181f88bb86b0cd769cf8699f9f9e57, got 95d90aa48ffb18e6d149731a8542acd6eb0e4c26449a4d4c8266009697fd1904
github.com/restic/restic/internal/repository.Repack
    github.com/restic/restic/internal/repository/repack.go:37
main.pruneRepository
    github.com/restic/restic/cmd/restic/cmd_prune.go:242
main.runPrune
    github.com/restic/restic/cmd/restic/cmd_prune.go:62
main.glob..func19
    github.com/restic/restic/cmd/restic/cmd_prune.go:27
github.com/spf13/cobra.(*Command).execute
    github.com/spf13/cobra/command.go:852
github.com/spf13/cobra.(*Command).ExecuteC
    github.com/spf13/cobra/command.go:960
github.com/spf13/cobra.(*Command).Execute
    github.com/spf13/cobra/command.go:897
main.main
    github.com/restic/restic/cmd/restic/main.go:98
runtime.main
    runtime/proc.go:204
runtime.goexit
    runtime/asm_amd64.s:1374

As you can see above, the prune command failed due to a corrupt pack and so I followed the process I previously wrote about and identified the affected snapshots using:

$ restic find --pack 9ec955794534be06356655cfee6abe73cb181f88bb86b0cd769cf8699f9f9e57

before deleting them with:

$ restic forget 031ab8f1 1672a9e1 1f23fb5b 2c58ea3a 331c7231 5e0e1936 735c6744 94f74bdb b11df023 dfa17ba8 e3f78133 eefbd0b0 fe88aeb5 
repository b0b0516c opened successfully, password is correct
[0:00] 100.00%  13 / 13 files deleted
$ restic prune
repository b0b0516c opened successfully, password is correct
counting files in repo
building new index for repo
[13:37] 100.00%  60020 / 60020 packs
repository contains 60020 packs (1548315 blobs) with 283.466 GiB
processed 1548315 blobs: 129812 duplicate blobs, 4.331 GiB duplicate
load all snapshots
find data that is still in use for 8 snapshots
[0:53] 100.00%  8 / 8 snapshots
found 1219895 of 1548315 data blobs still in use, removing 328420 blobs
will remove 0 invalid files
will delete 6232 packs and rewrite 1275 packs, this frees 36.302 GiB
[23:37] 100.00%  1275 / 1275 packs rewritten
counting files in repo
[11:45] 100.00%  52822 / 52822 packs
finding old index files
saved new indexes as [a31b0fc3 9f5aa9b5 db19be6f 4fd9f1d8 941e710b 528489d9 fb46b04a 6662cd78 4b3f5aad 0f6f3e07 26ae96b2 2de7b89f 78222bea 47e1a063 5abf5c2d d4b1d1c3 f8616415 3b0ebbaa]
remove 23 old index files
[0:00] 100.00%  23 / 23 files deleted
remove 7507 old packs
[0:08] 100.00%  7507 / 7507 files deleted
done

And with 13 of my 21 snapshots deleted, the checks now pass:

$ restic check
using temporary cache in /var/tmp/restic-tmp/restic-check-cache-407999210
repository b0b0516c opened successfully, password is correct
created new cache in /var/tmp/restic-tmp/restic-check-cache-407999210
create exclusive lock for repository
load indexes
check all packs
check snapshots, trees and blobs
no errors were found

This represents a significant amount of lost backup history, but at least it's not all of it.

I ve just setup the Yama LSM module on some of my Linux systems. Yama controls ptrace which is the debugging and tracing API for Unix systems. The aim is to prevent a compromised process from using ptrace to compromise other processes and cause more damage. In most cases a process which can ptrace another process which usually means having capability SYS_PTRACE (IE being root) or having the same UID as the target process can interfere with that process in other ways such as modifying it s configuration and data files. But even so I think it has the potential for making things more difficult for attackers without making the system more difficult to use. If you put kernel.yama.ptrace_scope = 1 in sysctl.conf (or write 1 to /proc/sys/kernel/yama/ptrace_scope) then a user process can only trace it s child processes. This means that strace -p and gdb -p will fail when run as non-root but apart from that everything else will work. Generally strace -p (tracing the system calls of another process) is of most use to the sysadmin who can do it as root. The command gdb -p and variants of it are commonly used by developers so yama wouldn t be a good thing on a system that is primarily used for software development. Another option is kernel.yama.ptrace_scope = 3 which means no-one can trace and it can t be disabled without a reboot. This could be a good option for production servers that have no need for software development. It wouldn t work well for a small server where the sysadmin needs to debug everything, but when dozens or hundreds of servers have their configuration rolled out via a provisioning tool this would be a good setting to include. See Documentation/admin-guide/LSM/Yama.rst in the kernel source for the details. When running with capability SYS_PTRACE (IE root shell) you can ptrace anything else and if necessary disable Yama by writing 0 to /proc/sys/kernel/yama/ptrace_scope . I am enabling mode 1 on all my systems because I think it will make things harder for attackers while not making things more difficult for me. Also note that SE Linux restricts SYS_PTRACE and also restricts cross-domain ptrace access, so the combination with Yama makes things extra difficult for an attacker. Yama is enabled in the Debian kernels by default so it s very easy to setup for Debian users, just edit /etc/sysctl.d/whatever.conf and it will be enabled on boot.

I ve been watching the show Riverdale on Netflix recently. It s an interesting modern take on the Archie comics. Having watched Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space when I was younger I was anticipating something aimed towards a similar audience. As solving mysteries and crimes was apparently a major theme of the show I anticipated something along similar lines to Scooby Doo, some suspense and some spooky things, but then a happy ending where criminals get arrested and no-one gets hurt or killed while the vast majority of people are nice. Instead the first episode has a teen being murdered and Ms Grundy being obsessed with 15yo boys and sleeping with Archie (who s supposed to be 15 but played by a 20yo actor). Everyone in the show has some dark secret. The filming has a dark theme, the sky is usually overcast and it s generally gloomy. This is a significant contrast to Veronica Mars which has some similarities in having a young cast, a sassy female sleuth, and some similar plot elements. Veronica Mars has a bright theme and a significant comedy element in spite of dealing with some dark issues (murder, rape, child sex abuse, and more). But Riverdale is just dark. Anyone who watches this with their kids expecting something like Scooby Doo is in for a big surprise. There are lots of interesting stylistic elements in the show. Lots of clothing and uniform designs that seem to date from the 1940 s. It seems like some alternate universe where kids have smartphones and laptops while dressing in the style of the 1940s. One thing that annoyed me was construction workers using tools like sledge-hammers instead of excavators. A society that has smart phones but no earth-moving equipment isn t plausible. On the upside there is a racial mix in the show that more accurately reflects American society than the original Archie comics and homophobia is much less common than in most parts of our society. For both race issues and gay/lesbian issues the show treats them in an accurate way (portraying some bigotry) while the main characters aren t racist or homophobic. I think it s generally an OK show and recommend it to people who want a dark show. It s a good show to watch while doing something on a laptop so you can check Wikipedia for the references to 1940s stuff (like when Bikinis were invented). I m half way through season 3 which isn t as good as the first 2, I don t know if it will get better later in the season or whether I should have stopped after season 2. I don t usually review fiction, but the interesting aesthetics of the show made it deserve a review.